Saturday, November 15, 2008
Bock
Continue to be intrigued by http://sophiebock.blogspot.com/. I'm not clear whether the nifty plans and models are destined to be turned into buildings.
Have just renewed my acquaintance with middle sized vans, in this case a Mercedes Sprinter. Started off the session with reducing an old sofa to small enough peices for me to load single handed. Working with the trusty 15 inch wrecking bar, this took about an hour. The interior of the sofa was surprisingly complicated with springs, sackcloth, some kind coarse brown curly padding made of I know not what and two kinds of white padding. Resisted the temptation to save twenty foot long, thin springs in case they came in useful at some hypothetical point in the future. On arrival at the tip, I learn that vans are not allowed in the recycling area and was directed over a weighbridge and down into the interior of the waste transfer station, a large smelly concrete cave with large vehicles trundling about, interesting puddles and where I now remember I had been once before. I then learn that recycling is only for people with cars. People with vans simply chuck the stuff on a heap. This saves you the bother of carting all your bits off into a multitude of differant bins and them the bother of putting it all back together again for transfer to the landfill site... To be fair, I guess they are doing the best they can. Vans mixing it with cars in the recycling area would probably lead to problems (remembering that this is the tip which caused a tip rage death) and having two recycling areas would be rather expensive.
Then paid my last visit for what will probably be a while to the Regional Capital of the West of England (aka Exeter) Library, the only municipal library that I know which is open seven days a week. I wonder what it does on bank holidays? Started off by getting thoroughly wet on my way up the Exe Valley Cycle Trail, so I steamed nicely during my visit to the warm library. (FIL observed afterwards that this getting wet was the obvious result of the beautiful pink, if very transient, dawn that morning over the Exe. Shepherds' delight and all that). Hopefully in not too odourous a fashion. At least no one got up and moved away. But for some reason the IT people were there at the same time as I was - the result of which blogging became something of a challenge, the intended appearance of the post page not having been achieved. Presumably some wrinkle in the rather tricky software which makes networked public PCs in libraries behave like the PC in your home. But we got there.
Set off back to the smoke at around 0600 with the full moon still going strong. The second auspicious sign was what looked like a barn owl flying over the van from right to left as I passed Exter Airport heading east. Hav'n't done a long drive in the dark for some time so that took some time to get used to. Then had the spectacle of driving up into the dawn on Salisbury Plain - made that much more special by sitting much higher up and with much larger windows than would have been the case in our humble, but serviceable, Fiesta. (By way of an aside, I was told yesterday that small cars such as the Fiesta are holding their price much better than large gas/money guzzlers. So maybe not so humble in these hard times). Somewhat irritated by the time it took people to turn their lights off as it got light.
Which prompts a moan. Which starts with an observation. We can't all be cleverer than everybody else, however hard New Labour try to drag the bog standard comprehensives out of the bog. It remains an arithmetic impossibility. In the same way, we can't all be more visible than everybody else. But the fact that so many people are trying makes for a huge amount of visual clutter on our roads and which does not result, to my mind anyway, in any overall improvement in the visibility of the things that one needs to see. So we have a multitude of wannabee emergency vehicles with loud stripes across their back ends. Cycles with flashing back lights. Cars with fancy headlights. Lorries got up like Christmas trees. Road signs with illuminated smiley faces. People who think it necessary to put their head lights on at the least sign of rain. I just wish they wouldn't. If it wasn't that one can hug the cats' eyes, it would be a job to keep moving at all.
Today, have been doing a bit of recycling of my own, being faced with the requirement to perch one small chest of drawers on top of its twin, rather than perching it on the floor, next to its twin. Making the necessary contraption, made a small dent in my supply of bits and pieces of timber reclaimed from old furniture, in this case a naval chest - the recovery of its twin into use being the subject of an earlier post.
So today, I used a slab of pine from the chest which boasted large brass, countersunk screws - maybe two and a half inch twelves (these had to be discarded despite the cost of replacement, should that ever be required, as their heads were rather bashed about and one was bent) - and which was made out of what appeared to be a single sheet of one inch pine board, maybe 18 inches wide. From the good old days when one inch pine board meant planed board which finished at one inch, not which started at one inch and ended up at about three quarters of an inch after finishing. From the good old days when it was still legal to cut timber to imperial measurements.
Have just renewed my acquaintance with middle sized vans, in this case a Mercedes Sprinter. Started off the session with reducing an old sofa to small enough peices for me to load single handed. Working with the trusty 15 inch wrecking bar, this took about an hour. The interior of the sofa was surprisingly complicated with springs, sackcloth, some kind coarse brown curly padding made of I know not what and two kinds of white padding. Resisted the temptation to save twenty foot long, thin springs in case they came in useful at some hypothetical point in the future. On arrival at the tip, I learn that vans are not allowed in the recycling area and was directed over a weighbridge and down into the interior of the waste transfer station, a large smelly concrete cave with large vehicles trundling about, interesting puddles and where I now remember I had been once before. I then learn that recycling is only for people with cars. People with vans simply chuck the stuff on a heap. This saves you the bother of carting all your bits off into a multitude of differant bins and them the bother of putting it all back together again for transfer to the landfill site... To be fair, I guess they are doing the best they can. Vans mixing it with cars in the recycling area would probably lead to problems (remembering that this is the tip which caused a tip rage death) and having two recycling areas would be rather expensive.
Then paid my last visit for what will probably be a while to the Regional Capital of the West of England (aka Exeter) Library, the only municipal library that I know which is open seven days a week. I wonder what it does on bank holidays? Started off by getting thoroughly wet on my way up the Exe Valley Cycle Trail, so I steamed nicely during my visit to the warm library. (FIL observed afterwards that this getting wet was the obvious result of the beautiful pink, if very transient, dawn that morning over the Exe. Shepherds' delight and all that). Hopefully in not too odourous a fashion. At least no one got up and moved away. But for some reason the IT people were there at the same time as I was - the result of which blogging became something of a challenge, the intended appearance of the post page not having been achieved. Presumably some wrinkle in the rather tricky software which makes networked public PCs in libraries behave like the PC in your home. But we got there.
Set off back to the smoke at around 0600 with the full moon still going strong. The second auspicious sign was what looked like a barn owl flying over the van from right to left as I passed Exter Airport heading east. Hav'n't done a long drive in the dark for some time so that took some time to get used to. Then had the spectacle of driving up into the dawn on Salisbury Plain - made that much more special by sitting much higher up and with much larger windows than would have been the case in our humble, but serviceable, Fiesta. (By way of an aside, I was told yesterday that small cars such as the Fiesta are holding their price much better than large gas/money guzzlers. So maybe not so humble in these hard times). Somewhat irritated by the time it took people to turn their lights off as it got light.
Which prompts a moan. Which starts with an observation. We can't all be cleverer than everybody else, however hard New Labour try to drag the bog standard comprehensives out of the bog. It remains an arithmetic impossibility. In the same way, we can't all be more visible than everybody else. But the fact that so many people are trying makes for a huge amount of visual clutter on our roads and which does not result, to my mind anyway, in any overall improvement in the visibility of the things that one needs to see. So we have a multitude of wannabee emergency vehicles with loud stripes across their back ends. Cycles with flashing back lights. Cars with fancy headlights. Lorries got up like Christmas trees. Road signs with illuminated smiley faces. People who think it necessary to put their head lights on at the least sign of rain. I just wish they wouldn't. If it wasn't that one can hug the cats' eyes, it would be a job to keep moving at all.
Today, have been doing a bit of recycling of my own, being faced with the requirement to perch one small chest of drawers on top of its twin, rather than perching it on the floor, next to its twin. Making the necessary contraption, made a small dent in my supply of bits and pieces of timber reclaimed from old furniture, in this case a naval chest - the recovery of its twin into use being the subject of an earlier post.
So today, I used a slab of pine from the chest which boasted large brass, countersunk screws - maybe two and a half inch twelves (these had to be discarded despite the cost of replacement, should that ever be required, as their heads were rather bashed about and one was bent) - and which was made out of what appeared to be a single sheet of one inch pine board, maybe 18 inches wide. From the good old days when one inch pine board meant planed board which finished at one inch, not which started at one inch and ended up at about three quarters of an inch after finishing. From the good old days when it was still legal to cut timber to imperial measurements.
# posted by Jim @ 8:35 AM 
