My Double Handle Medicine Ball
Ever since I’ve been back home, I’ve been using this medicine ball every day to build up my core strength.
Medicine Ball With Handles
Mine is a 5 Kg. model, but they come in different sizes.
I was given a set of exercises to do from a fitness expert, who puts judo players back together after serious injuries.
The exercises seem to have worked and I feel that my regained core strength has helped my balance and the ability to walk fairly long distances without feeling tired.
I bought mine on-line from Powerhouse Fitness and it doesn’t have a famous brand name, but those in John Lewis are twice the price and have names in the class of Adidas and Nike. So if you want one search on-line and don’t go for a brand you know.
It is rumoured that if ladies use one with the proper exercises, it can help put on a cup size. No-one would believe that would they!
A Most Annoying Advert
I can’t see the television that well in 2-D because of my eye-sight, so one of the most annoying adverts is one for LG proclaiming the virtues of watching 3-D television with someone else which also grates.
So LG has just joined my list of companies whose products I don’t buy!
Is that what advertising is supposed to do? Annoy your possible customers!
When is someone going to produce advert free television? I suppose it’s called the BBC, but what I want to see at the moment is on Sky!
Who Are West Brom’s Sponsor?
I’m just watching West Brom play Newcastle and their sponsor appears to be 247 999, arranged in two rows of three digits. Looking closely, you can just see 0800 in smaller numbers above them.
I thought it was probably some new on-line gambling company and it was only when I checked that I found it was the free phone number for Homeserve, who as far as I know are a perfectly legitimate company.
He Must Be Joking
I just received this e-mail from some idiot called Nepon Smith. With a name like that his parents must have been very stupid and they’ve obviously passed him a set of extremely crap genes.
Hello ,
Am interested in a champagne called Louis Reoderer Cristal Champagne
2002 vintage for an event this month i know the champagnes are expensive also let me know if i can have them in Gift boxes but i will like to know if you can source them for i we be happy if i could have them on hand be the Date of the event Let me know how soon you can get them I’ll get back to you with my Credit Card number as soon as i get the total cost for the cases and i will arrange for the pick up at your location as soon as payment is clear by my carrier to the location of the event below is the bottles needed i will like you to get back to me with the total cost for the bottles.
Champagne Name
Louis Reoderer Cristal Champagne 2002 vintage ……….24 bottles
Waiting for you quick respond.
This has scam written all over it, so I used my favourite Delete key.
I was tempted to e-mail him back, with a suitable address in Kabul.
Is it Me or My Cooking Skills?
I sometimes blame the stroke for my clumsiness, but I’m not sure it’s always to blame.
Take lunch today, when I thought I’d have some smoked salmon with scrambled egg. You’d think that the most difficult job would be cracking the eggs without getting any shell into the basin to mix them all up with a bit of milk and some salt and pepper. But no, it was separating the smoked salmon from it’s packaging. I had to pull it to open the outside packaging, which actually wasn’t too difficult, but I couldn’t get the slices apart without ending up with effectively minced salmon on the plate.
Now my mother taught me how to crack eggs and always said you should crack them into a cup first. But remember in those far off days of the 1950s, you occasionally got an egg with a chick inside it. They smelt something rotten too! So I often still crack them into a cup first, so that if I make a hash of it and get half the shell in it, I can get another cup and start again. But of the perhaps several dozen eggs I’ve cracked since the stroke, I’ve only had to go fishing for bits of shell in perhaps one or two. That would have been about the same number as before.
On the other hand, no-one has ever taught me how to disentangle smoked salmon from its tight packaging. So I’ve just learned badly on the job.
Now when it comes to cooking one of my fish pies, they seem very little different than before, except that I do have problems mashing the potatoes, which might be understandable. Or it might be that I just have very bad basic cooking skills! On the other hand I don’t have any problems peeling potatoes, but I think it was something my mother taught me when I was quite young.
So could it be that things taught to you as a small child, stay with you no matter what happens?
All comments are welcome!
Removing Fence Posts
I have always been an inveterate inventor. At school some of my poorly drawn efforts actually won prizes.
On the stud, we had a lot of what is known as Keepsafe fencing. Unfortunately, the idiots who put the fencing in used poor quality posts that were always rotting. So I developed a device for getting the post out of the ground without too much hard work. I’ve never been a great one for hard phyical work, although the mental stuff is a bit different. Luckily I’ve usually been able to earn enough money to afford to get a man in. Perhaps that’s the Jewish side of my mind, as one of my friends always tells me!
What follows is copy of a post from the stud blog, which shows C using the device to remove a fence by the side of the house. I’m posting it, as one of the photos is one of my favourite ones of my late wife as it sums her up so well.
We had a fence by the side of the house that needed to be removed. The fence was typical post and rail, with the posts buried half a metre into the ground. Luckily they were not embedded into concrete.
At this time, the tool was a few months old and the use had developed so thatyou could use with a high lift jack to remove fence posts without any great fuss or danger. Health and Safety fanatics please note!
As an aside here, just try the normal method of wrapping a chain round the post and then using a tractor to pull the post. This method makes a lot of mess and is very dangerous if the chain breaks.
Fence Post Removal Tool
You start by just dropping the tool over the post, making sure that when it is lifted, it will bite into the post.
Positioning the Tool
Note that there are no moving parts in the tool and it doesn’t need to be adjusted.
Note too, that the post in this example is in pretty good condition. If the post has broken off at the ground as they often do, then all you need to do is dig a perhaps ten centimetres into the ground so that the tool can grip the good part of the post.
The tool is linked to the jack using a shackle with a breaking strain of about a tonne and a half.
Attaching the Jack
Note that the high lift jack is stood on a fence rail to equalise the ground pressure.
The jack is now lifted to pull the post out of the ground.
Lifting the Post
This pull took about a minute and the post came quickly out of the ground. Note C’s ever present Scholl sandals. How Health and Safety!
C did most of the pulling for these posts as it’s actually quicker if someone else (me) holds the post vertically. This just shows how powerful the jack/puller combination is. Even a wimp can pull well over three tonnes!
Virtually Done
Note that little damage is done to the ground and in many cases a new post could be driven firmly into the old hole.
The jack can also be used to lift the heavy gate off its hinges.
Lifting a Gate
This picture shows how easy it is to pull a post in a restricted space.
Pulling in a Restricted Space
The wall wasn’t damaged or even touched.
In the end five fence posts and one gate post were pulled in about half an hour.
A Job Well Done
I will be taking the tool to London, not that I will have any use for it, but surprisingly, the old page gets a few hits and I’m always being asked for drawings or a tool.
So I’m going to publish the drawings on this blog, so that if you want to create one, you can do it. There will only be two conditions.
You must say thank you, if you like what you create.
And as C died of cancer of the heart just a few months after these pictures were taken, with our youngest dying of pancreatic cancer just a few months ago, the next time that a cancer charity tries to tap you for a few pounds, dollars, euros, yen or whatever, then contribute, especially if it is to do with pancreatic cancer research.
I don’t mind if you don’t contribute, because if you don’t, I suspect the Devil who has been haunting me these last few years, might have found another victim and might leave me alone!
The basic drawing is shown and don’t complain about the quality, as it is rather poorly drawn.
Fence Post Removal Tool
Perhaps one day, I’ll get a proper drawing done. There are also some notes to the forge who made the original.
- I haven’t put any dimensions on the side pieces as I will assume that you will use something close to 5 cm. L-section steel. One is upo one way and one the other to give a cutting and leverage effect.
- The endplates can be either flat or L-section. Whichever is easier and/or stronger.
- The only dimensions are that there must be 14 cm. between the ends and the width must be sufficient to allow a post of just under 18 cm. to be lifted.
- The attachment point on the front will have to be pretty strong as the jack can pull up to 3.5 tonnes.
Happy lifting!
Getting Out of Zopa
I’ve got about £50,000 of my money invested in Zopa. Most of it came from the sale of C’s Porsche Boxster, an upfront pension payment and lots of small payments when I’ve found that I’ve some money to spare. I’m now moving house and might need some money to buy bits of furniture, as not everything I’ve got here will fit.
I could use Zopa‘s standard method of getting out called Rapid Return, which I discussed here, but why should I give others the benefit of my good payers?
So out of curiosity I added up how much money was returned to me in the thirty days of November! It was £2,600. My statistics don’t tell me at present how many loans were repaid early in that time, so I can’t be sure if I’ll get this figure back each month.
But it does illustrate that if you want to invest a sum for say three years or longer, then Zopa might be a place to consider! Provided of course that you understand fully what you are doing!
By any measure, though I’m getting more than I would if I’d invested it with any of the reputable wunch of bankers! Here‘s what Lloyds TSB offer.
The other problem with a bank, is that doing business with them isn’t any fun at all. With Zopa you can play the rates to lend your money for either more interest or better clients.
The Oldest Mosque in Australia
In Adelaide, C and I visited the mosque and the associated museum to the Afghan camel drivers, who opened up the middle of the country in the nineteenth century. I have talked to Australians about this part of their history and few actually know of the story. It’s here in an article in the Guardian, which offers advice to those visiting for the cricket.
Australia’s oldest mosque (1888) was built in a back street for Afghan camel drivers employed in the South Australian desert. A simple stone affair with whitewashed brick minarets, it now serves city workers and a new wave of Afghani refugees. You can enter (avoid prayer times) but the wood-lined interior makeover now bears unfortunate resemblance to a Swedish sauna. The camels’ descendants have gone feral but their pure bloodline means they are in demand back in the Middle East. Those not exported can end up as camel pastrami at Wild Oz in the Central Market (wildoz.com.au), which also deals in wild goat, wild boar and, of course, Skippy.
In fact the Afghans, were a mix of people from all over those places where camels are a beast of burden, and as soon as they had done their work, they left, leaving behind the camels, wich quickly went feral. At least the Australians have seen fit to call the train that links Adelaide to Alice Springs and Darwin, The Ghan.
One of my regrets is that when I flew round Australia with C, we only allowed four weeks for the trip. We should have allowed a lot more time. But then C was a typical barrister, who believed that if you were away too long, your colleagues would nick your best cases. We did fly along the southern part of the route of The Ghan from Adelaide to Alice Springs, with stops at Coober Pedy and Yulara. One day I’ll put all of the Australian photos on the web, but sadly, many are missing and I don’t have the negatives any more.
It’s Raining in Adelaide
C and I liked Adelaide, when we went there in the 1980s. But it didn’t rain. In fact in the whole three weeks we were in Australia we never saw any rain at all. This was unusual, as we usually had rain on holiday, just like Queen Liz does!
Adelaide is a unique Australian city in that it was planned by Colonel William Light to be a city with wide streets and lots of green spaces. It is also surrounded by a large area of parkland and has proved to be one of the best laid-out cities in the whole world. There is a statue to his memory called Light’s Vision overlooking the city with this inscription.
The reasons that led me to fix Adelaide where it is I do not expect to be generally understood or calmly judged of at present. My enemies however, by disputing their validity in every particular, have done me the good service of fixing the whole of the responsibility upon me. I am perfectly willing to bear it, and I leave it to posterity and not to them, to decide whether I am entitled to praise or to blame.
Light and his father, Francis, are two of those characters in history, to whom I am drawn. C and I came across the father first in Penang and realised that the founder of the settlement, had been born in Dallinghoo, which was the next village to Debach, where we lived at the time. So the father of the designer of Adelaide was a Suffolk man. In fact, he was the illegimate son of a woman in the village, who was taken under the wing of the local landowner. He certainly was a well-educated and successful man as this extract from Wikipedia shows.
From 1765, he worked as a private country trader. For about ten years he had his headquarters in Salang, Thailand, near Phuket, reviving a failed French trading post. While living there he learned to speak and write several languages, including Malay and Siamese. In 1785, he warned the Thais on Phuket Island of an imminent Burmese attack. Light’s warning enabled the islanders to prepare for Phuket’s defence and subsequently repel the Burmese invasion. For the British East India Company, he leased the island of Penang from the Sultan of Kedah, where many others had failed, and was supposedly given the Princess of Kedah as a reward (other sources state that the Princess was sent to covet Light’s aid on behalf of the Sultan). The multicultural colony of Penang became extraordinarily successful from its inception and Light served as the Superintendent of the colony until his death.
They were an amazing father and son, who from humble beginning made a real positive contribution to the world. We get massive tomes written about obscure and useless politicians, but where is the dual biography of Francis and William Light? A book was written in 1901 and it’s here in PDF.
Let’s hope the rain eases up enough for the Aussies to take their deserved beating!
The Anonymous Widower 