Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Fence up
With a bit more help from BH the fence is now completed. Doesn't look too bad now that it is up. And for the first time I wore duffel coat, scark and heavy duty sweater on the allotment. Wiring up is not warm work. Digging here we come - or maybe after five months or so I will finally pick up the dreaded paint brush - for which there is plenty to do.
Discovered that I can buy small quantities of barbed wire from Wickes - around £11 for a 15m roll - which would make it a rather expensive business. I wonder what Challenge fencing would have charged for its 200m roll. But what they don't sell is sensible guage tie wire for which I had to repair to Robert Dyas in the High Street. A very useful establishment - while Wickes have reminded me again of the lack of depth of their stock.
Sunday fest was loin of pork which is rapidly becoming a favourite pork joint. But we will have to find a way to stop it finished up in a wedge shape - the fat side shrinking by around 30% and the bone side staying much as it started. Fortunately this does not affect the taste. Must learn to do better on the carving front - without having to resort to having it chined which destroys the appearance of the thing.
A easy new soup today. Simmer a couple of handfulls of pearl barley in water for an hour or so. Add Knorr vegetable stock cube (shock horror, an e-number). Fry some chopped onion in butter. Add three handfuls of slivered savoy cabbage to soup. Simmer for a few minutes then add the onion. Being a bit cold the two of us got through a quart or so of the stuff in a sitting.
Clearly got more work to do on the pictures front. Couldn't even manage a simple cropping job using Paint, although the HP scanner did quite a good job of capturing the image. Plus got lots of bother with the computer thinking it needed to reconnect using my obsolete dial up line. This seemed to be triggered by the fence picture. One more odd thing: unlike on the last attempt when the resultant pictures on the blog loaded more or less instantly, these are taking some time. I had thought that the blogger people did something clever to get the number of bits down to something sensible. Time of day - that is to say early evening - perhaps?
In danger of spending more time on tool than content. Must be careful.
We saw a photograph yesterday taken by somebody who was clearly more into this than I am. In fact there were two, one with and one without an unfortunate cupboard just behind the subject's head. In the one without, the cupboard had been carefully painted out and the thing reprinted. How one did that sort of thing ten years ago without a computer I have no idea.
Interested by the discussion of the merits of early morning arrests in the Telegraph this week. It does seem a bit keen to be banging up to someone's - at worse a respectable white collar offender - door at the crack of dawn mob handed. But the police do seem to be rather into this style of action and I can see that it will catch people off their guard and perhaps the crude style will make the subjects of it more submissive. Such things are certainly done in prisons and we think it OK in that context. Furthermore, as the T points out today, would you want said possible white collar offender treated any differantly from the possible crack dealer on their local bog standard estate? If, for example, said offender belonged to Crouch End - aka Islington on the Hornsey - there are plenty of such estates to hand.
Discovered that I can buy small quantities of barbed wire from Wickes - around £11 for a 15m roll - which would make it a rather expensive business. I wonder what Challenge fencing would have charged for its 200m roll. But what they don't sell is sensible guage tie wire for which I had to repair to Robert Dyas in the High Street. A very useful establishment - while Wickes have reminded me again of the lack of depth of their stock.
Sunday fest was loin of pork which is rapidly becoming a favourite pork joint. But we will have to find a way to stop it finished up in a wedge shape - the fat side shrinking by around 30% and the bone side staying much as it started. Fortunately this does not affect the taste. Must learn to do better on the carving front - without having to resort to having it chined which destroys the appearance of the thing.
A easy new soup today. Simmer a couple of handfulls of pearl barley in water for an hour or so. Add Knorr vegetable stock cube (shock horror, an e-number). Fry some chopped onion in butter. Add three handfuls of slivered savoy cabbage to soup. Simmer for a few minutes then add the onion. Being a bit cold the two of us got through a quart or so of the stuff in a sitting.
Clearly got more work to do on the pictures front. Couldn't even manage a simple cropping job using Paint, although the HP scanner did quite a good job of capturing the image. Plus got lots of bother with the computer thinking it needed to reconnect using my obsolete dial up line. This seemed to be triggered by the fence picture. One more odd thing: unlike on the last attempt when the resultant pictures on the blog loaded more or less instantly, these are taking some time. I had thought that the blogger people did something clever to get the number of bits down to something sensible. Time of day - that is to say early evening - perhaps?
In danger of spending more time on tool than content. Must be careful.
We saw a photograph yesterday taken by somebody who was clearly more into this than I am. In fact there were two, one with and one without an unfortunate cupboard just behind the subject's head. In the one without, the cupboard had been carefully painted out and the thing reprinted. How one did that sort of thing ten years ago without a computer I have no idea.
Interested by the discussion of the merits of early morning arrests in the Telegraph this week. It does seem a bit keen to be banging up to someone's - at worse a respectable white collar offender - door at the crack of dawn mob handed. But the police do seem to be rather into this style of action and I can see that it will catch people off their guard and perhaps the crude style will make the subjects of it more submissive. Such things are certainly done in prisons and we think it OK in that context. Furthermore, as the T points out today, would you want said possible white collar offender treated any differantly from the possible crack dealer on their local bog standard estate? If, for example, said offender belonged to Crouch End - aka Islington on the Hornsey - there are plenty of such estates to hand.
# posted by Jim @ 9:17 AM 
