With a slight sense of trepidation I went to fill up my car with petrol for the first time this year. It turned out it wasn’t actually much more expensive, but that might have been partly due to going to Sainsbury’s instead of my local BP. Anyway, on balance I’m all for higher fuel prices if they give the human race a few extra years before the seemingly inevitable climate apocalypse.
Another plumbing success story this week. Having tried seemingly everything to sort out the blocked drain from the kitchen sink, I finally twigged that the gunked-up bit of pipe was the short section between the plughole and the U-bend. Obviously having realised that, it was pretty trivial to clean it out, and now the water runs away at a more traditional speed. There’s a lesson in there about stopping to properly diagnose a problem before diving in headfirst to solve it.
The monthly Run for Beer came round again on Wednesday, and once again the weather was far nicer than everyone else’s dire predictions. We only stopped in the pub long enough for a bit of food and one pint, although I managed to fit in two (pints, not meals) after only realising after having one bought for me that they had a Burger-and-beer meal deal going. Well it would have been a shame not to take advantage to save money by … er … spending slightly more money.
It was also the Stowmarket Half on Sunday, which went OK-ish but not spectacularly. The weather was great – a bit warm if anything, but less wind than of late, but the last few miles were a struggle. Last time the event was held we were in that weird couple of weeks in 2020 where everything was still just about happening as normal but we all new it was about to come to a grinding halt for what we assumed would be a few weeks. It’s nice to feel like things are relatively normal again, albeit with infection levels some 5,000 times higher than they were two years ago. It was also nice to get a negative LFT result this morning, after the person I’d been sitting next to in the pub came down with Covid the following day.
The correct connectors for the weather sensors finally arrived, and although I haven’t made any actual progress as such I did at least confirm that the code I’d already written to interface with the anemometer works as expected. Just need to sort out the wind vane and rain sensor now, then come the no doubt long-running tasks of moving the electronics from a breadboard to a more permanent form, getting it all mounted outside (fortunately I have a handy bracket where the TV aerial used to be) and adding a web UI or whatever other kind of display I can come up with.
Somewhat against character, I actually washed the outside of the downstairs windows (well it’s a start) at the weekend. Partly triggered by the Sahara desert sand that was raining down recently, although to be honest it’s so long since I cleaned them that the sand didn’t make that much difference. A even gave the car a quick going over too, after I’d left it out overnight and one of the cats had left muddy paw prints all over it.