Early Risers.

[roundhouse]

good morning from a sunny Exeter. A good journey past the Stones on the A303 yesterday morning and then a detour to find a samll brewery near Chard down veey narrow lanes. My other half nearly had kittens many a time down these lanes as she does not like them at all but I am OK with them apart form her panicking distracting me driving and we did not find the brewery either. Took he doen more narrow lanes form Seaton to Beer and on to Branscombe before getting back on wider roads ot Exeter. Made the mistake of joining the M5 / as normal few miles of queuing to get onto the A30 with yet more road works being started with cones going out for 8 weeks or so over the main Summer holiday season.

 

Parked up at St Davids and took over half an hour to try and pay online or by phone so in the ned used the ticket machine despite signs saying to use the previous two methods. I then needed the loo and the barrier staff in the station were kind enough to let me use the gents along the main platform. Station was the quietest that I have ever seen with with the buffet and WH SMiths shuttered along with the shops on the approach to the station.

 

Then it was to the Imperial for a few pints till we could check into the hotel. A couple of nice dark ales. Fairly empty in that huge Spoons and the first time that we used their app to order. It was quicker going to the bar in the orangery but different ales on the app to those at the orangery bar as the other two bars aren't open for queuing.

 

After check in at the hotel we had a wander around town. The model shop near the steel bridge is closing down and had a queue outside so we didnt get in to see what discounted stock was left.

 

Most pubs in the city are still closed with a favourite looking closed down with the interior being ripped out. Even the Great Western hasnt reopened yet so no Dartmoor Jail ale for my other half.

 

We did get into the Exeter Brewery which now opens its bar on Thursday and Friday evenings.

 

We had food in the Mill on the Exe then over the river to finish in the Thatched House.

 

A good evening in the end.

 

Today we go for a long walk along the canal and river to Topsham.

[Barry O]

Ey up!

Sunny morning here so far. Herself is off to provide scoring assistance for a friendly cricket match today. My umpiring skills are not required. However, the Leagues are starting to realise they will be very short of umpires for their half season (11 week) leagues. Perhaps they should of realised that a lot of umpires are over 70 and have particularly varieties of things wrong with them to abstain from umpiring at the moment. I won't decide until I see if the League provide meaningful guidance to cover the guides sent by the ECB and the Association of Cricket Officials. I doubt they will so it may mean that I won't be umpiring. Strangely enough I don't miss cricket at the moment.  

 

Mugatea to be drunk, time to kick start Saturday. 

 

Have as good a day as you can. Hopefully we will hear from one or two of our missing ERs.

 

Baz

[roundhouse]

Breakfast in the orangery in the Imperial. Love this part of the building. Just a shame that you can no longer walk in via the garden from the station as its locked and you ha e to walk all the way around to the front of the building

[TheQ]

Mooring Awl,  inner Temple Hare, 

Not too bad a nights sleep,  4+2+1 hours. 

 

There's just been a piece on TV about  a young girl who did some of the maths proving 8 smaller guns were better than 4 bigger guns in a Spitfire.  In it they showed a mechanical calculator of they type she used in 1938...

I was taught to use the same model at school in 1970!!! Then we never saw it again and had to use log tables etc. 

 

This mornings patrol was with a much happier Ben the changeable Collie,  he was happily following scents around the garden till he found a ball.. Kick the ball dad kick the ball... Charge!!!! 

Scattered clouds but a bit cool out there. 

 

I've been following a long discussion on Rule 17 of the Racing Rules of Sailing,  170 posts and I still wonder if some of them in the discussion have bothered to read the rules.

If a boat clear astern becomes overlapped within two of her hull lengths to leeward of a boat on the same tack, she shall not sail above her proper course while they remain on the same tack and overlapped within that distance, unless in doing so she promptly sails astern of the other boat. This rule does not apply if the overlap begins while the windward boat is required by rule 13 to keep clear.  

 

Very shortly it will become expensive..  Landrover insurance time.. 

 

Time to... Wait till 09:00

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 11, 2020 by TheQ

[Tony_S]

6 hours ago, AndyID said:

 

The Vette must have been a bit of a mess. 

At least there was a nearby auto salvage  get some parts...

[TheQ]

I'm amazed,  press 2 for renewals. Beep.. And  Human speaks.  Amazing for a big insurance broker on a Saturday morning,  I was expecting 10 minutes of musick.

 

Time to go make some sawdust

 

Edited July 11, 2020 by TheQ

[Tony_S]

Morning all.

Bright and breezy here, well at least the weather is.

At school in the I960s I was taught how to use a mechanical calculator. We were told that everyone should know how to use such a device as it would be useful for the world beating technological future awaiting us. 
Not a lot happening today, no deliveries expected. Perhaps I will cut my hair.

Tony

[southern42]

3 hours ago, chrisf said:

Greetings one and all

 

Let me begin with CDs and in-car music.  I agree with Flavio about the tangible aspect and have wondered more than once in the past how you get someone to autograph a download.  I have little experience of streaming services such as Spotify.  Most of the music that I go for is definitely at the minority/obscure end of the spectrum and it was no surprise when some gentle readers professed never to have heard of much of my Top and Second 10s.  The music that I like is often so niche that I come to know the perpetrators personally.  I'm sure we all have discerning taste and that we do not all discern the same things.  FYI, the two most recent additions to my CD collections are by Sam Carter, an up and coming singer-songwriter who is also part of a modern folk-rock band called False Lights, and Calan, a delightfully noisy band from Wales.   I may not do it today but it will not be long before I go shopping for a modest CD player.  A generation ago it might have been called a ghetto blaster.  Today, I'm told, we do not blast ghettos but live with them in peace and harmony.

 

I should have been in Bristol this weekend for Pride.  Last year 18,000 of us marched through the city centre and it was just as much of a blast as it had been the year before with a mere (?) 12,000 marchers.  That had been the start of a life-changing sequence of events to which I shall return.  Meanwhile, there are persistent suggestions that those who rule us will soon insist that we all wear facial masks.  Perish the thought.  If they were at all effective, would there not have been more adorning powerful faces before now?

 

Before I get into more trouble, I drew much reassurance from the kind and sympathetic reception given to my post yesterday.  Thanks, folks.

 

Chris

 

Calan.  We first saw them some years ago, in Caernarfon, then followed this up with another in Bangor.  We had booked their latest gig up here...but covid got in the way...next scheduled concert in Caernarfon, 11 December.

 

One of my favourites.

 

Edit.  The Welsh lines roughly translates as:

Sgrech y storm mewn gwewyr : The storm screams in pain

Mellt yn rhwygo’r awyr : Lightening strikes the air

 

 

 

Edited July 11, 2020 by southern42

[tigerburnie]

41 minutes ago, TheQ said:

I'm amazed,  press 2 for renewals. Beep.. And  Human speaks.  Amazing for a big insurance broker on a Saturday morning,  I was expecting 10 minutes of musick.

 

Time to go make some sawdust

 

Are the chisels calling?

[iL Dottore]

15 hours ago, polybear said:

...I was aware of the leaves, but what designates "end of season"?

According to my GP friend, the rhubarb that is left to grow the longest, and therefore harvested the latest, would be the “end of the season“ rhubarb and has the highest concentration of oxalic acid in the stems. Which is, apparently, why you can only buy fresh rhubarb in the supermarkets around here for a limited time only.

 

A rather ghastly day awaits: Mrs iD has instructed me that, in the absence of our cleaning lady, I have bathroom and kitchen cleaning duties. Mrs iD, being a good Swiss, has very definitive ideas about the correct way of cleaning such parts of the house. waving a soapy rag at the porcelain will certainly not do the trick. Porcelain will be sterilised, cleaned and dried; chromed taps and hardware will be washed, dried and polished; liquid soaps will be topped up and nozzles cleaned and the WC will be submitted to the highest possible hazmat clean up protocols.
 

Mrs iD, of course, is nowhere to be found as she is off giving a first aid course. I am therefore left with (1) cleaning duties, (2) dog exercising duties, (3) Patisserie duties – I have to prepare some fruit tarts for tomorrow and (4) the usual dinner creation and preparation. So much for a quiet and restful Saturday.

 

I now must excuse myself as I must respond to the siren call of the sanitary ware demanding their weekly ablutions.

 

iD

Edited July 11, 2020 by iL Dottore
Typo

[Barry O]

my travel insurance for the next 12 months has just paid itself.. wonder how it did that??

 

Had my first appointment of the season. It is in Bradford and is a "hot spot" may just decline that!

 

Fred Karno and his army have appeared to paint the rendering on a next doors neighbours house. The ladder looks dodgy..the lad climbing it is not sure footed... could be a recipe for disaster!

 

Bacon butty consumed so time to .. get some "stuff" sorted!

 

Baz

[BSW01]

Good morning everyone 

 

A sunny start here in the northwest of England today as well. Breakfast is now but a distant memory and after spending a few minutes applying the last coat of varnish to the shelving, I'm off to the workshop. 

I may be some time! 

 

Stay safe, stay sane, enjoy whatever you have planned for the day, back later 

Edited July 11, 2020 by BSW01
Typo

[BokStein]

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

A rather ghastly day awaits: Mrs iD has instructed me that, in the absence of our cleaning lady, I have bathroom and kitchen cleaning duties. Mrs iD, being a good Swiss, has very definitive ideas about the correct way of cleaning such parts of the house. waving a soapy rag at the porcelain will certainly not do the trick. Porcelain will be sterilised, cleaned and dried; chromed taps and hardware will be washed, dried and polished; liquid soaps will be topped up and nozzles cleaned and the WC will be submitted to the highest possible hazmat clean up protocols.

 

Mrs iD, of course, is nowhere to be found as she is off giving a first aid course. I am therefore left with (1) cleaning duties, (2) dog exercising duties, (3) Patisserie duties – I have to prepare some fruit tarts for tomorrow and (4) the usual dinner creation and preparation. So much for a quiet and restful Saturday.

Don't forget to wash / sanitize your hands between tasks!

 

[PhilJ W]

Morning all from Estuary-Land. Just spent an hour catching up on I-player A House Through Time. I had missed the last episode and decided to catch up whilst it was still available. The cottage I had in Burnham-on-Crouch was built in 1862. I managed to find a bit of the history but sadly not a lot as this was before the days of the internet. My grandparents house in St. Leonards was even older, built in 1815 of massive sandstone blocks, the nearby quarry were the sandstone came from was turned into a small park a few years after the house was built and is still a park. Both properties were built as terraced 2 up 2 down workmens dwellings and had scullery and bathroom extensions added later.

[Tony_S]

We saw this house being built. Never thought we would live here! 

[The Stationmaster]

G'day all.

 

The house we live in was planned by me (in terms of room size and floor plan plus some of the exterior details - so guess who gets the blame if something, anything, is found unsatisfactory (even if it has nothing to do with me).  The house one grandfather lived in was probably 18th century, if not earlier, and had the luxury of a tap just outside the back door - that was its only mains service.  My other grandparents lived in much greater luxury - because the dairy had been at one end of the building they actually had a tap indoors and when their new milking parlour was built in the early 1950s electricity was to hand so they also had it installed in the house - 100% visible wiring fixed to the walls etc so the 19th century plaster needed no attention or chasing out and redoing.  In both cases of course the toilet was outside and one cooked on a calor gas fuelled cooker while the other used a coal fired kitchen range.  All sounds terribly old fashioned now but to them it was everyday life - as it was to use when we stayed there.

 

The weather is not to bad today and the G word has been more than mentioned - instructions have been issued regarding dealing with some of the long grass near the greenhouse which is crowding the outdoor tomato plants.  As for oxalic acid in rhubarb I wonder if it could be used to make something akin to Exmover for cleaning really ingrained dirt of the cars?  In fact it leaves n me wondering if rhubarb had a part in the manufacture of Exmover of which oxalic acid was a major component?  Strange how things come together like that?

 

Pasties are promised for dinner tonight, whoopee (sorry Baz).  Mushrooms have been acquired for my lunch by the Tesco foraging expedition.

 

Have a good day one and all and stay safe.   By the way it has often been said that one reason why masks were not recommended at an early stage in the Covid tale is because there was fear the NHS would be short of supplies.  I suspect the far bigger reason was that it was realised many people would refuse to wear them and the hand washing might get overlooked if folk thought masks were the real deal and nothing else was needed.

[PhilJ W]

When it comes to old houses I would mind living in one of these:-

https://www.abroadintheyard.com/12-buildings-today-around-when-richard-iii-on-throne/

I always thought that number 2 on the list was the oldest.

Edited July 11, 2020 by PhilJ W

[iL Dottore]

6 hours ago, Barry O said:

...Fred Karno and his army have appeared to paint the rendering on a next doors neighbours house. The ladder looks dodgy..the lad climbing it is not sure footed... could be a recipe for disaster!...

Oh, I don’t know. It could be, equally, the recipe for an afternoon‘s light weight entertainment. Perhaps, to spice up matters, a small wager could be made with Mrs Barry O as to how long it will take until the first mishap occurs.  
Depending on how the events of the afternoon unfold, you may also be fortunate enough to be able to submit, once the events of the afternoon have ended, an Observer’s entry for the Darwin Awards Website.

5 hours ago, BSW01 said:

...I'm odd to the workshop.....I may be some time! ...

I am assuming that this is a straightforward typographical error. If it is not, then it sounds like an exquisitely complicated psychological condition requiring considerable therapy often with specialised equipment that - to the uninitiated and uninformed - may resemble railway modelling material.

5 hours ago, BokStein said:

Don't forget to wash / sanitize your hands between tasks!

 

Fear not, Mr Stone, today I am scheduled for my quarterly bath and scrub down so I will finish the day with everything – including myself - clean enough for you to eat your dinner off (actually, re-reading that It does create the erroneous impression that I would also be clean enough for you to eat your dinner off me. Now that may “float your boat”, but it’s not for me – no matter how squeakyclean I would be)

5 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

...The cottage I had in Burnham-on-Crouch was built in 1862. ....My grandparents house in St. Leonards was even older, built in 1815 of massive sandstone blocks...

I know that they can be horrendously expensive, complicated and time-consuming to bring up to current standards for household properties, but there is something very appealing about older properties that seems to be absent from practically everything built since 1945. The less said about the brutalist architecture of the 50s and the ghastly inner-city prestressed concrete monstrosities and tower blocks of the 60s and 70s, the better. I know that the 1930s semi and the Edwardian “Villa“ (basically a fully detached house) have been dismissed as “speculators rubbish“ by the architectural intelligentsia, but the something very appealing about these properties. And certainly the housing designed and constructed quickly and as cheaply as possible in order to house the burgeoning working class can be pretty shoddy, but much of the same type of housing stock was built to very high standards and have become much sought after properties.
As an afterthought, whilst much of the housing stock built in the 60s and 70s has not worn well, that housing stock that has worn well, such as the apartments at the Barbican, are infinitely preferable to the ghastly little boxes that nowadays are being thrown up as quickly and cheaply as possible (yet sold at eye watering prices). Oddly enough, and as far as I can tell, all those architects wanting to be “innovative”, “daring” with their client’s projects seem to be living in very desirable examples of period property or in those modern properties that none but the most well heeled can afford to think about.
 

Well, lunchtime is now over and I am off to start in the kitchen. I certainly will be sometime...

 

iD

Edited July 11, 2020 by iL Dottore
Typo

[Rugd1022]

A'noon all,

 

I'm still relying on a stack / stash of favourite CDs in the car and I usually keep one or two in rotation in my work bag, the outgoing fleet of Freightliner vans all have CD players but some of the new ones don't. Ennio Morricone is top of the heap at the moment with some other soundtracks getting a look in, I find it very relaxing listening to this kind of music at night on the way to or from a twelve hour ballast job in the middle of nowhere!

 

I've yet to master 'ripping' / 'downloading' and don't currently own a smartphone anyway, so 'old school' it is until further notice. 

 

Edited July 11, 2020 by Rugd1022

[PhilJ W]

My current house was built in 1959 and is not too bad, no major problems with the construction. The house I had in Romford that was built around the same time was better in some respects but that house is scheduled for demolition to make way for those ghastly little boxes as mentioned by Flavio. Six of those boxes replacing a family house and garden. The best built property I have lived in was the aforementioned 1862 cottage.

[Florence Locomotive Works]

6 hours ago, jamie92208 said:

Morning all from a sunny Charente, which mercifully  is still a long way from an Ikea. The boss is still asleep but last night orders were posted that today should be a day of rest. I wonder if this state of affairs will continue.  

However there are a couple of tasks. The shorter ine is to shovel a third of a ton of sand out of the trailer onto a board and then cover the sand to prevent various deposits from feral cats and other creatures. The sand will comee in useful some day, but the trailer is needed rather sooner.  The other task is to monitor the leakage from the pool. Even though it was only filled to 6cms depth 23 square metres of area means that there was approx 1.3 tonnes of water in it. I may have to cut a larger hole in the liner to asist it's exit.  Apart from those two tasks nothing else is planned so I may do some more photo scanning.  I'm now doing a year of negs and a year of slides at a time and am starting to get to the point where I took quite a lot of French railway scenes. Once there are plenty done I'll probably start another random railway photo thread for European railways. Eventualy I plan to do one for North and Central  American ones as well.  All good fun.

 

Anyway regards to all and Douglas I sincerely  hope that you haven't just acquired a new landlord following the Supreme Court ruling.  

 

Jamie

 

No new landlord has been acquired in recent past. At least to my knowledge.

[PhilJ W]

6 hours ago, polybear said:

 

Seven quid??  Now that's what I call a result.  Mine were £12 a time, and that was before C-19 kicked off.....

 

 

 

Pensioners rate.

[Tony_S]

I am quite relieved that our house is box like. Nice rectangular rooms are easier to decorate. Our previous house had timber cladding on the upper storey. I said whatever we bought next should be mainly brick. This house is brick and is not like others decorated with faux Elizabethan timbers or Georgian plaster mouldings. It isn’t pargetted either. My nephew in Sussex is beginning to look for a house. He doesn’t want anything that is going to require constant maintenance or requires massive energy consumption to keep warm, so I expect fairly modern.  The nephew moving to Zurich soon has a temporary room rented but the company he will work for are sending him details of various rental properties. One he liked was on a car less development. You leave your car at the edge of the development and cycle or walk to your apartment. 
Tony

[Florence Locomotive Works]

Morning all,

 

Checked the UPS website this morning, and they still think it’s Friday, so no news about the delivery. 
 

The house I live in was built in 1956 ( I think) but had an extra two garage bays, master bedroom, and what we call the “Library” added in 1989. My Grandparents house was built in 1921 by a ludicrously rich Oil Man for one of his, err, female associates?  The oil man died soon after it was finished and she lived there up until the Grandparents bought it off her in the early 60s. It still has the original cast iron and brick incinerator in the basement. 

[Tony_S]

Aditi wants to watch the New York Met opera Eugene Onegin being streamed this afternoon. I asked if it is about a sailing ship company. She said no and it was set in Russia and surely the name made that obvious. I said I thought perhaps it was Irish? 
Tony