Finally back to bar service at the pub. I happened to be on the bar on the Monday it all restarted, so had to endure an evening of gawking idiots doing the whole "YERRR FRWEEDUM DAYY!!!!!1!" nonsense. Shit idea of freedom to be honest if there are a metric fucktonne of restrictions still in place.

The accumulation of cash came to some use this month as some bits were bought through necessity and some bits bought through want. I had to drop a couple of hundred on a pair of tyres for the Grannywagon after one of them developed a slow puncture. Subsequent inspection found another was worn past the stop block so they got changed. They also came with some free sunglasses for no real apparent reason - presumably for some free marketing where I can show off which particular brand of tyre I purchased. They can live in the glovebox for use on the rare occasions there is blindingly low sunlight when driving.

I also splashed out on a laptop. I'd been after a refurb/used X-series Thinkpad for a carry-about unit in place of the Pinebook which, although slightly more stable using Twister/Armbian, still has some drawbacks. The boot issue still occasionally occurs, but nowhere near as often as under Manjaro, and the weird architecture combination of aarch64 and rockchip means some everyday bits of software I use are not compatible with it, which is a bit of a deal breaker. I'd been after an X200 but these were a bit thin on the ground - Vikings are having a site rebuild, whilst Gluglug/MiniFree/RetroFreedom/Whatever-We're-Named-This Week seem to have paused trading again. I ended up going for an X230 from Morgan's after a bit of hunting. It came with Windoze as standard, so I ended up sorting out a dual boot setup with Fedora for the time being. It's running very well after bit of fettling; even the battery holds a decent level of charge for a refurb unit, going for around three hours from full. I may get an additional battery anyway as a spare for longer trips out. Not sure whether I'll keep or flog the Pinebook, I'll see how my use case for it evolves.

I broke my beer break on day out to Newark with Rich. I was more sensible this time and didn't get absolutely plastered, which was a plus. Although I enjoyed being social and all that, at the end of the day I didn't really enjoy the beer and I haven't had any more since. I must have lost the taste for it. And no, it's not a pox symptom as everything else tastes fine!

The hedge got its first trim of the year. I didn't shear through the trimmer cord this time. After I'd packed away, I noticed a stray stalk sticking out the top that I'd missed. I couldn't be bothered unpacking the tools again to remove it so I can have a stay of execution for the time being.

Bit of a heatwave as well, so the house did its usual trick of being relatively cool and pleasant downstairs and ridiculously warm and stuffy upstairs. Great for trying to sleep!

Having a bit of a fiddle with the domain setup as I'm migrating my various email setups onto one provider and took the time to sort out email properly for the deyes.im domain As a result, the Mastodon and Pixelfed instances are down for now as I'm binning off the VPS. They could return in the future, but neither saw much effort or attention whilst they were live to make it particularly worthwhile.