AndrewC

Good moaning all. Back in the boring borough after 8 days schlepping about. 

Highs: (not involving Amsterdam coffee shops) Much good beer and food. BXL Jazz weekend and Amsterdam Red Light Jazz. New places discovered, old favourites now back open after the last lockdown. The knee held up quite well with an average of 12,000 steps a day. 

Lows: Eurostar doing their best to make train travel as unpleasant as the airlines. At least we weren't travelling from Paris. We'd still be there otherwise. DB making SouthEastern look good with massive delays and our carriage locked off meaning our first class compartment couldn't be used and we had to cram into an already full peasant carriage for 5 hours. Now attempting compensation other than bloody useless vouchers for both the fare differential and the 80 min late arrival. 

Back to work today. Meh. Wish I'd taken an extra couple of days off to recover from the days off. 😃

First day of my 4 day week schedule. We'll see how that goes as I've already had to dump half a dozen meeting invites for Friday from people who should know better. 

1 hour ago, DaveF said:

 

The first job yesterday was to go the undertakers to collect the rings they had managed to remove from Mum's fingers - without damage to the rings or the fingers, thank goodness.  While I was there I paid for the flowers and moving the headstone which will go back on the grave when it has had Mum's details added and the ground has settled.  The funeral itself had already been paid for by Mum some years ago.

 

Than I went to the flat and picked up the post, next week the redirection starts.  While I was there I realised that much of her kitchen stuff, linen, towels and so on is a lot newer than mine as we recently replaced a lot of things which wore out so they will come to my house to be used and mine will be binned.

 

The rest of the day was spent writing e mails and making telephone calls to thank people for coming to the funeral and to reply to messages of condolence.

 

I'm not sure what I'll be doing today, but hope to fit in a visit to the beach for a walk.

 

David

 

 

This has brought back a lot of memories and emotions from 25 years ago. Mum had also prepared everything in advance. I had a complete instruction sheet of everything that needed to be done. It kept me busy for the first few weeks.

Apart from a few special things the bulk of her flat was donated to a women's shelter that used donations to set up homes for abused women & children who were trying to start new lives. 

My 2p of advice is to make time for yourself and keep your memories close. 

Good moaning all from the boring borough. 

1 1/2 working days until a 10 day break. yay. Loads of high speed trains in my near future. Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, Amsterdam. 

Tomorrow will be my last working Friday. Starting in June I'll be on 4 day weeks until retirement. Looking forward to "train day". Although with my luck it will become "everything else that needs to be done except play with trains day". 

25 years ago I did a stint working in Houston. To say that bunch are gun fetishists would be an understatement. The building I was working in had metal detectors on each floor in the lift lobbies. The shopping mall across the street was called Greenspoint, nicknamed GunsPoint. They had armed guards with golf carts to escort you to and from your vehicle. There was a running joke that in Texas you can buy booze, pills, and guns without ever leaving your car and use them all before you got home. It wasn't the kind of place I'd ever live in. Obviously the same could be said of several of my work colleagues who had transferred, only to transfer back within a year. 

Healthwise, the NHS has finally fixed all the screw ups with hospital visits, calls, urine tests for the call, etc. The GP called last week (shock) and apart from high purine levels my internal chemistry is mostly on point. (cholesterol is actually down .4 since last summer, without even trying hard) The upshot is Allopurinol is on the menu despite no actual signs of gout. Feeling a bit old about that as apart from one off prescriptions, mostly anti-biotics, I've never had any ongoing medication in nearly 61 years. 

Back to meetings, enjoy the day. 

Moaning all from the tropical paradise of the boring borough. Almost half way through the week already. Holy carp where did the last 2 days go?

Last Saturday I noticed a £0.00 transaction on one of my credit cards. Normally this is a pre-authorisation for something. However, I'm not prone to shopping with JC Penny in Texas. A quick call to Capital One. Answered very quickly. Nice Indian lady took me through the security questions. I was then transferred to the fraud department. Card blocked, investigation started, new account number created, new card dispatched. It arrived yesterday. I have to say I couldn't have asked for better service. Turns out there were a couple more £0.00 pending transactions that hadn't shown up in the app yet. We are quick to criticise but slow to praise, so three thumbs up to Capital One. 

Lesson learned: my precautions mostly worked. Inconvenience level 2/10. 

1: use a low limit sacrificial card for most online transactions. (£500 in this case) That way anything large gets declined quickly. It also means that if it gets compromised, you can live without it for a week or two. 

2: don't let the merchant store your card number. (I made that mistake once and that is likely where they got the number from)

3: use a phone app to keep your eye on all of your cards and banking. I check mine daily so the transaction was quickly spotted and stomped on. 

Coffee time then more meetings. Enjoy the day.

Happy Birthday Rick. 

I think my warranty expired in my early 50s. I've been a slowly decaying wreck ever since. At this rate I'll be in the knacker's yard by the time I'm 65. 

On a sad note SWMBO's manager's husband passed away in the night. I'd met him a few times and he was the nicest of people. He was originally given 6 months. He managed 7 years. Then a few weeks back he began to deteriorate quickly. They gave him another 6 months. He lasted only a couple of weeks. F*ck cancer. 

7 hours ago, chrisf said:

My journey home yesterday afternoon was not only wet but suffered from a constipated M3 and the usual unfavourable conditions on the M25 south of Heathrow.  I have to admire the optimistic mindset of those who operate the warning signs which ordain a temporary speed limit of 40 mph in adverse conditions.  Try 20, chaps: it is more likely to be attained.

 

Normal Motorway indications. 

no restriction = minimum 80

60 = try to keep it under 80

50 = best slow down a bit to 60ish

40 = you'll be lucky to get faster than 10. 

1 hour ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

 

Universities now are basically milking factories for the cash cows that are  overseas students. In Australia, revenue from foreign  students in 2019 was 10 billion dollars, Canada is something like 22 billion. Most western countries are now competing between themselves for these  overseas dollars in preference to making courses cheaper for their students, let alone free.

 

Nothing new there. UBC (University of British Columbia) has been long nicknamed University of a Billion Chinese. U of A (Alberta) is University of Asians. 

Moaning all from the boring borough. Fear mongering of a weather apocalypse from the usual sources turned into a not as damp as expected squib. Instead of a major light show and ark worthy rains, we got a bit of fog overnight. As always any interesting astronomical event was obscured by clouds. 

Little of note. A quiet weekend in the garden helping SWMBO battle the encroaching menace of bluebells. She let them flower this year to help the bees but they've got out of hand so out they go. Same too with many of the other bulbs which have reached the end of their flowering lives. A major schlep to the garden centre will be required after next Tuesday's visit to the Chelsea Flower show. Bulk BBQ time also saw me on the patio at midnight Saturday, slow smoking several kg of pork shoulder. This has now been shredded, vac packed, and frozen to provide quickie meals. A couple of kg of pork belly ribs became our dinner for the past couple of nights. 

On that note, I must now go in search of coffee. Enjoy the day

1 hour ago, The White Rabbit said:

Tesco have been the worst (so far at least!) contender for cause of my Rant of the Week entry - appalling customer service. I rather think some ERs, if given that treatment, would have started rolling their sleeves up and looking for some spare chunks of timber. Not that Tesco are alone in local supermarkets not being able to do the basics. Just how hard d'you think it is to ensure if you change your opening hours, the web-site reflects this as does the sign next to the door. 

One of my biggest hates are businesses that can't properly keep their operating hours up to date. Restaurants & bars seem to be the worst offenders. Only last week we schlepped a good km out of our way to visit a brewery tap room that said it opened at noon on their website, Google, and on the f*cking sign on the door. Did they open at noon? Did they b*llocks. We got there at 2:30 and they still hadn't opened. No response from their social media either. Asshats. It seems to be a British & European thing about not posting hours or adhering to posted hours. Ahh, we'll open when we feel like and close when we can't be arsed to stick around. Then they wonder why they are going out of business. 

Moaning all from the boring borough. 

NTSC, Secam, PAL. Takes me back 40 years to my television/radio BA days. Today's trivia, the frame rate for each system was originally based on the AC current frequency. NTSC being 2 complete scans per second giving 30fps. That is why it has a lower resolution of 525 lines as it only has 1/30th of a second to create a single "frame" With that, the colour signal had to be stabilised in a single line of colour bars in the video blanking area of the frame. Any disruption to that meant wonky colour. Hence the name Never Twice Same Colour. 

PAL and Secam on the other hand were 25fps based on 50hz power. More time meant more lines per frame and a more stable picture. The data for Ceefax etc, could be embedded in the much larger blanking interval. It also meant converting 24fps cine film to video was more robust than converting to 30fps. Today's digital formats are either 50fps or 100fps depending on the resolution. It's amazing the crap one remembers from years ago, yet I can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. 

Back to yesterday's clinician appt stupidity. Another read of the "phone" consultation is asking for a urine sample. Yes they are literally now taking the p*ss. I have a feeling the admin person used the wrong document template. Wish me luck while I try to sort this out over the phone. The Jewish community has the perfect Yiddish word for this. Schemozzle. 

Coffee, meeting, coffee, meeting, lunch, meeting, etc  Enjoy the day.

9 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

Any food that includes Gold as an ingredient should be banned in this Bear's opinion; there will come a time when such materials are soooooooo scarce we'll look back and think "what the f. were they playing at??"

Incidentally,

4 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

Gold is inert and passes harmlessly through the digestive system.  If we are that short of it in times to come it could be recovered at the other end of its journey 💩 although it would be a sh1t job 🥺

I have visions of 1800's style prospectors sitting downstream from the sewage works panning for gold nuggets. <blech>

24 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

Does anyone have a spare 10m ethernet cable we could borrow this evening?  

 

Asking for a friend ..... 😇

B*gger. I just used up most of the last of the cable roll I had. Could have done one for you. <grrr>

Back from the tulips. Knackered. Need another holiday to recover from this last weekend. Received an appointment finally for my elbow. It has only taken 9 months, 2 GP visits, multiple X-ray & Ultrasound appts, 1 physio, bloodwork, 1 rheumatologist drilling a hole to extract a sample, before they've finally allowed me to see a surgeon. But wait there's more...... Dated 2 days later is a letter for a phone consultation appt with a different rheumatologist for the same issue. (Are they like busses and can I expect a third appointment?) 

On that note, time for a break. Enjoy what's left of the day. 

Greetings from the boring borough. 

Happy Star Wars Day.

Don't get me started on GP surgeries. Ours spent 4 years at the bottom of the Bexley satisfaction table. Trouble is for us, none of the positive rated practices are accepting new patients. I can see why it is so bad as they have over 12,000 registered patients. 3 GPs and a host of revolving door locums and temps. No wonder the gestapo are hell bent on making it as difficult as possible to get an appointment. Just checked online again. Nothing available in the "window". Which means they have yet again failed to update the site provider with their schedule. <sigh> I'm still trying to get my test results from 4 weeks ago, despite the GP saying they'd book me in as soon as the results came back. <sigh> BUPA won't help as it is all knee and elbow related and that is pre-existing from before my employer signed me up. <sigh> I may decide to start identifying as a poodle and go the local vet instead. At least I can get same day appointments there. <insert profanity here> 

Little else to moan about. It is a Wednesday that feels like a Tuesday but in fact is a Friday. A 5 day break coming up and I'm looking forward to escaping. 

Enjoy the day.