I forgot to mention last week that, after about 18 months, Casper has finally figured out how to use the cat flap! Just in time to get a bit more use out of the garden before autumn arrives and the house seems more appealing – even Ninja has come in and purred on my lap a couple of times in the past couple of days, after spending almost every minute of the summer hiding outside as usual.
It was the last bank holiday for a while on Monday, but I did very little other than recover from the cycling and drinking on Sunday. Onwards to Christmas.
I still felt worn out by Tuesday evening, so drove to Felixstowe for training for a change, rather than cycling. Even without the extra miles on the bike the running wore me out even more, but after another couple of rest days (apart from riding to work) I managed to drag myself out of bed for Friday’s Run for Coffee. Only two of us running this week for some reason, although a few others joined us at the coffee shop. Then a slowish parkrun on Saturday on what’s still a horrible course (I heard someone describe the uphill bit as “barbaric”, which seems about right). And yet another ’Spoons breakfast.
On Saturday my neighbour popped round to say that the lady whose garden backs onto both of ours was concerned about a plant that’s growing in my hedge. Apparently it’s called a black locust tree, and grows quite aggressively and quite large. He offered to cut it down and put it in his brown bin, but I felt guilty so did it myself on Sunday (as well as also removing another smaller one I found a bit further along). I’ve got next week off, and cutting the hedge is on my notional to-do list, so we’ll see whether I actually get round to it.
After however many weeks it’s been with no hot water, and no success with my half-hearted efforts to find a plumber who wasn’t booked up for months, I’d decided to fit a new pipe myself. I think I’ve now assembled all the bits and pieces I need, and made a start this weekend. I need to cut the old pipe off in the utility room, then run a new one through the wall, over the door and under the sink (completely bypassing the leaky one under the floor), and it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to put an isolator valve before my new pipework in case anything sprung a leak. Then (very belatedly) I realised that with basically half an hour’s work cutting the pipe and putting the isolator on I could now turn the water back on at the boiler and have hot water everywhere except the kitchen. A shame I didn’t think of that earlier, but on the plus side I’ve got quite used to cold showers, which I hear are quite trendy.
I always forget just how much better SDS+ drills are than normal ones. The only 15mm bit I had that I thought was long enough to go through the wall was one with a normal round shank, so I spent ages with a hammer drill making about a quarter-inch dent in the breeze block wall. I eventually decided to save some time by drilling as far as I could with the SDS+ and a short bit, then reverting to the normal one for the remainder. It turned out it was just about long enough after all, and flew through the wall in about two seconds, almost literally like a hot knife through butter.
I’ve now got as far as cutting and dry-fitting the pipes on the utility room side (behind the washing machine), so just the actual kitchen bit and all the soldering to go.
I noticed that Point Break (the original one, not the 2015 remake) was on iPlayer. I missed it at the cinema when a bunch of friends went without me 30-odd years ago, but on balance I think I’m probably with Bill, who said at the time that it was rubbish, even though everyone else had enjoyed it.