After much work on the garden and an order of furniture, we’re finally getting to a stage that we can just sit and relax out there. Sudo’s really enjoying it as well – he can wee whenever he feels like it!

After having purchased Forza 3 and the Official MS Wireless Race Wheel, I quickly discovered that adopting a piece of home furniture to clamp this thing to was just not going to suffice. I looked into buying something fit for purpose, but I’ve spent loads on gaming in the last two weeks, and they’re really expensive. This presented a pretty unique opportunity to do try and prove to myself that I’m not a total failure when it comes to woodwork. I set about getting my measurements for a table that I could clamp my race wheel to and rest the pedals on so as to be a self-contained, geek-tastic cockpit type affair. After annoying Charlotte for a few nights drawing squares and triangles and figuring out how high it’d need to be (something that I messed up, incidentally!), today I set about using the bench saw in our workshop to carve up an old table to make this thing.

Without going into boring details, here is revision one of my race wheel stand. Future improvements I could make one day but won’t are:

• tidying the cables
• four little rubber feet for the bottom
• painting
• replacing the bit of the pedestal mount that I split driving a screw in
• some kind of elevated plate for the pedals/a stop for the back edge

Now taking orders. It’s pretty fucking badass.

I’m not taking orders. Charlotte would kill me.

Our lovely, turfed lawn. Complete with sprinkler.

I can’t take any credit for this, but I thought it might be quite nice to monitor the progress of it all. It’s very nice.

I’d wager those dainty pinkies never weighed anchor in a storm!

I also have a woman’s arms – men don’t get infections when they accidentally stab themselves with tree branches, they get super powers. Imagine if the Spiderman were real, Peter Parker would’ve just died and they’d have to close the museum, Peter’s grandmother and grandfather would’ve killed themselves, MJ and Harry would’ve had sex on Peter’s corpse as spider babies crawled out of his nose. It would’ve been terrible. I’d have still watched.

Shamelessly stolen from Luke Lanchester. Memetastic; just how I likes ‘em.

Also conveniently itemises the contents of my lounge for any reading thieves! Hi thieves.

I’ve been working like a trooper to clear out bushes and shrubs, and this is the result. I used an axe!

We’re trying to prepare the garden for some new grass. There’s a pretty big plant-bed that takes up about a third of the width of the garden for the whole length of the lawn. I’m not against plant-beds, but I’d prefer more space/less maintenance/better play environment for Sudo, so that’s what we’re doing. The bushes, trees and shrubs planted therein were quite large and well-established, and I can’t find my axe, so I’ve been bested for the day.

I need to find a decent way to remove stumps. Anyone has any ideas, hit me up.

I’ve wanted to take those top two for ages. With the shutters down, The Hub on Lower Shirley High Street looks so simple and distraction free. Problem is, I’m usually in a hurry to get to the train station when I go past at the right time.

Same with that house, really. I missed the decent opportunity – there’s way less stuff out there now than there was before, but it still looks pretty cool, I think.