Broithe

The one time I went, it was like being an extra in a Cecil B DeMille battle scene.

On RTÉ1 at 9:35pm next Monday, December 5th. Might be of some interest,

Facebook comes up with 'five people' called Tara Mines. Some of them might be real, but I can't be held responsible if any of them are a bit dicky.

There is an island bench in the middle of the shed which is just a 'pile of stuff' at the moment. Eventually, it will have this ex-school workbench with a plywood extension behind it. It'll be raised to the same height as the main bench along the back wall and provide a decent open workspace. Thinking about the external insulation possibilities, the side with the window faces square east, and the side with the double doors faces south. There's a good bit of solar input on any half-decent day - the doors, particularly, get quite warm - so, I might just insulate the north and (shaded) west sides. Painting the sunny walls a bit darker has been on the cards anyway, as the glare is a bit trying in the summer. But, the glazing-in of the window/greenhouse space looks very enticing for the future. The north wall is fully blank and the west wall has only the woodburner flue and the gas pipe defacing its smoothness.

Storage/retrieval is a serious issue, that you do have to confront, as best you can. One thing I have been doing is mounting 'occasional' machinery on plywood plates, so they can be clamped (almost) anywhere when needed and stored away when the empty bench-space is more useful. They can then be used around the main shed or in the greenhouses. The plates have an M6 T-nut sunk flush into the bottom of the plate and threaded rod to pull the machine down firmly.

I used to do the odd job for a chap who was deaf and blind, but I learnt to 'speak' to him via this "manual texting" system. The letters were tapped out on his hand and, knowing that I could hear, he would guess where it was going, almost always correctly - the only viable predictive text that I ever encountered. This could be accepted or rejected - one palm-tap for yes or two for no. I knew someone else that could do it and it was possible to 'text' her across a crowded pub, expressing a strong opinion about someone actually in the room, without them having any idea what was being 'said'.

Eye halve a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a quay and type a word And weight four it two say Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh. As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long And eye can put the error rite It's rare lea ever wrong. Eye have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no It's letter perfect awl the weigh My chequer tolled me sew.

The mixer is mostly for the birds. They do like to supervise the process. When I was living in the Shed, people sometimes commented on the amount of alcohol in the larder, but nobody ever noticed the bottle of meths in the middle. I did build the cooker in, when the benches were rearranged, to avoid going back up to the house unnecessarily. For the shepherds have become stupid And have not sought the Lord; Therefore they have not prospered, And all their flock is scattered. Jeremiah 10:21 When the truly righteous would have used a proper electrostatic machine. Or, have you led me into discussing religion..?

On the basis that there's no point having it if you can't find it, shelving has been a large part of the recent renovations. Any area of 'dead volume', behind the door, along the eaves, etc, has been filled with shelving, so that stuff can be stored in a visible manner. This is an ongoing project, with the intention, so far unachieved, of keeping the benches clear of tools and materials that aren't actually in use.

Harcourt Street.

That might happen one day, but it hasn't really been an issue - the fire helps and only burns €1 to €1:50 of wood a day. I did use it to 'isolate' for a couple of fortnights during the Plague, to avoid potentially contaminating the house - hence the camp bed and sleeping bag. Another possibility is to 'glaze in' the space between the greenhouse and the window, there's a lot of free heat to be had there. Baking the wood in the greenhouses definitely had a hugely beneficial effect on the efficiency.

Discussions elsewhere might lead to clogging up threads with talk of sheds. We could have examples of the "housing issue" here, to keep things organised and show/examine details of the various possibilities that exist. I'm (slowly) reorganising this one. Cavity blocks and a steel roof, but I did put in an insulated plasterboard ceiling, just before the Plague hit.

The remains remain at Ballybrophy. https://www.google.com/maps/@52.9023258,-7.5977056,88m/data=!3m1!1e3

I've had a few things off Nick Tozer over the years and found him to be reasonable. http://www.railwaybook.com/ I might be worth asking him to keep an eye out, he does seem to get a good bit of Irish stuff.

I did find these rather oversized sleepers at Blist's Hill, near Ironbridge, but I didn't have the means to measure them at the time.

A weathering example. Ideal for the "just bury it in the garden over the winter" technique.

Getting fertiliser through UK customs from Ireland will always result in them paying a bit more attention to the consignment... They're probably in a bucket of wet sand in the middle of a car park, awaiting attention.

I remain amazed that this has happened.

I have decided that I'm going to wait for the Irish mainline electric locos now - so that I can buy some food and have the heating back on at the weekends.

The thing is that The Nile, as seen by most people, is made up from the waters of the White Nile and the Blue Nile. So, eau-de-nil should really be light blue, surely?

I accidentally found this tunnel in the UK, where the A51 was straightened in the 1960s, cutting the yard off from most of the adjacent land. The viewpoint is from the resulting 'loop' of the old road. The 'new' road runs across the top, left to right (and vice versa). It's only visible from a very small area and few people will have spotted it - I've gone past many times and only know it's there because, to settle a pointless debate, I googled how many branches of Subway were in the vicinity. That location seemed very unlikely, until I investigated. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.8698612,-2.0918099,3a,90y,77.04h,84.52t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1soVY3Z_7mmFI3E3myGj6_tQ!2e0!5s20110701T000000!7i13312!8i6656 It would certainly be a struggle to operate there today by crossing the main road all the time. There are farm tunnels under the R433, either side of Rathdowney, these days.

The Forth Bridge.

As with all these "forthcoming projects", it can be difficult to remember what livery version you ordered all those months ago.