2014 Mulled Wine

I don't consider myself a wine connoisseur, but I remember one year when someone I worked with told me about their sampling of mulled wines across all the supermarkets. I thought it was a great idea but this is the first year I've thought about it early enough to have a chance to try all the supermarkets. So, following is a completely unprofessional list of everything I've tried in order and what I thought in rankings 1 to 5...

4 Mulled Wine (Selected by Tesco)
£3.59, 75cl, 10% vol
The first mulled wine I've tasted this festive season, it smells the way it tastes - sweet. Not enough to be sickly, but enough to overpower the other flavours.

3 Mulled Wine (Selected by The co-operative)
£3.49, 75cl, 10% vol
While it's not too sweet, this wine tasted less like one seasoned with spices and more just a mix of all the flavours of a mulled wine. Not bad, but not distinct either.

1 Mulled Wine (Winemaker's selection by Sainsbury's)
£3.00, 75cl, 8% vol
Now this is a bit more like what I look for in mulled wine; I can actually taste the wine.

5 Mulled Wine (Sainsbury's Taste the Difference)
£4.35, 75cl, 11% vol
Unfortunately, this falls back into the too sweet category, and so, with the (marginal) increase in price compared to the others, drops to the bottom.

2 Winter Warmer Mulled Wine (Morrisons)
£3.49, 75cl, 10% vol

While nothing special, at least this wine wasn't too sweet or mixed with so many flavours they all blurred into the background.

So, all in all, a rather disappointing first year testing out all the supermarket's offerings. I would have liked to sample some more but haven't planned well enough for it this year. Next year I'll do a shopping trip at all the supermarkets at the start of the month, rather than trying to head out to one after I've finished each bottle. It has been fun experimenting though :)

So, hair

I don't 'get' hair. I strongly suspect I never will. It's not something I'm passionate about, or even interested in, and I have been fed up with mine for a long time.

I am, however, trying to do 'something' to make it a bit more acceptable.

I'm hoping a few blog posts will help me log my progress and learnings, and, maybe, an expect will comment and solve all my problems.

My hair is wavy, and I like my waves, but it is also frizzy.

I don't like spending a lot of time on my hair. My ideal hair care routine would be a wash with shampoo and conditioner, towel drying and brushing through. I don't mind running another product through my hair, with my hands, but I have no patience for blow drying, straightening or curling.

I've read enough articles to know some of the science about hair and I've tried all sorts of products over the years, without any real success. I had a long phase of straightening my hair in 2006/7, but when I realised my dry, dead, and split ends were climbing up I stopped. I thought I'd had some success with putting some product in my hair when it was wet, twisting or scrunching it up into a bun or clip, and letting it dry naturally before taking the clip out, until I started receiving comments that my hair always looked wet, AKA, greasy.

Anyway, a couple of years ago I decided I needed to start at the basics, I needed to get my hair cut more often, no longer only when I wanted a change, but regularly, to try and keep it growing healthy from root to tip. I also needed a Hairdresser who knew what they were talking about. I wanted someone who saw me walk into the salon and knew straight away what the perfect cut would be for me, someone who had the knowledge and confidence to help me get it right.

In my attempts to find someone I quickly became annoyed with how many different Hairdressers didn't know what to suggest or who suggested so many options it was clear they didn't know much more than I did. They asked me what I wanted, but I was paying them to be the expert! I knew nothing about hair, I just wanted something that wasn't a mess.

Eventually, I decided to spend a bit more money on going to a pricier salon and I finally found what I was looking for.

I know it's just sales, but I've been buying everything my Hairdresser recommends, in search of my miracle product.

I exasperated him when I was last in. He asked me how my products were working and I told him that there'd been no change, my hair was as much a mess as ever. Maybe I needed more time using them? During the course of him cutting my latest trim I explained about my wet twisted bun method and he said I couldn't expect the products to work if I put no effort in.

He instructed me to buy a round bristle brush and to blow dry my hair whenever I washed it, every two/three days. I went home and looked for YouTube videos on how to blow dry hair. Seems it may take some getting used to, so I will keep it up until my next appointment.

I have also bought a round bristle brush, one that has the highest ratings on the Boots website.

I've now tried blow drying my hair on several occasions and I can't say I'm overly impressed. Yes, it is straight, but it's frizzy as ever, if not more so. I have a bottle of Argon Oil in my draw at work, another product I'm experimenting with, and I found my hair so messy throughout the day that I had to get it out and work it through my hair on multiple occasions. At least that tames it for a little while.

I've seen no next-day benefit either. Usually if I have my hair straightened properly it lasts for a couple of days, but my hair is just the same, frizzy and tangled as it's always been, a day after blow drying.

Still, it's nice to feel my hair light again. I didn't realise how much I'd been weighing it down by working some product through it while wet and twisting it up to dry.

I'm discouraged, but unsurprised. I'm going to take this photo with me to show my Hairdresser next time he asks for a report.

Fixing a Davina McCall Magnetic Bike

A quick link to the site where I ordered replacement belts from:
http://eriks.co.uk/
(I wasn't able to find a listing for the belts themselves but they were able to get a hold of the belts I needed when I emailed.)

Please note: To fit the belts I've had to cut into the casing, but it is possible to avoid this.

What to ask for:
Poly V 230 J 3 (for the right hand belt, if your looking at the bike face-on)
Poly V 240 J 3  (for the left hand belt, if your looking at the bike face-on)

Assembly & user manual:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5pBrePbUv4fZzBoWUFYYWQ5TUE/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-kx5kkhQT4uVCiec8o2giqw

A story
I decided to buy an exercise bike after an appalling experience at a gym, wanting to slim down for my yearly snow sports holiday. I purchased a Davina McCall Magnetic Bike, mostly because it was cheap, fold-able, and had really good reviews on the site I purchased it from. It's been well worth it.

However, I started to notice a 'klunking' in the pedalling. To me, it felt like I was cycling normally and then the pedals would spin faster for a moment, pedal normally again and then spin faster again, but it wasn't at every rotation of the pedals. I ignored it for a while but it became worse and worse and I recently decided to try and open up the bike to see if I could find out what the cause was.

The bike was cheap, but if I could repair it that'd be much cheaper than replacing it, especially as no other bike caught my attention in my latest search, missing the handy fold-able feature that the Davina Bike had.

Taking it apart was relatively easy, wherever there was a screw, I unscrewed, until I was able to wriggle the blue face-plate out.

There are two belts inside the bike. If you face the bike, so the handles are closest to you and the seat further away, the belt connecting two wheels on the left appears to be for the little computer to detect your progress. The belt connecting two wheels on the right appears to link to the magnetic resistance.

The left of these belts was clearly frayed but I couldn't tell if that was the problem. I slowly pedalled with my hands, watching the belt to see what happened to it when the pedals slipped and span fast again. At first I couldn't tell what was happening but, unable to see anything else that looked like it might be a problem, I continued pedalling and watching.

I eventually called in my fiancé and, while we don't agree on what the problem is, we do agree that replacing this belt was probably the way to go.

The right-hand belt was undamaged, so we could ready that it was a "ACRON S-Teknic 230 J" belt. Unfortunately a search online wasn't very helpful and the manual for the bike only listed the part very usefully as "57 Belt".

While we couldn't find a "ACRON S-Teknic 230 J" belt online I was able to start piecing information together about what this part actually was. "ACRON" was the manufacture, which was good to know because it meant if I could work out what the part was I could look for makes from other manufactures. I don't know what "S-Teknic" is, probably just some branding but the 230 J is interesting, you need to know a few other things too:

These belts are knowing as "Poly V" belts. 

Poly: Just means many, Greek in origin I think.
V: This describes the shape of the belt, if you look at the underside you'll see this sort of shape vvv, the V is the shape, the poly bit just indicates that there's more than one. (Two vv s is still a Poly V belt, not a Poly W belt).
230: The first two digits is the length in full inches of the belt. The number always has a zero on the end for some reason, I think it's an indicator of how much of a full inch extra there is but I haven't seen any belt listings with any number other than zero online. (The left hand belt actually snapped while we were testing the problem so, while we could read 230 on the non-damaged belt, we were able to measure properly the one that needed replacing anyway - 240).
J: This is an indicator of the dimensions of each v, height, length and width, you can look up the specifics if you want but you don't need to, just know that it's a J.
3: I mentioned that the underside of the belt looks like three v s next to each other, this is what the 3 stands for, the number of vs.

Phew! So, I finally knew what I was after and my fiancé and I did a small tour of local washing machine, vacuum, lawn mower and motor parts suppliers to see if they had any. No luck, and finding somewhere that clearly sold Poly V 240 J 3 belts online wasn't easy either as at that time I was still piecing together information about what I needed.

There were a lot of sites that only catered for mass industrial orders and the site I actually approached informed me they wouldn't deliver to the UK. (If anyone's interested the original site was http://www.motionindustries.com).

When I contacted this company though, they gave me an email contact for the website at the top of this post. Their own website doesn't list the parts, but a friendly and helpful man responded to my online enquiry and after a quick phone call, arranged the order of a replacement Poly V 240 J 3 belt. There was a minimum order value though, so I also ordered the other belt, Poly V 230 J 3, and a Poly V 250 J 3. Just in case I'd measured wrong.

They're due for delivery this week and I'm looking forward to getting the bike fixed up and running again for 1/10th of the price it would have been to replace.

As a quick internet search wasn't all I needed, I thought I'd post about my exercise bike fixing adventure in case anyone else found it useful and save them the long weekend it took me to figure all this out - not that long really. :P

Poly V 230 J 3

This is what the right, Poly V 230 J 3, belt looks like. The belt should fit in the teeth on the wheels in these positions.

Poly V 240 J 3

This is the left, Poly V 240 J 3. Again, it should fit in the teeth on the wheels in these positions.

Magnets

Here's a picture of what the magnets look like. We moved mine while working on the belts, and you can see that the spring has been over stretched, to get the original level 4 resistance I now have to use level 5. This spring is used to increase or decrease the effect the magnets have on the resistance. If you're still having trouble, see if there is something you can do to the positioning of the magnets.