I made a successful pear torte by scaling down a recipe from It's Raining Plums according to the ingredients I had available: 2oz ground almonds, 2oz butter, 2oz sugar, 2oz flour, half a teaspoon of baking powder to make it 'self-raising' (didn't seem to have much effect so maybe I should have used more), half a teaspoon of cinnamon and half an egg, a.k.a. one of my chickpea water emergency ice cubes (again, it might perhaps have risen more if I'd had more liquid -- but then I had a disproportionately high proportion of pear already), all cooked in a 6-inch tin instead of an eight-inch one. The recipe describes it as 'a shallow cake', so I assume that the topping/base was only ever meant to spread out rather than rising, but it probably shouldn't have been so crumbly....

I also found my mysteriously-missing cooking scissors, which were reposing in the bottom of one of my cycle panniers where I had put them in preparation for an expedition to pick elderberries back in August which was frustrated by what would ultimately prove to be the terminal malfunction of said bike :-(

My current (I think I am now on my second or third replacement) Parker 25 pen broke in the most unexpected way this afternoon.

I was holding it between finger and thumb on my left hand after coming in from my latest walking trip (during which I had achieved the grand total of half a sentence of Roland de Céligny in the space of about ten minutes) while I fumbled to get out and use the door-key with my other hand, and it just went weirdly wobbly. I don't think I was putting all that much pressure on it, but when I managed to get indoors and put down my bag, violin, etc. and take a proper look I found that the plastic nib unit had snapped right through at the point where it screws into the metal barrel. In fact I had some difficulty in extracting the remaining stub, which was still firmly screwed in and flush with the end of the barrel!

In forty years I've never seen a pen fail like *that* -- I'm afraid I think it must have fractured at some point when dropped on an earlier occasion (I do remember dropping it fairly recently, although it was firmly capped at the time and has always been fine when that happened before).

I still have the old nib from the previous pen, so have switched back to that for the moment (I now have quite a graveyard of barrels and caps in varying states of batteredness), but it is pretty scratchy :(

( Camera battery )

( Cycle computer )

Well, I managed a twenty-minute bath without stopping the clock...

My cycle computer (with its brand-new battery) stopped working again after the bike fell over on a Sheffield stand; I initially assumed that the magnet and/or transmitter had become displaced, but no amount of adjustment made any difference. Eventually it occurred to me that the battery might have been dislodged internally, and when I managed to prise off the cover -- always a fiddle -- this fortunately proved to be the case: one end had been jolted sideways enough to break contact but not enough to open the cover.

And after several days of wondering whether the flashing red light on my replacement central heating controller represented 'Alarm' or 'Receive' (according to the labelling it doubles as both!) I finaly got worried enough to look it up on the Internet, having failed to find the original manual in my Box of Manuals, and discovered that it meant 'low battery'. I also immediately remembered exactly where said manual was, and was then able to consult it as to how to change the batteries... yes, you really do need to use a coin to open the battery cover, as directed. A butter-knife will not work! :-p

First hot-water-bottle last night....

Current odometer reading: 1118.0 since August 2022, when I fitted the new cycle computer. As before, this amounts to an average of about 19 miles a week (393 days/1118 miles * 7).

I'm not quite sure how I manage this given that my normal weekly journey to market is about a 12 miles round trip, and I'm not doing a lot of extra cycling!

In all fairness to the manufacturers I should probably note that I did eventually work out how to tighten the magnet fitment up as intended -- *not* using the socket drive screwdriver to turn the nut at the front, but simply screwing the actual back of the fitment round to lock it against the nut :-p

I acquired a new (unused from charity shop -- looks like a cheap Chinese piece of kit) Blusmart Bike Computer for a few pounds to replace my old Cateye Velo model with the damaged wiring. This one happens to be a 'wireless' model, which means that you don't have to worry about cracks in the wires, but that the sensor/transmitter unit which fixes to the front fork has to be much larger and heavier than before, and includes a battery. ( Read more... )

I managed to remove the old model with all its cable ties, but struggled to fit the new one due to the fact that the plastic cable ties provided kept snapping when I tried to tighten them. The kit comes with two spare cable ties, and I thought I could see why... then the third one broke as I was trying to fix the sensor to the front fork, and I was a bit stuck :-(

( Read more... )

Final reading on the old odometer: 4081.9, representing a pessimistic total of 2390 miles since Covid, ignoring the various miles that failed to register because of the damaged wiring ;-p ( Read more... )

I think (hope) the bicycle is finally fixed now, after yet another round of repairs; I did a twenty-mile shopping run today (a big pot of yoghurt, some chicken carcases to boil up for stock, two Scotch eggs (one for lunch), two big cartons of still lemonade in preparation for hot weather (of which I partook gratefully when I got back), and returning the empty honey jar while buying a new one) and had no trouble with either the gears or free-wheel. Of course it may be another false dawn.

Recorded mileage: 3664.8 (actual figure will be higher, since the odometer is still malfunctioning; it is now loose in its mount and sooner or later will fly off altogether).
Nearly nine hundred miles since last July.

Chapter 6 of "High City on a Hill" has received 14 hits on AO3.

Why does everyone assume I 'go for bike rides' as some kind of leisure pursuit? I almost *never* set off for no purpose on my bicycle (save for a brief period at the start of lockdown, admittedly, when I had no manuscript in hand and was attempting to exercise myself in as high-intensity a fashion as possible...), and "wasn't it a nice weekend, where did you go" always has the same answer -- I went along the same heavily-trafficked roads as usual to buy urgently-needed supplies and it wasn't much fun.

And when my bike isn't working, that isn't a minor inconvenience to my hobby -- it means I can't get anywhere. Including to bike repair shops located more than two or three miles away, because I have to be able to walk back.

After another fortnight I think I've finally finished my epilogue, on the note of Hertha trying to make the best of things:

Sun was still streaming into the room. I smiled brightly at Raoul and dropped a kiss on top of the baby's head, tired and sore and bracing myself for the future. "We'll manage, I'm sure."

(Except that, looking back at my former post, I now remember that I *still* haven't sorted out the Beauvais travel issue; my feeling is that Hertha's obstetrics appointments at least ought to take place by train...)

( Potential title change )

It occurs to me that this means I now have *two* novel-length manuscripts to type up and edit, and no writing to procrastinate the process with :-p
I suppose I now have the option to switch to cycle-based exercise in place of deliberately walking places so that I can oblige myself to write en route, but I'm very worried about my bicycle; I've had three rounds of repairs since December, and yet the last time I used it the gears were going wrong yet again. I did a lot of fiddling with the adjustment and managed to get it into a position where the middle gear could successfully be selected, but it started making disturbing noises after that, and I wonder if all I actually managed to do was to pull the wheel sideways in the forks. Unfortunately it's very hard to be certain what you are hearing when you are surrounded by heavy traffic and/or have an icy head-wind blowing past your ears...

---

I was horrified to discover by chance that the Royal Mail is telling people current 1st and 2nd-class stamps are going to be made obsolete in favour of 'bar-coding'; on further investigation, it's not as bad as my original impression. Stamp booklets are not going to be phased out altogether in favour of smartphone app/JavaScript-driven print-it-out-yourself labels -- they are simply bringing in a new stamp design for sale and invalidating further use of the old ones as of next year. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2022/02/anyone-with-stacks-of-stamps-at-home-has-less-than-one-year-to-u/
Although I'm a bit worried about the idea of the two elements being "connected using the Royal Mail app" -- presumably that doesn't mean you need to run compulsory software to be able to post a letter?( Read more... )

The heatwave basically stopped the tomatoes dead in their tracks; all the trusses abruptly ceased setting halfway along. ( Tomatoes )

( Chillies )

( Transplant success )


( Herb seed )

( California poppies )

( other plants )

( Chrysanthemums )

---

At the weekend I made a cycling trip to pick wild plums -- which really are cherry-sized, considerably smaller than my supposed cherry tomatoes! Fifteen miles out and twelve miles back (thanks to not getting lost so much on the return journey); two hours versus ninety minutes' cycling respectively. [Edit: mileage 2832.6] Ten miles an hour average is dependent on going well over 10mph much of the time down flat roads and a well-known route, I'm afraid... and not being tired, having a head-wind, or carrying an additional load of plums in your panniers :-p It may be 'just down the road' by motor vehicle or a brief sprint on the Tour de France, but it just underlines how completely unrealistic it is to do two forty-mile coach journeys in a day, even if using different teams of horses. Modern transport schedules completely iron out the amount of time and effort it takes to get anywhere by ordinary labour.

( travel to Beauvais, redux )

( plums )

( Russian air pie )

I finally got round to taking some tools to the seized barrel adjuster on my back brake. ( a five-second job )

Current odometer reading 2574.5 -- a hundred and forty-six miles since February, although that figure is undubitably under-recorded; the cycle computer has been malfunctioning frequently, and I only know about it when I look down to find that it is registering nothing at all. Some of my regular journeys have only displayed about half the known mileage.

---

Another surprisingly successful recipe: pasta with sausagemeat and carrots. ( Read more... )
As promised in the cookbook, "the grated carrots combine with the [skinned] sausage to form an unexpectedly good sauce which is thick and satisfying" -- and doesn't taste of carrot! Flavoured with home-grown sage and thyme, it was very appetising, as well as being a good way to get two meals out of a single sausage. With both carrot and tomatoes in, however, the sauce came out quite shockingly orange :-p