When the sun shines

This week: When the sun shines; Breaking tiles;

I’ve been off colour this week, which has curtailed work I was intending to do. I picked up a stomach bug, or some minor food poisoning at the start of the week. Either way, I have not felt at my best and even today, Saturday, I still feel as though I have been kicked by a small horse!

Our weather has remained nice, with warm daytime sunshine. However the clock change last weekend means that sunset is now 16:50 and the day length is ten and a half hours, so our long winter nights are here.

Our temperatures this week are about, or just a little below the average..

The rain last week has done a lot of good and I can see that my Meyer Lemon has new fruit buds. It was one of my citrus trees that I was worried about during the summer drought.

My parcel arrived this week with the new cat flap, to replace the one which broke a week ago.

It is ever so slightly larger than the broken one, so after marking around the new one, I cut the polycarbonate sheet with my oscillating cutter.

I needed to trim a little bit of the triple wall so that it fitted perfectly. Once that was done, I fixed the two halves together and the cat flap was ready for use.

After lots of sniffing, they are using it.

Not so successful was my order for five new casters for my computer chair. Before ordering I measured the size of the originals (which have started to delaminate) and then ordered accordingly.

Opening the box, everything seemed OK, until I tried to fit the first one. It would not go into the hole in the base of the chair.

When I measured it with my digital calliper, the shaft is 1 mm oversize. A millimetre doesn’t sound much, but no amount of lubricant would persuade the new caster to fit. Clearly the holes in the IKEA chair are exactly milled with no tolerance!

The death this week of Sir Patrick Stewart, a fellow Yorkshireman is sad. He is best known for his role in Star Trek, as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. One of his quotation I especially like is this one:

“Time is said to be a predator that has stalked us all our lives, however I believe time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, it reminds us to cherish every moment, because they will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived”.

Make it so….

When the sun shines

With an average high temperature this week of 20°C, it has been pleasantly warm during the day. Certainly warm enough to lie around in the sunshine – when you are a feline. I have told them that winter cold I coming soon, so make the best of it!

Checking the citrus trees, several have new green leaves coming.

This is really not good at this time of year, but is the result of the summer heat waves and drought.

Several have flower buds forming, which usually happens in the early spring, so again not good.

I need to think about putting the winter protection netting around them soon, as I do every winter. But especially this year if there are new, tender leaves and flower buds.

Elsewhere, the Narcissi which I planted on the 3rd October, are now in flower.

I did say that when I planted them, I could see they had shoots, however to go from an unrooted bulb to being in flower, in four weeks is unprecedented.

For the second time this autumn, I have had a visit from an adult Preying mantis. This one is a male.

Having seen none at all during the spring and summer, at least some have hatched. So I hope that the females have laid eggs in a protected egg case so there will be young next year.

One morning this week, the sun was shining through the vine leaves making the colours look very autumnal.

Breaking tiles

I have spent time this week, once again trying to trace the fault in my outside light.

Progressively I have accessed the easiest parts, starting with the bulb. So it was this week that I was in the area around my consumer unit, where I thought the junction box for the light was.

It wasn’t, so on a sunny Thursday morning, I was up on the roof above the light, to get at the void which is behind the consumer unit.

Walking on old roof tiles is like walking on egg shells. You break some! In fact three.

One of the problems is that these are the war reparation tiles, provided after the Italian Fascista burnt all the houses in Dol, as punishment on the local community for actions by the Croatian Partisan movement.

They are made of concrete, a poor quality concrete and without any internal support. The tiles have also been out in the baking sun every year for the last eighty years and so as concrete does, it has degraded.

This means that if you put your weight on a tile, which has limited support underneath, it snaps in two with a loud ‘crack’.

So after breaking tiles, before I even got into the area above the void, I was not best pleased.

The next problem was the bright sunshine. Even with a good torch, I could not see into the void, to properly identify the lead to the outside light. At that point, as it was lunch time, I gave up and decided to wait until the afternoon, when the sun would have dropped behind the hill to the south.

Going back up on the roof, this time with a flood lamp, I had forgotten how many cables run in conduit from the consumer unit. These are in a limited amount of space behind the unit, so trying to trace where the lighting conduit goes was difficult.

Even with a mirror, I was unable to trace where the junction box is. I even wonder if I put it into the false ceiling?

So I gave up. I couldn’t do any more and so I replaced the tiles I broke (I have spares in my architectural salvage area) and decided I need to find another way to get my outside light working…

While I was up the ladder, I removed the old satellite internet system.

The dish has been on the wall for a decade but has been out of use since I got a landline installed. It was about time for it to come down. NCG