station cat

I didn't know you could get them off the shelf...................I'll pass thank you.  One was enough!

 

I shall be easily identifiable at Railex on Sat am as I will wear my hippo shirt and hippo socks and  be singing 'All I want for Christmas is a 16xx'.

 

Enough to make any fellow stand out from the crowd

Under normal circumstances maybe, but at a model railway exhibition?

I have just had a phonecall to say my mobile is fixed. Considering that I only took it in yesterday and the bloke reckoned it would be 3 days before he got the parts I reckon that's rather good going I shall have to go and get it tomorrow, then Railex on Sunday. Now all I need is a ticket for Wembley on Monday and my weekend will be complete.

Tesco change their layout plans often. For a long time I could work out what they had done, swapping food across an aisle or from end to end as it seemed to be consistent but I think now they have randomised the moves. They don't at our one change the signs over the aisles though which is irritating. Our local Sainsbury seems immune from such behaviour and there is the added fun of parking on the roof! I am easily pleased.

A lot of supermarket moves are seasonal - especially on fresh food. On fruit and veg for instance, you stock more salads in summer and more prepared veg in winter so the space needed for them changes - and then you need to move other stuff to keep those things together. So mushrooms, which you sell about the same amount of year round, tend to move around a lot.

Preserved food and non food are a bit more complicated. With that, the moves are normally done with the aim of achieving a more logical layout(!), fitting in more products, or increasing sales of certain things.

Yes that is a possibility that I hadnt though about as my other half does tend to know just about everything they like or dont like.

 

I wil mention that ot her.

 

Does anyone know of a large supermarket delivery chain that will take payment on delivery (not a problem if they dont but just makes it simpler especially if they only want ot deliver to the card holders address)

Could a neighbour help out? Ie the neighbour orders the shopping and is repaid in cash?

On the subject of Resusci-Anne, my best friend and I got into terrible trouble at school.  Our Anne didn't have arms and legs (apparently, they are an optional extra which the school couldn't afford) - we set about discussing whether or not it would be worth resuscitating from a quality of life point of view.  Black humour, I know - but the PE teacher didn't find it at all funny!

 

Have a good day everyone...

It's a good thing your PE teacher wasn't on my course then, because that was about the only bit of dubious humour we missed.

Today is may day off so I get to go over to Reading and try and get a new screen for my phone. Oh joy. Good thing they pay me extra for being a first aider isn't it?

Sometimes life is a bastard!  Other times however it isn't and on here we can laugh & cry, rant & rave,  sympathise & empathise. We can't alter the inevitable but we can make the most of whatever it is we've got, whether it's a little or whether it's a lot.

 

Blimey. it seems that Bob is (almost) becoming poetical - must be the beer. Another Pride please barman.

Well said that man - hugs, best wishes and condolences to them as need them (and the list does indeed seem to have suddenly lengthened).

On a related, but lighter, note I have just finished three days of first aid training. I'd encourage you all to go in for some kind of first aid training because it can, and does, save lives - one of the main things holding back the UK's survival rates for heart attacks etc is that so few people can do CPR.

The course was very informative and extremely funny. Assessment was via taskbook which had a combo of things the instructor must see you do, things you need to write down and multiple choice questions. The first multiple choice question was things you can do to prevent infection and one of the (incorrect) answers was 'remove casualties clothing'. The next three days were spent making jokes about removing clothing (no we don't really do political correctness where I work). We also had a great instructor who encouraged 'casualties' to behave realistically rather than providing helpful hints to their first aider. Thus people were sworn at, pretend puked over, and not allowed to touch. But I think I might win the amateur dramatics prize cos nobody else thought of choking on their vomit (which is actually a major risk).

RIP Coolio. What a gorgeous boy he was

I changed my mind at the last minute. Since it was apparently too close to call I thought I had better choose between Labour and the Tories rather than spoil my ballot paper - I thought vote share could become a bargaining chip.

Who else is still up then?

Dad had various trips down to BAC when he worked in the aircraft industry. A lot of the company's products (rivets & bolts) went into BAC aircraft. They supplied stuff to the worldwide aeronautical market, though Dad said some of the collaborative projects with France were "interesting".

I worked in the factory making and counting rivets in the summer of 1973. I wonder what they ended up in.

I am strangely delighted by the idea of somebody being employed to count rivets.

The end of the line - literally - in Croatia features in this post by Football Special http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/74140-croatia-to-london-by-train/

I've been eagerly awaiting the Austrian pics. And they were well worth waiting for.

Tank cars for me, lots of scope for weathering and interesting liveries

Best election leaflet so far - one from a 'local' councillor standing for re-election and saying 'I called today hoping to speak to you but you were out.   If you would like to speak to me blah, blah .......'

 

As I heard the leaflet shoved into our letterbox - about 10 feet from where I was sitting - I can but conclude that he is a former(?) meter reader and his habits have carried on in his role as a councillor, guess who I'm not voting for, and he left the bl**dy gate open.  Incidentally I see from the local 'paper today that a rather public split among one bunch of local councillors has made a 'Downfall' spoof - can't find it on the 'net alas.

Found it. It's got a lot of swear words in it...

I see Downfall is on this evening. I wonder what version of the Hitler rant will be included?

The Soviet spirit lives on!

Apparently the Slovenian border police are pretty awful. Just what I need on an overnight train journey.

In other news, having despaired at the cost of train tickets between Munich and Nuremberg (55€ for a one way!) I had decided t take the bus for 5€ instead. I went to book the bus just now and it had gone up to 13€. So I decided I'd have a quick look at train tickets again... I found one for 19€. Train it is then. Boy am I glad I checked.

Wait for someone to get knocked down and then calmly walk out and start feasting?

Those are the ones on motorways then?

I also saw some white stuff on the ground today but down in Bucks  it was cherry blossom

And the bluebells have come out

I had a lovely day watching the eventing at Hambledon today, though I did have to run after a loose horse at one point (didn't get close to catching it). I am going again tomorrow so I will post some pictures after that.

I think part of the problem that Aditi may have over summer leave is that she has three weeks of her leave and it has been decreed that someone has to be in the office over the summer teaching break which is the only time she can take the leave even though she doesn't teach now. What is difficult is that her boss said he won't authorise any staff leave until he knows that there are staff available to answer queries from potential students. This is going to cause conflict possibly as he isn't the teaching staff line manager, Aditi is ,and the only person whose leave entitlement her boss can hold up is hers!

We could possibly get a late booking but this year we want to go to a specific hotel in Austria and early booking helps.

No chance of a refundable/ pay on check in hotel booking?

I too am a mammoth, which is just as well given that my Dad is too. Nothing much to report here, just a nice afternoon spent playing with ponies.

I've also got a Lumix and agree with what other have posted about them. Very nice little cameras

All those examples of peculiarities in place names made me think about where similar phenomena occur in German! I know the dialects in the Moselle and Saarland regions have equally odd divergences between written and spoken forms of place names, such as "Hölzbisch" for Saarhölzbach, "Häschbre" for Hasborn, "Neinkeijje" or "Neinkerjje" for Neunkirchen; or for an example which could be totally misinterpreted by speakers of English, "Fëckinge" for Saarfels.

 

Outside the Saarland but in the same dialectal region, there is a placed called Grimburg, pronounced "Sóuschett."

 

There also is the fact of numerous place names in the Saarland in particular having a distinct French origin, so that in Saarlouis, for example, there are boroughs called Picard and Beaumarais – pronounced in turn like "PICK-erd" and "BOM-ma-ray" by locals.

I still haven't figured out how to pronounce the name of the place I stayed in last summer- Zirl, in the Austrian Tirol. I'm not sure i've got Ulm right yet either, it seems to be a far bigger word than the number of letters would suggest.

Ours work in teams.

 

One lands on the bird feeder and bounces about, causing seed to fall to the ground, where it is eaten by the rest of the team.

 

A while back the neighbour's cat sussed this and had one whilst it was feeding. Disembowelled it on the patio and then lost interest, so I had to dispose of it.

The bird or the cat?

Those slabs look familiar Pete, very similar to ours. The big ones certainly are heavy so my sympathies if you have to do all the moving and laying yourself.

I measure things in metric, imperial or both as is convenient. I'm quite capable of going to Jewsons and asking for a plank a foot wide and a meter long.