We had to laugh this morning when Lorena carried the ironing board upstairs instead of hoover! It did look funny when she stood at the top of the stairs and realised what she has done.

Plugged in the PowerMonkey Extreme to the SolarGorilla today via the Gorilla-Pad to see if it made any difference to the rate of charge. Unfortunately the sun kept going in so it wasn't a very good test and it didn't seem to improve the level of charge in the unit at all. Need to try it on a sunny day but to be honest I'm thinking we may well have seen the last of those for this year.

Suddenly had inspiration today and searched my camera bag and finally found found my Nikon flash shoe cover :-) Really pleased about this as it being missing had been bugging me for weeks if not months. Perhaps things being more organised is finally starting to pay some dividends, I do hope so.

I've started doing some more scanning of Mum's and Ann's documents, also scanned some old photos I’d never seen before. It's actually pretty shocking what a mess Mum's stuff is in, there is just no system at all and everything has just been opened and then shoved back into the envelopes in a pile.


Got a Tweet from Mark Liversedge today and we ended up enjoying a Skype call which was great. I was surprised how little lag there was on the video call and I'm assuming he must have a fibre optic network at his end for it to work that well. He is currently working from home which he seems to be enjoying. He's started cycling again and is trying to lose some weight and is making steady progress, in fact he is losing about two pounds a week which is great.

He wanted to know about blood lactate testing so I happily passed on my experiences and how I use it. Mark it seems is planning to go out to Majorca next year so I've told him when we are going, it would be great to meet up with him out there and to do some riding but we shall see.

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Facebook Updated: August 24, 2014 at 07:53AM I think if I were in power, heaven forbid, and I wanted to discourage British Citizens from going to fight for the Islamic state I would make it plain that anyone doing so would have their passports automatically cancelled to prevent their return at any point. This would not render them stateless, the Islamic state would be their state, whatever that ends up being, and it might make it less attractive to some.

Facebook Updated: August 24, 2014 at 07:55AM Another step that I feel would make the UK more secure would be to prevent all foreign national from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria etc. entering the UK at all for any reason. Just how much of a detriment to this country would that actually be?

Facebook Updated: August 24, 2014 at 07:58AM Forecast for today's Great North Bike Ride looks pretty decent, hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable day and that the chips are good in Tynemouth.