Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

3 October 2023
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Leicester Society of Artists

The Leicester Society of Artists has an excellent exhibition on at the Sock Gallery in Loughborough’s Town Hall at the moment. It runs until 14 October and the gallery is packed with a whole range of artwork. Unless your interest in art only runs as far as 18th century pastoral scenes, you’d be hard pushed not to find at least one or two pieces to fascinate you. Thinking about it, even there you might be won over.

I’ve been a couple of times already and might see if I can work in another visit before it closes.

1 October 2023
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More Wining

We got another donation of grapes on Friday evening so a chunk of yesterday was taken up with processing them. You can’t leave fresh fruit too long or it goes bad, so time was of the essence. I’ve produced another demijohn of wine and another bottle of grape juice.

The original gravity of the wine was about 1.056 and, within a couple of hours, fermentation was clearly underway. Meanwhile, I also racked off the two existing demijohns into a single container. Fermentation seemed to have come to a halt (they had got down to 1.002 / 1.003 – a minor discrepancy despite being started at the same time) but there has been a little more activity since being transferred.

I’ll get that racked off two in a week or so (whenever activity slows right down) and then I’ll probably be able to bottle both batches together around the end of October before storing them for several more months to condition. Will it be any good? Hard to say but hopefully I’ll at least learn something to benefit future experiments and, ideally, I’ll end up with a half-way decent drink.

29 September 2023
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Try Again Another Day

We were meant to have all the portable appliances at church tested this morning, which covers a lot of the music equipment and sundry other electronica that I look after. Unfortunately the engineer missed the bit on the job sheet which said “do the church first”. By the time we found out and it was offered to pull him off the job he had started to come straight over (30 minutes drive plus whatever time he needed to put things away there), it wasn’t feasible with other events happening at the church. Ah well… at least I’ve had a look at everything that needs covering and know what to get out when they come in just over a week.

28 September 2023
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Lost and Found (Android)

I had a bit of a panic this afternoon, having mislaid my phone. I’d had it at church but, by the time I was getting ready to head onto my next destination, I couldn’t find it despite looking round several times. When I got home, I went back with Jane and her phone and tried the tested technique of ringing my device. The trouble was that I’d had it on ‘vibrate’ mode for the service I’d been in and we couldn’t locate it.

Back home, I went online to search for what to do next. Fortunately, my Google-fu was strong and I landed straight away on Google’s Find My Device page: https://www.google.com/android/find/

That put the phone somewhere in the vicinity of the church – initially round about some bushes I’d walked past but then on the far side of the car park at the back where I definitely hadn’t been. However, I could also see that it was connected to the WiFi node based in the main church building. WiFi doesn’t give an exact location and I know for certain that you can’t even pick up that network even in the church hall.

It was back to church with my tablet to make the ringer sound, and it was there we found it, being looked after by the local Brownies group who are in tonight and had picked it up when it started sounding. I think it must have dropped out of my pocket when I was checking devices for tomorrow’s portable appliance testing visit and, in a dark red case on a dark red carpet in a dark corner, I hadn’t seen it before.

Phew! Hurrah for that location tool. Fortunately I ticked all the boxes for using it but it would be worth looking up if you have an Android phone and haven’t lost it… yet!

28 September 2023
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Apple Harvest 2023

Apples
Apples

This is a good chunk of this year’s harvest from our apple tree (which I’ve tentatively identified as the ‘wealthy’ variety). It is not as abundant as previous years but, given that apples often seem to have alternately good and bad years, I’ll take 4.5kg as the main batch (plus ones and twos taken earlier) as a reasonable haul, and a lovely subject for a quick photo.

26 September 2023
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Make it yourself

Over the last few months, my consumption of oven-ready pizzas has gone up. It’s not really much of a guilty secret. Pizza is a relatively complete meal in itself, they aren’t too pricey and it is very easy to prepare. Today though, with a few things in the fridge I needed to use up, I decided to make my own pizza base and it reminded me how easy that is and how much better the home made one tasted, not to mention that I’ve got a much better idea of what has gone into it. It wasn’t the first time I’ve done that but it is the first time for a long while.

Time to start preparing some pizza bases to store in the freezer and then I can get this quality combined with the convenience of picking one up from a shop.

25 September 2023
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Wine at home

I’d count myself as quite a brewing veteran. I’ve done a lot of beer, mainly starting with the grain, and a fair number of batches of cider but I’ve never attempted wine. I’m not so interested in kits and I’ve never had a sufficient supply of fresh grapes. That is until this weekend when we were kindly given three large trays of them.

Today I’ve plucked the grapes from the stems, removing the ones that had gone too far, and mashed them down using enough heat to pasteurise them before straining out the juice. That took quite a while and was somewhat messy but I got a decent amount of juice. Taking note from recent cider batches, I barely used any additional water and the result was juice with an initial gravity of 1.056 (adjusting for temperature), which I think is enough to try on its own. I’ve set it going in a couple of demijohns with just over 2l in each in case initial fermentation is very active. If it doesn’t kick off overnight, then I can always add some sugar but I’m keen to see what the fruit alone can achieve.

23 September 2023
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Movies Evening

Tonight’s CSWO gig went pretty well. I missed a few little bits and dropped in the odd wrong note but, with ensemble playing, it is about the whole, not each individual detail. I’ll be interested to hear the conductor’s feedback at the next rehearsal.

Meanwhile, I did a couple of songs on banjo at this afternoon’s Plough session – You Gotta Move and Bad Moon Rising (AKA Fogerty’s weather forecast, which is how I introduced it).

22 September 2023
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Accidental(s)

Today I added another snippet of knowledge to my understanding of lilypond. I’ve spent a fair amount of time getting ready for tomorrow night’s CSWO gig, including playing along with versions of the songs I’ve collected in a private playlist on YouTube and also, where things were getting a bit messy, typing up corrections onto some of the scores.

One instance wasn’t so much a correction as a visual aid. Most of the time, the band plays in ‘flat’ keys (ie. ones with one or more flats in the key signature). When a sharp key, such as G (F# required) comes up, I’m normally okay but in the West Side Story medley there’s a quiet section resting on a foundation of long, held notes from the bass and, if I accidentally play a natural rather than naturally play the accidental, it can be quite excruciating, certainly to my ears. It is such a slow, gentle passage although I wonder if part of the problem is that I sometimes do need to play F rather than F#?

Anyway, it sometimes trips me up so today I’d pencilled in the sharps and today I found out how to write that in my the lilypond file that generates my score. You simply add an exclamation mark after the note if you want the accidental to be made explicit or, if you want it in brackets (a ‘courtesy accidental’) you use a question mark instead. So fis4 is rendered as an f note preceded by (#) and that should do very nicely to help keep me on track.