The never ending story

This week: Your weekly dose of cats; Last one on the boat; My Achilles heel…; The never ending story;

The weather in Dol is beginning to heat up.

We are still below the average for the middle of June, but when you compare it to Spain and France, we are positively cool.

Once again, a huge mass of hot African air is moving up from Morocco and will cover much of western Europe by Monday.

This is climate breakdown, where the established weather patterns of the last century no longer exist and places which were once relatively temperate in summer are now baking in heatwaves.

This of course brings problems of forest fires and excess human deaths due to the heat.

However there are plants, for example Lavender, which need heat to produce the essential oils, which the plant is grown for.

This hot weather has meant that there have been spectacular sun rises and sunsets this week, as the rising and setting sun reflects off the local clouds.

Because of the heat, I am irrigating every day, just to keep plants alive.

The soil moisture in the citrus orchard is down from 30% last weekend to 25% today. However the netting I put over my citrus is doing its job, keeping the trees underneath cooler, stopping some direct evaporation and protecting the young fruit.

As the northern summer Solstice is tomorrow (Sunday) morning, I am up early, often around 05:00, so I can work when it is cool outside.

This morning is was already 28°C at 08:00. By 10:00, it is time to retreat indoors where the metre thick walls and small windows, keep my home cool. I don’t have any AC, so rely of the pressure differential on different sides of the house, to ensure there is an air flow through the buildings.

The first Cicadas have hatched this week. These are the annual hatchings and their chirping forms the background sound to Mediterranean summers.

This is a recording I made last summer. https://soundcloud.com/norman-woollons/cicada-jul-25

They are still not very numerous, but I record the first in my Springwatch calendar. They are the last species that I record.

I need to do the full analysis of the data for 2026, but a quick check suggests that overall events were 6 days earlier than last year.

It is yet more proof, if any was needed, that our climate has been irrevocably altered and is not getting any better…

Your weekly dose of cats

There are readers of this blog who feel cheated if one of the felines has not inveigled their way into a photograph (I know because they tell me).

With 7½ permanent residents, who like following and generally being wherever I am, it is often hard to take a photo which does not include one or other of them, somewhere in the shot.

Then there are the occasions when one of the tribe is just “there” as I walk past. Like Tigger in this photo.

He was on the wall, at the top of the steps outside the dining room as I came up form the courtyard.

Last one on the boat

I had to go over to Split on Thursday for a hospital appointment.

I have to say the way that appointments run to time here is impressive, however I am getting ahead of myself.

This is the first time ever I have been over to the mainland at the summer solstice, so as I sat outside on the top deck, waiting to leave Stari Grad at 05:30, the sun was just coming up over the Dinaric Alps.

With a little cloud reflecting the rising sun, the water turned to burnished gold. As always the ferry left spot-on-time.

They were just using the main deck on this, one of the smaller ferries, because our regular big ferry, called the Zadar, is still off-line waiting for parts.

The port was busy when we docked in Split so it took a while to get out onto the road network, so it was just after 08:00 that I arrived at Bauhaus.

Once again I had a fairly long list of things I needed. The difference was that time was on my side. Usually I am rushing because I need to get the 14:30 ferry back.

The chaos in the Bauhaus store seems to have been resolved, although many aisles were still blocked with pallets.

As on my previous visit, staff were noticeable by their absence, so trying to find someone to ask for help in locating items proved impossible.

What they have also done is add some self checkout tills. However they are only open to trade customers. This meant that there were long queues at the ordinary checkout positions.

All in all, I got most of what I wanted.

Next stop was the Centre One Mall for cat food and to try and get some assorted crushed nuts for when I am making bread. I failed in the latter task.

My appointment at the hospital was 13:30, so I was there early, at 13:10. At 13:25 I was called in to see the doctor. After being wired for an ECG, I was given an ultrasound and at 13:45 I was on my way out. The report will be sent to the cardiologist.

I had booked a place on the 17:00 ferry, because I anticipated spending much longer at the hospital, so I set off for the ferry port to try and get the 14:30 ferry home.

From past experience, I know that if you hit the traffic lights on the Poljička cesta, the main road between the port and the auto cesta, just right, you can get a “green wave” so at 60kph, the lights all change to green for you.

I managed to get my “green wave” and was at the ferry at 14:10. However because I had a ticket for the 17:00 sailing, I was put into a queue of 8 other vehicles, to see if they had space.

Unlike the morning sailing, the crew was using both decks of the ferry. I really thought that I was going to be stuck at the port for three hours, however, they sandwiched the vehicles in.

I was called forward and was the last car on the ferry for the trip home.

Getting back home after an early start and a long day, especially in summer heat, always means I sleep well….

My Achilles heel…

Everyone has an Achilles heel, or more correctly two achilleas tendons.

The term stems from ancient Greek mythology and the legendary warrior Achilles.

According to the legend, Achilles’ mother Thetis dipped him into the River Styx as an infant to make him immortal. Because she held him by his left heel while submerging him, the water did not touch that specific spot.

Years later, Achilles was killed during the Trojan War (13th century BC) when a poisoned arrow struck him exactly in his unprotected heel.

You have to love the excruciating detail of the great Greek Myths, as related by Homer et al!

The Achilles tendon is the thickest in the human body and connects the calf muscle to the foot, at the heel bone. Mine has been “playing up” for a month or so, which I put down to tendinitis.

Two common Achilles conditions are tendinitis and bursitis, both painful, both common but with different causes.

I’m not really sure which I have, but because the pain is higher up than the heel, I am fairly certain it is tendinitis.

Of course rest is one of the elements of care. The problem is that I don’t do “rest”, or taking things easy. It’s just not my nature. So I ordered a specialist support bandage and it arrived on Monday.

I wasted no time in wrapping my leg, but not too tightly, above the ankle and around the affected tendon.

After a few hours on my feet, I was actually getting quite a bit more pain with the support, than without, so I took it off.

That transformation was magical. All pain disappeared and I wasn’t aware of even being careful for the rest of the day.

By a little trial and error, I have found that if I use the wrapping for an hour or so first thing in the morning, restricting movement, it then begins to hurt at which point I remove the bandage and the rest of the day is pain free.

This really is contrary to what I would have expected, but it works for me.
Maybe I’ll leave off the triathlon training for a while longer….

The never ending story

Early in the week I started to assemble the second stainless steel workshop table I bought at the end of last year.

Having bought one from TEMU and being impressed by its strength and durability, I realised that if I bolted two together, I could make a moveable stand for my Scheppach pillar drill..

These are heavy machines and need to be bolted securely to a work bench. Because I use my work benches for many different things. I didn’t want a permanent installation, so the idea of a moveable workbench, with the pillar drill on top was born.

I find that I enjoy project planning as much as I do the actual building process. I usually start with a pencil drawing, which develops into a list of materials needed.

With a heavy drill press on the top, I decided to replace the casters on the bottom of the workshop tables with two 10 x 10 pieces of timber that had overhangs and lockable casters.

This means that although the two tables together measure a 60 x 60 cm² work surface, with the drill in the middle, the overhang gives more lateral stability.

Precise measuring and drilling of the stainless steel was needed so that the two tables were perfectly level. I reinforced the insides where they were bolted together with aluminium “U” channel, along the whole length of the join.

I realised I needed some more bolts, that were unobtainable on the island, so added them to my list for the visit to Bauhaus on Thursday morning.

My preference is to use ENOX fasteners where ever possible, because they don’t corrode. I also like bolts that have a HEX Allen key head fastening because they are easier to tighten (and maybe undo later) and great for confined spaces.

My list included the size and quantity of the metric nuts and bolts I wanted.

With a long list of things I wanted from Bauhaus, when I was in the fixings aisle, I went from drawer to drawer, getting the things I wanted.

There is a single long aisle in Bauhaus which consists just of drawers or boxes of almost every kind of fixing someone may want.

The process is that you select your fixing, which can be loose items, put them in a waxed paper bag, place the bag on a weigh scale, enter the code number from the front of the drawer and the machine prints a cost ticket with a bar code for the checkout.

I recall now that the M10 size nuts and washers were above eye level, so I had to reach up, open the drawer, remove a dozen or so nuts and put them in a bag. I used the label on the front to guide me to the size.

With the metric system of bolt sizes, you just need to know the diameter and length of the bolt you need to find them.

Back at home on Friday, I spent much of the day cutting threaded M10 bar with a hacksaw, fixing the 15cm pieces into the feet of the table and then dropping the wooden “feet” over the bolts.

I used frame clamps to jack down the wood onto the bolts, until they were firmly located.

On Saturday morning when I opened my bag of nuts, they didn’t fit, being too small.

When I looked at the label on the bag, it says M10, so I know I used the right code. All I can presume is that who ever filled up the drawer put M9 nuts inside instead of M10.

In my haste to complete my shopping, I never noticed.

Unfortunately I didn’t have enough M10 nuts in my stock drawers, and it being Saturday early closing here, I will have to wait until next week to go to town and get what I need.

It is for reasons like this that my projects, even with a lot of planning and preparation, become a “never ending story”… NCG