Tony_S

12 minutes ago, polybear said:

Stop yer whingin' - I let you live didn't I??

My brother had to have the remains of a big toe nail removed. The nurse told him to look away and yanked it out. My brother said he assumed she told him to look away so she could apply some local anaesthetic . She said there wasn’t usually any need! 

44 minutes ago, New Haven Neil said:

 

I think Paneers do look fine in LT livery.  I have a Caramac version, actually two now I think about it, 4mm and 7mm scale versions!

I do have a red LT pannier but I bought that years ago. The new acquisition is a model of a crimson lake steam powered GWR vehicle. 

54 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

visited Basildon hospital on Friday f

The signage there isn’t that great. Fortunately (or perhaps not!) when I have to go to Basildon the departments I need have their own buildings so easy to find. 

9 minutes ago, J. S. Bach said:

Efrem Zimbalist, jr. His father was a great recording star in the acoustic record era.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efrem_Zimbalist

 

Juniors name remained lodged in my memory but I never bothered to find out why. Thank you. I wonder if I will ever get a chance to demonstrate my knowledge. We don’t go to pub quiz nights but I am sure I  would enjoy them, though one that was on in a local pub where we went for a meal had some rounds where I  would have scored zero. 

49 minutes ago, New Haven Neil said:

 

Happy Birthday to Midland Red Dave, may your singles never be compounded.  Or anyone mention the Midland used to paint their locos green.....🤡

My latest ex GWR model is in a rather attractive lined crimson lake livery. 

27 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

sometimes wonder if the UK would be better off building Euro-style (and quality) apartments

There isn’t much non green field building land round here. Most developments now are flats or apartment buildings where a small business or a couple of bungalows with big gardens previously occupied the land. There are two sorts of apartment buildings “executive development “ and “retirement”. Executive means near the railway station with communal gym in basement. Retirement means alarm pull cords and a communal lounge area. 

24 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

orthopods

I think I may have once confused arthropods and orthopods. Fortunately the person I was speaking to thought I was being amusing rather than stupid. 

7 minutes ago, The White Rabbit said:

but it can happen. 

Well even space flights with multiple redundant systems can go wrong. Once our Waitrose order van was crash damaged and the order was delayed but I wouldn’t criticise them. 
I think if @zarniwhoop is able to order his white asparagus from Ocado it will be despatched. It could of course be snatched from the air by an aggressive gull as it is carried to the  front door…

38 minutes ago, Dave Hunt said:

Today sees the celebration of my Sunset Strip* orbit of our closest star so I am being taken out for lunch with some friends near Oswestry. I may be some time.

 

* 77 for those not old enough to recall such things.

 

Best wishes to Beth and hopes for a swift recovery.

 

Dave

Happy birthday.

I can remember the TV series but I suspect I was in the room while my parents watched it rather than actively watching it. I  do remember the theme tune and also being intrigued that one of the actors had Jr after his name despite being an adult. Isn’t it odd what gets recalled.  

The technician from the solar power installers has been and gone. Nice chap, explained why he was replacing a couple of items in the fuse box , checked all our voltages and made sure our inverter had all its updates. 
We had  a chat about car chargers and air source heat pumps and he was on his way. 
Next big excitement of the day will be the food arriving at midday.
Tony 

3 minutes ago, The White Rabbit said:

Fate being an a*** and it's the same risk as with any of the online order suppliers... 

Though because Ocado use huge depots instead of local supermarkets to fulfill your order we have found them to be very reliable. The only problem we had was a robot error that packed frozen Yorkshire puddings instead of frozen croissants. With Ocado if you can order it, it gets delivered. Waitrose substitutes are things like perhaps an ordinary cucumber substituted for the organic free range, ethically sourced cucumber we of course order. 

Evening all.

The Moderna vaccine after effects have gone now and I feel normal (well, normal for me) again.  I went out and gave the garage another sweep so that the solar power system  technician doesn’t get bits of pink foam on his clothes. He will only be here for 30 minutes checking everything is ok.  The pink foam was from some scenic carving for the model railway layout in the garage. It doesn’t spread as much as the bobbly expanded polystyrene but it can still be messy.  Access to the batteries and inverter was still as it was when we had another battery fitted recently so I didn’t need to move much and there is nothing stored near the inverter and batteries . As the inspection is only 30 minutes I don’t think the roof panels get inspected. I assume if they haven’t fallen off and are generating the correct voltage they are ok. 
Tony

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

Thoughts?

Aditi’s Mum lives in a 2 bedroom penthouse flat. It is on the third floor of a purpose built building. It has a very large main bedroom with a spacious en suite. The lounge dining room is huge. The kitchen has plenty of workspace and enough space for a table for kitchen meals. There are roof lights so rain noise is higher than in a normal building and pigeons tap dance on them too. The managing agents keep the communal garden neat but seem to leave the external maintenance longer than I would like. The second bedroom and main bathroom are adequate  and there ismamroofmterrce where MiL can have a few plants. For someone with limited mobility when the lift is faulty (not often but lack of spares had caused long repair times. Parking is in dedicated spaces in an underground car park. 
Is  the proposed view from the garden apartment nice?  Is it next to a busy road? 
 

Aditi was looking at some properties (just out of curiosity, we are not moving) in Northamptonshire near her brother. One of the properties in the “offers over £1 million” section  didn’t appear to have a kitchen sink, just a half depth butler sink in the dining room attached to the  kitchen! 
We made a decision some time ago that we will stay here. It is easy to maintain and there would be no problem installing things like  stairlifts if we became less mobile. We had all the soffits and fascias replaced with upvc when they started to rot.some years ago. 
Aditi’s Mum and Dad bought the Enfield penthouse as their property in Nottingham was too big (both house and land) and incredibly expensive to heat. Aditi’s Dad died before they moved. Aditi’s Mum missed living in Nottingham but would have found it difficult to stay there without considerable support. 
 

12 minutes ago, Dave Hunt said:

As long as it does the job they can use whatever they like. I did know someone who tried to do it himself with cotton buds and made a right mess of his ear that ended up needing hospital visits so maybe that won’t be an option though.

 

Dave

It will be a mini vacuum  cleaner. Then a wallet extraction…

9 minutes ago, Dave Hunt said:

Off to the pharmacist shortly to have an earwax removal job, which will be only the second time I’ve ever needed it. Old age I guess (tomorrow will be my Sunset Strip birthday).

 

TTFN

 

Dave

It is all high tech now, no syringes.

2 minutes ago, Dave Hunt said:

for instance, we have a partially blocked radiator that needs attention but so far it has taken four months for him not to attend.

Years ago before we had the new boiler our old system was a bit prone to clogging. So,I thought I would take the big radiator from the lounge and flush it in the garden. It was only as it was coming away from the wall that I realised just how heavy a large double radiator was. Also no matter how well I thought I had drained it there was still some sludgy drips escaping. It isn’t a problem now but I am not doing that radiator again. Perhaps a smaller one, but the cleaning and sludge management routine seems to make anything more involved unnecessary. 

46 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

when I attended they were green with purple lettering,

Were those not the Suffragette colours?

34 minutes ago, TheQ said:

Parathyroid disease seems unlikely as he has none of the symptoms...

Robbie had some tumours removed from his parathyroid. His symptoms really only presented as drinking a lot and elevated calcium levels. He had a parathyroid hormone test (frozen blood sample sent to special lab) . The vet removed the tumours, they were malignant but slow growing. Back then the parathyroid blood test for dogs was quite new. I had the same test for my parathyroid and had to have it done at the hospital. Done at outpatients clinics routinely now. 

19 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

Day trip to Hipposhire then?

Aditi used to take her geography A level students to Hipposhire  for field trips as she wanted them to see somewhere that wasn’t like London. She had previously been to Malham in Yorkshire but it became difficult to book for some reason. Then while she was on maternity leave the college closed down geography (too expensive) so,rather than be unemployed she reinvented herself as a sociology lecturer. This didn’t involve fieldwork so was cheap enough for the college financial managers. At that time she had a 6 month old child, I was ill and unable to work . Then on top of teaching a new subject she had to become acting head of Psychology and teach the classes for a while as two lecturers departed without notice. She had to quickly come up to speed on deviance and abnormal psychology, while desperately hoping the college would employ someone.  

2 hours ago, polybear said:

There are some countries Bear wouldn’t go due to common sense for self preservation - and Columbia is one of them.

And when Columbia is the better option than Venezuela…

3 hours ago, polybear said:

There are some countries Bear wouldn’t go due to common sense for self preservation - and Columbia is one of them.

The list of places I don’t want to visit for holidays is quite long. Though I am amused at some places I visit frequently in London listed as “no go” areas usually by a certain type of American (though perhaps they are Russian trolls) social media user. 
My enjoyment of travel is enhanced by Aditi. She is just so enthusiastic about all kinds of thing and overcomes my “I would be quite happy at home”.  She has already started “revising “ for Iceland. 
 

1 hour ago, Phil Himsworth said:

Yesterday was rubbish, we hardly generated anything. We use a tariff with a good off-peak import rate over winter or a tariff with a good export rate over summer; while switching there is a period of neither, which exactly coincided with yesterday's cold and dark snap in the most expensive way possible. Rats!

We produced 15.6kWh yesterday. It was quite cloudy but with a few really sunny spells .

The people who installed our system are coming on Thursday to give it a “health check”as part of their after sales care service.  It should be ok as we had  an extra battery fitted by them a couple of months ago and they did some update checks and fitted a better WiFi device.