Today is my first of five whole, glorious, non-working days! Big yay! I’ve sorted out a bunch of videos, (all the TKD poomse -required patterns- for all of the grades to black belt) numbered them, put them in sequence, chucked them into a file with the photo’ of my badge on the front, (you still wish you had one) and now have written about it. Sad, sad, sad. I have also been making the most of the non-torrential moments to do a bit about the garden. Many’s the suspected weed that has felt the pitiless brutality of the dark side of my gardening. Also I collected a nosegay of sweetpeas and roses, an eye-candy of crocosmia and dahlia, and a touch of hosta and butterfly bush to make an arrangement. I call it ‘Summer in a glass’. Nice, don’t you think? Also I decided to try an idea I’ve been mulling over. For a while now I’ve fancied putting some plants out the front of the house, but we have no garden and the local pre-convict youth would have trashed any plant pots with their relentless football. Now however, the darling youth have mostly moved their delinquency to some other poor bugger’s domain. Mostly. It would only take one hit to knock a plant over, possibly to break the pot. Then I noticed I’ve had to start weeding in the 10" gap between the house and the pavement. It is covered in large stones, with more of the same and sandy gravel below. I thought it would be too inhospitable a terrain to support plant life. But if weeds can do it, why not try some of the hardier plants? So today I’ve been excavating small holes in the stones/ gravel, filling them full of compost and heavy soil, then planting lavender. I had one small lavender growing independently, but the other two were just branches I’d pinned down to root (layered). They were still attached to the mother plant until today. I’ve just snipped them off, cut them right back (to encourage rooting and decrease water loss through the leaves) and stuck them in the front. Watered them in, obviously. Now we wait. If anything can take it it will be lavender. Hot, dry, and poor (to the point of non-existent) soil. Nothing lost, I’m layering another bunch of branches now. While I was at it I potted up one of my dwarf firs and buried the pot in a whole I made in the stones. It’s a nice fir, but I can’t really find a home for it in my garden, so it’s an ideal experimental candidate. Talking of firs, whilst we were in Scotland we were surrounded by the buggers. One particular flavour caught my eye. I went rooting around for pine cones, trying to find one bearing seeds, but they were all wide-open, dried husks (due to it being totally the wrong season). Not to be put off I ripped a few cones apart to try […]
Continue readingTag: Gardening
Carry on regardless
Hi there, I’ve had an interesting few days. At work everyone on my shift in my department was off on Tuesday and Wednesday, except yours truly. This meant I was left, de facto, in charge, and given a couple of work-shy muppets to try and get the job done. For one thing, I’m not a bossy sort. I prefer to do my own job, and let everyone get on and do theirs. Then there’s the calibre of muppet they send over. It seems to be the rule that if they are any good at their job, or don’t mind working, they won’t send them to our department. Tuesday was bad; two lads who although they had worked in our department before and therefore knew the job, were determined to do as little as possible. One bright spot in that shift though was a conversation one of them was having with another lad about one of the managers. Said manager has started growing one of those fashionable moustache/ beard jobbies, commonly and erroneously referred to as a goatee. Anywho, one of the lads said "What’s up with him? When I saw him before, he looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders." The other lad replied "His missus has left him." "His new missus?" "Yeah." There was a thoughtful pause, "Still, no excuse for not shaving." Lad humour. Cruel, but fun. Then on Wednesday I had an even more work-shy crew, and I ended up losing my rag and giving one of them a mouthful. I was ready to lay him out, I was that angry. After that he pulled his weight and everything went swimmingly. The moral to that story being; if your man-management skills aren’t great, just make it known slackers will be severely beaten. As one of those demotivational posters proclaims: "Slavery. Gets shit done." The very same day I managed to pick up a wannabe copper on my way home. I was tootling well within the speed limit, (as set by Einstein) took a corner somewhat enthusiastically, then noticed a cop car in my mirror. Obviously I obeyed all the highway code strictures (as always!) and surreptitiously put my seatbelt on. I got on to a national speed limit road, still being followed, accelerated to 70-ish, came to an island, slowed to 60-ish, shot across, then got flashed down by the cop-car. It had no blue lights, so used headlights to get me to pull over. (Does that mean it was one of those volunteer, wannabe coppers?) So I pulled over. On a clearway. Bit miffed. Stupid arse had me get out of the mighty Micra and into the back of his play cop-car. Giving me grief about, not slowing down and driving like I was in a go-kart. He was saying there was a car at the island and if he’d have pulled out I couldn’t have stopped. I know. It was my right of way. Darwin had something to say about […]
Continue readingGeneral ramblings
Hi, today has been a taxing one. I crashed a pallet truck last week (they don’t have a brake, just a forward or reverse. If you want to brake you switch to reverse. I shot on to a wet trailer, put it into reverse, no grip so no brake, meaning the truck crashed to a stop and I slammed into the corner of the steering column. Just on one rib it feels like.) So that was less than fun. However after the initial staggering about like a shot hero’s death scene, it wasn’t too bad. If anything though, it seems to be getting worse. Silly things like lifting on my right hand side, bending over, sneezing or breathing deeply are to be avoided. This makes a physically demanding job all the more enjoyable. However, after me slagging off the shunters at work they finally came good. On Sunday one of them took me for a bit of a spin in one of the works trucks, showing me how to use and position it. As a bit of a bonus he took me around some of the assessment course the works examiners use. Then we went back to the yard and he showed me a few reverses and talked me through a bunch of goes. The main thing I took from it was a realisation of how to make the trailer do what I wanted in reverse. Not that I can make it work yet, but that horrible moment when the trailer is pointing one way, the cab the other, and I know where I want the trailer to go but get totally confused as to how to make it happen, should be behind me. The instructors have a trick; if one side of your trailer comes out and you want to be straight just steer towards the side you can see. Alas, when I am half way through a move and don’t want to go straight, I can waste lots of valuable room going the wrong way then having to correct the error. Not forgetting that as soon as you run out of room and have to pull forward, that is a minor fault on your test, and one of the two you are allowed. Three, as I know all too well, is a fail. It really is simple; get halfway through my move, think ‘fine, now I want the trailer to start turning right’ put left hand down. The other thing I learned, before my last test, was how to steer the trailer. You’ve got trailer turning towards your target area, but if you leave it it will carry on steering and go too far, so you have to get the cab straight behind the trailer to make it reverse in a straight line. This I was doing, but by the time I’d got behind it the trailer had steered too far. Simple again; BIG steers. I was shuffling the wheel round and taking too long to straighten up. […]
Continue readingThe road to hell
Can you believe it? After last week’s debacle (when the shunters at work said they would give me some help with my reversing, then didn’t, then had the audacity to ask me where I’d gone, after they had said goodbye to me at the clock machine) I really thought the shunters would be too embarrassed to not help me this weekend. They said they would, one of them took my ‘phone number (as it has been my weekend off) then when I texted him today to make sure he’d not forgotten me he rang me back asking who I was! I told him, and he said "oh, I’m off today." He was off bleeding work, and presumably knowing this had taken my number. Oh yes, bit cheesed off. Then he suggested I ring work to try and get the other shunter. I rang my department to get one of the lads to see him for me, and got some gob-shite who gave me lip. I will be finding out who that was and putting them straight. Anyway, when I got through to one of the lads he went to try and get the shunter for me. He came back with a message saying the shunter was too busy to talk to me. Thanks a bunch chaps. I didn’t ask for them to help me, they offered. One of them is the union rep and was saying how he’d square it all with the management, the other was saying he was a fully qualified instructor. Their help would have been immensely beneficial to me. But if they didn’t think they could do it why offer? They may have had good intentions, but I wouldn’t be pissed off if they hadn’t made offers of help they couldn’t be arsed following up on. I didn’t go to my Advanced Driving jobby today in case they called whilst I was out. I think the Sunday lesson of Taekwondo was off (being Easter) but I didn’t bother to check because it would have been for an hour and a half in the afternoon, the likeliest time for them to be able to fit me in. Anywho, other than that I’ve had a splendid weekend off. Any time off work is splendid time, but this weekend was splendid-er. It was supposed to be wet and miserable according to the forecasts I heard. Friday wasn’t so clever, but Saturday and Sunday have been glorious. I’ve been out in my garden for hours and hours. I took my seed trays out for a bask on both days, bringing them in for the night. I kept trying to sit and have a relaxing brew, but as Jo so rightly noted it’s just not possible. The amount of cold brews I’ve remembered too late. But considering I’ve not spent a penny all weekend it has been great. I seem to have found endless jobs that needed doing, (often at the cost of hot brews) but it is so deeply satisfying […]
Continue readingDeja vu
It’s that time again. Test tomorrow. I went for another four hours training today; I spent two hours practising my reverse, still only about 60/40, maybe 70/30. I got it in a quite a few times without him having to stop me, but I also had to have him stop me twice or three times, and had to take three shunts on one go. If you consider all the times he had to stop and correct me, the once I had to stop and start from scratch, and the three shunt fail, it’s probably more like 50/50. I have an hour tomorrow to try again before driving to the test centre. The other two hours were spent with me driving around without any real need for instruction. I brushed one kerb (not a fail) then pulling into the last street (the one which my training placed is based on!) mounted the pavement (fail). Bugger. Still, unless they actually take me to that street I think I should be alright on the road. The first few minutes were a bit hairy; it’s a massively tight turn onto the street from the yard and some clown had parked a van just where you have to drive the cab to make the turn, which was focusing. Then I fumbled a gear change but after that I was chatting away whilst doing the business. I was a lot nervous again. I was all buoyed up after my fail, knowing that I had it in me to pass on the road, but three weeks off and it had grown into a big scary monster again. Two minutes in the cab and I was a happy bunny again. Well, two minutes on the road anyway, pissed off with myself in the yard trying to suss that reverse out. It’s a bigger course tomorrow, if I keep my head and make tiny corrections I think I could do it. Not will, but could. That is another issue I have with my reversing, I want to swing the trailer around, so I put loads of turn on the unit, get it in the right position and straighten up to come straight back, but because I had so much turn on by the time I’ve got the cab back behind the trailer, the trailer has carried on turning and gone too far. I really have not got my head around it. It will be the luck of the draw tomorrow. I could do it, but I only get one go at it (well, you could consider it three goes as I get two shunts, but it’s been taking me those and more in practise). If I understood what I was doing and how to do it I would be laughing. As it is I just keep steering one way and then another, then give up and take a shunt, and hope for the best. Still, I feel reassured about my driving ability on the road part of the test. […]
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