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Day 2 – Snow and Disappointment [L2]

We had snow and ice overnight, although by the time we’d noticed it the rain had turned it into slush. I think that’s a sort of metaphor for 2021 so far, the promise of something good that doesn’t quite turn out to be as pleasant as we might have hope for! It would be nice to have a couple of proper snow days though, it would redeem the winter.

Snow on a car windscreen 6th January 2021 (Photo: James Kemp)

I took a couple of pictures on the way to school with Lucy this morning. There was evidence of a strong snowfall on the grass and the cars. It looked like there was an inch, or maybe more, of snow. The rain had removed it all from the ground though.

Creative Writing

I finished off a short story for the Write Club Surrey January session. The Mother’s Dream is a creation myth for the world I built for Fierce, the fantasy novel I finished in November 2020.The world starts off in ice and darkness, and warms up as it is populated and the movement of things heats it with friction. Eventually one of the goddesses sets a small sun going.

Repairs

Some of the innards of our Kenwood Chef Titanium, including the burnt out controller on the bottom left. (Photo: James Kemp)

Somewhat mysteriously the Kenwood Chef stopped working a few days ago. I used it on New Year’s Day, and the next time I tried to use it nothing happened when I turned it on. So I watched a YouTube video on how to disassemble it. Having done so, along with some general web searching, I identified that the controller was burnt out. Very literally, you can see the carbon scoring in the picture.So we found a replacement part. It looked like an easy fix given the modular nature of the components.

The burnt out circuit board for the controller, you can see the carbon on the yellow component and the metal plate on the left. (Photo: James Kemp)

Unfortunately in trying to find a better price for it I managed to get slightly side tracked. The link I ended up on looked like it was the same one, but turned out to be for a slightly different model of Kenwood Chef. So when I had it all apart to fit the replacement I discovered that it didn’t fit. So it’s all packed up to be returned, and we need to wait longer for the replacement to arrive.

Food – National Shortbread Day

According to Lucy today is National Shortbread Day. I guess in honour of all the packets and boxes of shortbread doing the rounds for New Year. At school today Lucy made shortbread, and it was very nice indeed. It went down well after dinner. I do really wish she’d been able to make more, or at least brought the recipe home too.

Lucy with the shortbread she made at school. (Photo: James Kemp)

Another Scots delicacy that I managed today was some fried clootie dumpling. There was the end of a piece I’d made in the bottom of the bread tin. It was fairly small, and I was very hungry, so I decided to shallow fry it with a small knob of margarine. The margarine wasn’t the right stuff for that, butter would have been much better. That said, I suspect that when I had this as a kid it was probably fried in a mixture of bacon and Lorne sausage fat. Practically lard. The margarine burnt a bit, but the dumpling was still good to eat.

Supplies Arrive

This is what greeted me when I went out this afternoon to collect Lucy from school. Tracy put the toilet rolls on a quarterly order in the summer, and this was the latest installment. I think this should be enough to see us through Lockdown 2! (Photo: James Kemp)
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Days 46 & 47 – Weekend

I didn’t write yesterday evening because I was trying to write a short story for the Merstham Write Club. The . challenge was to write a short story of up to 2,000 words based on a picture. I wrote 3,128 words last night and didn’t quite finish the story.

We’ve had a fairly relaxed weekend. Lots of TV and a movie and also a trip out for essential items, including posting some things.

A very empty Belfry shopping centre on Saturday 2/5/20 (Photo: James Kemp)

I also spent most of Saturday in the front garden, weeding the border, planting some plants and cutting the grass.

My front garden on one of my breaks from tidying it up on Saturday 2 May. (Photo: James Kemp)

On Saturday afternoon we had a zoom session with our friends, the Lows, and played a picture quiz of our joint family photos in Kahoots. It was a lot of fun and we’re planning to repeat it next week.

We also tidied up bedrooms, took down the blanket fort, washed all the sheets, and put clothes away. In short getting the laundry done and tidying up. It was all done in short bursts and between episodes of Doctor Who. We started with the Impossible Astronaut and we’re working through that season.

Lego House

Lucy built an awesome Lego house, which is her best one yet. So I took a series of photos.

It has a tall front door because it is supposed to be in a desert, and according to Lucy it needs to let the wind through to cool it down.

The kitchen was one of the most awesome parts. It had drawers with utensils in. The cupboard had a cup and teapot inside, and the oven a cupcake.

There was also a coffee machine on the counter, a smoothy maker and a box of food. Best of all was the large picture window above the sink, so you could see out when doing the dishes!

Downstairs also had a living room area with a TV, sofa and a hamster cage.

In between the kitchen and the living room was a waterfall, which doubled as the shower.

Upstairs was the bedroom, complete with bed, dressing table and storage for accessories.

Along the corridor was the toilet.

Experimental Food

On Sunday morning we encouraged Lucy to microwave some marshmallows so she could see what happened.

Two microwaved marshmallows on a pancake (Photo: James Kemp)

Repairing my bergen

Part of the tidying up included a repair to my Berghaus Roc. It was moved out of the way for the blanket fort into the hallway. During the night I stood on one of the quick release buckles and there was an ominous crunching sound. To be fair the bergen is over thirty years old, I bought it in 1989 when I joined the TA. It’s seen a lot of action over the years.

Given its age it was impossible to acquire replacement buckles of the same style. They haven’t made them for over a decade. However there were a couple of helpful suggestions on the web. It seems that the Berghaus Roc is a very durable bergen and many people are still using them 30 years on. A few have even had the same issue as me.

So there was a no sewing solution. I took a spare 25mm quick release buckle from a repair kit I had in the cupboard. I then used a hacksaw to cut a slot in the middle of the bar that went onto the lid. It needed two cuts to get a wide enough slot. The plastic was easy to cut. I then filed the edges to make sure they weren’t sharp.

I then prized off the old clip, which was already cracked. It took some brute force, but it came off clean. I then pushed the loop of webbing through the slot I’d cut and worked it all through. This was the trickiest bit of the repair. I ended up folding it by rolling it after it was through the slot. Once I’d got it in I just straightened it out.

The other end was much easier, although I needed to remove the stitching on the very end of the webbing that stopped it rolling off. It was triple folded, and I left it double folded, so there’s still some protection from the webbing sliding through accidentally.

The broken buckle (green) on my venerable Berghaus Roc that I stood on, and the replacement (black) buckle fitted without sewing. (photo: James Kemp)
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Day 43 – Poetry

Another rainy day, and the forecast is for a couple of weeks of rain, although we had some sunny spells over the course of the day.

I was off today, and Tracy was at work. We played a bit with zoom backgrounds, did school work and took a breadmaker apart.

Zoom backgrounds

We’ve seen many people with fancy backgrounds in the zoom meetings we’ve done. However I couldn’t work out how to enable it. What I realised recently was that you can’t do it on a phone, nor on the Linux client. Out of the 11 devices we have that could run zoom only two aren’t android or Linux.

So we got a Windows 10 machine and turned on a single person zoom meeting so we could try them out. I was wearing a green t-shirt, and it became the zoom background!

We then worked out how to spot the colour, and made it blue like a room divider we had. Both Alexander and Lucy were wearing blue and they also blended in.

Disembodied heads and hands were a strong draw and made us all laugh a bit. We also tried a number of other things, like Lego marvel models, Alexander’s shield and a mug.

Once we’d had enough fun I hung a blanket so we’d get a full background next time we’ve got a zoom meeting.

Poetry

For writing practice Lucy chose the option to write a poem with Hello as the first word. She did a plan, thought of all the rhyming words she could and wrote them in a circle. Then she decided that she’d pick a form. Once she’d done that she practiced it out loud and then wrote it on the computer because she didn’t want to keep copying it out when she changed it. You can read Hello on the earlier post today.

While she was doing that I also wrote a poem. Mine was a villanelle, a format I quite like, and which has a standardised rhyme scheme. Mine is titled Hello, Hullo, Hallo.

Breadmaker disassembly

On Monday the breadmaker stopped spinning the paddle about ten seconds after we switched it on. The motor was still going, so it wasn’t completely dead. However I couldn’t get into it because I couldn’t find the U shaped screwdriver head.

Today the replacement U shaped head arrived. So Lucy and I undid all the screws on the bottom of the breadmaker (a Morphy Richards fastbake breadmaker model 48280 for the record).

It was clear from our initial attempt that the manufacturer didn’t intend for people to fix this themself. It was particularly awkward to take apart. We took five screws off the base, and used a screwdriver to separate the base from the body, but it wouldn’t come off.

At that point we were able to dislodge the control panel from the front plate. I also took the lid off, which was super easy. I guess they expected that we might want to wash the lid!

With the front panel off we could see more screws inside. Five more screws later, which were unscrewed through the hole in the fascia, and the front part lifted. It wasn’t free yet, but we could see that the drive belt had disintegrated. We could also see two more screws at the back of the breadmaker. They were behind the oven compartment and completely inaccessible.

Lucy decided that she’d seen enough and went off to build Lego. I watched a couple of YouTube videos. This included one that said the easiest way was just to take a Stanley knife to the bottom cover! I think that’s true.

I found another site that said to remove the seal round the main compartment. Once that was off the top cover just lifted off. This gave access to the last two screws. With both covers off I removed the fragments of the old belt. Then came the job of finding a replacement. All the branded ones were very expensive, about five times the price of the generic ones. However I couldn’t really tell from the online pictures whether or not they were compatible. Usually I’d have gone to a shop and had a look. But I couldn’t, so I bit the bullet and ordered the cheapest that would arrive in the next week or two.

Scouts

We had another scout meeting on zoom. There were 14 scouts and 4 leaders online. Like last week I found the zoom connection unstable. Afterwards I realised that Alexander was playing an online game.

I ran a bit of it, questions on a segment of an OS map. I’d wanted to put the scouts into breakout rooms, but we didn’t set them up in advance. So instead we put them all on mute and let them find the answers individually. We then used the annotate function to identify the places on the map that answered the questions.

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Day 36 – Stories, Sunshine and Scouts

My turn to be off work today, while Tracy toiled saving people from the pandemic at the hospital. We had a morning of Lucy writing a story, and building the scene to go with it. Then we sat in the sunshine and had a picnic in the back garden. Afterwards we went for an afternoon walk, and when we got home we looked for pictures for the bingo cards we’re making for Lucy’s birthday party.

Stories

The first thing on this morning’s school timetable for Lucy was writing. Her class teacher sent us a writing activity to do this week, which was to think about a picture prompt, with an accompanying paragraph. There were two tasks, one to draw the scene, and the second to write a detailed description of it.The setting was some odd circles of creepers in a wood. The person saw a deer walk through and disappear.

Lucy decided that she would find a unicorn through the portal and looked for a picture to copy. She found a YouTube video of how to draw a unicorn and sat down to draw. However she wasn’t happy with her attempts and thought the unicorns looked too chubby. Her frustration at not being able to draw what she had in her head made her quite upset.

The compromise we eventually came to was that she could build the scene with her Lego. Alexander broke off from his biology homework to help, for which I rewarded him with a CBG. We all had some of they fabulous gingerbread that Tracy made yesterday for a midmorning snack.

Once the scene was built Lucy wrote some description, but wasn’t up for continuous writing for 20 minutes. She really just wanted to tell me about it. So I decided that it would be okay if I typed what she told me to, provided that she wrote it out later to practice her handwriting.

Once I’ve checked that it is to her satisfaction I’ll post her story to her teacher. It’s definitely a real brain twister…

EDIT: The Mysterious Forest, by Lucy Kemp

Sunshine

We managed to spend a couple of hours outside in the sunshine. The first part was in the back garden. While I was sorting out some of the birthday party preparation Lucy had taken a bag into the kitchen. She quizzed me about what I wanted for lunch and then disappeared.

Just as I finished printing out the bingo cards Lucy reappeared to drag me into the garden. We went out and she shook out a blanket on the grass, and emptied her bag. We had a plate each, and she’d packed me a chopping board, sharp knife, ham, a block of cheese and a punnet of cherry tomatoes, as well as a loaf. This was so that I could make myself a sandwich.

We had a very pleasant lunch outside, talking about what we could do for Lucy’s party. When it was done we packed up and went back in to get Alexander to come for a walk with us. We had to wait for him to get out of the shower, because he’d forgotten that I’d told him we were going for a walk.

We took a different route than usual and went round Spynes Mere. It was busier than I’d expected, we met several groups of people out for walks. Bearing in mind it was Wednesday late lunchtime, there were more people than we’d usually see on a Saturday afternoon when we’d walked it last year.

The sun made it look idyllic, and it certainly was warm enough to be okay in a t-shirt. We played eye spy for the walk to the lake, and then the alphabet game on the way round it and for some of the return trip. All in we walked 1.7 miles in about an hour.

Scouts

I joined in the local scouts weekly zoom this week. It was my first meeting as Scout Leader and Woodhouse Troop’s first meeting too. We did it jointly with Battlebridge Troop, who have only just adopted that name because until tonight they were our only scout troop.Woodhouse Troop is named after one of the early leaders in Merstham. Miss Woodhouse helped scouting during and after WW1. Her father was the local rector at St Katharine’s non Merstham, and her brother was killed in Mesopotamia in 1916. He’s commemorated both in the church and the scout hut.We had 14 scouts on zoom, 5 of whom were new members of Woodhouse Troop. I was formally invested as the Scout Leader and then I invested one of the Woodhouse scouts. He was so keen to start that he joined in a few weeks early. It was also the first time that I’ve invested anyone using an alternative promise, our first scout is Muslim, so we used that version.The zoom session was pretty chaotic. We played pictionary, with a random word generator. Each scout took it in turn to draw, and their patrol had to guess. It sort of worked, but my connection was rather iffy and I had to join back in a few times.

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The Mysterious Forest [Story]

The Mysterious Forest

Sam had stumbled across the mysterious circles in a clearing in the forest, and watched as the deer approached them. With a slight twitch of its ears, the deer stepped indifferently through the first circle, and vanished. Completely vanished.

Sam let out a gasp and walked towards the circles to investigate.

Sam was walking her dog in the woods. She saw the deer in the forest go through the portal. Sam and her dog went through the portal. The first things she noticed that changed shape and colour. When she looked down she saw an ID badge that said ‘Emma’. Her jacket had changed into blue ruffles, and instead of trousers she was wearing a skirt. She noticed that her hair had darkened from blonde to black. Even the dog’s lead had changed, it was no longer stretchy, just a plain leather strap.

The winged pegasus sipping from the well (built in Lego by Lucy Kemp, photo: James Kemp)

The summer heat had got cooler, and the leaves were mostly buds. She heard rustling grass from the wind. The deer that Sam had followed was nowhere to be seen. But there was a grey spotted winged horse, a pegasus! It was resting next to a well outside a cabin in the woods. It sipped from a bucket of water that had been left out. Nearby there was a bouquet of flowers. Sam picked them up and smelt them, a nice perfume scent. She offered them to the pegasus, and put them on the ground near it. The pegasus neighed, and nodded.

 

Lego cabin in the mysterious forest as built by Lucy Kemp (Photo: James Kemp)

Sam slowly moved to the cabin. She opened the white wooden door. It slid open like magic when her hand touched it. She thought it must have been the pegasus’s magic that opened it for her. She saw a little low table with drawers, and a cushion on top. She put her puppy down on the cushion and she span around three times and then lay down to sleep.

Bedtime in the cabin in the mysterious forest. (Lucy Kemp)

There was a very comfy looking bed, which she tried out. There was a lantern next to the bed, and when it was turned up it wasn’t dark. It was so comfy that she felt like she wanted to sleep. But she didn’t. She wanted to check out the whole cabin. Next to the bed was a cupboard with a computer on top. On the side was a golf club, and inside the cupboard was a dog treat and a golf ball. She went to see how the puppy was doing, and found a telephone and a saxophone. Then she saw the back door, which she opened. Outside the back door was a little train. She didn’t pick it up, just in case it was a trap.

Above the cooking stove was a lovely painting of someone kicking a ball. On the stove was a pan with some strawberry jam. She saw a yellow crystal growing in a box next to the stove through the transparent lid.

There was a desk with a fake tree growing real leaves, they looked like someone had stuck them on. An apple hung down. There was a fish tank with a single blue, white and purple fish in it next to the desk. Fish food and a flower pot were on the desk, along with a roller skate, some money and a mug. A stool was to the side of the table.

Now that she’d seen it all Sam decided to rest with her puppy. When she went to lie down the puppy started barking excitedly and jumped up and down. So she took her for a walk outside.

When they were outside she saw the same little train again. This was weird, she thought they might be gone. It was strange, very strange indeed. When she got back to the place where the pegasus had been the pegasus was gone. Instead the well didn’t have a roof any more, and there was a sword with a barrel full of steak, and another bouquet of flowers. She decided to take the barrel of steak and the flowers inside. She left the sword where it was, alongside a top hat and a bird box.

They went back through the door into the house. Sam decided to do some golfing practice, but when she opened the cupboard the golf ball had gone. That was also very weird indeed. So Sam decided not to play golf because the ball would just disappear again. Since they were getting hungry they decided to cook some steak, chips and strawberry pie for supper before going to sleep in their new beds int he new home they’d found.

#

When Sam woke up the next day her puppy was gone. She checked in the back yard, and thankfully the puppy was there, running around. There was also a pegasus in the back yard, not the one they’d seen yesterday, but a baby pegasus. She wanted to climb onto the baby pegasus and ride on its back to find the pegasus’s mum. However the baby pegasus said that she was going to a wedding, a human wedding, and she would take them there.

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Day 18 – 4th April 2020

Today is a Saturday, none of us are working. Despite this a young lady, who shall remain nameless, decided that we needed to get up early. So we’ve been at it just as long as the weekdays. I’m knackered and ready for bed, and it’s only nine o’clock.

Creative writing

I wrote a short story this morning, it’s not brilliant, and life writing rather than fiction. I’ve been meaning to write it for a few weeks, since the first Write Club meeting in the Merstham library at the beginning of March. I couldn’t make the meeting, Saturday mornings are when the kids do martial arts and we do our shopping. Or at least that used to be what we did. Lucy did her martial arts lesson over zoom, but we didn’t go shopping until later.

Anyway the challenge was to write 1,000 words on a place where you’d lost something. I struggled with that because I haven’t really lost anything. In the end I decided to write about a loss of innocence that I experienced, although it wasn’t my innocence that was lost. You can read Lost Luggage on my main blog.

Extreme Close Ups

We had a lot of fun taking photos of things this morning. It’s my turn to set a team quiz this week. We did a picture round of TV shows last week. So we had a chat and thought that extreme close ups of everyday items might be a really interesting idea.

This snowballed and we’ve taken pictures of about thirty things and challenged each other to identify them. So I’m definitely doing this with my team on Thursday. Here’s one for you to guess.

Food

Lots of cooking went on today. This morning Alexander made French toast for his breakfast. I had a little bit and it tasted fab, although I’m not a fan of the texture of French toast.

When he’d done Tracy moved in and made a large pot of chilli con carne. She also started the prep for dinner, which was an experiment. We had a mixed feast of quesadillas for dinner, there were at least four flavours, chicken, sausage, chorizo and peppers. It was a very good meal.

Exercise

We all went for a walk after lunch. It was supposed to be a rough circular walk round our house. I’d had a quick look at the map and decided that because there were public footpaths marked that we could walk round our house. The chosen route was to go up to Furzefield Wood, get onto the embankment and then follow it round until we got back onto Bletchingley Road. From there we’d go over the road and follow it back to our house.

It didn’t quite work though. When we got to the motorway junction the path became quite overgrown with brambles. Alexander was in the lead and he’d chosen to wear shorts. So we turned back and had an attempt to follow the embankment in the woods. However that brought us to a similar dead end. We turned round and went back to the other marked footpath and followed that instead. Total distance was 2km, and we were out of the house for an hour.

After that Tracy and I sat outside the house and enjoyed the sun. I read some of my current book, Polgara the Sorceress, and we just chilled for a bit.

Shopping

After dinner Lucy and I walked to the co-op. Lucy navigated us by her special route. We went up the hill towards her school, past the childminder and a couple of her friends houses before arriving at the co-op. She talked the whole way there about what way we were going next and whose houses we were going past. It was a good walk.

When we got there it was just over half an hour before closing time and it was quite busy. There were four people ahead of us waiting to go in. While we were waiting a couple of NHS staff appeared and we encouraged them to jump the queue.

We were there for milk, bread and ice cream. We got some sweeties too. The shelves were pretty sparse, I’ve never seen them so empty. We managed to get some skimmed milk and a nice loaf. There was plenty of bread and milk. There were almost no crisps and half the sweet aisle was empty. Fizzy drinks were likewise depleted, just coke and some Schweppes lemonade. Pretty much just the more expensive stuff was left.

When we came out, with twenty minutes before closing, there were about eight people waiting to go in. All standing their two metres apart.

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Day 12 – Sunday 29th March 2020

Today is the first day of British Summertime, so of course it snowed, hailed and rained for most of the day!

Hail and Snow

When it wasn’t doing one of those it was noticeably colder than yesterday with a biting wind. We did manage to paint the shed though before the first hailstones started coming down. I also cleared away the rest of the stuff we’d cut down, and was just spraying some weedkiller before covering it in black fabric when it started. There will be other days, and it’s not like we have anything else planned for the next couple of months.

We’ve started gardening most years, and what usually derails our attempts to keep it under control is an active social life and weekend trips away. That doesn’t look like it’s going to be an issue this year. Sadly.

Adjusting

I’m starting to get used to staying in, this is my third consecutive weekend out of what might be described as my normal routine. Usually Saturdays involve taking Alexander and Lucy to martial arts lessons in Redhill. They go consecutively, so Tracy and I take Alexander for breakfast in West Central while Lucy has her lesson. Alexander then has an hour and a half of jiu-jitsu and we do some shopping in the market with Lucy and then go for a drink and a snack before collecting Alexander. Sundays are more varied, but if the weather is good gardening happens, and if not sometimes we go to the cinema. Either way we usually go out for some reason.

On 10th March I came down with cellulitis and sepsis. So my routine was disturbed, mainly because I had a couple of days in hospital and then daily IV antibiotics and a couple of follow up trips to hospital as an out patient. That was just when we were all starting to worry about the Covid-19 virus, but before it was properly declared a pandemic.

Just as I was getting better Lucy developed a cough and a temperature. So we went into sled isolation, following the government advice at the time. It’s been a pretty odd couple of weeks. I doubt anyone hasn’t felt that way, and there’s been way more than the usual mental strain. I’ve certainly been fractious at times, and I know my family have been too, although thankfully not all of us all at the same time. What seems to be helpful is realising that we don’t need to do everything all the time.

Food

I think this is going to be a standard heading!

We used up the last of the sliced ham for sandwiches, and finished the fresh orange too. I also finished off the lettuce in the salad I made to go with the pulled pork at lunchtime. That said there’s loads of fruit and vegetables, and also rather a lot of sausages.

Tracy made shepherds pie and a pork stew. Both of them are for other days. The shepherds pie is going in the freezer for later in the week. I’m going to do some dumplings in the pork stew for tomorrow night. It seemed a bit pork heavy to have it this evening, after bacon sandwiches for breakfast, and pulled pork for lunch. The kids and I did have sausages and chips for dinner though. I also had more apple crumble for dessert, although I had it with ice cream this evening. Alexander and Lucy had cupcakes that Lucy made this morning.

The Mandalorian

The TV has yet to move channel from the Amazon Fire Cube that arrived yesterday. As well as a bunch of random TED talks and Jeff Goldblum, we started to watch The Mandalorian this evening. Disney have only released three episodes so far in the UK, which is slightly disappointing. However I really enjoyed both the episodes we watched this evening. It’s pretty awesome, and a great expansion to the Star Wars universe.

Map Making

Apart from the dozen blog posts, which are all easy reportage, I’ve not written any fiction for almost three weeks. It’s was too hard to concentrate on creating things when I was unwell, and since I’ve recovered there hasn’t been enough peace to get into the headspace I need to be properly creative.

When it was alternately hailing and snowing this afternoon I had an attempt to digitise some of my hand drawn maps into inkscape. It sort of worked, but I got bored before I finished. It would be really nice to be able to have digital copies of the sort of thing I can happily draw freehand. It just seems to take so much longer digitising them than it takes me to draw them. I suspect that the answer is to find a way to draw them on a computer.