Merry Xmas to all.

A big swag of pressies for us this year, Olivia has a lot of friends, hers are on the left and mine are on the right.

I'm very pleased I'm not 10 y/o anymore, I scored new underpants, happily it's something I can really do with so they're gratefully accepted despite being a fancy brand instead of my preferred lifestyle choice of cheap generics.

I also got a new shirt that I need to lose about another 15 kg to make comfortable, I'll see if my Dad can use it.

Olivia looks radiant with this new top, something that's spot on for the interstate footy matches come winter.

Jimby gave Olivia this phone watch, dunno whether it'll be any good but it sure didn't cost much, even if it fails to work it's a pretty white so can be a fashion accessory.
Olivia got plenty of stuff but I'll let her post about it to her Facebook page.

Golly.

I just noticed our Xmas tree has a rather overflowing menagerie of goodies around it, Olivia has a very busy social life.

A busy day ahead.

First up take a table around to Lorna's place so they can set up for her party this evening. It's under a mango tree so we're sure to be bonked on the head by a few.

Then off to the cemetery to say hello and check on Grace.

Then with things nicely warmed up I gave Daisy a freshen up for Xmas with a change of oil. This time I've followed by tightwad instinct by opting for Coles oil now that they've finally 35 years too late changed to a 15W-40 brew, for way too long the budget oil in Australia has been 20W-50 which is too thick for any engine made since about the Model T, it seems to be an Aussie thing to offer treacle, thank you Coles for making the change. Last time I looked Woolies still sold 20W-50, so those suffering chronic oil consumption can still get a cheap fix.

88 today.

My Dad Fred turned 88 today (17th December), he's also moved to Ingham to be closer to family, and now has a lovely flat close to town, we expect my mother will join him shortly but for now we're helping him out.
Sorry I've been very lax of late but things have been very hectic for us.

I actually enjoy being positive for a change.

We were at a Xmas themed seniors do at the Shire Hall today and this fellow Nev Milne entertained us, he was very good and I even messaged the council not to be afraid of hiring him again some time.
The event was a junket to use up some ratepayers money but I still got a positive feeling from it, helped by my taking minimum advantage of the refreshments on offer.
On a frustrating note was when Nev performed "Little Drummer Boy" which like pretty well all of his numbers was a singalong one, I realised it was made for my voice, or at least the pom poms are as a counter to the girls singing the real notes, but it isn't in our Sing Australia catalogue.

Very fancy teeth now.

I just had another two teeth filled by the best dentist ever, Brittany Burberry at the Ingham Hospital, I don't have many teeth left but at least those few are fairly presentable now.
We sing later today in town so I had to insist on no needles but she's such an artist there was only minimal pain despite her worried brow.
Now I notice I missed a whisker, so I'd better lop it off before showing myself in public. I've already had a nice close cropped haircut which should hide my baldness and make the girls less ashamed of me when the sing sweet dulcet tones alongside frogmouth Jimby.

Rusty is normal it seems.

I took a photo of this pushbike later after a tiny bit of shopping, I can't say I'm pleased by the amount of chains I see that have never felt the caressing feel of oil.

Something fun to do.

We were at a place called the Hub, which to me appears to exist solely as a means of using up taxpayer money, and I was waiting for Olivia who was doing something that's a mystery to me, and eventually after eyeing millions of brochures that must nearly encourage men to beat their spouses, I sat down and sorted out this far from simple puzzle.

Sweet.

It does work,but why?

This town clock was repaired a couple of years ago after somebody had noticed that it had stopped but without giving the bits around it a good refurbishment I can't see the point of bothering.

We can hope.

Olivia took our budget but pretty decent S32 camera to the pool today but it drowned. I think the back became unfastened for whatever reason but now I'm hoping it can dry out and become serviceable again, I do wish the battery had been immediately removed but at least it isn't seawater.

A welcome visitor leaves.

My Father Fred has been at our place for the last four weeks, he's getting on a bit now and was fairly crook when he arrived but most of his health has returned now so he's heading back south to sort things out with my Mother regards them possibly moving north again.
We had 138 mm of rain here on the day he left so hooking up the trailer was a pain, and a nervous one for me as I had fitted and wired new lights on it but happily they all lit up in the correct manner.

I took of photo of Fred and Olivia a few minutes before leaving, since it's a nice photo I'm posting it, Olivia's own parent's died a long time ago and it's been a surprise for her to marry into having in-laws.

A pair of Sunbirds.

I just noticed a pair of Sunbirds feeding in our front yard, not an easy subject to photograph but I'm glad they're hanging around, they're tiny little things.

Jimby's now on the NBN.

Finally after the rest of Ingham was connected to the NBN a year ago our end of town has been switched on.
I used to get a pretty good ADSL connection with about a 16 Mbps download, and now despite having the inferior fibre to the node optical connection I'm getting a pretty impressive speed.
The added bonus is this being cheaper than the old service if you take the VOIP phone service into account.

7th anniversary.

Dad brought up a coffee machine with him and this coffee, I thought it might be a fair idea to try it before it got old enough to vote.
It was OK but OK isn't the reason for making fancy coffee, a wow factor is what's desired but it won't be wasted.
Amazing coincidence the date, I only noticed after taking the photo since my eyes don't manage so well these days.

Ready to bolt back on.

Another little problem on Dad's drive here was the mudguards had broken off the trailer.
I've welded the broken bits back together in my Mr Blobby fashion and hope it'll stay in place for a while.
I know I'll have to do a bit of work to my welding mask so perhaps I might be able to see what I'm doing next time, but then it just wouldn't be me if my work had a professional neat look to it.
Americans also deserve a little bit of credit for naming the welding tool a stick welder, quite clever actually, we merely call them arc welders which is only half as descriptive, but at least our native 230 Volts is better suited to them.

A real convolution.

At enormous expense I managed to find a new belt and pulley this morning, it would have been much easier if the belt was ~15mm longer but it's fitted and things are good again.

New pulley and belt required.

This calamitous ruin is what was on Dad's Commodore when he arrived, incredibly it was still operating the things it needed to, a very lucky lad was he.
I'm off shopping in a few minutes to source replacements.

Jimby attacks a VT Commodore fuel flap.

My Dad Fred has driven up here in what may not be just a little visit but I have a few things on his car that I have to sort out, more to follow.
The catch of the fuel flap was broken and held on with *shudder* duct tape (naturally it's pronounced duck tape but I shouldn't write that), since the car is pretty badly marked these days I just used some steel I've bent and a couple of pop rivets (not rivots as I've seen in a Ford manual).

Just to make them a little less obvious I sprayed a bit of blue paint over them, blue being the closest colour I have to purple. The scratch here is part of the reason I'm not bothered about changing my leopard spots to pretty boy Jimby.
There'll be more to come with this little tale.

"I can't see a bl**dy thing"

A capture from the classic film The Great Escape, I post this because the way my eyes are now I'm saying the same thing as Donald Pleasence did here.
I've been meaning to wait another year until seeing an eye doctor again but this may be a difficult thing to do if Olivia leans on me a bit to do something, a man has to follow the easiest option and face his fears of the system feeding off medicare. It's only been nine years since I did an eye test and I wanted to last a whole decade, although I know a standard test is useless to me as my issue is rather deeper and I don't have any faith in the system.
I need to do something about my hearing too, my ears hear loud enough but too often what my they decode is a scrambled mess, hence why I've given up on phones.

I hope this restrains a naughty washing machine.

Our washing machine wanders about a bit so I wired it up to a screw I put in the wall.
Of course a plain screw wouldn't warrant any attention, so I welded a bit of scrap steel onto the end to help me feel a bit more useful.
There's never much danger of my handiwork ever looking pretty.

Jimby makes a face.

I put a face on this clock the other day, I even got fancy by penning in some hour markers. Dunno what was on the disk but I can always burn another if needed.

This works, for now.

My old wire brush failed me when I wanted to use it the other day, while I'm waiting for a new one to arrive a brain wave just struck me to try welding a nut over the failed thread section.

It works but I don't think it'll be long before it fails again, the extra length of the assembly will doubtless add enough extra stress to cause issues but we'll try to get another job out of it.
I was welding a bit blind too due to the nature of these modern automatic shades, I'll have to try and fit a battery holder into one so a measure of reliability can be gained.

A surprise date.

Olivia bought this pack of shaving irons today at a very good price, I would never have thought shaving irons would have a best before date but was it sheer coincidence it was date stamped with today's date?
Today the 5th of September also marks our faithful carriage Daisy's 3rd birthday, which also means the warranty has expired, since I haven't made any claims in that time it has been a fairly meaningless warranty, but then again I usually find all warranties rather more a nuisance than a help.

Prize opening.

I had no idea what was in my raffle prize so I put it in the fridge to wait for Olivia to open it.
When I saw men's and women's prizes were different I was hoping for alcohol but this was a pretty good result.
Some razors and a shaving brush.
A tin of the best instant coffee International Roast, something our budget doesn't stretch to these days.
A bar of soap, useful but not something a man would get excitement from.
Some clothes pegs.
Some band-aids, I've never had much use for these, as a child our home didn't have them, and over the years I've just tended to use masking tape on finger wounds.
These were wrapped in a handkerchief to make the prize resemble a bomb. I was raised by a foster Grandmother for much of my younger days so I find handkerchiefs most useful and I actually disdain the use of tissues, I know I'm in the minority now holding that view.
The end result for me was a very well thought out prize, kudos to those who thought about what to offer.

Smug Jimby.

At a social event today where we sang a few ditties I managed to win a prize from their raffles, I'm not used to winning anything of late so this was a pleasant surprise, poor George beside me had upped his chances nicely by inadvertently scoring two door tickets but didn't win a thing.

Watch time again.

Olivia bought herself a new used watch today from the Salvos, I'm hoping looking at the worn coating on the face that it's using good old fashioned radium to make it glow in the dark rather than the new stuff that's fairly useless, but we'll have to wait until dark.
Of course it wasn't going when she purchased it but Jimby likes that since he enjoys replacing batteries, however this one had a major issue that was only found upon opening the case.

With my lousy eyesight it took a few seconds of puzzled looking until the tiny spark in my head realised "idiot! it's a wind up watch" a little wind had it ticking away quite silently.
We shall call this buy a win, Olivia's very happy.
I suppose in my defense I had to take a photo of the face in order to read the brand label, so the dead set giveaway words like jewels and incabloc weren't read.

A learning experience.

I was asked to replace another watch battery in this somewhat fancier one than I'd usually play with, naturally as it has a fancy label it takes a slightly different cell than the ones I'm used to, but no worries I've ordered some in.

The worries started later when I wanted to see if the crown worked alright to set the hands.

That was the end of my easy job, the stem had corroded away a bit and the crown snapped off, and off I had to look online for a new (and overpriced) stem, I just hope I can get the bit of stem out of the old crown later.
I hope Kevin who owns the watch is in a good mood as he isn't going to like this and the reality is that it isn't really worth the effort of pursuing it but I do like the concept of maintaining things in running order.
It seems this model has a quite complex system of resetting things after battery replacement, and that's something I found out about after investigating it online, you've got to love the internet.

A day out at Abergowrie.

There was a NAIDOC event at the Abergowrie school today which we putted out to experience and I can very happily report that I got myself a lovely little Aboriginal flag, a flag I like for probably all the wrong reasons. The singer in the background was a lass known as Casey Donovan, a name that I had heard of but this was first exposure to her, she has a fine voice but I think the material let her down.

This shocked me but in a very positive way, a Hyundai police car, that is so sensible.

This bit of machinery is a great target for a photo, what I found a bit startling was how wide it was, by my pacing I reckon 3 metres wide, you'd never get it registered even if it ran.

What must be causing nightmares is while it looks like it could us a fresh coat of lovely pretty paint it's riddled with metal cancer. No easy answer for this dilemma.

Another problem is that it appears to have become a rubbish bin.

A back view of chef Mark Olive addressing us visitors, he has a show on TV called The Black Olive but what I really liked about him was onstage earlier when after other presenters performed all I heard was mumbled words not knowing what they were talking about, then he came on and I could understand most of what he was saying, this made me feel better about my ears. I wasn't comfortable in the crowd in front of him so I shuffled of away from the hustle and bustle.
For a where's Wally (Waldo) moment Olivia is in this picture, and just to make it easier for those adventurous enough to have a go look up from the red cup.

Wasted time.

I bought a cheap Chinese spot welder a while back but when I finally felt like giving it a go it tripped the house circuit breaker, being a fixit sort of chap I had a good look at it, then as I had the transformer out and was thinking I may have the difficult task of removing the laminations and rewinding it I had a bit of a look online and now just think its current draw is a bit to much for the circuit I was using, so this piccie shows me reassembling it, at least I have a sharper haircut than James May even if my house hat hides most of it.
I'm thinking of adding a home made ballast coil to the transformer input but I'm now in wait and see mode before I try something else.
I sort of wish I'd made up a unit using supercapacitors but this unit has a nice case as well as a pretty decent timer and physical welding probes, something I could rejig later if I decide to make a supercapacitor welder.