November 30th

It's been bloody windy all day, so a lot of the leaves have left the tree, but hopefully they're away down the road by now.  I'm hoping they're not all blocking the gutters.  Again.

After work, I got up in the roof and found that the pot I'd left for the furnace was almost full of water, but the thing has been struggling to start.  Screw it, I've plugged it all back as it was before I started.  I'm thinking that the pressure switch could well have failed, so now I just need to figure out how to test it, and where I'd get a replacement.

November 29th

The furnace didn't want to start this morning, but eventually it did, and warmed the house up.  So, I got up in the roof and unplugged all the hoses from the drain for the furnace, and put them into a pot to catch the water.  We'll see what happens now.

November 27th

It was a pretty grim day, so we just did chores around the house.  The furnace seems to be behaving itself at the moment, but I know not why.  I'm thinking I'll be looking at getting a little man in sometime soon.

November 26th

We packed up our stuff, as it looked like it was going to be a nice day, and headed home.  Tilly whined a little, then settled down and went to sleep.  When we got home, she checked that everything was where she'd left it, then crashed out.

November 25th

We were still camping, but we took Tilly to the sea side, so she could play in the ocean for the first time - other than that, she's paddled in a river :o)

November 24th

We were camping, so we spent the day avoiding showers, walking Tilly and sodding about in the camp site.  Oh yeah, and it was Thanksgiving, so we celebrated a year of stealing people's land by eating turkey.  Wait, what?

November 23rd

We packed up the van and drove down to the campsite to meet Scott and Becky and friends.  It took us a few minutes to set up, and then we set about the important tasks, and by that I mean entertaining Tilly.  She'd whined the whole way there, but she was happy to play with Daisy and Zeus, and go for a series of long walks around the camp site.

November 21st

As this is a 3 day holiday week, I decided to take those 3 days off and have 9 days not working.  I need some time off, even though the weather's decided to screw up anything we'd planned.

I've been tinkering with the Dell Streak, to try and get it to run as a decent GPS.  Yeah, good luck with that - most of the software I'm finding sucks.

There are leaves all over the garden again, so I cleared those.

In the evening, we went to dinner with Gwen and Walter.

November 20th

I got up on the roof to check that the furnace vent wasn't blocked, then went and totally failed to get a replacement hose.  Luckily it's designed to run vertically or horizontally, so there's a blocked hose at the top.  I took that one off, and used the plug in it to plug up a short length of the buggered hose, then used that hose to replace the buggered up one - apparently the manufacturer doesn't like selling spares to DIYers, so 2 rubber hoses cost around $75.

The van's started idling at around 1500rpm, so I prepared for the worst and opened the engine hatch.  The cruise control adjuster had come undone,so it had been slowly tightening up the throttle cable.  Sadly it looks like the threads on the adjuster are crap, so I've put another nut in there as a spacer to get to the unbuggered thread.  It looks like it'll work, and it's easy to get off now I know what the problem is.

The furnace was still throwing errors when I stomped away in a huff, but it seems to be working for the moment.  We'll see how long that lasts.

In the evening we had a marathon Dr Who watching session, and we're almost up to date now.

November 19th

I started out by clearing the leaves in the front garden, then went to look at the furnace which seems to not be working.  I can't see anything obviously wrong with it, but I don't know what the hell I'm looking for.  It lights when it's supposed to, but then goes out.  Except when it doesn't.  I took the flame chamber apart and vacuumed out a bunch of dead moths, and that seems to have made no difference at all.  I then looked at the drainage lines from the condensers, to find one was full of water, but it fell apart when I unplugged it.  I'll look for a new one tomorrow, and go from there.

November 17th

I went in to San Francisco, as Romer's visiting from Philadelphia.  We worked, did lunch, then played poker.  I managed to get away up a bit, for a change, but then Dave and I had to beg entry into the car park to get our vehicles out - apparently "closes at 7pm" means "closes at 7pm".  It was a long drive home, as the traffic was pretty sucky all the way across the Bay Bridge - usually once I get to the bridge it's plain sailing, but it wasn't.

Tilly's taken up stealing the toothpaste tube as a trophy, which makes a change from the tea towels.

November 14th

We watched Attack The Block - mostly because Nick Frost is in it.  It's funny, and I didn't have to translate once!

November 13th

We didn't go flying, as Vic wasn't feeling up to it.  It's ~6 hours' driving, with Tilly getting more and more excited as we get there.  We just lazed around and wasted the day.

November 12th

I did the usual weekend chores, then we took the van over to Lincoln and took the Flightstar up for a couple of circuits.  It wasn't too cold at all, but when it started to get busy, we came in and packed everything away.  On the way to get something to eat, we saw Larry, which I thought was interesting, as he'd only have time for a couple of circuits before it got dark.  Sure enough, he only got in a couple of circuits.

When we got home, we got the Jeep all racked up and ready to go hang gliding tomorrow, then caught up on some of the TV from the week.

November 11th

Hey, today's 11/11/11, and at 11:11:11, I was working.  Whatever.  After work, we met Gwen and Walter for pizza.

November 6th

As it had stopped raining, I wasted most of the day just clearing leaves and cutting the grass.  Oh, the joys of home ownership.

November 5th

We went out and put the van back together, and I managed to chip a few bits of the bed liner off while doing it - no problem, I can touch those in.  We also spent a little while fixing a couple of electrical problems - a burnt out fuse, and a couple of corroded joints. 

I've bought a Dell Streak tablet, and started trying to get it to work as an offline GPS.  I've also installed Angry Birds, so there goes my weekend.

As it was raining, there wasn't much else to do, so we watched Priest, a pretty decent vampire comic book, sorry, graphic novel, adaptation and had a quiet night in.

November 3rd

I was bored after work, so I pulled the masking tape off the van.  In a few places it's pulled the paint off, too.  As I've previously discovered, the respray wasn't done that well, so I'll have to look at patching a few places when it warms up a little (it's too cold to spray now, I reckon).

November 2nd

We went out and put a second coat of bed liner on the van - I used the roller and Vic filled in the bits I'd missed with a small brush.  It's not looking at all bad, and I'm quite liking the green masking tape go faster stripe :o)

October 31st

After work we pulled the racks off the Jeeps, then caught up on the Hallowe'en TV episodes while I trimmed the videos from the weekend.  Seems that I didn't click the record button far enough forward on the wing camera for the 2nd 2 flights, but hey, you get the staff you pay for.

I was playing with stuff in Youtube, and found that you can change the background audio - I chose one of the older videos and tried "I'm feeling lucky", and it chose "Bodies" - hmmm... not the feeling I was going for :o)

Oh, this month's electrickery:

and what we generated:

October 30th

We got up terrifyingly early, threw the glider on the Jeep and waited for Gwen to arrive before heading down to Ed Levin.  Vic got 3 jumps from the 600' launch, and one of those counted as a spot landing towards her Hang 3 qualification.

I discovered that my 14x zoom camera also zooms up to something crazy like 50x digitally, but it's almost impossible to hold it steady at that level, and the picture looks crappy.

Tilly got to run around the dog park for ages before we headed back - she was busy stealing a tennis ball from a 2 year old German Shepherd called Rocko.  He wasn't too bothered, as he got to chase her - she's a lot quicker than a Shepherd :o)

When we got home, Gwen headed off home (lightweight) and we went to dinner with Vince, who's having the usual run-around with the insurance company about his bike.

October 29th

I got it into my head to do some work on the van today, so I pulled the bumpers, lights and mudflaps, them spent a stupid amount of time masking it up so I could paint the wheel arches, under the bumpers and suchlike with pickup bed liner.  The paint's bloody hard to work with, and by the time I'd finished the first coat, it was drying pretty quickly.  I'll leave it a couple of days before going around again with a second coat.

I've been toying with getting an iPod Touch, and we went to see somebody who's selling one.  The thing is, first he gave me the wrong street, then he'd decided to put the price up $10 while we were driving over there, so screw that guy.

In the evening we watched Thor, put the rack on the Jeep then had an earlyish night.