Early Risers.

[BokStein]

25 minutes ago, New Haven Neil said:

Eveingk.

 

A sudden hit of warmth late afternoon here, after a rather grey day.  

 

Tea?  Hate the stuff, don't even like the smell of it. Euuww.

 

I think the Brit HiFi market had a backlash to the sort of equipment shown above, chatty cheap looking with minimal controls (My late lamented Musical Fidelity amp had a volume control and an input selector - nowt else) but high quality components.  It only recently died after many many years constant use.  Looked awful though, as does its accompanying tuner which I still use.  I also have a Kenwood AV amp which has a mesmerising array of buttons, which I never touch. Just turn it on. So why does it need.......ah, I see, buttons score cool points!

 

Another afficianado of the Music Fidelity marque, I see! My own (customised - had the rack fitting removed!) PreAmp has, alas, not seen the light of day since I moved jobs in 1997. (My EAR509 monoblock power amps find themselves in a similar state!) Where one of my B&W DM11 speakers disappeared to in my most recent move is another question.

 

One day, I might find myself able to re-build the system, but that may remain a mere pipe-dream for now!

 

[Ozexpatriate]

50 minutes ago, TheQ said:

I found you could get Liptons tea hot or iced which I quite liked

Iced tea is ubiquitous in US diners. Usually it is offered unsweetened and being cold and usually served in a glass full of ice, resists having sweeteners dissolved.

 

In the south, sweet tea (where the sweeteners, usually sugar, are added while the tea is hot) is preferred. It's quite delicious in hot weather but a diabetic's nightmare.

 

Popularized in golfing circles, the "Arnold Palmer" is half unsweetened iced tea / half lemonade, which if made well is surprisingly good. In this case "lemonade" is not a carbonated drink but a sweetened lemon juice and water. The quality of lemonade offered is infinitely variable. Freshly made it is wonderful but on an industrial scale it could come powdered or be mixed with syrups in a soft drink / soda dispenser.

 

Despite the hot climate, iced tea, while known, isn't really a big thing in Australia. For tea, hot tea is preferred (where it hasn't been supplanted by posh coffee). Australia continues to offer really outstanding lemon soft drinks. Lemon squash and Solo brands come to mind.  Maybe I'm partial, but there is little to compete with many Australian sodas (including passionfruit and ginger beer), though Mexican, sugar-cane sweetened piña (pineapple) soda comes close.

[PhilJ W]

Afternoon/evening all from Estuary-Land. All this talk of tea and no one AFAIK has mentioned warming the pot. An essential part of making a pot of tea IMHO. I also use 'real' tea, the sort that comes as loose tea not in bags that are the work of the devil. So called fine leaf is almost as bad being ground to dust, the water must be allowed to circulate amongst the leaves so large leaf it must be. I use a teapot with an infuser, which makes using leaf tea as easy as tea bags. Another reason for not using tea bags is that they are nearly all made of plastic, bad for the environment as many councils will not allow them to be put in the green waste and they have to go for landfill. You can get infusers now that fit into a mug so you can now make a single mug of tea without resorting to tea bags. Collected the car this afternoon, its now MOT'd for another year. Only needed two new front tyres though the ones on there would have passed the treads were down a bit to much for my liking. I replaced all the tyres about six years ago (the cars 12 years old) because the original tyres were getting feathered, the rubber drying and cracking around the edges. The only advisory was a pinhole in the exhaust, luckily in the cheapest and easiest part to replace, a flexible pipe connecting the manifold to the rest of the system. 

[J. S. Bach]

6 hours ago, J. S. Bach said:

Time to shut up, I think. The lawn mower awaits my presence as operator of the day.

Well, that did not happen! Too much time spent somewhere! Plus the temperature was rising beyond the comfort level and corn beef was beginning to call me. Tomorrow will be the day.

[polybear]

3 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

........several nail bars have gone although the one we use hasn't so I might be able to get a pedicure before too long. 

 

A pedicure??

You're a railway modeller.  Files, sandpaper, paint brushes, cutters.

Job done.....

[Dave Hunt]

I'm with NHN regarding tea - horrible stuff no matter how it's made although Jill reckons that I make a nice cuppa even though to me it tastes like, err, tea and therefore horrible. Hence MiL used to say that I couldn't really be English. I am, though, a consumer of coffee on an industrial scale and when I went to work in California I was at first delighted to share an office with a USN Commander who had a coffee pot on the go all the time. Unfortunately the operative bit was 'all the time' and the coffee he made would not only keep you awake for about 48 hours on one cupful but could be used to repair the road. Plus he regarded anyone who, like me, put milk in coffee as a pussy (his word) but eventually we came to an unspoken arrangement that the office really needed a kettle and small fridge as well as the coffee machine. The whole time we were in America and whenever we have been back there Jill has bemoaned the lack of 'proper' tea but I have always regarded it as the coffee drinker's place to be. Later on in Australia I discovered how good iced coffee could be, especially at the small coffee bar near the western entrance of Wynyard station in Sydney.

 

That is not to say, however, that there aren't other beverages that I appreciate, such as the small libation that is currently near my right elbow and which came out of a bottle labelled Talisker.

 

Have a quiet and peaceful night everyone, unless you are antipodean in which case g'day.

 

Dave  

[tigerburnie]

Evening all......................nice walk round the fields to cool off, 22 degrees is way too hot for us after living north of Hadrians wall for a while. Grass was cut in preparation for a weekend bar-b-q and a lot of loafing around has been done. SWMBO was conveyed to Dundee Ninewells hospital to have a dodgy freckly thing looked at, seems to linked to her arthritis, so that's one worry out of the way, she's been quiet for a few days, now back to her usual noisy self.

Might go out with the camera tomorrow to see what wildlife is around on the sea cliffs.

Grandsons will want some things moving on parallel bits of metal, so some precautionary testing will have to take place before the weekend.

[AndyID]

5 hours ago, 45156 said:

Has anybody else noticed that Yorkshire tea seems to be a little more variable of late than it used to be?  I have noticed that some batches are stronger, and have a slightly different (but not unpleasant) taste - I have not changed the way I brew it - been the same process and teapot as it always was.

 

I think it depends on the how much of it comes from the plantations on the moors versus the dales. Getting the blend just right is quite tricky.

[AndyID]

18 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

A pedicure??

You're a railway modeller.  Files, sandpaper, paint brushes, cutters.

Job done.....

 

Dremel is the way to go - for dogs anyway. I've never tried it on Shona. I don't think she'd be too happy about it.

[AndyID]

Mum was a real "Tea Jenny". When we were in Mallorca she got so ticked off that on one famous occasion she stormed the hotel bar and showed the bar tender how to make a proper cup of tea.

 

Generally speaking she was not a pushy woman but she had her limits when it came to tea.

[PhilJ W]

9 minutes ago, AndyID said:

 

I think it depends on the how much of it comes from the plantations on the moors versus the dales. Getting the blend just right is quite tricky.

Tea is actually grown and sold in the UK. In Cornwall in particular. Churchill during the war suggested that it be grown commercially to free up shipping space but the idea had to be dropped when it was found that the tea bushes did not produce a viable crop until they were five years old.

[newbryford]

8 hours ago, J. S. Bach said:

Whoever owns the green bus better czech that tire, it is low on air.

 

 I think it's been in that yard for many months without turning a wheel.

[Ozexpatriate]

2 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

Churchill during the war suggested that it be grown commercially to free up shipping space

Makes you wonder how much tea is at the bottom of the ocean courtesy of the Kriegsmarine. I can imagine a reporter writing one of those silly comparisons like "enough tea leaves to make xxx Olympic-sized swimming pools of brewed tea". There are certainly a lot more useful cargoes littering the surface of the seabed.

 

Tangentially related to the Kriegsmarine, there's a lot of buzz around release of the Tom Hanks' movie "Greyhound" (based on C.S. Forester's "The Good Shepherd") about a convoy escort. It's on some streaming service that I don't subscribe to so no input from me.

 

[newbryford]

5 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

 

This is either something designed by a committee after a long (and generous) liquid lunch or by a former Soviet Bloc tractor factory now trying to make consumer goods.

 

 

 

Or a "Top Gear" challenge.........

[Coombe Barton]

We are living in interesting times.

 

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2020/07/16/conference-day-four/

[laurenceb]

Night awl

[Barry O]

6 hours ago, 45156 said:

Has anybody else noticed that Yorkshire tea seems to be a little more variable of late than it used to be?  I have noticed that some batches are stronger, and have a slightly different (but not unpleasant) taste - I have not changed the way I brew it - been the same process and teapot as it always was.

Depends on what colour the box is and also what your water is like .Ours have been  fine but we buy it in a bulk bag.

 

Baz

[tigerburnie]

G'night all

[monkeysarefun]

9 hours ago, Gwiwer said:

Even some of the humans want to kill you.  I offer as evidence the rivalry between Carlton and Collingwood fans, those who will fight tooth (they only have one left  ) and nail over the best beer, anyone who won't share anything with his mate / neighbour / family and the rivalry between Holden and all other car manufacturers. 

 

Plus the not insignificant human effluent on the city streets of a hot night over-full of alcohol and refused entry to any further topping-up establishments.  When I left Melbourne one method being employed to manage drunken on-street violence was a 1am lock-in; you couldn't get into clubs or pubs after that time but were welcome to remain there if already in until they chucked you out any time between 3 and 6 in the morning.  

 

No not everything in Australia wants to kill you.  Just make sure you drive a Holden ute, barrack for someone lower-profile such as Gold Coast Suns, always have a slab on ice for when mates drop round and never EVER run out of smokes

 

 

Hmm, you've just cut and pasted this from the Victorian Governments "The best things about Melbourne" page! 

 

(though I DO have a Holden V8 ute - and Collingwood beat Geelong  5.5 (35) 8.9 (57) last night...)

[Barry O]

Right

 

Umpire meeting attended.. the lunatics are now out of the asylum..  Covid..pah I am invincible!.. erm no you are not!

 

In other news.. Ian Able hopes to be back soon his bursitis is still around.. GDB is Ok

Baz

[Barry O]

Goodnight all!

 

Baz

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[Tony_S]

Aditi has got her spectacles back. She said the old ones were ok as long as she kept her head  still. So we sat and watched Turandot (from New York) this afternoon. I only knew it as the opera from which “Nessus Dorma” came. I didn’t know about the story. After that and a trip to the optician we finished dinner just in time to watch the National Theatres stream of “Amadeus”. I had seen the film of the play but hadn’t seen the stage production before. After all that lot I may just watch a bit of cricket tomorrow. 
The Tom Hanks “Greyhound” is on Apple TV. Our television has the app for AppleTV but we don’t have a subscription to it. For some reason my mobile phone service supplier has given me six months free subscription to Disney+ channel.

I will try and finish the slot car kit (a Matra 670) tomorrow. The replacement part arrived today. 
Tony

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone 

 

Well despite this morning’s miss givings, I did manage to finish assembling the bench, I even managed to sit out on it and have my mid morning muggertea! I do wish I’d taken a photo before work had started, but it wasn’t unlike the one that Jamie has just finished, anyway, here it is. 

 

 

 

Once I’d finished that I carried on with the turntable control panel. My first task was to plug the lead into both the socket at the rear of the panel and the socket on the turntable and then test each core from end to end, I’m pleased to say this test was successful. I then made a start on planning the layout of the switches, and LEDs etc. This took quite a bit of time, with lots of amendments were needed to get everything looking right. Once happy with everything, I got a small offcuts of MDF and drilled some holes to the same spacing that I’d got on the panel fascia, then fitted switches and LEDs to make sure that not only did they fit, but they looked ok. Thankfully everything fitted well and looks good, so over the weekend I’ll drill lots of holes in the fascia. By the time I’ve finished drilling holes for 28 switches, 45 LEDs and a rotary switch, it’ll look very similar to a colander!

[BSW01]

Goodnight all