The last few months I’ve started to make a mental note of the artwork I’ve seen. In the last few months I’ve seen Only Fools and Horses, Rambo, Princess Diana and Phantom of the Opera.

My niece gave me a gift. I've used it but still can't work out my 10 signs.

Mods, do your thing if you need to 😬

Don't know why I collected these

Maybe I was waiting to make some sort of wall art 🤷

Anyway..............

I've just dismantled 3 CD shelving units.

I've recovered 84 of those shelf support pin things, 48 good panel pins, 33 small screws (odd that it's 33) and 28 large screws.

Now to find the correct places in my screw and stuff storage boxes.

I'm having a lovely morning. 😁

So I grabbed a 4‑pack of jam doughnuts from the CO-OP, wandered to the park, opened the bag… and was immediately confronted with FIVE doughnuts.

Not four.
Not “three and a sad squashed one.”
A full FIVE.

At this point I’m convinced I’ve either:

• Unlocked some kind of bakery side‑quest
• Been selected for a covert doughnut‑based social experiment
• Or the doughnut packer simply said “sod it, live a little”

Thinking back to the transaction, the self‑serve machine absolutely lost its mind when I put the bag down.
It threw up an error like I’d tried to smuggle a live ferret into the bagging area.

Now I’m sat in the park trying to work out whether:

• These are five normal-sized doughnuts, meaning I’ve just won the bakery lottery
• Or they’re five slightly smaller doughnuts, meaning the nutrition label is now lying to me and I’m unknowingly consuming fractional calories

No scale.
No answers.
Just me, five doughnuts, and a growing sense that the CO-OP has introduced chaos into my life in the most British way possible.

The final conundrum - do I open while nobody is looking and score an extra doughnut? Or do I share the joy with the family and have to sacrifice 3/4 of the extra doughnut to them?

I tried to be sneaky and polished off one before anyone noticed but then failed to contain my excitement and had to share all 🤣

No bananas here but doughnuts for scale. Assuming they are actually to scale and some shoddy half size knock off

M UK size 9

It seemed appropriate to name my Apple Bluetooth mouse ‘Harald’ after the inventor of Bluetooth.

When I got a second (spare) Apple Bluetooth mouse, the obvious name was ‘Cnut’ for similar reasons.

I'm not a car nerd, but I find mine fascinating.

It's a Mazda MX-30 RE-V and it's a couple of years old.

The MX mark stands for "Motoring eXperiment" and is reserved for experimental cars. The original MX-30, produced a few years before mine, was all-electric. But, after studying driving habits, they realised most people only drive short distances, so gave it a range of just 100 miles. What Mazda forgot was that the remaining longer journeys will still important as they need to be made, so the car didn't sell well an they quickly stopped producing it. Meantime, they created the R-EV. Sadly, that too is disappearing as Mazda concentrates on slapping their badge of Chinese cars.

Anyway, both models have one thing in common - the not-common doors. They class the door as a coupe, despite it having 4 doors, because the rear ones are "suicide doors". They are also overlapping, which means the rears can't be opened without opening the first too - the handles are on the inside door frame, so nothing visible outside. Rear windows are small, porthole windows. My family hate the rear and it's the one big downside of the car. Why Mazda couldn't have stuck standard-opening doors in it, I don't know.

Where it gets interesting is the engine technology in my R-EV model.

It's a plug-in hybrid but, most importantly, it's a serial hybrid, which very few are. This means that instead of switching the drive between electric and wet-fuel engines, the car is constantly connected to the electric engine and the wet-fuel engine is used to recharge the battery. The R-EV has a battery range of 50 miles which, when it came out, was huge (these days it's not unusual to see plug-in hybrids doing 80+ miles on battery alone). I do the majority of my journeys in pure-EV model, which means the petrol never gets used. But the serial nature of it means no gear changes, lots of torque, etc - all the driving benefits of an EV, but with the backup of petrol to keep my range when I need it.

But that's not all.

This is the first Mazda in a while to have a rotary engine. It's a single rotor, just 830cc, producing 74bhp at 4,500rpm. It's also compact and light, taking up little room within the car.

The downside - like rotary engines in general, it uses quite a bit of oil (particularly the first year), but it's also not very efficient. I think figures I saw said 40 mpg, but I think it's a lot lower.

As I said, it's a fascinating car and I see why they added the "MX" prefix. I don't think it's there, though - the rear of the car really needed sorting, and the rotary engine isn't really efficient enough, imo. The problem is, if they took these away, there isn't much less that makes it "experimental". Nissan's e-Power system is serial hybrid too, albeit standard hybrid rather than plug-in hybrid.

Next year I'm due to change the car and will be going to a fully-electric car, sadly moving away from Mazda. The Mazda cars, for the money, are really nice to drive (my MX-30 certainly is) and feel quite luxurious inside too.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. No banana to scale, but I do have a photo of it hitting 9999 miles (albeit through a very dusty dashboard).

My wife and I purchased a used car just over a year ago and got a pretty good deal given the current state of the market and the low mileage. It's a 2008 Pontiac Vibe and we're the second owners. Pontiac contracted Toyota to make them a hatchback back in the day, it's basically a Toyota Matrix and has been quite reliable. When we bought it, the car had just over 104,000 kilometres on it (we live in British Columbia, Canada). Unfortunately, despite my regular reminders, my wife forgot to take a picture when the odometer hit 111,111 kms. I took a long detour yesterday on my way to pick her up from work, and made sure to capture the next numerological milestone (kilometre stone?). I hope the car remains dull as the only maintenance required since we bought it has been oil changes, A/C recharge, and new tires.

Edit: from not for, repetition

My adrenaline sport

The postbox is operational, the two phone kiosks are decommissioned. And behind them are boxes containing the infrastructure for all that has superseded those phone kiosks.

Nothing Special here.

Hey I like Motorsports and Donington holds a special place in my heart

Heres some photos from before and after the BTCC meeting a week ago.

But I don't expect anyone else to care but I like it.

I think I am going to invest in one of these. It brought back memories of practicality and at the time I did not believe it to be too hideous.

Our small bathroom wall cabinet is not hitting the spot.

Tremendous.

From left to right:

FOC, Headcode, Movement type, Platform, Direction, Line, Location, Time, Mins variation and status.

Next I’ll apply it to a map.