Archive for the 'Rambling on…' Category

The White Stuff

Posted by on November 18th 2007 in Rambling on..., Weather
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We have Snow! Not quite in abundance, but hey, any snow's good. Maybe we'll have a proper winter after all. Excellent!

 

 

 

 


Proto-Daleks

 


Not a partridge in a pear tree

 


Tracks

OK, so it's no great shakes to some folk, but here it's quite unusual at this time of the year.

What a difference a day makes

Posted by on November 13th 2007 in A bit of a rant, Great Escapes, Rambling on...
This morning, during those periods of time when working "on auto-pilot", I devoted a fair amount of time to deciding what to do with the three free weekends between now and the end of the year, weekends that I had reserved so that I could go away winter-walking for at least one of them. This coming weekend there'll be an OM meet up at Langdale, I would have been up for it but I've already declined the invitations to it because Chris is on call-out so I'm on kids-duty. But hey, I thought, I've got three more chances later in the year. So, this evening, Chris tells me that she's rearranged her night out with friends... it was to have been this coming weekend, but it's been postponed until the weekend after, so that's one of my weekends gone. Never mind, there are still two left. Being an organised sort of bloke, I cranked up the lappy and made the appropriate edits to the M$ Outlook calendar, at which point I was told to enter the details of Chris's work's Christmas Party... yep, it coincides with one of the two remaining weekends. Well, the choice was gone, I was down to just one weekend, so it was take it or leave it time. I declared that I would be going away for that one remaining weekend, hopefully to find some snow up in the Lake District. That satisfied feeling took over, at last there was a definite window of opportunity, a fixed date to plan for. In my mind I was already mulling over the map of the Coniston Fells and sharpening the axe and crampons. Wetherlam, Swirl How and Dow Crag would be mine. Chris looked at the calendar intently, studying the entries for her call-out commitments. From her briefcase she pulled out her ace of trumps, and played it... a revised call-out rota... wtf??? The one remaining weekend was consumed by a previously non-existent week of out-of-hours service for her employer, which means that I'm back in the childcare hot-seat. Chris can't figure out why I'm ranting at anything that moves, nor why I'm kicking things that don't.

Gravatars: few takers

Posted by on October 29th 2007 in Rambling on..., Site update, Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)

Well, by the looks if it, out of all the readers of this blog, only two have grabbed themselves free gravatars.

"Bad form", says I.

Who would be a paper-boy these days?

Posted by on October 26th 2007 in Mags and rags, Rambling on...

The dull rumble of the trolley on the pavement...

The sound of footsteps on the garden path...

The familiar squeak as the letterbox opens...

The sharp clang as it springs back to the closed position...

The heavy thud as the local weekly free-paper hits the floor.

Thud? Free-paper? Surely not.

Yep, this one:

But it only weighs in at 75g.

The reason for the thud?

All of this crap that's stuffed inside it:

Small wonder the folks that deliver this lot to each house have shoulders like tallboys and knuckles that drag on the ground. This lot weighs in at 922g, that's 2lb 1/4oz in old money.

Predictably, all of the associated crap went directly into the recycling bin.

What a waste of effort.

Oh, and the main feature on the front page of the free-paper? It's all about the local council's recycling scheme.

😕

Seasonal variations

Posted by on October 22nd 2007 in Rambling on...
I know that Duncan got an early sighting of essential wares for the festive season, but did I miss something? Has Christmas been re-scheduled this year?  

Deep Thought

Posted by on September 13th 2007 in A bit of a rant, Rambling on...
Maybe I'm being a bit dim, but how is it possible to have multi-grain corn flakes? Multi-grain flakes... yes, I can understand that concept, that would be flakes made from a range of different types of grain, one of which may or may not be corn... but multi-grain corn flakes? Is it possible to have multi-grain corn? Whatever, it still doesn't sound right.  

  While we're on the subject of confusion, how can a cinema matinée be an afternoon showing, when the word is derived from the French for "morning"? Finally, what's the point in providing a template for drilling the fixing holes for radiator brackets? Today I used one to fix a new radiator to the bathroom wall... after the brackets were screwed on, I used a spirit-level to check that the brackets were the same height, them put the rad on... the result? - a 4-degree slope on the radiator. OK, rad off, recheck brackets, rad back on, check seating of backstraps in bracket-slots, all's fine but got the same result. I downed-tools for 90 minutes, two ciggies and a cup of tea while confusion reigned, then I had a look at the back of the radiator to find that the tosspot manufacturer had welded the backstraps on in the wrong place. So now I've got to reposition one of the brackets to compensate for somebody else's shoddy workmanship. Feck! It's all too much. I need to take a break. Hopefully this coming weekend away in Wales will suffice.
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