Pizza (salami, olives, anchovies)

Malbec (perhaps a drop of Lagavulin later)

Kittens tearing around like lunatics (actual kittens, that’s not the name of some obscure band).

Zees + 203/180 rotors w/ sintered pads upfront + decent tyres

PetPlan here. They paid out ~£9k to have both Mr F**cking Expensive’s hips rebuilt. It got pricey as he got older (10+ I think) but for us it was worth it.

My wife is a bit worried about insulting the breeder… :-/

Any decent breeder won’t mind you asking. We asked our breeder for a bit of info on tests and they sent us the parent’s genetic test results.

MCs are brilliant. Love ours. We’ve just got two kittens, I wanted to call them Dave and Steve but the Mrs wasn’t impressed so I obviously lost.

If you’ve not had them before by lots of bottles to drink out of. Our old one loved nothing more than walking around the house knocking glasses over. He also liked jumping on my chest in the middle of the night. A 9kg cat is quite a surprise at 3am.

The Lidl single malts (£18) are pretty good for the price. Just finished a bottle of Jamesons IPA cask mates which was better than expected. Quite a few offers at Tesco for less than £30 at the moment.

Booze. Food is optional.

Roast chicken

Malbec

Random cr@p on netflix

Everything past Taunton is up country. Birmingham is practically the Arctic.

Bike’s ok, it’s just my back, knees and ankles that need sorting

You could talk about something dull, I imagine it’s planning, structure and delivery they’re looking at.

Yeah, if you follow it all the way down it comes out on the road.

The Nutcracker is a lovely rocky descent off the ridge above Lustleigh Cleave. If you do the trail from Hunter’s Tor straight into and then cut down to the river via the slightly hidden traverse it makes for a really nice run of technical single track. I would post an image of a marked up map but the image function appears to be stuck in the 90s.

It’s part of this loop.

Lustleigh cleave holds up pretty well in the wet. The nutcracker can be a bit interesting if properly soaking but I’d rather ride there than the open moor stuff.

Whatever happens, you’ll have a hoot.

SLX with kevlar pads? They’re less grabby than sintered, the bite point has supposedly been fixed* and they’re mineral oil.

*the bite point issue isn’t down to the bleed. I sent a set of XTs back under warranty and they came back with new levers. Not perfect but a bit better but replaced with Zees.

I started looking at the specs of (not fancy) bags and decided the best way was to try a few. Spent about an hour rolling around on the floor of gooutdoors and picked one I could actually get in. Lots of the posh bags are designed for people who only have one leg and have never had a curry.

You need one of these…

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dad-Bag-Adjustable-Joseche-Traveling/dp/B075VQ8C7J

It’s nice to see that even after the ‘updates’ and flouncing this place can still have ridiculously long threads with no real outcome.

(FWIW, refund)

I’ll help out and reproof all my wet weather kit.

“Any dividend above £500 per employee goes to the government.”

Blimey. So that’s the real reason… more money to the state.

Have a I read this right…

Employees get X shares (or options?) but the dividends get split between the employee AND the Government?

That’s near Blackpool, right? Surprised they didn’t try to steal your kidneys.

I’ve gone for a section of tyre on the new bike. Can’t see how tape is going to protect a frame from a large pointy lump of granite travelling at 20+ mph.

New bike day is ace and that looks a lot of fun. Took for Aeris 145LT out for the first time today and it initially feels faster down than the Mk1.5 it replaced.

<span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”>Felt a bit harder work on the techy twisty flat bits but I’ve not ridden for 6-7 weeks so most likely me rather than the bike. Ha</span><span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”>ving a rear tyre with some tread may have something to do with it as well. </span>

If it’s for a kid they’ll find a way around it. Not much help, sorry.

SLX for £80 on CRC. You could spend more but it won’t get you to the top / bottom of the hill any faster.

“The rider wishing they’re on their proper bike”?

Change who you ride with. The ups become less tedious when you and your mates are taking the piss and the ride ends in the pub.

OP earlier today…

10 mins in the car to some of the best Dartmoor singletrack, 5 mins to Haldon. I can live with that.

20 hard but fun Dartmoor miles. 25 degrees and breezy on Hameldown and it was still wet!

The WI selling tea and cake in Manaton was a bonus.

I really hope this place gets back to what it was but they’ve got their work cut out.

The rollout was a total **** up, there’s no other way to describe it. That pushed people away (I don’t believe user numbers).

The new version may be responsive / mobile friendly but it wasn’t that bad before but it now comes with ads everywhere* (gotta make money, get it), that it feels really clunky, especially with poor page load speeds.

> don’t show people a message saying they’re not logged in without putting a login link in the message <

That said, for advice and general politeness, this place is hard to beat, even if it is heavily populated with audi driving, orange riding, quinoa eating Guardian readers.

* I don’t use an ad blocker because I’m interested in how different brands use different formats and approaches

I’ve got some 2 year old DT ex1501s. They’re great (light, tough etc) but they’re less ‘service with a hammer’  friendly than Hopes and spares are more expensive (star ratchets!?!).

Need a stupid tool to change drive side hub body bearing. Changing spokes is fiddly compared to Hope / j bends.

<span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”>That said, still on my original hub body bearings and I only snapped a spoke by being an idiot. </span>

They’re fine when they work but my 3rd one has developed the same problem as the other two (three shocks in just under 2 years and I’m not thrashing it).  I’ve now got to, hopefully, get it replaced under warranty (fingers crossed). There’s clearly a design or manufacturing problem so steer well clear.

Get some Zees and stick sintered pads in. I’ve also changed the split pin to a proper bolt on mine.

@johnners purely for scientific purposes I’ve opened the 16 year old lagavulin and the Lidl Islay.  The latter is good, but the former is close to perfect.

#takingonefortheteam

+1 for the Lidl single malts. The Islay is my favourite. Not quite Lagavulin but for £17 it’s a cracker.

At the FIL/MIL. He’s great (two polypins, loads of whisky) but she’s very Daily Mail (“so and so is gay but quite nice”, likes Mrs Brown’s Boys). And my nephew eats pasta with ketchup… Yes, I sound like a snob but you have to draw a line somewhere.

Shepherd’s pie

Doombar

My wife trying to get a very excited 9 year old to bed as we’re up early for a 5 hour drive

Neither. DHF.