What have you been doing today?

Popped over the allotment to check on things. Other plot holders have had their sweetcorn trashed by the badgers. A slash and enter here:

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Tunnelling under here:

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But safe and sound in my cage. :giggle:

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I spoke to the bloke who had been tunnelled under and asked him how his badger trap was working. "Nearly had the bastard a few times, the snare was closed right up, it must have wriggled free". Teehee, little does he know it’s me closing the noose. I’ll be back over at dusk to trip it again. :ROFLMAO:

The pumpkin patch is doing well, I fed it some liquid feed today to bulk them up. 'Big Boi' is doing well, it’s put on another inch of girth. Just for fun, can you see how many pumpkins in the patch?

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Checking the car over, in particular the exhaust back box rusted outer skin, and the air con. I checked the a/c with a thermometer, at the air outlet, in 25C ambient - it was outputting air at 3.5C, after topping it up myself, a few weeks ago - so I'll call that a success :)

The small hole in the outer at the very back of the rear box, had progressed across half the width of the rear box, and they are unobtainium, so rather than trying to braze a patch on it, I opted to have one made up to measure, at no small expense, in stainless steel, but they couldn't fit me in for a month - so I began worrying, if it might give way before it was replaced...

I was thinking to pack the gap between inner and outer skin, with glass wool insulation, then make an alloy plate to wire over it with copper wire, just in case the inner rusted through, but... I just had a proper look at it, and the inner skin is solid as a rock, so no need to worry about it.

My car's insurance broker, has just quoted me for next year, and suggests it will cost 2/3rds more than last year. I have emailed them back, suggesting that if they want to retain me as a customer, that they put some real effort into brokering, and find me a more sensible quote, because I had found, without any effort, several, at less than I was charged last year..
 
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Just had a little play with my drone. Flew it from my house up to the windmill in Upminster. It’s in my line of sight so no real problem with signal - it is supposed to have a 10km range in clear sky. Couldn’t see the drone though but I could watch it on my phone. Coming back, I spied the C2C train heading from Upminster towards London so I put it into sport mode and gave chase. I'd almost caught it up when I had a message flash up on the screen saying I’d lost contact with it! Obviously the further away I got, the signal got blocked by too many houses and trees - I should have flown higher. Then the screen went blank. I lost the picture, lost all data - how fast, how high and how far away it was. When it takes off, it gets a GPS fix on its takeoff point and in case of losing contact, you can set it to either hover, land or return to its takeoff point. I’d never set that up but it must have been set up to return to home as default. After a nervous 30 seconds or so, everything came back to life and I saw that it was on a trajectory back towards me. Big relief. Reminded me a bit of the time Apollo 13 was returning home and they lost transmission when it was re-entering the earths atmosphere. Phew!
 
Mrs Motties birthday today and she wanted to go to RHS Wisley…but I had to go too! :ROFLMAO: Actually wasn’t bad at all. Had a nice lunch and bought some plants to bring home. Bought an Orchid for my mum, some plants for our garden and some shrubs for the piece of council land across the road to me that along with a couple of neighbours, we've adopted.
 
Late evening visit to the allotment, mainly to set off the badger trap. While I was there around 9.30, I spotted a couple of bees having a sleepover on one of my Artichoke flowers.

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Doing a bit of batch cooking. One batch of chilli con carne, one batch of Bolognaise sauce. All gluten free for Mrs Mottie. Organised chaos and the clean up will be finished 5 minutes before Mrs Mottie gets home. :ROFLMAO:

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The recipe called for 125ml of wine in the sauce. I dumped that in and thought I’d finish the bottle off by drinking straight from the bottle. There was more in there than I thought - I was chugging away for ages! I feel slightly píssed now. ;) (y)
 
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Had a request from the DiL asking if it was too late to grow some Kohl Rabi. I’ve got the seeds coming tomorrow so I went over and prepared a couple of beds. Did a bit of pruning in my pumpkin patch while I was over there. I want any further growth to go to the pumpkins and not the runners/foliage of the plants.

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Did a bit of harvesting while I was there too. Cucumber, sweetcorn, tomatoes, kale, courgettes and beetroot.

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