Daily Slow Chat

5 comments

1. I read that we’re supposed to be eating 38 g of fiber (28 for women). Do you guys pay attention to how much of what you should be eating? We probably all don’t have quite enough fiber in our diets (a lot of fruit and vegetables aren’t that rich in fiber).

   I also read that Lush stores in UK closed for one day in solidarity for Palestine. While I think that’s great, I still don’t think I can buy anything from them. Their stores make me sneeze.

   What smells great and doesn’t make me sneeze is my epiphyllum, which is blooming 🥰 I adore it. They only bloom for one night, but one flower can make the entire house smell like jasmine and orange blossom.

2. Heading back to London today for a few days.My sister is there and my brother is coming too,a kind of family reunion… not a common event in my family!

3. There’s some videos about mixing different percentages of two colors of paint recently. I wonder how it went viral.?

4. Pro-government media in Serbia didn’t wait long before they started exploiting the tragedy in Lisbon.

   Pundits are already claiming accidents happen everywhere in the world, and nobody in Portugal will stage a color revolution or block universities over the simple derailment.

5. Well, I was planning on going away for the weekend, but my phone broke, so, like the aspiring middle-aged dad that I am, I instead spent the weekend tending to what ended up being a much more elaborate DIY project than I’d ever hoped for.

   So, being in California and having a sunny balcony, I thought, why not get a little balcony garden holder so that I can grow plants in full sunlight without being shaded by my balcony wall? So I ordered two little planters that were supposed to hang over the edge of the balcony like [this](https://imgur.com/W5AK4AH). So far so good. Then when I got the planter, it turned out the adjustable brackets weren’t long enough to go over the balcony. Not to worry, just go to the hardware shop and get a bunch of metal extenders. Screw on the metal extenders, looks a bit ugly but at least the brackets are long enough now.

   Only now, we have a new problem. You see, the balcony edge is designed in this really annoying way where a) the top edge is sloped downwards slightly so that nothing can lie flat on it, and b) the ledge the bracket’s supposed to clip onto is so short that you can’t fasten anything onto it. So what I ended up with was something like [this](https://imgur.com/a/6D6Fyvj).

   Flatmate (an engineer by background) comes in, asks what the hell I’m up to. I hebben een serieus probleem met de balkoniegaarden mbt de slippiwupsie krashbang potential en ik hop dat de skullkrakkie man dood wat nou kan worden avoided, I said. I suggested maybe buying a heavy plank of wood to place on the top of the ledge to make it level and counterbalance the weight a bit. He says no, I’m an engineer, what you do is you duct tape a bit of yarn to the end of the bracket and hang a 4 litre bottle of water to the end to counterbalance the weight of the plant. We argue, and then we compromised by doing both, spending at least twice the amount of money I’d initially spent on the stupid thing on various bits and bobs from the hardware store to try and keep the planter upright in the most Heath Robinson-ish way possible. Of course, turns out the string won’t hold the water bottle through gravity alone. So why not instead use the weight of the water bottle to just pull it taught by placing it at a distance behind the planter, like a catapult? Nah, doesn’t work either. The solution? Duct tape the planter to the inside wall instead. Anyway, 3 days and a good $150 later, [this is the result](https://imgur.com/a/haLH4ba). Perhaps not the most practical solution, but hey, me and my flatmate managed to bond…