Early Risers.

[monkeysarefun]

14 minutes ago, Barry O said:

Up to the maximum amount allowed (which was higher in Oz and New Zealand) i

They upped the limit further, to $200 when covid turned up to help limit keypad touching

[simontaylor484]

I always took a credit card abroad and my bank cards luckily i needed them in Tenerife when swmbo had her fall. Medication had to be purchased at just short of 200€.

 

When i was late teens my parents had gone to Rome he must have used his credit card. The bank rang home to check it was right when i answered phone i did think for a minute about saying he wasnt in Rome just for devilment 

[Pacific231G]

Goodnight all.

One of those frutrating days when urgency constantly trumps importance. 

 

I have a lot of editing to do over the next couple of weeks but it takes time and thought which gets interrupted by less important things that people need tomorrow getting in the way.

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone 

 

Like yesterday, the weather has been a little bit mixed. This morning’s sunshine turned to dull about 11 o’clock. We then had a few light showers before the sun came out again. Then whilst we were eating dinner, it started to rain again! 

 

Despite that, I’ve had another productive day in the garden today. The water butt was emptied, the last 12” were dumped as it was quite silty and murky. The but then had a thorough clean, before being re-sited and then re-filled, it’s currently about 80% full at the moment. I then dismantled and removed the old plinth (basically a pile of bricks with a paving stone on the top) that the water butt was sat on. Removed a couple of paving stones and then put the composter in position. I don’t intend to make garden compost, instead I’ll be making leaf mould, as we get lots of leaves falling from the trees that edge the school playing field that backs onto our house. Once all that was done, I did a couple more trips to the skip to put the last of the old paving in. Just before I put the last few items in the skip, I contacted the skip company, telling them that it’s now ready for collection, they will pick it up sometime tomorrow. 

 

Like yesterday I took a rest in the afternoon, a bit of eyelid inspection, doing a couple of sudoku puzzles and also reading the latest copy of BRM. 

 

Disappointingly, our winter break in Harrogate has had to be cancelled, as the B&B owners have sold up and the new owners of house will no longer be running it as a B&B. We could of course look for alternative accommodation, but the friends that we normally meet there had already decided to give it a miss this year, so Sheila has decided to do the same also, oh well!

[BSW01]

Goodnight all 

[The Stationmaster]

5 hours ago, polybear said:

 

 

I had a call from buddy over the road (not the next door buddy); he's suffering with blocked lug 'oles - the doc has told him that (unless there are specific circumstances) the NHS now no longer syringe ears - you have to go private.  It's started...

 

Doctors aren't at all keen about doing ear syringe jobs niowadays, seemingly th it often caused more problems than it solved.  The recommended treatment for bunged up ears and lots of wax is a d-i-y treatment get your head lying down one one side and an application of olive oil in the ear that's now on top in order to loosen and dislodge what is in there.  works quite well actually.

[The Stationmaster]

G'night all

[PhilJ W]

1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

Doctors aren't at all keen about doing ear syringe jobs niowadays, seemingly th it often caused more problems than it solved.  The recommended treatment for bunged up ears and lots of wax is a d-i-y treatment get your head lying down one one side and an application of olive oil in the ear that's now on top in order to loosen and dislodge what is in there.  works quite well actually.

Almost 70 years ago when I was attending infants school the teacher told us that we should never use soap to clean our ears just use hot water. I have never used soap on my ears since and I've never needed to have my ears syringed.

PS my hearing is better than many half my age.

Edited April 30, 2021 by PhilJ W

[Ozexpatriate]

Just now, PhilJ W said:

I've never needed to have my ears syringed.

Lucky you. I don't soap my ears either, but have had occasional wax build up. Happily not so much in the last couple of years.

 

I have had doctors remove it with tiny spring loaded forceps on the end of a probe.

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.

[Ozexpatriate]

4 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Here it is advances in cooling that allowed  civilisation to progress.

Across the "sunbelt" in the US as well. Much of it would be barely habitable without air conditioning.

 

The following graphic was produced by CNN, based on the results of the 2020 census and can be found here.

 

The growth in the "south" would be nothing like this without air conditioning.

 

We were talking about the "Connections" television show a while ago. The similarly themed "How we got to now" programme, episode called "Cold" explores how the invention of air conditioning led to changing demographics in the US sunbelt.

 

At one point Henderson, Nevada (part of the Las Vegas metro) was the fastest growing city in the US. It would never exist without cheap electricity from the Hoover Dam and the invention of air conditioning. 

[pH]

13 hours ago, AndrewC said:

Again, I prefer the Canadian system where a signed and accepted offer is the contract, no chains, no gazumping, without major financial penalties. 

Isn’t working quite like that in the Vancouver area just now, Andrew. Houses are already priced at ridiculous levels and are going at over the asking price. Once an offer is accepted, yes, that’s it. But before that, there are “nods and winks” between the buying and selling agents to let people know their existing bids are too low, but not by how much. Which means that often a bidding war develops where an existing winning bid could/should have been accepted.

 

Our son and his wife are in the middle of trying to buy a house and are getting really p’ed off.

[pH]

 Before we set off on a journey today, I reset the trip counter. Amongst other things, this re-initializes the average fuel usage calculation. Before I reset it, it was at 9.7 litres per 100 km (we’ve only been driving short distances in and around the city for the last several months). This morning, with a well-loaded car, cold engine and a steep hill to start, the first re-calculated figure shown was 34.6 litres per 100 km! It did get down to 5.6 later in the journey.

[iL Dottore]

Good Morning All,

Up early (as seems to be the norm as of late) due to a (biological) systems malfunction. Still, mustn’t grumble - the alternative is pushing up the daisies.

 

Lucy is doing well, her eye is pretty much normalised and whilst still not happy about the treatment (ointment to both eyes) she seems resigned to it in a “I’ll put up with it if I have to, but there’d better be sausage” kind of way.

 

Returning to house heating (and cooling), somebody mentioned a heating fixture in the bathroom ceiling. My great aunt had a two bulb lighting fixture in her bathroom - one was for illumination and the other (infra-red???) for heating. I dimly recall there being two switches - one for light, the other for heat. I also dimly recall that on bath nights (remember those? You bathed once a week) the bath would be run, the heating turned on and the door closed. Then when ready to bathe, you went into a bathroom and were enveloped in warm steam (yes, yes, I know that it’s warm water vapour, but let’s not get pedantic here). A rubber duck may or may not have been involved...

 

Whilst it is certainly true that air-con has made much of the US inhabitable, we shouldn’t overlook how AC has pushed much of the world into a western (basically Northern European) way of living. Thanks to AC we no longer have siestas or other afternoon naps and centuries old rhythms of living are increasingly vanishing. Whilst the famous song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” may mock the “dress for dinner in the tropics” Brit (definitely a vanished species), I think it also highlights another, possibly better (???) rhythm of life:

Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
The smallest Malay rabbit
Deplores this foolish habit.
In Hongkong
They strike a gong
And fire off a noonday gun
To reprimand each inmate
Who's in late.
In the mangrove swamps
Where the python romps
There is peace from twelve till two.
Even caribous
Lie around and snooze;
For there's nothing else to do.
In Bengal
To move at all
Is seldom, if ever done.
But mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun

(for all the words: https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/17462633/Noël+Coward/Mad+Dogs+and+Englishmen)

 

And on that noontime note I bid you an enjoyable POETS day.

 

iD

[chrisf]

Greetings one and all

 

I rather liked Flavio’s references to “Mad dogs and Englishmen” this morning and the stocks yesterday.  Subjecting a criminal to public humiliation could well be much more unpleasant for the miscreant than prison and would be much less of a burden on the public purse, as well as fun for anyone who finds him/herself with a sudden glut of over-ripe tomatoes.  As it happens, the local rag has more details of the recent trial of the person who made me a victim.  He was found guilty of one charge of blackmail, two of fraud, one of burglary from a church and four of theft.  He managed to steal £12,000 from just one victim so I reckon I was jolly lucky to be taken for only £20.  Among other things the judge said that these offences are particularly despicable.  The only downside of his incarceration for 54 months is that he will be out again in 27.  Will he learn his lesson at Her Majesty’s pleasure?  Somehow I doubt it?  Would I feel better for contributing to his public ridicule?  You bet! 

 

Here in Bedford there is but one election next week, that of a new Police and Crime Commissioner.  The candidates are an unremarkable bunch and the name of only one of them is known to me.  In my view this is not a post that should be seen as political and I have no incentive for supporting any of the nonentities laid before us.  I am not even sure that any of the candidates is bad enough to be worth voting against.  It speaks volumes that no previous candidate has stood again.

 

Tomorrow is May Day and I am due to meet friends for breakfast at 5.30 am.  Once again there is unlikely to be morris dancing for me to watch and an open pub in which to have solid and liquid breakfast but the May Day collective is nothing if not ingenious.  I hope that gentle readers will forgive me for not posting tomorrow but I will be back on Sunday.  Best wishes to all!

 

Chris

[TheQ]

9 hours ago, simontaylor484 said:

In my first childhood home we didnt have a radiator in the bathroom we had a heater mounted on the lightfitting . Dad eventually had a radiator fitted in there and in the kitchen

Still got one of those and it's needed, even though there is a small radiator in the room. The bathroom isn't single brick walls as in 9 inches thick, but single brick as in 3 inches thick. the flat roof has no insulation in it either.. It also sticks out from the house being mounted on top of the entrance way at the back of the house..

The rebuild of the bath room is a early retirement project, flat roof off insulation in , new flat roof to be fitted. The main side wall (from ground level) to have an additional skin fitted outside with insulation in the cavity..

Edited April 30, 2021 by TheQ

[jamie92208]

Good moaning from a cool and cloudy Charente.  We had an odd day yesterday. Up with the flatulent sparrows, their hotel is on the pylon in the garden.  Then off to The Danglies with the cars, drop Beth's then come home. Aftervlunch, eyelid inspection interrupted  by the garage rining to say that the car needed a new battery. Thecplan was then to set off to pick up the carcat 5.30 and get fish and chips on the way home. No such luck, another phone call from the garage"The test centre have lost your car key and we can't get it back from there". You couldn't believe it.

 

Anyway I was dispatched to The Danglies, 24 miles to the garage, with the spare key. The story continued. Apparently  the CT centre had managed to give theckey to another custoner who must have taken it home. I was not at all amused and told them that if the keys, which inclyded our house key, were lost, that at the very least I would expect, reprogrammed locks and new keys for the car, and a new lock and keys for the house, plus a reduced bill.  They agreed to that request but 5 minutes later told me that the keys were en route back to the CT centre.  I told them we'd pick the car up today and got the fish and chips on the way home.  

 

We now await a phone call to say that the car is ready.  What we  can't work out is how the 'customer' ended up with the key. We both presume that the tester had left them in the other clients car.

 

Anyway the day remains to be seized. Beth is waiting for sister drac to appear and I'm then taking her to a friends. I wil need to stay in to listen for the phone.

 

Hope you all have a good day/night (delete as appropriate) and hope to hear good news about BoD and Mr Hunt Senior.

 

Jamie

[Barry O]

Ey up!

 

For some reason my body functions well in hot weather. I still like air con though..

 

Next door have gone quiet. Still can't see any objections on the planning site. Pah!

 

Her indoors is off volunteering again today so I am free to do what I want but must mow the grass, sort out a couple of items in the garage, revisit the match regulations for tomorrow and take some photos of Gabe's items for sale. Other than that .. time is mine.

 

Hope you all stay safe and well!

Baz

Edited April 30, 2021 by Barry O

[polybear]

5 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Lucky you. I don't soap my ears either, but have had occasional wax build up. Happily not so much in the last couple of years.

 

I have had doctors remove it with tiny spring loaded forceps on the end of a probe.

 

Bear used to get ear infections on a fairly regular basis.  I then got one when working in S.Korea in 2000 and the hotel arranged for Bear to visit the local specialist at 9am the next morning.  Very little english spoken, but we got by.  Examined & lug'ole hoovered out (if you've not had that done then you've really missed some fun.....boy, is it LOUD).

The next patient is watching proceedings by the way - Bear had an 8yr old-ish kid watching him - so bravery was the order of the day in order not to look like a wuss or to be responsible for him leggin' it out the door.  Coupled with the subsequent meds. the total cost was six quid.

 

The next one was in 2005-ish, in Malaysia this time.  Big fancy hospital this time, and an ENT setup that would have UK docs pleading for something even half as good - it looked like the starship enterprise.  Excellent english spoken - it turns out the doc did his training at Stanmore, Middlesex.  Bear was offered the opportunity to watch proceedings  via the monitor - the hoover has a camera on the end and the infection can be seen as little white bits.  That one was about eighty quid IIRC.  Now ever since those guys have done their stuff Bear has (touch wood) had v.little if any trouble, and certainly no specialist visits.  Wonder what they did that the UK docs didn't?

 

Today is designated as a MIUAIGA day.....still no news on the kitchen delivery - if I don't get a message by 10am telling me it's due tomorrow then Bear will be on the phone - I'll be a seriously p.off bunny if it doesn't appear.  Of course it could arrive today, unannounced - which won't be fun cos' Bear has yet to clear the room for the delivery, as I'm leaving it until the last possible moment.

[TheQ]

Mooring Awl , inner Temple Hare,.

 

5 hours sleep followed by a couple of uncomfortable not dozing.

 

Ear problems are well known in Saudi, you spend time outside and everything melts and collects in the bottom of the ear, you go inside to air conditioned coolness, and it solidifies hard.. I found OTEX, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Otex-Express-Ear-Drops-10ml/dp/B001LK8BRW/ref=asc_df_B001LK8BRW/?tag=bingshoppinga-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=&hvpos=&hvnetw=o&hvrand=&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4584413736749562&psc=1 to be a good dissolver of the problem. 

 

Forepaws were slightly warning of a change in the weather, and there was black clouds to the North and West, great fried Egg to the east, dampness and drizzle on the roads. Ben the cautious Collie peered out of the door and ascertained it wasn't raining, then happily came out for his normal patrol..

 

It's definitely a case of joints and muscles liking warmer weather, I really dislike the cold these days..

 

Looking at the forecast on the seaweed, tomorrow looks like laying concrete, Sunday boat work, Monday more shelving..

 

The New major system is doing the end of it's cross check at the moment, then it will be put on a stability run for the whole weekend. That's a loop continuously running all the tests that don't need manual intervention. It should get 7 or 8 runs in over the 3 days. Then we can analyze the results and see if there are any variations..

Meanwhile I have a bunch of current shunts to do today..

 

Time to... start warming the Lab..

[polybear]

BBC news (and no doubt all the printed rags) are running with the story that Bojo's mobile number has been freely available on the 'net for the last fifteen years.  Well it obviously has never been a problem for him - until, that is you lot announced it and all and sundry are now trawling Google for it so they can trash his inbox with messages and fone calls.

Now the taxpayer will be funding the subsequent transfer of numbers and all data, plus advising all those deemed important enough to need his new number.  Well done.  Tw@ts.  Lucky we're not busy with global pandemic....

Rant Over.

[New Haven Neil]

Morning, a sunny but chilly one again, 6c feels like 3 according to the techno-weathero-phono thing.

 

Ear problems at sea as an engineer are common, a working environment often over 50c, constant wearing of ear defenders at least 8 hours a day, then escape into air conditioned accommodation.  Sharing space in a metal box with a 30,000hp diesel engine is an unpleasantly hot experience!  When 'up the gulf' with intake air being possibly 40c, I have no idea what the engineroom temperatures got to as the thermometers didn't go that high.  Modern ships have air conditioned control rooms as the electronics need to be cooler, otherwise they wouldn't bother for the engineers.  There were still manually controlled ships around when I was at sea, you just had to tough it, there were no cool spaces to retreat into.

[AndrewC]

2 hours ago, pH said:

Isn’t working quite like that in the Vancouver area just now, Andrew. Houses are already priced at ridiculous levels and are going at over the asking price. Once an offer is accepted, yes, that’s it. But before that, there are “nods and winks” between the buying and selling agents to let people know their existing bids are too low, but not by how much. Which means that often a bidding war develops where an existing winning bid could/should have been accepted.

 

Our son and his wife are in the middle of trying to buy a house and are getting really p’ed off.

There are always ways around a system. Bidding wars prior to a formal offer are old school but at least once there is a formal offer and acceptance it is rare for any other hanky panky to happen. Not like the UK where the lady we bought this place from had her chain collapse 3 times because someone further up decided they wanted more £££ or one who kept changing their mind on whether or not they wanted to actually move. In the end ours came down to the last possible minute as one old rat bag kept dithering. 3 hours later and our mortgage offer would have expired and we'd have pulled out. 4 1/2 bloody months of farquing about. 

 

Good moaning all. TFIF and all that. Bank holiday weekend approaches, as does the rain. <sigh>

Little of note otherwise so I'll just bid you all a good weekend. 

 

 

[iL Dottore]

51 minutes ago, New Haven Neil said:

....Sharing space in a metal box with a 30,000hp diesel engine is an unpleasantly hot experience!  When 'up the gulf' with intake air being possibly 40c, I have no idea what the engineroom temperatures got to as the thermometers didn't go that high.  Modern ships have air conditioned control rooms as the electronics need to be cooler, otherwise they wouldn't bother for the engineers...

I thought that, (based on various films I’ve seen), all marine engineers were sweat, oil and grease encrusted and wore singlets that showed off their rippling torsos and muscular arms to great effect (and, apparently, being Scottish was also a requirement...)   The rugged, square, jaw seemed to have been optional 

So, NHN - are you Scottish and do you have one or more singlets in your wardrobe?

Edited April 30, 2021 by iL Dottore

[New Haven Neil]

1 minute ago, iL Dottore said:

I thought that, (based on various films I’ve seen), all marine engineers were sweat, oil and grease encrusted and wore singlets that showed off their rippling torsos and muscular arms to great effect (and, apparently, being Scottish was also a requirement...)   The rugged, square, jaw seemed to have been optional 

So, NHN - are you Scottish and do you have one or more singlets in your wardrobe?

 

Well, I'm half Scottish, but we wore boiler suits (white = officer) with long sleeves as compulsory as it is too easy to burn yourself on something, and ships enginerooms are full of hot somethings!  Just underwear underneath although some of the older guys wore a vest to soak up sweat - I presume that's what you mean by a singlet.  No oil or grease for long, as we were aware of the risks by then.  It is often necessary to get very covered in it when working inside the engine (see below) but we cleaned off very soon afterwards.

 

 

I was a skinny as a rake back in those days, although 'somewhat' better padded nowadays - rippling torsos would never have been applied to my physique in any of my 62 years for sure