A couple of weeks ago Daisy and I started on our diet again. I’d ballooned to 13 stone 8lb (86kg, 190lb) and my legs were starting to feel it: I’ve been having some trouble with my right hip for the last few weeks. Daisy’s also put on weight (better not tell!) so we’re back on the WeightWatchers diet again. It’s a very good diet – you can still have goodies as long as you count the points and don’t go over for the week. We don’t visit the meetings because we have all the books to do it ourselves (although it’s debatable if we have the motivation that the meetings give you).

Before we started the diet, we had already decided to do more exercise. Once a week I meet up with my friend and play badminton or squash, while Daisy goes swimming or to aqua aerobics with my friend’s partner. Last night I played squash for the first time in a while (both my friend and I prefer badminton). It was no more knackering than badminton, but much harder to play. That said, I felt much more able to play the game than the last time I played a couple of months ago. Still, I think we’ll continue to play badminton most often.

It’s a difficult time to start a diet. With my birthday and Christmas coming up, one must have nerves of steel not to end up binge eating. I’m sure we’ll forget the points on my birthday and Christmas day but we must stand strong on the days following.

I went to the optician on Wednesday (technically she’s an optometrist but you know what I mean). Had my eyes re-tested after the fiasco with the other opticians’ shop and the Glasses Direct order. Turns out my prescription is quite different to the one that the first opticians created, so that’s probably why I couldn’t see through the glasses that Glasses Direct sent me. I’m now down to around -6 in both eyes – that’s blind-as-a-bat to you.

I have considered having laser treatment, but the videos I saw online of the process actually put me off. The statistics seem to say that 95% of people are satisfied with their treatment. Maybe I’m a pessimist, but that means 5% are not satisfied. That sounds quite a lot when you consider how many laser treatments occur every day.

Anyway, £226 for new lenses in my current frames (how do they sleep at night?!) and I’ll keep considering the laser thing. My Mum goes in for cataract removal before Christmas. It’s a very similar operation, although her’s is now necessary, unlike mine. I’ll definitely wait to see how she goes, although she is having her operation done under a general anaesthetic. On the plus-side: I know what to get Mum for Christmas: A white stick.

One of the ways I try to cut down my carbon footprint (and my monthly costs) is to use my bike when I can. Perhaps the most often I use it is to nip down the shops and do a bit of shopping. Often my panniers are enough to get by with, but sometimes you just need more space.

A couple of years ago I bought a bike trailer. It was about £40 off eBay and has done it’s duty well. But it has a serious drawback and that’s that the wheels are so small that getting the pump into the valve to inflate them is almost impossible. This has annoyed me for ages. It’s also quite small. Going to music sessions with a violin and a mandolin is impossible with just panniers and difficult with my old trailer.

So, up steps my latest trailer. It’s big. And it can hold 100kg (although I doubt I could pull 100 kgs very easily). The size means I could fit in a violin and a mandolin quite easily and the larger wheels are as easy to inflate as a normal bicycle tyre. Best of all, though, is that the frame has attachment points all around for the canvas sides. This means that in the future I might be able to customise it to have different tops for different trips; for example, high sides for taking voluminous but light objects down the dump (like garden waste) or possibly a better way of attaching a guitar.

Here’s some pictures of it attached to my bike.

New Bike Trailer

New Bike Trailer from back

Since I’ve taken these photos I’ve added rear lights for towing in the dark. It’s very solidly made and yet dismantles easily. I’ve managed to store it almost flat in the garage.

I have one thing I must remember: my old trailer attached near the underside of the seat post which gave it all-round manoeuvrability, but the new trailer attaches at the centre of the rear wheel and the tail angles out and around the wheel. This it means it’s not possible to do sharp right-hand turns because the rear wheel hits the trailer’s tail. Hopefully it won’t be a problem but I must try to remember that! The advantage is that the centre of gravity is lower (so heavy loads don’t affect the bike’s balance) and it frees up the top of the bike rack again.

I haven’t used it yet, though. I’m looking forward to its first outing. That might well be on Friday when I go to my next session.

I ordered some new specs a couple of weeks ago from Glasses Direct. As my first introduction to buying specs online, I was both anxious and excited when 2 weeks later through the door popped a jiffy bag with “Your Glasses Have Arrived” emblazoned on them.

I excitedly tore into the bag and pulled out the bright blue snap case which came with them. I opened it up and inside were a shiny pair of rimless specs, not too dissimilar to what I already had.

I took off my grubby, fuzzy old specs and carefully pushed the new ones onto my ears. A bit of eye rolling and daze-inducing adjustments and they were straight. I looked out of the window to the distance.

Uhm…

I re-adjusted.

They’re rubbish!

My right eye was pretty much out of focus; possibly worse than my old specs. The left eye was better – almost correct – but I wouldn’t say it was pin-sharp.

To be honest, I don’t think this is Glasses Direct fault: I don’t think my prescription is correct. For example, if I look at something that’s just into my field of view of my left eye, it’s still blurred in my right eye. This surely means my right eye is weaker, so why is my prescription the same for both eyes?

Quite honestly, I’m not convinced the optimetrist at the shop I went to was up to much. She was doing everything so quick and seemed to make very few adjustments. At the end she decided it was right, but I wasn’t convinced. I was like “er, well.. ” but the test specs were off and I was being herded to the frames section.

So, my plan is to get another eye-test done and check out that prescription. If it really is correct, I will not use Glasses Direct.

Not the vegetable, this time, but the game.

On Monday, I played squash with Gary. It was hard work, partly because it was much like getting into an oven and stuffing your head in the fan, but also because it was a work out to which my body is currently quite unaccustomed. It was great fun though, despite the fact that I lost all games.

Daisy went and splashed around in the kid’s wee wee; that is, she went to aqua-aerobics in the swimming pool. As we’re now back on the Weightwatchers diet, it was nice to get a whole bunch of points for our efforts (and points mean pri.. er.. chocolate).

Come Wednesday and my body has realised what happened to me on Monday. My butt cheeks are aching like I’ve been sitting on a rollercoaster all day! And to top it all off, I think I might have to get on my bike and go into town, as we’re running low on bread flour.

It’s against most of my eco-friendly principles, but sometimes getting brand new toys is just too much fun to pass up.

Today I received my new Zoom H4. It’s personal digital recorder but designed for music and stuff. It’s basically a really posh dictaphone. It’s got a really nice set of microphones on the front which is what makes it so special, really.

I bought it because, when I go to sessions, it’s going to be useful to record people playing tunes I don’t know. The music (or ‘dots’ as we folkies call it!) don’t provide enough information on how it should be played. The only way to really know how it should be played it to listen to someone playing it. So, if I take my little device along to sessions and workshops, I can set it to record so that when I get back home I can learn to play tunes properly.

At least that’s my excuse for buying a nice little new toy

The longest day has just passed in a blur of rain and dark clouds, so winter’s on its way now.

It’s usual though with the lag of the seasons that the best weather is still yet to come. My veg are just starting to crop and things are looking sunnier today.

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So, I am now officially carless. On the way to work a couple of weeks ago my car began to feel like the engine was missing – it was stuttering and feeling a bit lethargic. A few miles down the road it began to make a squealing noise, like there was someone on my backseat with long nails and a blackboard. As I neared work, with less than a mile to go, the engine really began to tighten up and I was having to toe-heel to keep the car going. I pulled over not wanting to destroy the engine thinking it might be an oil problem as I had once before.

Dad kindly drove the 30 miles to see if he could fix it at the road-side. He had an idea what it was and didn’t look happy. He suggested the best route would be to get some benefit from the bags of cash I’d pushed at the AA and get them to recuse me. In 20 minutes a (very nice) man arrived and started the car. He got out.

“Next stop for this is the scrapyard,” he said.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“The big-end’s gone.” he shrugged.

‘The big-end’s gone’? Sounds like a comedy sketch and the sort of thing your dodgy garage mechanic might say.

(Science bit): Every piston in the car has a rod connecting it to the crank shaft (the bit that makes the wheels turn) and at the connection to the crank-shaft there’s a bearing called the big-end. Most cars have at least 4 of these, so it’s a bit of bad grammar when they say the big-end’s gone; they mean one of the big-ends has gone. When they say gone, they don’t mean it’s packed up and taken a holiday in Barbados, they mean it’s knackered.

This is apparently a big job to fix, mostly because a knackered big-end knackers up the crank-shaft for you, and that’s a really expensive bit of metal.

So, after a great deal of consideration, last week my poor old car went up on eBay for spares or repair. I said in my listing I was hoping someone could take it and re-use bits of it. The reduce, re-use, recycle mantra still wafts around my empty head from time-to-time. Anyway, seems like the guy who’s bought it (for £74 no less) is simply going to scrap it. Seems a lot of money and effort to simply scrap it, but scrap yards pay money for scrap metal, which is usually sent to steel processing plants to be recycled into more cars, or whatever. So, at least it’s being recycled, but recycling is expensive (environmentally) compared to re-use, so I’m rather upset that the buyer is doing this. After all, I could’ve just taken it down the scrap-yard and grabbed the money if I didn’t give a shit about where it went.

Oh well. So long, old car.

I’ve joined a local nature conversation group called Friends of Kinson Common. They are, unsurprisingly, concerned with the upkeep, management and publicity of Kinson Common, a 40 acre reserve right in the middle of Kinson. It came about rather randomly having received a comment on one of my photos on Flickr. Since then, I’ve also found out about another local nature reserve near Ferndown called SlopBog. I’ve visited there too and it’s rather nice — saw lots of common lizards there. Anyway, we’ll see what comes of that. Currently I’m just enjoying “surveying” the site (i.e. taking lots of photos there!). At least the weather’s still nice; it’ll be winter soon and no insects left to photograph

Two posts ago I talked about the vegetable cage I was building to keep the chickens off my veg and I mentioned that I was in the process of building another one. Well, it’s been so long since I last wrote a post that since that post I built the second cage, planted courgettes and peas in it, eaten the peas which have now died off, and eaten pretty much all of the courgettes – the plant is looking a bit ropey now. My other cage was a storming success and a month or two back I harvested my garlic (50 bulbs is a conservative estimate) and my shallots (probably about 40 shallots) which we’ve been munching our way through since.

As usual, I’ve been working on all sorts of things in the day and the evenings, only one of which I’ve been paid for, but hopefully there is more to come soon. It means I’ve been able to save up more than usual, particularly as I’m saving nigh on £100 a month simply by working at home most of the time. I tend to only visit university on Thursdays now when I have a regular meeting.

In June Daisy joined me for a week’s holiday in a small city in Italy called Figline. I was having a meeting there and so we extended the stay to enjoy the beauty of Tuscany. Unforunately on the first day, Daisy slipped over and hurt her leg, so we didn’t see a great deal of Tuscany as it turned out. But it was still nice. Her leg was never quite right, so she started physio sessions after seeing her doctor.

Then. about 6 weeks ago now, at the end of July, we went to a mate’s birthday do, in a local village hall and had a fun game of skittles. In the middle of the following night Daisy’s ankle swelled up and was causing her some pain. She spent all Sunday with her foot up, not walking anywhere. We thought it may have been some sort of after-shock from her slipping over but, Sunday evening, we sensibly decided to go to the out-of-hours GP service which is hosted at Poole Hospital. After a long wait, the GP non-committally uhm’d and ah’d before deciding to keep her in overnight. In fact, they didn’t let her leave until 4 days later having poked and prodded her and given her all manner of x-rays and blood tests. Her ankle had swollen due to a flare-up of arthritis caused by a genetic disorder she’s got (and has always had) that means all her joints are malformed. This is why she’s always had a bit of trouble walking (and never since her teens has been able to run). The disorder is called something like Multiple Epiphyseal Displaysia. Daisy would be interested in hearing from anyone else with it.

So, it was decided that if her joints are all mucked up, the best action would be to minimise the strain on them. Her physiotherapist suggests doing non-weight-bearing exercise, like riding a bike and swimming. All good advice, but we’ve also decided to go back on the diet we were on 3 years ago and lose some weight again. Weightwatchers worked very well for us back then and we still have all the books from that last time, so it’s a perfect excuse. I’m going on the diet too; partly to be supportive, but mostly because of my ample belly which uncomfortably inhibits my breathing when I need to do up my shoe laces!

We started the diet 3 weeks ago and I’ve lost 2.5 pounds. Daisy’s lost 1.5lb. At last I’m down below 13stone once again! This week’s been more of a struggle, I think because we haven’t done much exercise. We did our regular ballroom class (yes, weight-bearing!) but haven’t done much else. Last week, though, I was busy chopping the hedges the hard way using hand-shears. I found it much more rewarding that using a noisy hedge-trimmer (if taking somewhat longer — but not a great deal).

And so we’re back up to date. The summer’s been and is already beginning to wane, despite being a lovely day today, and I’m feeling more environmental than ever these days having had some recognition for some of my wildlife photography, even if it’s only from the chairman of a local nature reserve support group. I think Daisy and I might try to go on more wildlife walks and talks, although it will depend on whether Daisy’s joints can cope with the walking!

Other than Figline, I’ve not been travelling too much over the summer, thankfully. However, I have another busy period approaching with three trips in the three months before Christmas – Barcelona in September, Edinburgh in October and Leuven (in Belgium) in November. I’m not looking forward to it, to be honest.