Darren Steele

We took apples and carrots to feed the horses in a nearby field

 

We’re seriously considering building a garage so that I can indulge in my promise to myself to drive a car that’s older than I am.  In order to build the garage we have to move the shed.  In order to move the shed I had to chop down the rotten tree that would almost certainly have come crashing down onto my newly moved shed at some point.  So that’s what we did…

My favourite build so far, although it did get a little tedious doing four legs one after another

Love the pleasure beach!!

The family Steele

Every time I look at Oli’s face in the picture above it makes me giggle.

We had a fun trip to Wales and stayed in a little cottage in Bala.  Other people camped and caravanned.  The main point of the trip was to go surfing…

We also managed to fit in a long walk, a few drinks and a meal out at a wonderful pub – the name of which I can’t remember

Whilst we were there we stayed on this fantastic houseboat

and we even did some sightseeing, that’s the palace behind us…I think

My bike has been making a nasty clicking sound when pedalling for two or maybe three…YEARS.  It annoyed me for a while, then I got used to it, then it annoyed me again so I poked at it for a while.  It then started really annoying me so I bought a bunch of tools and took the crank shafts off and opened up the bearings.  All seemed fine though so I put it back together hoping it would fix it, and it didn’t.

I ignored it for some more time and then had an idea that it may be the pedals.  Bought some new pedals and then ran into the next problem.  The factory fitted pedals were on incredibly, ridiculously, hernia inducingly tightly.

So my usual metal pole lever came in useful – as did a couple of blocks of wood and some G-Clamps.

We went to Amsterdam and took a ferry ride out to NDSM because it was supposed to be a cool place.  Either we couldn’t find the cool bit or it’s only a cool place at night…or during a full moon or something.  Anyway, we came across this massive picture of Anne Frank whilst we were there which made it almost worth the trip.

Long time readers [ hah yeah right ] will remember when I built the sail shade.  I didn’t quite factor in the amount of hassle it is to put it up and down.  It involves ladders, wobbly posts and arse twitching moments when hooking it up.  It would be great to just leave it up but the rain doesn’t quite run off and during a big old storm the water gathers and posts will snap…like one did.

I’ve considered some sort of furling mechanism like one gets on a boat’s jib – but that was looking pretty expensive and complicated.  But continuing with the sailing theme I went with a rough knot at the bottom to keep it off the ground and a reef knot mid-way up to reduce the windage.