Warm Jam

Found this scratching about outside the allotment with a bloodied nose. Seeing as it was daylight & he was bleedy, I scooped him up and am feeding him Whiskas whilst he recuperates.

At 200g, it’s only a baby, and won’t survive winter alone (think nearer 600g before they’ll survive hibernation). Trying to contact a rescue center to drop him off at eventually led to someone local, who asked a bunch of questions & said he seems fine. She’ll take a look if we drop him by, then we can take care of him at home if we like.

I get to build a hedgehog hutch!

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A pair of oval plugs, with padauk fascias on an ebony body. Quite a few people, including myself, get skin irritations from prolonged contact with some woods, so I put these together to try out an alternative to inlays. They’re working a treat – no itching, and once they’re in they look like solid padauk

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My squash are coming up a storm – this picture is just a few days out of date, and the difference is phenomenal. I’ll have to take a fresh one tomorrow, there are now 30-odd hardening up outside in the plastic greenhouses.

The planters I posted a while back are working out wonderfully, as well – radishes, rocket, lettuce, spring onions and turnips. If this keeps up, as well as the allotment, it’s going to be a very good year.

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DIY press-up stands from spare parts & scrap timber, since £12+ seems pretty daft. Not my most exciting project, but thought someone might benefit from the idea!

In other news, I seriously need to vacuum the study floor…

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Some seeds arrived from the Fothergills website – awesome site, by the way. No postage to pay on seed-only orders, only if you order plants. Also, two free random seed packs with each order, even when I only ordered one packet in the first place!

Anyway, these are the squash for this year:

There are 42 seeds germinating on my windowsill. This is quite possibly madness, but will almost certainly lead to the best Hallowe’en decorations EVER. Also, tasty soups.

Bugger, just noticed I don’t have any butternut…

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I present you with one pair ebony ear weights. Unusually light piece of wood, colour-wise, which I think makes for a really pretty subtle grain.

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Despite being much nearer the allotment since moving back in September, 10 minutes’ walk is still too far when the rest of the meal’s in the oven and you remember something!
I’ve built four planters to go on the patio outside, to plant salad and herbs and such without digging over rented lawn. They’re built to fit a grow bag each to keep life super-simple butt jointed affairs, and so far are working out pretty awesome – got two planted up with the first few seedlings showing, two more half-painted. The frames are cut from 8 ft timber planks. Feet were drilled with a holesaw from offcuts and wrapped in anti-slug tape. Bases sit on batons cut from the leftovers screwed around the bottom edge of the frame.

Kinda tempted to do the lot over again and have eight… so far we have lettuce, rocket, spring onions and radishes planted, and peppers, aubergines and various herbs planned, with tomatoes going in hanging baskets. That’s pretty much all the salad we need (plus aubergines) but I’m sure there’s other things that’d be great.

Anyway, they’re really easy, and timber, stain and all else came in at £40 or so for the four from B&Q. I recommend the exercise highly, looks like being very useful – and now we’re headed into barbecue season, picking seasoning and side salads even as the meat’s still on the grill will feel very good indeed!

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Not quite as amusing as when they lost their membership list, but considerably more poetically inept.

The Register brings to attention their “Battle For Britain” campaign, complete with Spitfire poster.

“The British National Party has pulled off a bit of a blinder by fronting an anti-immigration campaign with a poster featuring a Spitfire belonging to 303 Squadron of the RAF – the “most effective Polish squadron during the Second World War”, as the Telegraph puts it.”

How good is that?!

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The Register carries this rather excellent story. Sacked workers at a Sony VHS factory have taken hostage the Sony France chief executive. I’m not sure at what point you get to claim indignation when a VHS factory is shut down – the format’s all but redundant, after all – but I really rather like the course of action.

To say I have a strong distaste for Sony would be an understatement.

• They’ve included viruses on their CDs (See the Wikipedia article), to which their response was (and this is a genuine quote) “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”
• Then, the uninstaller created “a far greater security risk than even the original Sony rootkit“.
• Their SonicStage and Connect MP3 player software is terrible, despite the premium costs of the players.
• They were the focus of a class action lawsuit when their PS2 lasers were shit.
• They were sued, and ultimately removed feedback rumbling from PS3 controllers, since the whole technology was ripped off from Immersion with niether payment nor even acknowledgement.
• Then there’s their suing Lik Sang into oblivion for daring to legally buy their products wholesale in Japan and sell them on to Western consumers, because it circumvented their region encoding & price hiking.
• They’ve consistently tried to introduce proprietary formats with no place in the market – Betamax, Minidisc, and UMD.
• Most spectacularly, they’ve manufactured laptop batteries for Dell, HP, Lenovo and Apple which have exploded with flames reaching six foot plumes.
• Most recently they’re bitching about the Change4Life campaign using a Playstation controller in their attempts to get kids off their sofas from time to time and get some fresh air.

So, if anybody would like to kidnap any more Sony execs under any thin veil of industrial action, or just recreationally, you have my blessings. That said, I won’t be purchasing any fresh VHS tapes, solidarity or none…

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I’m finally getting my appetite back after the hospital’s culinary efforts, so went to town a bit yesterday evening – these are the results.

Slow-cooked pork belly in soy sauce, lemon juice, honey and ginger glaze, with broccoli, ginger rice, and crispy kale. Total comfort food, read on for a vague how-to.

The pork goes in at gas mark 3-ish, about a quarter inch deep in the marinade (mix the listed ingredients to taste) for anything from an hour and a half. This time I think it was in there about two hours, regularly turned & basted. When it’s ready you’ll be able to cut the fat with a spoon.

The kale gets stripped from the stalks, splash of oil (sesame in this case) and some salt (not much, it shrinks a lot in the oven so it’s easy to over-season) then in the oven at something less than gas mark 1 for 25-ish minutes (not in with the pork though, as the steam stops it from drying out).

Rice was mixed with some finely sliced ginger then steamed, and the brocolli was just chucked in boiling water for a couple minutes then briefly in a frying pan with some of the (cooked) marinade from the pork.

Everything but the broccoli is cooked pretty slow so the timings are flexible, which is good because my coordination sucks. Presentation is my usual “fuck it, I’m going to chew it up in a minute anyway”.

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