Swine Fever!

Today I must confess I crossed the line from interested to addicted. I mentioned the Bath pigs in an earlier post and the fear that, seized by collector urges, I might might find my self traipsing around the city trying to get a picture of each one.

The addiction started quite innocently, I would encounter Pigs on my way to places in Bath, and take a quick picture. No harm in that I thought. Then I found myself taking little detours, just to see if I might ‘happen’ across a pig or two. Then the chaps at work started to talk about ones they’d seen, and I’d find a vague excuse to walk that direction. Yesterday I crossed the line, yesterday I set out specifically to photograph pigs on the other side of the city. Its a slippery slope down from here.

I’m not alone though, flickr already has a support group for pig spotters, and perhaps, once we have all one hundred, we can get back to life and resume our normal lunch hours.

At least I’ve been able to indulge my geek urges by geotagging pig locations on flickr , using the tremendous trippermap . Using trippermap and google earth actually turned out to be far more fun than using the GPS on my phone.

Pigs in….Bath

A couple of weeks ago pigs started poping up all over the City Bath. At first I was somewhat puzzled, where they a student prank? a CCTV cameras hidden to catch felons? A race of slow moving alien beings who had skimped a bit on their preparatory research?

It may surprise you to learn that it was none of the above, as I found out reading the website of the people behind the project. The sculptures are collectively known as King Bladud’s Pigs. Legend has it King Bladud discovered the healing properties of the Bath springs, which lead to the foundation of Bath itself.

I was delighted to see that the aim of the stunt is to raise funds for the Two Tunnels project, a new sustrans cycle route, that could knock miles off journeys by cutting through a fairly substantial hill.

I was less delighted to learn that 100 different pigs are to be scattered about the city. Although I shall try to resist, I fear my spotter urges will take over and I’ll feel obliged to try to photograph them all.

Summer = bus

According to the calendar, if not the ambient temperature, summer is nearly here, and that means it’s time to dust off the trusty VW T25 (Vanagon to some) camper ready for another season of holidays.

We’ve had the T25 for years, and it has become a trusted travel companion. Our first trips started with it full of beer, then mountain bikes, then various tandems and more recently, children. The later however, are causing the greatest problems for the bus, in fact they threaten its very existence!

Our bus is a classic VW conversion, as offered by Devon, Westafallia, Holdsworth, and in our case Bilbos, it’s a fantastic spacious layout for two travelers, but its not really designed with families in mind. Each year, as the children grow, there is a new problem to figure out. Where do you sleep another toddler? How can they travel safely?, where do we put all their stuff?

As luck would have it, the solutions to the problems normally involve a couple of hours drinking tea and pondering, a frantic trip to screwfix, and a few hours using core bloke skills like hammering, drilling and swearing.

Last year the problem was beds. Where do you put an engergetic toddler when the roof is out of bounds and there is only a double bed? I looked around and there wasn’t an off the shelf solution. The closest thing was a cab bunk from bluebird, but it doesn’t work if you happen to have head rests. In the end I built a bespoke bed base which rested on the cab seats and laid in a giant hammock strung between the head rests and sunvisors. It worked rather well, and had had the handy advantage of stopping nimble fingers accessing the controls.

This year the problems are multipled; we have a bigger, more energetic, more destructive toddler, and a new, not even one year old, grabbing, chomping baby. I think a lot of tea and pondering will be called for……

Murphy’s (Revised) Law

The other day I wanted to go home on time, I wasn’t selfish, I didn’t want to leave work early, just on time. So, almost inevitably, an hour before close of play a software problem arose which I was obliged to stay and fix.

So why do these problems always occur last thing in the day, and why hasn’t anyone coined a law for it ? Murphy’s law is too general, this the more specific:

“If you have somewhere to go, something will break and prevent you going there, the severity of the problem will be proportional to the importance of your appointment, and inversely proportional to the complexity of the cause, and the time you have to fix it.”

To put it another way:
If you have somewhere really important to be, a really critical problem will occur, caused by a stupid thing, minutes before you have to leave.”

So, I call for a new law, or a revision to Murphy’s law, if anyone knows who I should contact, and which forms I should fill in, please get in touch; but don’t leave it until the end of the day!

Snowboard Survival

Its the winter season again, and for the umpteenth time I’ll be heading to the mountains to get an all too brief boarding fix. This time though I’m older, marginally wiser, and proficient enough to spend more time off piste

With this in mind, watching Ray Mears on television, as he harped on about being prepared, I wondered why I’ve never carried any survival kit; in probably the most hostile environment I’ll spend time in. I wondered why I’d never even been given the advice to ignore.

Even if you try to restrict yourself to the piste its easy to imagine getting lost in a white out, taking a wrong turn and popping over the wrong side of a mountain. After a mistake like this, going back up may not be an option. Should you happen to accidentally nip under a boundary marker or two, perhaps due to being distracted by some fresh untracked powder, for example, even more risks arise.

Searching on google I find that this isn’t an entirely irrational fear, it does happen, all be it infrequently.

In this article a chap froze to death close to the resort, after losing his friends and becoming disorientated, in less than 24hrs. Another site catalogs snowboard deaths

Well I don’t want to join any of these lists, so I shall follow the words of the great man Ray (Mears) I’ll do some research, and be prepared. I’ll make sure I have the basics to survive for a night on the mountain if needed. Given that a 10 quid survival bag could be the difference between being rescued with toes, or without, it seems well worth the effort.

Hello World

So here it is, my first blog entry. Blogging is not something which really
appeals to me, why should I write down things which I already know, for an
audience I don’t? It seems rather like standing behind a fence near the
high street and shouting random details of your day at work. Actually, I
don’t know that from experience, but maybe I’ll try it next, if blogging
doesn’t work out for me. Something I do know however, is a number of clever

people who do rate blogging. Clever people have a frustrating habit of being

right about things, so it seems only fair that I should give it a try.

This first entry also calls to mind some wise words, said by one of those clever people in fact; Its never to late to start.