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.