Am I going to regret this?
Probably not. I like riding, it’s for a good cause and I’m sure we’ll have fun on the day.

It all started over a morning chat at work, Chris (my boss) was talking to Angela about doing the London to Brighton. Angela responded with “I’m not doing it on my own.” and stupidly the words “I’ll do it with you.” came out of my mouth. And as it was Chris’s idea he’s joining us aswell.

So we will be joining about 27,000 other cyclists on the 54 mile cycle on the 17th June.

I have set up a JustGiving page if you would like to help me reach my target, raise more than my team mates and donate some money to the British Heart Foundation.

It’s the first of November and I have just been dodging step ladders in the Co-Op while they put up their Christmas decorations. It’s 54 days until Christmas and way too early for decorations. I love Christmas just not early decorations.. December is early enough.

More on this later…

Follow the Way.

There is only one Way.

Do not deviate from the Way, this leads to distractions and the wrong way.

The Path is the Way.

Knowing the Path is not the same as walking the Path.

Nothing better than camping with open fires. We’ve been lucky this year, finding two great campsites that allow open fires. Both farms, both very friendly and both selling their own produce for us to savour.

Both we will visit again. I will add both websites to my links and link them here once home, I’m writing this while the sun sets and cooking some veggie skewers by the campfire.

It’s great to see all the families here with children enjoying the outdoors, playing in the woods, and enjoying cooking marshmallows.

We had a wonderful week, and wonderful evenings sitting by our little campfire enjoying a few drinks, enjoying the peace and quiet (no radios allowed), and admiring the stars.

Those links: Church Farm, Ardeley & Dernwood Farm, Sussex.

SPAM is everywhere now. I even get SPAM comments to this blog.
Now some of these comments try and hide themselves as normal comments, just adding an url or a quick line for a service/product to buy. Some are little more clever and look nearly like a real comment so the comment is approved and next time around their comments (the real SPAM may be automatically approved).

Now this more intelligent SPAM make some nice or amusing comments (to the post) so I thought I would share.  So if you see a comment from ‘SPAM Post’ that is what it is with any urls, emails & IP addresses removed. And I will reply to each comment just to please my little mind.

I have made a lot of changes over the last couple of weeks.
The website needed a new home so this was a good chance to give it a new look and update and rewrite a lot of the old bits and pieces.  Lots to load back up to the site, which will appear over the next week (or two).

The theme for the site has been crafted by me, the colours chosen by the wife (it could have looked ghastly if left to me).

There will also be some new stuff appearing soon, as well as some old stuff that has been rewritten and appears on the site for the first time.

Once spring arrived work on the ponds has progressed to the point where I can now say they are done.

The Wildlife Pond

The Pond for the Frogs & Newts

This pond was really completed last year but the wifey has added her touch, I do the hard work and Hannah adds the finishing touches. We now have a variety of plants around and in the pond as well as snails, newts, mussells and tadpoles living in the pond as well as a variety of wildlife living on top of the water.

The Fish Pond

The Pond for the Fishes

The fish pond was a lot more work than the wildlife pond. The waterfall was changed several times until I got it right, and then moving again so it could be viewed better from our seating area by the pond.  Again the pond was finished last year and this spring was just remaking the bridge, it was too high, and continuing the decking around to the patio area we unburried. The patio stones were very uneven so they were lifted the area levelled, took me two attempts, and the stones relayed.

Hannah then added the various plants in and around the waterfall and behind the pond aswell as the furniture on the patio. This is now our relaxing area for the evening, as it is far enough down the garden to get the evening sun. With the addition of my windchime, which was a present from some good friends and a few plant pots, and our outdoor wine rack, also presents from friends we have a great area to sit by the pond.

Just found a nice little application for my phone which now means I can add pointless blogs like this one wherever I am.

I stumbled across this at http://astro.berkeley.edu/~gmarcy/thermal/tpteacher/jokes/icecream.html, a diet that is much more realistic to keep to.

As we all know, it takes 1 calorie to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade. Translated into meaningful terms, this means that if you eat a very cold dessert (generally consisting of water in large part), the natural processes which raise the consumed dessert to body temperature during the digestive cycle literally sucks the calories out of the only available source, your body fat.

For example, a dessert served and eaten at near 0 degrees C (32.2 deg. F) will in a short time be raised to the normal body temperature of 37 degrees C (98.6 deg. F). For each gram of dessert eaten, that process takes approximately 37 calories as stated above. The average dessert portion is 6 oz, or 168 grams. Therefore, by operation of thermodynamic law, 6,216 calories (1 cal./gm/deg. x 37 deg. x 168 gms) are extracted from body fat as the dessert’s temperature is normalized. Allowing for the 1,200 latent calories in the dessert, the net calorie loss is approximately 5,000 calories.

Obviously, the more cold dessert you eat,the better off you are and the faster you will lose weight, if that is your goal. This process works equally well when drinking very cold beer in frosted glasses. Each ounce of beer contains 16 latent calories, but extracts 1,036 calories (6,216 cal. per 6 oz. portion) in the temperature normalizing process. Thus the net calorie loss per ounce of beer is 1,020 calories. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate that 12,240 calories (12 oz. x 1,020 cal./oz.) are extracted from the body in the process of drinking a can of beer.

Frozen desserts, e.g., ice cream, are even more beneficial, since it takes 83 cal./gm to melt them (i.e., raise them to 0 deg. C) and an additional 37 cal./gm to further raise them to body temperature. The results here are really remarkable, and it beats running hands down.

Unfortunately, for those who eat pizza as an excuse to drink beer, pizza (loaded with latent calories and served above body temperature) induces an opposite effect. But, thankfully, as the astute reader should have already reasoned, the obvious solution is to drink a lot of beer with pizza and follow up immediately with large bowls of ice cream.We could all be thin if we were to adhere religiously to a pizza, beer, and ice cream diet.

Happy eating!

Other jokes from the Sydney School of Physics, http://astro.berkeley.edu/~gmarcy/thermal/tpteacher/jokes/jokes.html

School of Physics, University of Sydney

This is the first post that shows how our garden has ‘grown’ over the time we have been working on it.

The Old Pond

The BIG feature of the garden was the pond.

We knew the pond had been neglected by the previous owners of the house and had been told there was no life in the pond, except the abundance of lily.

The plan was to ‘shrink’ the pond and turn it into a wildlife pond and hopefully attract some frogs and newts.  A problem soon arose, the pond was not empty. It already had fish, frogs and newts living in it!

The New Pond, with Adam trying to help dig.

Plan B

So plan B came into action. Build a smaller pond opposite the big one for our wildlife pond and worry

about filling in the old one when done.

After some time the new pond was finished and we could drain the old and transfer the few fish and frogs into the new pond.

Suprise number two then came up. In the pond were over 80 tench, 30 newts and I stopped counting the frogs at 50.  New pond was going to be a little small for all those fish, let alone the rest of the wildlife!

Plan C

So Plan C began. The old pond would once again be shrunk to less than half its size and the tench would go back to live in there and hopefully we could persuade the frogs and newts with the right enviroment to live in Pond 1. Still had too many fish, so we managed to persuade my brother (Thanks bro’) to take some for his pond (20 – 30).  Over the winter and with the help of a hungry magpie when the fish were moved into the now shrunken old pond there was just over 30 of them.

They are now happily enjoying life in there new filtered pond that is complete with running water. Didn’t think a fish could look happy but they do. The tench are a boring browny green and difficult to see when swimming near the bottom so we have added some colour, Koi, Goldfish & Shubunkin and some other fishes, I’ve forgotten the names of already. 12 new fishes to enjoy our pond and add some colour.