AndrewC

Did you remember to pop a loonie in the meter first? 😃

Thanks for nothing. Now I'm bloody homesick. Seriously, rather nice pics.

Afternoon all. The elbow continues its recovery. Received a text on Sunday morning advising me of an appt at King's for 09:00 Tuesday morning. Arrived to find the automatic check in didn't like me. Reception had no record of the appt. She dug deeper and found it had been moved to the following Tuesday afternoon. Letter received today. <sigh> Nurse & surgeon took a look anyway. No more heavy restriction bandage or sling. It is still seeping a bit of blood now and then but to be expected as the 3cm incision is right along the outside of the elbow. With no heavy bandage compressing my arm it has now turned a rather unfetching shade of bruise yellow and dark purple. Doc says nothing to worry about, all is as expected. Apart from the postal delay and wrong date on the text everything about this little op went swimmingly. Three thumbs up to all the staff at Orpington and Kings. Back to work as of today. Enjoy the rest of the day.

A Happy Birthday to @DavidF afternoon all from the Bodington ward of Orpington hospital. Elbow sorted. A nice ham sandwich consumed. Just waiting to be thrown out the door. Little else to report. enjoy the evening.

Our BT line is/was basically unusable for anything other than olde worlde land line calls. I went with the Virgins for broadband as it was the only thing available as all the others relied on that rather dodgy pair of copper wires. We kept Sky as that is what we had before we moved and we were still on contract. Over the years though we've trimmed it down to the base hd package with the Q box. Even that has gone up to £60/month now. They've been pulling fibre along our street for the past 3 months and having nothing but trouble.

Greetings all from the boring borough. Things are fairly quiet. We are both fans of the mystery drama. Shame the CBC dumped Private Eyes and Frankie Drake last year. 2 really enjoyable ones. On the other hand I think I'm now the only Canadian citizen who hasn't appeared in an episode of Murdoch. Unlike Ian, I quite like the old Citroen in Provence. There is a chap nearby to us with a bright green one that we see on occasion. I could just spew out a list of what we've watched but I won't. However, if you haven't seen it before there is the Aussie series My Life is Murder, which is part whodunnit and part Melbourne Visitor's Bureau promotion. 😃 Season 2 starts tomorrow on Alibi. We're still debating on whether to add more services and dump Sky or trim out the streams and hope anything interesting eventually shows up on one of the channels. I used to enjoy the NCIS series and spin offs. The original should have been retired about 5 series back, LA is now poor, and the only still decent one "New Orleans" has ended. Don't think I'll bother with Hawaii. On that note, time for me to murder a coffee. Enjoy the day.

Not email but the latest scam going around is the "you have been exposed to covid" texts that have a link to order tests. I've blocked about a dozen numbers so far in the past 2 weeks.

Welcome to the post Brexit importation minefield. In this case eBay is partly/mostly to blame as if the item is coming from the EU it should be marked as ex-vat in the price. If VAT was in the price then it is up to the seller (if a business and French VAT registered) to remove the VAT and ship it as an Non-EU export. That lets him reclaim the VAT paid on the wholesale price. It is then up to the importer (you) to pay all VAT, duties, and handling charges. Of course you could try to claim that you are being taxed (UK VAT) on top of tax (French VAT) and try to get 4% knocked off. (Fat chance) HMRC is also so backed up that anything that is checked can take up to 4 weeks to be inspected. Be thankful they didn't decide it was subject to duty as well as VAT.

The same applies for food and other goods. Generic or supermarket brand goods are mostly from name brand companies that sell on batches that fail SQC. (statistical quality control) This also explains why many of these generic items have greatly varying taste and consistency. This is also the difference in many other products like motor oil. If the base refined product doesn't meet spec, it goes into making a lower spec product.

A quick trawl of the tv listings will bring up far worse than Naked Attraction. You are right, the Victorian Freak show is alive and well. Best part as far as the producers are concerned is there is an endless supply of willing freaks. Plastic vacuous "people" all looking for their 15 minutes of fame. These so called reality shows are a stupidly cheap way of filling schedules. Who needs to spend 7 figures on 12 hours of quality drama, when for 1/4 of that cost you can have about 100 hours of Britain's Favourite Naked Essex Island Bakery. I feel a rant coming on.

Once the greed took over and every bloody network and distributor decided to create their own service (I’m looking at you Paramount) the writing was on the wall. To get the shows I want to watch used to be about £40 for a basic HD Sky package. Now it is around £50 for Sky and another £70 for all the streaming services. I’m more inclined to wait, pick up several whole series at Fopp on Blu-Ray for a fiver each, then donate it. Likely cheaper in the end. I can see the Paramounts failing and crawling back to the bigger ones to distribute their programmes once people really start cutting back. My prediction is that in 18 months we will be down to 3 survivors. Prime, Netflix, & Disney. The Acorns, and others will just lose too many subscribers to survive.

I bought the U2 satnav. It's crap. The streets have no name and I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

Summer on the Canadian prairies. The b*stards would just carry off the electric bug zappers for some late night kinky fun. Driving more than 100km meant stopping at the next town's self serve car wash to power jet wash the front of the car. Seriously, they'd block the grille and cause overheating. Grass hoppers the size of eagles. Mosquitos show up on the Flight Radar app. horse flies that were about the same size as a palomino. Those up side down people ain't got nothing on our prairie bugs.

Having grown up and spending 42 years of living on the edge of what used to be called an Indian Reservation, I can say the First Nations people have been treated like sh*t since day one. That discrimination is always in the background. One of our longest friends is part Metis & Innu. She suffered racism that would make being Asian in the 70s UK seem like a picnic. SiL is part Cree and again her and her kids from a previous have been subjected to a lot of sh*t. I won't repeat any of the derogatory names that have been used. A big part of the problem has always been their status and the residential school fustercluck wasn't part of general knowledge. The stereotype of the drunk Indian has self perpetuated for the past hundred years. One thing I did learn was in school there was a whole social studies/history section on the prairie whisky trade. Basically they got the natives addicted to alcohol (using "alcohol" term loosely), screwed them over, and left them as broken people. Another thing I learned when working with several FN people in Northern Alberta when I was 18 was they work to live. Like their forefathers, they only take from mother earth what they need. In European culture that is looked at as lazy. They'd show up for work for a week, get their pay, then live until they needed to work again. Maybe we could and should learn from them.

Today's useless trivia. A while back this thread mentioned Humphrey Lyttleton. In the man's honour there is a North London pub named the Lyttleton Arms. No prizes for guessing which tube station is across the street.

Greetings from a much cooler boring borough. We had rain. Well, almost enough to make the path look wet. <meh> Happy Anniversary to @andyram. Good to see @Robert popping in for a visit too. I know they are stretched to the max but the NHS really needs to sort its administration out. Pre-surgery assessment yesterday. Visit, nope. Video call. Logged in, sat in the "waiting room" as the countdown clock kept getting later and later. Eventually it reset to show 59:59 delay. Phone rings. Nice lady says they are locked out of the system, so she does the assessment over the phone instead. Now for the fun part. I need another Ultrasound. Go to Queen Mary. Need an MRSA blood test. Go to King's @ Denmark Hill. Can't go to the phlebotomy clinic that is literally across the street. Nope, different NHS trust. <sigh> Surgery? Orpington. Queen Mary's MSK has 2 separate check in desks. One of each NHS trust that has space there. Duplicated staff. What a waste of resources and desk space. <arrrrgggghhhh> Oh and post op will be at either Orpington or King's depending on the day of the week and phase of the moon. One thing I do miss about Canadian health care is most GP offices are in "medical centres". That means one stop shopping for blood work, cardio assessment, and imaging. Last time I had an x-ray there, it was GP > imaging > 30 minute wait > back to GP with the results. End to end in under an hour. Here, it is now, GP > random hospital depending on the form you get > 90 min wait at the hospital (usually a couple of days later) > results to GP in 5 to 10 days > 10 days minimum to get back to the GP. And now..... work. Looks like I'll be escaping the present project and moving on to a bank project. This will mean my first work travel in over 3 years. Off to Copenhagen in Sept for a couple of weeks. I may have to buy new clothes as I've been living in jeans & sweat pants for nearly 30 months now. I'm going to have to watch YouTube videos on how to tie a tie again. Latte consumed. Another coffee needed to investigate why said latte has failed to inject any caffeine into my blood stream. Enjoy the day.

When we had ours foisted on us we were worried as there were 3 of us in the house. Daily showers. Loads of laundry and tons of plants that needed watering. After the first reading we were about £80 in credit from the previous paid in advance standard rate. Our actual usage is well below their guestimated one. Then again, if you aren't metered you are paying for the average area consumption that includes all the leaks.

Ahh, the strong silent type. 😃

Would those of you receiving rain be so kind as to ship some our way. We've had less than 1mm in the past 3 weeks. Our water butts are bone dry and I fear for the next water bill.

Greetings from the boring borough. Just checking in as there is really b*gger all else to report. All quiet. Another work week begins. Doing some interviews this week for a new project mangler. Something I really dislike. (both the interview and project manglers in general) Coffee consumed. Enjoy the day.

Greetings all from the boring borough. Warm, sunny, etc. Another wasted weekend but with the lack of sleep over the past week it wasn't surprising. Not from the heat but from staying hydrated meaning I have to get up every 12 minutes to pee. Chiropractor last Friday. He managed to tweak my neck and remove the stiffness I'd had for a couple of weeks. Hospital called shortly after to say my elbow surgery has been scheduled for Aug 4. Yikes that was fast. I'd been led to believe October would be the earliest. Pre-surgery appointment is now done by video. Good thing it is my elbow and not my arse. Trying hard not to visualise me mooning the web cam Bart Simpson style. Grand attempts to make it to DEMU failed miserably. My get up and go, got up and went, without me. I may attempt to rearrange the crap in the shed today as that is likely as close to modelling as I will get for a while. I really need a second shed to just house all the junk that is cluttering up the first shed. Plans to take all the recycling to the tip also failed as SWMBO is feeling under the weather. Likely we'll sort & load sometime in the week and I'll run it down to Thamesmead early the next morning. That's about it. Enjoy the day.

Not strictly PAYG but Lyca do a monthly £5 which I use for my work phone. It isn't a contract either but a rolling charge. I use it as an emergency 5g tether at home if the broadband goes down too.

Afternoon all. @DaveF I enjoyed the description of your walk. Thank you for sharing. @iL Dottore For number 5 in your recent list may I suggest watching the film "Cargo". Apart from the great soundtrack, it is just evil and twisted enough to get a thumb up from CC. @polybear I've come to the conclusion that half the boring borough must change their mattresses on a weekly basis. That is the only way to explain just how many there are stuffed into alley ways, around recycling bins, and on commercial large bins.

My ex is Mormon. I'll say nothing else to avoid the wrath of the mods. Very strange people. Moaning all from the boring borough. Looks like the bin strike has been extended for another couple of weeks. We'll be making a tip visit with all the recycling in the near future. Sadly the nearby large recycling bins were removed after they became general fly tipping magnets. There are smaller ones at the Morrisons but they tend to fill within 12 seconds of being emptied. Tony has got me seriously thinking about looking into the practicality of installing Solar. With longer term climate change moving away from gas and increased electric use, it makes sense to make my own and eventually go to a house wide 2 way heat pump / climate control. I was hoping to make it to DEMU this weekend but queuing at the recycling centre seems like so much more enjoyment. Pah! Little else of note. Iced latte time. For me it is TGIT. Enjoy the day

Thanks Tony. I'll look into frames for the shed. The math says about 240kg total. As for the house it is east/west and a terrace so the roofing area is quite small. There is about 9m² available on the back extension that faces south. Definitely go with the pigeon guards if we end up down that route. I'm paying £0.1541/kWh plus the ripoff daily standing charge which is about £0.22/day. Our electric is about 5% higher as we buy 100% renewable which is to say it partly pays for someone else's solar as well as wind farms. Still a lot less than what many are currently paying.