This is normal? Right?

This is the sort of thing that normal people do when they've got an hour to kill on a Friday night isn't it?

 Oh, you don't recognise what I'm doing? Well I don't have access to a centrifuge, so I have tied the nearly empty bottle of expensive hand cream to a rope with a small plastic bag over the open end. Then I went out into the garden and flung it round and round to get the last of the hand cream out of the bottle and into the bag.

Tada!

Richard "money saving lasso" B

Insults

 I've been insulted three times over the long weekend. I had breakfast in a café with table service with a couple of friends. I was asked to pay as soon as we ordered. In the old days they would have trusted me with the about £30 worth of breakfast and coffee until after we'd eaten and were ready to leave. Do I really look that untrustworthy?

I had a dream (I don't remember all of it) where I got told off by somebody at a polling station about a political argument that had got out of hand. What bothers me is that the person telling me off was an NPC that I had conjured up in my own mind and he was right. I woke up feeling chastened and naughty.

Some of my friends think I drink too much and we happened to be watching a sitcom about recovering alcoholics. "Is this what the AA meetings are like?" they asked me. "He wouldn't know, he's not in recovery yet, he's still a functioning alcoholic". It's not the (mickey taking) suggestion that I'm an alcoholic that bothered me (I'm not), it's that they didn't describe me as a "high-functioning alcoholic"

Richard "You wound me sir" B

LED Conversion

 I'm a cheapskate and I used to be an electronics engineer. These two facets of my personality gave me the tools for an interesting project over the weekend. The reversing light and the fog light on my car have gone wrong. The bulb holders are very inferior and they have got a bit corroded and a bit loose so I would like to do away with them entirely. LED bulbs for automotive applications are quite expensive and they still rely on the bayonet cap so they wouldn't be much more reliable than the current set up. I noticed that domestic G4 capsule bulbs run on 12v and that LED versions are cheap, readily available and have exposed legs that you can solder wires on to. My reversing light is now an G4 LED, soldered permanently in place, and drilled and glued to the reflector. It might never go wrong again.

Richard "Not E Marked" B