Saturday, 28th February, 2026

Been losing interest in this site recently.

Doesn’t really matter, it’ll just sit here until I come back.

Tuesday, 24th February, 2026

I did it. Got my 1,000 points in SOTA for the “Mountain Goat” award. I ordered the glass, engraved trophy 🏆.

Now what?

Saturday, 21st February, 2026

Put the rower in the attic for now. Turns out it did take up a lot of room. Moved away from building custom shelves on one wall, and just ordered some newer, more robust set of shelves for the garage. Be a good opportunity to sort out the existing ones and hopefully tidy up somewhat. We’re still a very long way off fitting a car in the garage.

A friend told me he’s bought a SNES to add to his impressive game console collection. I think in the past I would’ve like that, but these days I’m not interested. I still have a strong overwhelming desire to not have things, but many of the things in this house aren’t mine and so it’s hard to get rid of them. Plus lots of my stuff that takes up space, are “maybe useful items”, like cables, adapters, fittings, tools, etc. I don’t mind those, although I would like them to be organised more. Have been quietly thinking about selling some of the boys’ Lego. They’ve got a lot of minecraft sets and once built they’re not that exciting to play with. We’ve dismantled them all now, and they’re back in boxes/bags. Makes me wonder about the lego trains as well. Wonder what I should do with them, they’re quite big. I guess they’re packed up in boxes and one boring wet weekend I should get them out and have the kids make a new track etc. on the lounge floor. Although I think I enjoy them more than they do.

Makes me wonder about tiny miniature railways. I should investigate that. Be nice to have something that could fit on one table but be interesting, with switch points, signal logic, etc. something that could be setup and not be annoying to have out for a longer time.

Almost at 1,000 SOTA points now. Monday should be my day, although trying to find a suitable hill(s)/route. My hiking pal wants to come too, which is good but then that changes the options. Still lots of snow on the hills and the slight thaw is making the avalance risk higher. Getting access to some is also tricky, or it would be an absolute slog in wet, slushy snow. It’s hard to know what some places will be like. He’s supposedly going to think up options so I’ll see what he comes up with. Probably spend all evening looking at the map and making a load of schedules to compare.

I did start making my own scheduling app - bsaically a sqlite db plus some interface to add and look things up. My spreadsheet is fine but it gets messy and hard to remember if I’ve looked at a hill or not. I should finish that off at some point.

Tuesday, 17th February, 2026

I should sell the rowing machine. If I’m honest - it’s boring, my free time to use it is the evenings and when I did do that I struggled to go to sleep as all worked up/hot. Maybe at weekends I could use it during the day. I lack discipline/ motivation / incentive to use it.

Speaking to guy at work about it and he immediately said I should sell it. I’m torn as they’re a pain to sell, I keep thinking about in years to come, ie retired, I might want it as an activity to do, and I got mine for a good price. Ugh I dunno. Perhaps I should pack it away into the loft and worry about it another day.

It leads on from a conversation with my wife about sorting out the garage. She does not like it being in there. Wait till I tell her I was thinking of a defender and how that could live in the garage.

The defender is not a light purchase. Getting GAS for something like a MacBook or camera or LEGO trains etc. even a rowing machine is fine as the thing isn’t that big and when I get bored it isn’t overwhelming. The Defender is not that. Especially if it’s the third car. I do worry it’s just a phase, another minor obsession that lasts 1-6 months and then I’m done. The only thing I’ve lasted with is summits on the air.

I like the idea of modifying it myself and making it my own, but then when each bit is £250+, I’m not sure I could do that and in the end just do nothing.

Probably best I don’t.

Saturday, 14th February, 2026

Discourses has a new free tier where you can spin up a forum and use for free up to the limits. I made one…because…I dunno. Although there’s a lot of config and I’m not that interested so maybe I’ll come back to it another day.

Thought it might be useful as a lazy-mode journal/scrapbook. Think it has 5GB of storage, so should be plenty for images as it compresses things anyway.

Really I don’t have time for another hobby/project and if I did get a Land Rover and it broke down then most likely I’d take it somewhere and pay for it. Uh I dunno. Maybe I should find something to distract me.

One of the niggles with a Land Rover is that we don’t really have a nice place for it to live. Sure it can sit on the drive but the drive is only two cars wide and so we’d have to stack them up. That’s fine but I can see it being annoying at times. Maybe I should set myself the goal of organising the garage such that I could keep it in there. Probably help with it not rusting! Be nice to have an organised garage with tool racks and worktops for stuff. Although my concern is that there are too many things to fit in the garage. Felt bad enough when I was trying to setup the rowing machine (that 1 million metres goal has long gone). Probably just better storage is needed, although 6 bikes makes things difficult.

Or I should put some effort into my home ham radio setup. Actually put up some decent antenna, get an aerial man to put one on the chimney. That kind of stuff.

Friday, 13th February, 2026

Sent the old snow shoes back, bought a bigger size. Except my model was then out of stock so I had to buy the top spec one. Ah well.

Should arrive Monday, and more snow is forecast next week, so hopefully get an outing with them.

Was looking at Land Rover Defenders again. I could just buy one. Seems excessive but fun. I do worry I over optimise everything. Do nothing now, to save money, to do things later. That’s a slight exaggeration but I do always think “I’ll do that when the kids leave home” or “once I’m retired”. Why not now? Future me will be old and boring.

This is probably just my brain justifying buying things.

Soon enough we’ll have a teenager in the house…

Thursday, 12th February, 2026

Guess what? I still can’t decide about the snow shoes. I emailed to start a return and the store then sent a big email about choosing snow shoes size. Which is a lot of what I’d read previously. He was stating the same things that led me to go for the smaller size, but the instructions on the shoes implied my body+kit weight should go for the larger size. So fuck knows.