Tuesday 14 May 2024

What's the worst than could happen?

 Much of this morning was spent on administrative stuff. Pension forms were completed. tax forms were checked and filed, an agenda for an upcoming Horticultural Club meeting was drafted.* This admin extravaganza culminated in a forty minute wait to talk to HM Revenue & Customs and get them to make a tax code adjustment to my little Civil Service pension.

The afternoon saw me undertake either a work of genius, or possibly the most stupidest thing I have ever done.  The blade on the porn mower is well past its best and a spare blade has lurked in the shed for years. The reason that it hasn't been fitted is because it isn't quite right ... it is the right length and has the right size holes, it is just that it is missing a single hole that aligns with a pin on the mower drive shaft.

I decided that it could be made to fit by simply drilling a hole in the blade in the right place. Well, nearly the right place ... a couple of minutes with a Dremel and a grinding stone had it locking on to the drive shaft nicely.

I tightened it all up and pulled on the starting cord a couple of times. The porn mower roared in to life and the new blade cuts beautifully. However, I do feel a little nervous about having a 20" piece of sharpened metal spinning at several hundred revolutions per minute in close proximity to my ankles. After all, I have potentially impacted its structural integrity. 

In response to today's Journal entry title ... I'm not sure I really want to think about that!

I spent a further hour up in the orchard and can report that two thirds of it are now cut back. I can see a bonfire happening in the next week or so, or a monumental session with a rake and pitch fork to clear away the grass and nettle cuttings.

My final exertion was a walk on the Three Miler with Bobbyn and the dogs. We had an interesting chat where she seemed interested in a piece of self-analysis, whilst I suggested that this was completely unnecessary and that she simply need to ensure that calendars were shared or synchronised. 

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* Don't Ask! I felt guilty at last year's AGM and offered to support a friend who had literally been thrown under the bus by 30%.  In the absence of any volunteers for the vacant Chairman role, she volunteered Hoppy.  Now Hoppy is a very skilled gardener, but he was in the process of assuming a new role for a large seed producer out in East Anglia. I knew he was going to be very busy, so I stupidly volunteered to act as co-chair ... I seem to have been doing a lot of the chairman stuff over the past few months.

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