Track Pump

I finally caved and got a track pump for my bike - a Blackburn Air Tower 1. Its a beauty. My beloved Brompton's tires have been a bit flat lately, and I can't get them up to much pressure with my teeny weeny hand pump, so I thought it was about time I became a proper cyclist with a proper pump. The tires on a Brompton go to a suggested max pressure of 100 - mine were at around 30. A mate in work who also has a Brompton's tires were at 20. I pumped up both bikes to around 80, so today we got in way faster with less effort, but with killer sore arses.

Some days I feel like stopping cyclists on the street and pumping up their tires - people cycle with such flat tires they put in so much effort and get nowhere. Their commutes could be way more enjoyable if only they knew!

Fran and Peter

Fran and Peter are visiting London at the moment. They arrived on Friday and we went out for a nice meal and drinks in Soho. Then over Saturday and Sunday we saw pretty much every single tourist attraction central London has to offer. A busy few days! Then yesterday we had afternoon tea, which is the largest amount of food I've eaten in a single sitting, and around a million cups of tea. Brilliant!

This is an odd little car that we saw in the Science Museum that matched Hugh's jumper.

Drum Hero

We got the drums for guitar hero! Here's a picture of Hugh giving it holly early this morning driving our neighbours nuts. Great craic though. Also note how fashionable Hugh's pyjama trousers are. Very rock and roll.

Half Marathon!

This is me and some friends from work looking pretty pooped after finishing the Run To The Beat half marathon last Sunday. In the picture is me, Alissa and Helen. I finished in 2:27:15, averaging around an 11 minute mile, which I was really pleased with. After the 11 mile mark, I must say I was totally going to pack it in, but there were so few people walking that I was too embarrassed to. A few of the guys from work did it too, and they got some pretty impressive times. Us girls will have to actually train for the next one and see if we can beat them.

Some other pictures of the race are available here. Look at Sony Ericsson Run To The Beat London and enter Mc Carthy (the space is very important).

Wonderbrass!

Hugh has opened his inaugural brass instrument repair workshop in the spare room in Godmanchester. He has all the tools he needs now and is set to go after training with Trevor Head last year. He's already fixed a bunch of Trumpets and Trombones and even a vintage heralding trumpet, like in old medieval films! It's a pretty sweet set up, and he's hoping to fix up a bunch of instruments from the schools around his borough. he's called it Wonderbrass, but it was a real tough decision between that and Kiss My Brass.

Engagement!

It's old news by now, but myself and Hugh are engaged. This is a picture George took for us with the glitzy ring and Hugh's best smile. We will be getting married in July next year and have finally settled on a place - Ampleforth college where Hugh went to school. The Abbot has kindly agreed to celebrate the wedding, and we have dresses and suits already, so now we can start thinking of the reallly important stuff, like the cake. I want something like this masterpiece:

Beer Ball

Hi everyone, it's been a while since I've blogged about anything, but I'm going to try doing a few updates a week from now on, especially for the folks in Australia.

This is a picture from a softball tournament my team hosted this weekend in Finsbury Park. It's called Beer Ball and the rules say that you have to have a beer in hand from the early morning, and you have to chug it if you do anything stupid. And if you do something particularly stupid, like getting the start time of the tournament wrong and showing up after the first game was finished, oops, you get spun around in the air while chugging. Also you had to play with a ridiculous hat on and every now and then you would have to do pretty unhelpful things, like batting left-handed and everyone swapping fielding positions. It was great fun, and only one injury; poor Claire hurt her ankle pretty bad tripping over one of the bases and got carted off to hospital.

Fancy Cars

Myself and Hugh went driving cars in an abandoned airfield outside Oxford yesterday. It was with a company called U Drive Cars. They have a range of kick ass cars, and you can take your choice of cars out for a few laps with a professional driver as a passenger to make sure you don't plough yourself into a wall somewhere. Hugh drove a silver one, a red one and a green one. For any more detailed information you'll have to ask the man himself. One was a ferrari and one was a James Bond car. Here's Hugh with all of them.




Hugh didn't drive this one, but I thought it was hilarious. It's some form of crazy English car.

Sleepy puppies

These are Hugh's parents' puppies. We rented a boat recently and they were good as gold on board. They alternated between ripping things up and sleeping, but at least they weren't running around or jumping out. The first puppy is Jaffa. She is small but diabolically clever. The next is Beamer who is a real pedigree looking beagle, and Jaffa's Igor type servant.

Godmanchester

Hugh's family had a big house party a few weekends back. Ian and Roisin came to visit us for it. We took a rowing boat out in Finsbury Park near our flat, and we got mobbed by baby swans looking for food. Ian managed to pet one but the rest of us chickened out for fear of having our hands pecked off.


Then on the way to Hugh's parent's house we had to go through a field of huge cows who took rather a fancying to Ian and Roisin. There were also millions of rabbits in this field which we tried chasing, but they are fierce quick. And Ian tried to catch a squirrel, but it was like lightening.


One of the neighbours in Godmanchester rebuilds monster trucks and he has a yard full of them. Here's Roisin expressing her disbelief.

Maple Tree Race

The race is on here in XBridge to grow the fastest Maple tree. My friend Kat went home for a visit and came back with some Canadian Maple tree seeds. One set has gone to the BView developers, one set has gone to us. So we have gotten off to a flying start and have already planted the little fellas in a little compost pellet thingy (technical term). More progress as it unfolds...

Nerd Fest

Last Thursday myself Meg and Kat went to the Firefox 3 launch party in the Shooting Star near the Liverpool Street Station. It was fantastic fun and we got loads of free Firefox Swag, which we are adorned with in the picture. Kat was quite dangerous with her jaunty sideways hat action, but thankfully noone actually lost any eyes, just a few close calls.

Bits

These are the other parts of Audrey. The fork and handlebars have been painted and I've put them back on. The ball bearings were filthy and coated in solid old grease, so now that they are clean and have lovely fresh grease on, they are turning brilliantly. I'll get a picture later to put up. It's pretty cool.

New Dress

It has finally happened, Audrey has been painted. During the week I sanded and rust treated the frame, forks and handlebars. Then I primed them by painting them gray. This is how the frame looked on Saturday morning:


Then myself and Kat painted it all a random mix of red and blue. Here's Kat in her wonderfully unmatching socks in the back yard. Do you see the millions of leaves by her feet? We have a bloody enormous horse chestnut tree next door that floods us with leaves in the winter and a crazy japanese tree that does the same in the summer.


When the red and blue dried we stuck on lots of little stickers, then painted it black. Using a tweezers we took the stickers off and were left with some pretty cool patterns. I was considering putting a few stars around them place, but in the end what we did was write a load of my girl friend's names on the frame! It's really cool. It's very subtle so isn't really noticable till you look closely. This is the frame looking like a normal black bike:


And this is the decal on the front. I tried to save the original paint for the decal, but it was so rusty that it had to be treated and the treatment melted the paint. I like this one though, Audrey Hepburn; and the H is very similar to the Hercules H that was there before. Below is my name on the frame, I'll put up more later.

80's Night

There's an 80's clob near where I work called Reflex. We've been trying to go for a while but it gets completely jammed, so last Friday we made it a mission to get there on time so rocked up around 7 o clock for a night of total 80's mayhem. The place itself is pretty dingy, noone has felt the need to clean since the 80s, but the music and atmosphere is excellent. I never knew the people I work with are so fanatical about the 80s. David Hasslehoff is revered as a total hero in this place, here's a picture of me giving him the adoration deserved. No girls can pass without having a mandatory hug photo taken, this gem is near the front door. The night only got madder after this and now i am the proud owner of an inflatable electric pink flying v guitar.

She's Nude!!!

OK so this is what Audrey looked like for the last few weeks. I decided to take her apart completely, but soon found that stubborn rust and crazy attachments meant that I didn't have the tools necessary to take everything off. Especially the handlebars and fork gave me huge problems. Never fear though, the solution came to me yesterday - the wrench-master 4000. Well I don't know what it's real name is, but it's fantastic. It's a ginormous wrench with good teeth so it can get purchase on about anything. It also doubles as a hammer. Nice.

These are the parts of the handlebars and fork after myself and Hugh eventually managed to beat it into it's individual parts.


And this is me with the indecently naked frame, wielding the wrench-master itself. I've started sanding the main frame now in preparation for priming. Note the tiny silver patch towards the front of the bike? Great eh? Only around 500 more hours of sanding to go...

Exhibition

Last weekend myself and Hugh went to his school, Ampleforth, to see his brother Peter playing cricket. It was a weekend called Exhibition, where the parents are invited to come see various sporting events and shows around the school, and annual awards are given to the students.

This first picture is the pavillion on the 1st cricket pitch with the school in the background. It's a monastery school. The big building in the middle is the church, to the left is the monk's area, and to the right is the school itself. The living areas for the students is off the right of the picture. It's an amazing place.

On the first day of the cricket, the opposition batted first and got 228. Peter and one of the lads on his team opened the batting and between them got 229 not out. Pretty impressive! The other lad was "given his colours" for such an outstanding show. This means that he is given a red school jacket and hat, an award given to only the best cricketers. It's pretty sought after! The guy was delighted with it and his father was there to see him being awarded it and everything. It was really cool. Below is Peter batting.

Baby Duckies

I'm too lazy at the moment to get any new pictures off the camera, so here's another from Canter Parcs a few weekends back. There were ducks and ducklings everywhere. They weren't that shy of people either, so walking through the main village there'd be kids legging it after ducklings with the Mom in hysterics, of both species.

Vegetables 2008

It's raining here at the moment so I'm not able to do anything with the bike, so here's a few pictures of this years vegetables. I started them from seed around 6 weeks ago, in seedling trays out the back garden. I planted tomatoes, broccoli, onions, carrots, leek and lettuce.


Since then they have started getting pretty big! First here is a pot of broccoli and next is a tomato plant. The tomatoes are definitely my favorites and I like to water them and talk to them before going to work in the morning. Hugh is looking into loony bins for me.

Cool New Wheel!

Over the weekend I took Audrey's wheel apart. This is what the hub looked like at the start - pretty gross. The spokes snapped very easily so I was able to pull them all out of the wheel pretty easily.


As soon as they were all gone it was very easy to take the hub apart. These are all the parts. The balls sit in a rim just inside the hub and they are held in place by the bar and the shaped nuts. They are covered in grease which makes the bar able to turn around against the balls easily instead of rubbing off flat metal. I cleaned and rusted and treated the metal and it turn out like the next photo - pretty good improvement!



I took one of the old spokes to my local bike shop and was able to buy replacement ones. They come in 2 parts - they have a nipple (he he he) at the end that goes through the hub and they look like a screw at the top. Then there is a bit that looks like a long nut that goes in through the rim and connects onto the spoke. You can tighten it with a normal screwdriver and the idea is to keep the spoke from coming up though the screw cause it will puncture the tube.

I followed Sheldon Brown's instructions on how to respoke the wheel. It's a great article and really easy to follow. It's a lot easier than I thought. It's not completely true, as I obviously don't have a truing stand, but I got is as close as possible by looking at it spinning on the bike upsidedown. The spokes alternate at being on the right and left sides of the rim. If the rim is bending to the right, tighten a spoke on the left to pull it back. And hey presto - a shiny new wheel! When the rear wheel is ready I'll bring them both to the bike shop to be trued properly.