Rick's b.log - entry 2026/03/28

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Big town

So I had a rather disturbed night as you can imagine. Which is why it was quite a shock to me to find myself on the road at quarter past ten heading to Big Town.

It wasn't so much "planned" as "happened". If it had been planned, I would have remembered the ice packs in the cool box. I also would have remembered my noise cancelling headphones.

I stopped at the Bricomarché (a DIY place). I hardly ever go there because it's off of the lesser hellish roundabout. Traffic in that part of Châteaubriant is always a bit of a nightmare. It's how I enter the commercial zone, but going through it once is more than enough. Stopping at the DIY place, well, that would be twice. With impatient drivers.

I got an inexpensive pair of ear mufflers, because I really didn't fancy walking around the supermarket listening to... ugh... everything.
And, because it was fairly cheap, I got myself a new letterbox.

There's nothing wrong with my current letterbox, exactly, it's just that it is dark green which gets pretty hot in the summer. I have, for a while, wrapped it in alu foil. This is because my post usually comes at about half one (ish) while I get home from work around quarter past five. Which means, in the hot weather, anything put in there would suffer the heat. Probably not so great for the sorts of things I get delivered.
My new letterbox is boring beige. That ought to be a cooler colour. No more tape and foil.

I'm not going to install it yet. It's not hot weather and I really don't have the inclination right now to drill and glue to sort out the letterbox monitoring system.

My next stop was the Leclerc supermarket. With sunglasses and bright red ear mufflers. ☺ Thing is, though, with all of the many distractions muted, I don't think that I have ever been through there so quickly, or spent so little. I knew what I wanted, I knew where it was, so point to point and done.

As I was walking around, looking like the most autistic person in the place, a woman stopped me and offered me a sample of something called Ballantine's - some sort of whiskey I think...wait...Scottish? So it'll be whisky (without the 'e'). Either way, I apologised saying that I was allergic to alcohol.
The woman looked at me like I’d just announced that I had an arse full of tentacles.
Lady, I thought, if it exists there's a fifty-fifty chance that my digestion will react by exploding messily. Like it did just last night. I mean, at this rate I'll be in my early 70s, senile and leaky, and on a diet of nothing more than tea and porridge...

The supermarket system still trusted me. I handed over my self-service scanner and paid and that was it. No need to check that I can count to seventeen (items).

Afterwards I went to Au Vide Grenier, the perpetual boot sale place. Little of interest. There was a Cookeo for €20 that said "complet". Well, it was very clearly missing the metal inner lid, the pressure/steam valve, and all of the various attachments. Inside was just the bowl, and the whole thing was...not even remotely clean.

I did, as an impulse purchase, get myself a printing calculator for €3. I don't need another printing calculator, I did a teardown of a Citizen PA10 printer module, which was in the Citizen CX-32N calculator (of course I took it apart), and somewhere along the way also a Casio HR8A-BK printing calculator that I hooked up to my oscilloscope and made a little circuit to investigate how it actually printed. Follow the links if you're interested.

This time? A Casio HR-8TEC. Not as fancy as the Citizen, but fancier than the other Casio. This one does "Euro and Tax". That it has a built-in Euro conversion function probably dates it - I'm going to guess early to mid 2000s.

Alas, it was broken. It refused to print, it refused to feed paper. It just said "P". Of course I reached for the screwdrivers (in the late evening, so we're messing with the timeline a little here). ☺ The gearing was really stiff. I have no idea why, there wasn't anything obvious stuck in there. No paper, no hair. So I took it apart, applied WD40, put it back together... okay, let's back up a little. It took an hour and a half to get that thing back together, it's amazingly fiddly and I won't lie, you very nearly got a video of me hitting it with my trusty pickaxe. But, after swearing in multiple European languages, unsoldering and resoldering (don't ask), and wrestling with a circlip roughly the size of the hole for a headphone plug...I managed to get the thing reassembled.
And, of course, it works! (because if it didn't...pickaxe)

I have no idea what I'll do with it or why I even bought it. It is currently sitting atop the other one. But, hey, small mind easily impressed by little mechanical marvels. If you haven't already, take a look at my examination of how the printing works, it is all run by one motor and a solenoid, with millisecond-accurate timing.

I then stopped at Action, got a big picture frame for my ghost picture and some solid wire to string things up. Why? Well, there's a plan coming...

My final stop of the day was Picard. I spent more there than in the supermarket, oops, and my freezer... let's say I had to persuade everything to fit. But, alas, I feel as if it'll be a while before I go back to Big Town so I wanted to get all the goodies while I could. Which reminds me, I wanted to have the Mac&Cheese so excuse me while I sort out the oven. It's a good Mac&Cheese so I'm going to do it properly and not half-arse it in the microwave.

(beat) Fifty minutes? Have you seen the price of electricity? Sheesh... It only needs eighteen in the microwave.
Oven it is, then.

I was home by five past one. At least, five past one according to my snazzy-chunky self-built watch. Which, for the moment, agrees with my computer.
Oh, wait, it's the biannual (don't confuse with biennial!) annoyance tonight.

Red Bull

I was interested in what reaction a neurodivergent brain would have to a big dose of caffeine and taurine. The caffeine isn't excessive, I think it's something like two cups of coffee - which is maybe four teas (totally doable!). I have no comparison for the taurine. Our bodies make this itself, so until reading the ingredients of this drink the only other place I saw taurine mentioned was in cat food. Apparently cats need it and they can't synthesise it...which leads to the obvious question of what did cats do before we invented cat food?

Now, there are two potential effects. Firstly, I could fall asleep. Okay, it's rare but brains are weird and caffeine making a person sleepy is a thing.
Or I could become the Energiser bunny's hyperactive cousin. I was hyperactive as a child, in all the "worst of what that implies" senses. So, a little dose of energy wouldn't go amiss about now.

It... it tastes like Lucozade mixed with cough syrup. If I had to take a guess as to the actual flavour, it's sort of somewhere between peach and grape and failing at both.

I filled a paper cup, guzzled, emptied the rest of the can into the cup, guzzled that. So, effectively, I just one-shot my first energy drink.

The final verdict - a Red Bull did exactly Sweet Fanny Adams. I was pretty tired, due to not having slept half the night. That didn't change. My head hurt. And, yeah. No boost. No power. No superpowers. Nothing, zip, nada.

Swing

This was an impulse buy at Lidl a few weeks ago. It's for children, which is why my fat arse barely fits - but it claims it's good to 100kg so I'm okay, even after Mac&Cheese I have a quarter of that allocation unused.

Now, you see, the thing is, I never had a swing as a child. The freestanding models were kind of crappy and kind of expensive. The one in the Littlewoods catalogue obvious better than the one in the Argos catalogue, but with a price bump to go with that.
As for a plank of wood and two ropes? Well, that would require a tree.

I saw the swing in Lidl, it was something like six euros. And... one thought bumped into a nostalgic reminiscence and before you knew it, I was driving home with the thing.

But, being Lidl and being German, it was designed for safety. Two hooks from something at roof level. Absolutely definitely not slung around a branch.

I got the steel rope and cut it to go between the tree and the top of the rope, rigged it up, tightened the bolts (seven mil, who the hell uses such a weird size?) and... now I have a swing. It's not for acrobatics. Just gentle swaying. Which is what I think I'd like.

Mowing

After about half an hour I swung by my car to check on the charge, and grabbed my gloves. It just all of a sudden felt really chilly. I looked at the sensor just outside the kitchen window and it said 8°C - a drop of around 4°C in that time I was mowing.

As usual it took about two hours. On a ride-on. There's a lot of grass. The amount slowly grows as the amount of bramble reduces. Well, that's the theory. It's a bit hit and miss as to whether that happens in reality.

No sooner had I finished and was heading back to park did the heavens open. I guided the mower into the barn, then rescued the little mower, and stood in the doorway as it absolutely tossed down hail. Lumps about 8mm in size.

If I had been mowing for five minutes longer, I'd have been soaked and shivering. The weather here can be like that. Luckily I missed most of the deluge.

Anyway, then I came in, took way longer with the calculator than I planned, and am writing this while dinner becomes.

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