Early Risers.

[The Stationmaster]

Morning all,

 

Quite sunny out and the moving men are busily moving the folk over the road - they'll be on their way a mile or so up the hill later today but I don't know if the replacements are moving in today.  The new arrivals area  couple with two youngsters fleeing the big city beyond the big airport away to the east - which seems to be a common trait in the local housing market at present as larger houses have really been shifting round here in the past few months.  I don't know what the newcomers will make of their new, late Victorian, house which the present residents are leaving because they want to live somewhere a bit smaller and which has not only cavity walls but walls with cavity insulation.

 

Herself's catching up with my age - she was 'a year younger' than me until today - will, as previously adsvertised, be duly celebrated witha lunch at the crooked Billet although his ladship is 'working so he'll watch the movers as he tends his lonely keyboard.

 

Have a good day everybody and stay safe.

[jonny777]

Another dry and sunny start here in North Somerset. 

 

Weather station still working ok, despite yesterdays swimming lesson. 

 

There was a message on the local Facebook town forum saying the scrap metal man will be round and if anyone wanted to get rid of anything, just PM them a photo and the relevant postcode and they will pick it up today. 

 

I had a few old bits and pieces lying around which needed to go to the tip, but were probably too big for the car - so I did as they said, left them by the front gate and a lorry has just taken them away. Nice one. Saves me a trip to the scrapyard. 

 

 

[45156]

4 hours ago, chrisf said:

 I chose ‘The burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’, which I would take to the mythical desert island should I ever be invited.

 

As for guitars, I shall stand on the sidelines.

 

Ah yes, off Through Smoke and Fire, if I'm not mistaken.

 

I now own about ten of these, but no electrics any longer - my prize possession is my beltingly loud hand made dreadnaught by Barry Vernon, which is a wonderful instrument.

 

Morning All

 

Much skipping has taken place, and it's now the usual generic greetings.

 

30747 has a Dr's appointment soon - has to go into town for it, so guess who's driving - I need to go to the bank anyway to pay in the £10 cheque from the guide dogs lottery.

 

Regards to All

Stewart

[tigerburnie]

Morning, up early as had to take the car in to get the brakes looked at, £90 out of the pocket money for this month, all this chasing Whales is costing lol.

[PhilJ W]

Not three, or four or even five but NINE.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-woman-becomes-mum-9-24039916#source=push

[Andrew P]

1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

Morning all,

 

 

 

Herself's catching up with my age - she was 'a year younger' than me until today - will, as previously adsvertised, be duly celebrated witha lunch at the crooked Billet although his ladship is 'working so he'll watch the movers as he tends his lonely keyboard.

 

Have a good day everybody and stay safe.

And a Happy Birthday to the Good Lady of the House Mike.

[The Lurker]

46 minutes ago, jonny777 said:

Another dry and sunny start here in North Somerset. 

 

Weather station still working ok, despite yesterdays swimming lesson. 

 

There was a message on the local Facebook town forum saying the scrap metal man will be round and if anyone wanted to get rid of anything, just PM them a photo and the relevant postcode and they will pick it up today. 

 

I had a few old bits and pieces lying around which needed to go to the tip, but were probably too big for the car - so I did as they said, left them by the front gate and a lorry has just taken them away. Nice one. Saves me a trip to the scrapyard. 

 

 

that's quite different from round here. If you leave anything vaguely metallic in your driveway for more than a few hours, the local metal collectors snaffle it, usually without asking. There are tales of people doing things like removing a radiator temporarily and putting outside only to find it gone a few hours later. To be fair, when they snaffled our radiators, they did at least ask the people who were changing them over for us!

[southern42]

' morning all from red dragon land.

Sunny but interrupted by showers.  Garden temp. 6C.

 

Birthday greetings to Mrs SM.  Enjoy your day.

 

Good to see Trisonic back among us. Those guitars look fabulous, Pete.

 

Myself, I used to play acoustic guitar until life got too busy.  Tried one out last year but the after effects of breaking the top of the radius made me think it would be better just to be happy with the toot on the flute.  I am just getting back into it after the attempt to decapitate the thumb two and a half weeks ago. I did try and play with the thumb in a different position but it threw the other fingers out of position, too, so they kept falling over one another!

 

Some pobl bach to be painted today - kitted out for their No.6 day out at Portmeirion. 

With another magazine day looming, it is also time to sort out more articles from the old mags, not to mention ones we keep finding!

 

Garden temp. has gone up to 7C and the sun is round there, too, which means more light for the above job! 

 

Fitt  and  Elfie warming up.

Take care all and play safe.

_________

Best wishes

Polly

[southern42]

Thought I was seeing double there for a minute!

[PupCam]

3 hours ago, polybear said:

Now I have a choice - get fleeced for a pack of screws at some exorbitant price per screw, or a box of 100 - only for 80 of them to sit in the loft until doomsday.

You know that there is only one correct answer to that question.  Go on, there's space in the loft for another box of screws (and they may come in very handy for building a model railway)

[southern42]

Just refreshed the page and the repeated posts above mine have disappeared!

 

Gremlins, lurking?

 

Repeated Posts: PhilJ W, AndyP, The Lurker

Edited May 5, 2021 by southern42

[AndrewC]

13 minutes ago, The Lurker said:

that's quite different from round here. If you leave anything vaguely metallic in your driveway for more than a few hours, the local metal collectors snaffle it, usually without asking. There are tales of people doing things like removing a radiator temporarily and putting outside only to find it gone a few hours later. To be fair, when they snaffled our radiators, they did at least ask the people who were changing them over for us!

Hours? More like nano-seconds. I'm sure I've bored you all with the tales of the metal fairies when we did our renovation 3 years ago. The boiler chap had put the old one on the front path while he went to grab his van. It was gone by the time he got back. < 5 mins. When the radiators were being replaced, a polite older lady asked if she could take them. She got all 7 over the course of a week. Not like the house next door when it was empty after a repossession about 9 years ago. Idiot estate agent had left the ground floor windows open to air the place out. Half the radiators and the boiler were gone the next morning. Nobody heard or saw anything. Ninja metal fairies no doubt. 

 

 

 

 

[BSW01]

I did have an acoustic guitar and the family also had an old piano, which was given to us by a neighbour. I did try to learn both, but I was better on the piano than the piano, managing to teach myself to play a few tunes, that even my siblings recognised. However, my prefered instrument(s) was/were the drums.

 

I should add that I can't read music properly, I can read/understand the different notes, but not the timing, tempo or key etc. So I was better at learning a tune that I knew, so understood the tempo etc. If it was a song I didn’t know, then it might as well have been written in Greek. 

 

I'd struggle with both piano and guitar now, as I'm missing part of a finger on my left hand, and I'm right handed. 

Edited May 5, 2021 by BSW01

[iL Dottore]

15 hours ago, New Haven Neil said:

 

I hadn't thought of myself as Aspergers, but I hit 5 of the 10 traits I have just looked up - but not heavily.  Mild case then.  Interesting.

I am pretty certain that you do not have Asperger’s (mild or otherwise).  In fact I am 100% convinced that anything you self-diagnose from quizzes or questionnaires on the Internet will be - 99 times out of 100 - 100% wrong.

 

Differential Diagnosis is a skill learned through many years of reading, practice, observation and being taught. And even then, humans being bizarrely human, there are patients who turn up with an odd constellation of symptoms that are completely atypical and  which lead to an incorrect diagnosis (which is why so many diagnoses have to be confirmed by laboratory tests, scans, x-rays and so on). 

 Just as an example: if you tell me that you have chest pain, nausea, vomiting and diaphoresis;  without even trying I can think of four common potential diagnoses and a number of other conditions for which the symptoms are not the primary symptoms but which are not atypical for that condition.

 

A final thought: I was taught many years ago that the person who self diagnoses has an idiot for a doctor!

 

p.s. A note about “proper” testing for psychiatric disorders. One of the best and most commonly used instruments is the MMPI, The current MMPI-2 has 567 items, and usually takes between one and two hours to complete depending on reading level.   A far cry from an online 10 item tick box questionnaire.

13 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

...so why bother at all until much later in the year when things will be a lot clearer - one way or the other?

To be blunt I think it is because too much of the “Great British Public” do not have the societal discipline to hang on until the worldwide situation regarding CoVID-19 is much clearer than it is now.

One of my medical colleagues made the observation that what he would like to see is a dominant variant of the virus to emerge that it is equally (if not more) infectious but with a very low morbidity (in his opinion the mortality of the coronavirus is not the problem, but its morbidity and the fact that it is very infectious).  Take away the high morbidity associated with the disease (which is what is overloading the world’s health systems) and CoVID-19 becomes another somewhat nasty respiratory disease that leaves most people infected by it relatively unscathed but kills a number of thousand of the elderly, infirm and (genetically?) unfit every year - just like influenza.
One thing is very certain, this particular genie is NOT going back in the bottle!

12 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

... Clearly such measures are effective - though not welcomed by everyone....

Well tough! Quite frankly in this post-pandemic world the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.  We’ve seen in a number of countries how laissez-faire individualism has worked, so perhaps it’s time to give utilitarianism a go?

6 hours ago, TheQ said:

....Ben the Pointer Collie was a wandering the garden and stopped looking intently into a Berberis hedge one leg up. Just like a Pointer.. But being a sensible Collie he didn't venture in with all those thorns.....

You indeed have a sensible dog, Sir. Schotty when he is after his ball is like a heroin junky desperate for his next fix: the ball is all that counts and is all that is focused on - to the detriment of everything else. Many is the time he has emerged triumphantly from a thicket of bushes with his ball in his mouth, covered with thorns (some of which dangerously close to his eyeballs). In fact, this silly dog has a number of very, very tiny bald patches in his fur where the fur had been ripped out by him charging through bushes and the like.

Lucy, like all sensible females, refuses to do anything so obsessively stupid and only chases after her toy when there is plenty of flat, even, open space (and even then only when she is “in the mood“)

 

So, enjoy another hump day.

Edited May 5, 2021 by iL Dottore

[Tony_S]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

A far cry from an online 10 item tick box

When Matthew was three Aditi and I were summoned to nursery for a discussion about Matthew. The deputy manager sat us down and said as in her opinion “they” thought Matthew was autistic and we should start making arrangements as he wasn’t going to be able to go to a mainstream school. Now this was a bit of a surprise to us. I asked and he had apparently some of the characteristics from a checklist. The most damning one seemed to be not making eye contact when “being told off”. I suggested he may have been scared. Matthew was dyspraxic and apart from the coordination issues had some of the characteristics associated with it. I suspect the nursery deputy had been on a course and was trying to fit him in to a category. I have mentioned before the train incident. Part of the diagnosis was scribbles on the train pictures they had given him to colour. They seemed to think he was disturbed. I enquired if they had asked him about the scribbles.  So I did. His answer “outside valve gear”. He was somewhat “into” trains at nursery. 

Edited May 5, 2021 by Tony_S

[polybear]

5 hours ago, jamie92208 said:

One idea might be to use studding that screws into rawlbolts with a simple nut and washer inside the cabinet. Rawlbolts often use standard metric centres that studding replaces. I did this on a fence post fastened into a concrete wall and it worked.

 

Jamie

 

The only catch being that rawlbolts are a lot dearer than screws....

Bear has now ordered a box of 100 6mm x 120mm wood screws - after being led astray by Puppers.....the largest I had in the loft was 3" long.

Incidentally, they were ordered at 09-15 this morning, with free delivery promised before 7pm today.  Courtesy of a certain south American river using Bear's "Prime" account; the price (eight quid) was about 10p more than the same thing from Toolstation (and I suspect Screwfix too) - and I'd have to collect from those establishments or get stuffed with delivery costs, which would no doubt take a few days.

 

I see some bright sparks seem to think another Royal Yacht is a good idea - for £200M.  They seem to have overlooked the costs of the necessary RN ships that are required to shadow it every time it puts to sea - not to mention crew, maintenance etc etc.  I'll not hold my breath.

 

Bear is off to drill holes in walls.

 

2 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

Not three, or four or even five but NINE.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-woman-becomes-mum-9-24039916#source=push

 

[PupCam]

13 minutes ago, polybear said:

after being led astray by Puppers

Glad to be of service

[45156]

Back after a trip to the bank, where I actually was "allowed" to visit the counter instead of one of their wretched machines - how I achieved this was that I wanted to pay a sum into my credit card, and it was not a round amount, and involved paying in coins - so the machines could not accommodate this.  Once I was at the counter, I just suggested that I transact all my business there.

 

Now then - here's a few of my all accoustic collection - the Barry Vernon, my Ovation 1517 bought from Frank Hessey's in Liverpool, and alongside it, my vintage Hofner Congress, restored by me, and previously owned by the late Malcolm Lockyer which his widow asked an ex colleague of his who now ran a music shop to sell it, on the strict condition that the new buyer would never sell it on - and I haven't.

 

 

[TheQ]

As it's the Bi centenary of Napoleons death how about a bit of Strawhead..

 

[Tony_S]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

You indeed have a sensible dog, Sir. Schotty when he is after his ball is like a heroin junky desperate for his next fix: the ball is all that counts and is all that is focused on - to the detriment of everything else. Many is the time he has emerged triumphantly from a thicket of bushes with his ball in his mouth, covered with thorns (some of which dangerously close to his eyeballs). In fact, this silly dog has a number of very, very tiny bald patches in his fur where the fur had been ripped out by him charging through bushes and the like.

My Robbie wasn’t at all sensible but he was made for rushing through undergrowth. His outer fur just came away, nothing seemed to penetrate the inner coat. We were told never to trim him, just brush vigorously! We had quite a selection of brushes. He didn’t really like being groomed and wriggled a lot. I am surprised our garden isn’t full of weeds grown from all the seeds extracted from his coat. 

[Tony_S]

Aditi has been on the phone for ages sorting out our next holiday. A cruise to Iceland was postponed last year and she had rebooked for the Med for October this year. We were not really happy about going as we suspect there would still be restrictions in place. So I think we are now going to the Mid Med in July 2022. Should be warm! We haven’t been on a cruise in school holiday time since 2012 but the presence of children isn’t a bother to me. 
Tony

[The Lurker]

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

I am pretty certain that you do not have Asperger’s (mild or otherwise).  In fact I am 100% convinced that anything you self-diagnose from quizzes or questionnaires on the Internet will be - 99 times out of 100 - 100% wrong.

 

Unless things have changed (again) in this country you would not get a diagnosis for Asperger's any longer. It's now "just" part of ASD.

 

It took the best part of 2 years to get a diagnosis for Younger Lurker, especially as they had to work through the other traits that he exhibited (extreme anxiety being one that is perhaps far more debilitating to him than the autism). Autism rarely comes alone.

 

[The Lurker]

In other news, I have managed to book somewhere very nice for Mrs Lurker's birthday - the meal will be in just over a month's time.

 

If I remember, once it has happened I will let you know whether it was as good as it sounds. 

[Ian Abel]

Happy birthday Mrs @The Stationmaster...

 

HUMP day.

Nothing to report from yesterday, and expected to be a repeat today. <yawn>

 

Weather "iffy" with a morning start of just 2 and overcast. Warming to 13 with predictions of the yellow orb becoming visible.

 

Enjoy the day.

[TheSignalEngineer]

6 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

.  In fact I am 100% convinced that anything you self-diagnose from quizzes or questionnaires on the Internet will be - 99 times out of 100 - 100% wrong.

The script used by the NHS helpline is probably as good. I only used it once when I woke up with severe back pain and couldn't get off the bed.  The questions didn't lead to any diagnosis, and as l could move around but not get up I wasn't that concerned. Then the  telephone operator person ended up by telling me that if I lost the use of my limbs I should phone for an ambulance. My reply was if I lose the use of my limbs how do I get to use the phone? Total silence from other end.

Edited May 5, 2021 by TheSignalEngineer
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