Darren Steele

If you’ve been paying attention to my blog then you’ll recollect that Oli and I built some beautiful compost bins https://junglefreedomfighters.com/?p=1392

Well, it turns out that because my compost bins are built beneath a tree it ends up being a bit dry. It got so dry that a bunch of wasps, and I mean thousands of the little buggers, decided to make a nest there. Usually I’m pretty cool about stuff like but they started freaking me out whenever I went into my shed and they even started flying into my office when I had the windows open. This obviously would not do!

On the day of Oli’s birthday, Dragan, Oli and I went down there to do battle. I’d found a submersible water pump in the garage and bought myself a hose to go with it. Actually I bought two hoses but that’s more down to me hallucinating about receiving packages that hadn’t arrived yet – yeah, things got messy. Anyway – I plugged the hose onto the submersible water pump, dropped the pump into a full water butt, plugged the pump into a wifi enabled smart plug and then tried to fasten the hose to the top of a home made tripod that we built years ago for making tea on a fire https://junglefreedomfighters.com/?p=1046

It didn’t really work.

Eventually I just got my rake out and started pulling the compost apart.

Then I laid my blue pipe in there and emptied a water butt full of water over them. They stuck around for a few more days. Stung me twice whilst I was raking them out, but eventually they all wandered off and lived somewhere else.

It was Oliver’s birthday and the sun shone. We had a few ummmm socially distanced friends over

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Now that I’m getting all old and grey I don’t like kneeling on hard concrete floors or bending over for long periods. Still quite like riding my bike though so I bought myself one of these

Jamie Oliver may well be an annoying Mockney nobhead, but he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to breakfasts. I present to you my Saturday morning breakfast [ and leftovers lunch ] – Cherry tomato tray baked eggs.

Son of a bitch tried to shoot me in the ass.

God damn shot me.

So Jason, who is in the best friend category – but is in danger of being relegated from the group – shot me in the leg. We were visiting Paul and got the air rifle out to shoot some targets. Paul and I decided to have a bit of a mash in the Polaris …

… so we asked the guys to stop shooting whilst we drove down to the bottom of the garden. We drove down, stopped at the gate, I jumped out to open the gate, Paul drove through the gate and then Jaz took aim. Calmly sighted my ass in the telescopic sights and squeezed the trigger of the gas powered air rifle, and motherfucking shot me.

It really hurt. It really really really fucking hurt. It bled. Jaz…shot me….and drew blood.

As I alluded to in a previous post I’ve been doing my sail shade all wrong. When I initially did the maths to work out where to position the poles to get the appropriate tension on the shade I just always assumed I would be attaching the shade to the poles directly using shackles and turnbuckles and such. This was stupid. Completely retarded.

Anyway, at some point in the past I bought a new sail shade but because I’m a bit of a cretin I bought the wrong size. I never bothered to return it and had a vision of using it as TV screen movie projector thing…anyway, I didn’t do that either. But I finally worked out that with some judicious use of paracord I can suspend the smaller shade between the posts and get it all lovely and taut and centralised.

It was whilst straining to pull the paracord to tighten up the shade I remembered we used to use pulley systems like the one above on my little boat and those pulleys would make this whole sail shade tautening thing much easier. It did…and it’s a thing of beauty.

Look at it – just look at it man – beautiful.

Nipped out to get some essential supplies

Emma and I left the sail shade out and failed to notice that we had a load of wind coming. The wind blew, the sail shade whipped around, the pole snapped. It was most definitely not a cool thing. Fortunately my neighbour suggested a quick way to fix it would be to put a post-foot into the concrete and slide the post in. To do this I had to drill some holes in the concrete to fix the post-foot down. My drill burnt out whilst doing this…which meant I had to buy a new drill. It’s a thing of beauty

Then I worked out that I’d been doing the sail shade wrong all these years. I now have a smaller shade rigged up with paracord to tension it. Should have taken a picture of it really!

Alan, the very talented chap that built my garage popped around for a socially distanced beer. Whilst he was here he observed that I hadn’t Osram oiled my garage. I had no recollection of him telling me to do this in the past but my memory is pretty bad so he may well have mentioned it. Anyway, long story short – bought some Osram oil and spent a lovely sunny morning oiling the oak.

I think it turned out rather well

So thrilled that my crazy friends got together and sent me a beautiful bottle of Japanse Whisky for my birthday. Absolutely love it!