My new sig

People who send messages to usenet often append a four line bon mot to the bottom of their posts, called a signature or sig.

I fill mine with random quotes from things I’ve seen, heard or read that have just tickled me in some sort of way. I used to update it every few weeks, but I think this has become an example of how time is passing faster these days.

For the last two years, nearly, I’ve had a sig taken from the Narnia film. “We’re not heroes! We’re from Finchley!”

But something I heard on something I was watching today has made me change it again.

I came to find you, Gabriel. My name is Chandra Suresh. I’m a geneticist. I have a theory about human evolution, and I believe you are a part of it.

Solar panel

Today we had a visit from the Notts Energy Partnership to consider whether solar hot water might work for us. They run a project called Sungain, which is about bringing solar hot water to as many homes as possible – and in the process drive capacity amongst local firms for putting solar panels on local roofs.

Just for good measure it’s the first properly sunny day for ages, so we could see clearly that the roof over our car port gets its fair dose of the rays – at least until 2.30pm when the sun goes behind the tree. Our house is oriented with the corners on the compass points, which means we don’t have a south facing roof, but a south-east facing one. This is less good, but not impossible.

It’s not a trivial job to fit one in this house. We already have a hot water cylinder based system, but at present our hot water is only used for hand washing and the little hand washing up we do. There’s neither the pressure or capacity in the current old cylinder to run showers, which would be the main point of embarking on something like this.

So to get solar hot water, we would need to

  • fit evacuated solar tubes on the roof
  • replace the hot water cylinder with a larger one
  • relocate the hot water header tank to the highest possible point in the attic
  • pipe the whole lot together
  • replace bath taps with a mixer shower combo

It is quite a lot to do, and won’t be cheap. But in the context of some of the other things we are spending on the house it is an affordable cost. It’s not a great deal more than the cost of new windows.

There are still some things to weigh up.

  • Pay-back time. This should give us cheap or free water heating for much of the year. Even over the winter, on bright days, the kit should mean the boiler has less work to do to get the tank of water up to temperature. But calculating payback will be complicated. It will mostly be electricity we save (no need for electric showers).
  • Changes in the bathroom. Neither of us has particularly fond memories of the times we spent in homes with tank-fed showers instead of on-demand heating from an electric shower or system with a boiler that heats as you use. Don’t want to run out of hot water, or get scalded when loo flushes or washing machine starts. This is mitigated by the fact there’s only two of us, and we usually shower at different times of day
  • Fitting a mixer tap might mean replacing the bath
  • There’s a chance a yob with a rock could damage the solar tubes
  • Fitting complicated things – or even just “different” features – might make it harder to sell
  • Still more work to do on the house and plumbing!

On the plus side

  • Low cost hot water, even when fuel prices increase
  • A bigger airing cupboard
  • Feeling better about banging on about sustainability issues in planning meetings
  • Solar panel will improve house performance on energy performance certificate element of home information pack
  • Watching the control gizmo, which monitors the temperature of the panel and the temperature of the hot water tank, and switches on the coolant pump whenever the panel is warmer than the tank, will appeal to my temperature nerd elements 🙂

EDIT: Good grief, a bath/shower mixer tap costs over £100, according to B&Q website!

Man-eating badgers

Just found this quote amusing:

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

Thank goodness for that!

Aunty has more. (via)

Mad cooking frenzy

Mid-afternoon, I established that P did want feeding today (often at weekends, he prefers to eat very little meals), and took a bit of a stock-take of what was available, then went back to the computer to do a bit more work on a current project.

Tart

By 8pm, I was trudging back from the Co-op with a small amount of supplementary ingredients. By 9.30pm, we’d eaten the three-course meal I’d made, and the kitchen was
approaching normal again. Or as normal as it ever gets around here these days.

We had:

warm salad with melon (the one with orange flesh – very very ripe and gorgeous) and bacon, lettuce, cucumber and mini-plumb tomatoes with an elderflower vinaigrette

oOo

salmon parcels with onion, red pepper carrot and lemon juice, served with fresh potato wedges and runner beans

oOo

apple tart

Cooking it all was a mad nonstop frenzy in this sort of order

  • make pastry (foodprocessor) and put pastry in fridge
  • put bottle wine in freezer
  • peel and chop Bramley apple for base for tart
  • start simmering apple with a little water
  • preheat oven
  • chop potatoes into wedges, put in bowl, add olive oil, paprika, herbs, sesame seeds, mix, leave to steep
  • chop onions, carrots into cubes, slice red pepper into attractive slivers. Juice lemon. Mix together in bowl with herbs, salt and pepper
  • Make foil parcels with bit of frozen salmon, veg mix, bit of butter. Spoon in spare juice after partially closing parcels
  • Put wedges and salmon in oven
  • assemble apple tart: press pastry into buttered flan case, spoon Bramble apple purée over the top, slice 2 dessert apples and arrange over the top. Sieve icing sugar on top, pop in oven
  • chop and fry bacon, prepare runner beans
  • chop cucumber, tomatoes, and melon, wash salad leaves
  • make vinaigrette: equal parts cider vinegar, hazelnut oil, elderflower cordial shaken together in an old jam jar
  • mix vinaigrette with salad, place on leaves, start runner beans boiling
  • serve/eat salad
  • take tart out to cool, wine out of freezer
  • unwrap parcels onto plate, arrange with runner beans and potato wedges, pour wine, serve, eat
  • serve tart

Now all that remains…

AJ220673

Leigh’s 30th

Spent much of Saturday at Leigh’s 30th birthday party in Derby.  It was intended as a garden party with a barbecue and a whole lamb spit roast.  The weather had other ideas, and the party only managed to carry on thanks to an enormous tarpaulin tied to the top of the house and spreading down over most of the garden, which let us still spend most of the day outside.

Highlights included the world’s toughest Piñata.  This video starts after several minutes of Leigh trying to break the thing:

Eventually he gets  fed up and gets his aunt to take over.  In the post-mortem afterwards, it was decided that the thing was too high up, and too full of sweets, making it harder than usual to break.  I was sitting directly underneath it and got showered in sweets.  Which was nice at the time, but it wasn’t really until this morning that I realised I’d also been showered in shards of broken boiled sweet, which gently melted at body temperature, and in the heat from the chiminea, then cooled to form hundreds of lumps of sweet on my clothing.  Interesting.

We were there from 4 in the afternoon to gone midnight, and it’s a testament to how good the party was that we didn’t really realise how much time was passing.  The food was ace, with special mention for the lamb roast.  Leigh borrowed a spit from friends that slowly turns the carcass over a split oil drum full of barbecue charcoal – it got through multiple bags as the day progressed.

Topics of conversation – all the usual, plus the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn. Naturally.

Here are my photos of the day.

All this sets me off thinking about what I want to do for my 30th next year.  I do want to have a big party – it’s been a while since we’ve thrown any party at all. It’ll probably be the day before on August 2nd next year – put it in your diaries now!

Tenbury II

Tenbury Wells, Worcs, was flooded for a third time this weekend – more dramatic photos on Flickr, including a public loo whose foundations were undermined by flood water slipping into the river.

The BBC has pictures too.

Meanwhile, friends on UMRA have discovered this dramatic sequence of photos covering the floods in Evesham from the perspective of a chap trapped in a hotel.  The water rose 17 feet over it’s normal level. 1 2 3 4 5 6.

I live  most of the way up a hill.  These photos are clearly something to bear in mind the next time I’m huffing and puffing up the hill with a heavy shopping bag and wishing I lived somewhere flatter.

The proms

The proms are a wonderful institution, but I don’t tend to have a great deal to do with them. (I mean of course the BBC music thing in the Royal Albert Hall, not the evil heteronormative behemoth that marks the end of formal schooling in the US and increasingly over here too)

In any given year my sole engagement with them is to vaguely hear something on the radio round about now and think “Gosh, are we in Prom season already?”

Then, a few months on, there starts to be massive trails for the Last Night of the Proms, and I think, “Gosh, is Prom season over already?”

I don’t even normally make the effort to tune in to the LNOTP – but if I’m home, and near a radio or TV and not otherwise occupied, I might turn it on for the best of the flagwaving.

I have once been to a prom, which was quite exciting, but as it was in the middle of a choir week, and I was a wee bit knackered, it was all I could do to stay awake.

This year, however, I am looking forward to note-by-note sarcastic commentary from a rather nice-looking young man who seems to know what he’s talking about. He’s doing video blogs and taking photos and everything. He wasn’t very impressed with today’s effort, and displayed his displeasure in a series of photos of himself looking less and less pleased. I shall watch with interest.

Does it count?

does it count?

Does it count towards your 5-a-day if you eat them all together after midnight in a desperate attempt to get your numbers up? Or if they’re (almost) all fruit? Carrot, apple, kiwi, banana, melon.