14th October 2006 - With all the triangles cut out and bevelled it was time to start assembling them into their respective pentagons and hexagons - but first I had to make time for a little serious work in the garden. Having filled in the 150m trench along the garden path, the soil had subsided a little (as anyone who has burried a body in a shallow grave will know) and needed to be re-filled and leveled out. I spent the morning raking extra material into the long depression, piling it up a couple of inches before rolling it down with a very heavy garden roller. Now dragging this monster up and down the garden path was absolutely knackering work, and by 3 o'clock my arms were several inches longer and I was ready to collapse. As luck would have it, a friend called me to say he was going flying at a local site and was I interested. I didn't need my arm twisting, so I downed tools, loaded the glider onto the car and headed for Killiney Hill.
Flying Hang Gliders at Killiney Hill, 14th October '06
To cut a long story short, we had a lovely evening flight and I was just lining up the glider to land on the beach in the dusk when my right shoulder dislocated with a sickening crunch while I was manoeuvring the glider onto finals. I managed to land the glider with just one arm but renched the dislocated shoulder badly when the glider came to a stop when I had to drop it... and suddenly I was in a world of pain! Anyway, torn tendons and nerve damage put the kybosh on all work for the next nine months while my arm was in a sling and receiving physio. X-Rays revealed that I had managed to yank my arm a good 2.5" out of its socket! Bummer.
Interlude and Twiddling of Thumbs.
By the end of December the damaged nerves in my shoulder were starting to repair (painfully!) and I was able to start using my arm again to some degree. Having pulled most of my hair out with my left hand over the previous few weeks of enforced boredom, I figured I might as well knock up this website and do a little detailed design for the mount and telescope tube.
It's probably worth mentioning a little discovery I made around this time - namely that pills and booze are a wonderful combination for killing pain, dulling the senses and making the real world go away... which may partly explain the general tone of these pages! The down-side is that reality always comes marching back to goose-step all over your cosy little fantasy world like an invading swarm of storm troopers in the cold light of morning... and as for the big nasty bright thing in the sky, we hates it, we hates it; it hurts our eyeses!
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