What have you been doing today?

When we moved here in 1990 I was up and down on the roof like a monkey fitting the aerial and a satellite dish onto the chimney - I even hoiked the satellite receiver and TV up there so I could line the satellite up and spent a pleasant half hour flicking between channels.

No need for a sat dish to be up high, at all - they work perfectly well, placed at ground level.
 
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No need for a sat dish to be up high, at all - they work perfectly well, placed at ground level.

Depends on the layout and orientation of your house as well as the location of the satellite. Anyway, the chimney stack was removed from the roof a few years later and we've been without a satellite ever since. Tell a lie, we had sky fitted when it came out but we stopped using it after about 6 months - they fitted it on our flank wall just peeking over the roof. Can’t honestly say I ever missed it when we got rid of it.
 
Went to a local amateur dramatics production tonight. They got the amateur part right!
 
Bloody diesel Golf wouldn’t start again this morning - it’s not been right since it stood for a week while we were on holiday. Jump started it and it was fine. Then it wasn’t used for 4 days when we had covid and again, it wouldn’t start, jump started it and it’s fine. Used daily, it’s not been a problem but leave it a few days and if it doesn’t catch quite quickly, the battery runs down. I was going to put it on my CTEK battery conditioner/charger but as I last fitted the battery on it 7 years ago, it was due for a new one anyway with winter coming up. It's only used for dog carrying duties and dump runs these days and if mrs Mottie got caught our in one of the country parks she takes the dog to for its walks, I’d be getting a world of grief so I bit the bullet and bought a new one today. It started in half a turn! Weird thing was, I still had the emailed receipt from Halfords when I bought it (as it had a 5 year guarantee and I thought it was still in warranty - how time flies!) and I paid £88.80 for it in 2017. It was a Yuasa 096. Went and bought the same battery today from the same Halfords branch and it was £92.39 so it had only gone up £3.59 in 7 years (Both prices are trade prices). Most car parts have gone up a hell of a lot more than that in 7 years!
 
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It's only used for dog carrying duties and dump runs these days and if mrs Mottie got caught our in one of the country parks she takes the dog to for its walks, I’d be getting a world of grief so I bit the bullet and bought a new one today. It started in half a turn!

Mine always does that, starts with just half a turn cranking, from cold, no matter how it has been stood. I never wait for the glow plugs, just on and crank. M47 has a reputation of not needing the glow plugs at all.

It is always charged regularly, when in the garage, via a dumb charger - it just chucks 14v out, irrespective of what the battery needs, but the charger is on a smart switch - which comes on for 20 minutes only, once per day. At the end of the 20 minutes, the little charger, always show it as fully charged/not drawing any charge current.
 
Had to go to Beckton Halfords to pick up my new cordless Karcher washer so took the opportunity to swing by the workshop to test the alternator charge rate - 14+v so all good. While I was here I thought I'd check the Golf over for its MOT next week. No major problems - one headlamp a bit misted but passable, some slight wear on the lower joint of the offside front drop link - perfectly passable but going to replace it anyway as the suspension rattle is getting on my tits. The main thing it will fail on is the offside rear seat belt that has a couple of chunks out of it where I've caught it in the rear seat catch when putting the seat back into position. I have to slam it hard as it wedges the dog crate securely in the boot. Nobody ever sits in the rear, ever, so I'm damned if I'm going to fit a new belt. I'll take the rear seat out before I take it for test. ;) Might even treat it to a service too.
 
Fed 'Grandads girls' as our grandson calls them. Every night about 6.00, I’m visited by some pigeons and a Robin which I feed. Started off with one and now I’m up to 8. Word must get around!

My flock is increasing. I’m now up to 12 pigeons waiting on my roof at 8.00 and 5.00 for feeding. We're going away to a wedding from Thursday to Sunday and I’m already feeling guilt that I won’t be here to feed them. They depend on me…. :(



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The dog has really, really got used to making use of this stair lift now, to get her upstairs. She hasn't quite sussed out, though, how it works - that somebody needs to press a button on one of the remote controls, before it will actually move. When she decides herself, that she wants to go up, she steps on the board I adapted the footrest with, then if it doesn't go, she bounces up and down on it, to try to wake it up. There have been times when Avril has got up before me, on a morning, leaving me in bed. Dog might follow her downstairs, have her breakfast treat, then she wants to go back up to bed - all you hear is clatter, clatter, as she bounces on the footplate board, trying to make it start.

At bedtime, she had to be always sent up on the lift first, she hadn't quite got the idea of getting on, with you pressing the button at the top, the lift is slow, and the board is difficult for me to climb past it, when it's other than at the bottom. I've just found a way around that - I tell her to get on the board, me behind her, then I go up ahead of her, pressing the remote, so she is following close behind me.

At lunchtime today, I've arranged to go look at, and probably buy/collect, a little used trailer. Only a few weeks ago, I swapped car and caravan electrics, over to 13 pin. Now I find that most small trailers are still 7 pin, so yesterday I went to the large car parts store, in the next village, to source a 13 to 7 pin, plug in adaptor, in readiness. I then remembered I had a spare trailer board tucked away on a shelf in the garage, and so thought it would be simpler to simply get that tested, set up with the number-plate, and use that instead of any lights the trailer might be fitted with, just to get it quickly home. Plugged in on test, the car was complaining the board had a faulty right turn indicator, which I eventually traced to the lamp, not quite making proper contact with the centre pin.
 
A little quiz, just for fun. One of the places we walk our dogs has a lake. There’s an overspill for when it gets too full that goes into a sump which collects all matter of things from general rubbish to trees/logs etc before flowing away into a drainage ditch that disappears into the woods below. Just recently we noticed they had cleared it out and a strange pipe was fitted in place. We couldn’t work it out but we saw the ranger today and he told us what it was. Any ideas?

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Is it to syphon the spillage from the bottom, to stop the algae from overspilling?
 
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