Reply to: test please delete

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all, local time 1210

Sunny with wispy fluff. Currently 19 degrees with a high of 24 expected. Barometer at 1016 mBar.

Sunrise 07:42; Sunset 20:47 CEST

Two hours of meetings to kick off the working week. Now to try and time lunch to match when housekeeping will do the room.

[xoggoth]

^I had nice dream about summit, forget what. I shall avoid doing bluddy company accounts too close to bedtime, had a boring accounty nightmare the other night.

Just done Wordle in 2 goes! Lucky day I hope. Nowt on today, just walky and farting about in me garden.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Monday?

Wet.

Grey.

Wanly sunny.

Odd horizontal rainbow high in the sky further down the valley. Most curious.

Cool in here at 19.6 deg, 20 in the kitchen, 19 in the leanto.

994.5 mBar, 29.367 in Hg, 745.9 Torr, 14.424 psi, (unchanged), 68% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 13th of February 2020 eek, BR14 and vetran popped in, LM's HWMBO was cooking beans like there was no tomorrow (obviously prescient), NF was going shopping and I was watching "The Wrath of Kahn" again.

Today's dream before waking involved some peculiar radio thing that was monitoring something or other, most of it was semiconductor apart from the output which used a valve. No idea WTF that was all about.

Shopping trip to Morrisons done dusted washed dried sanitised & put away. It rained on me. A lot.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: The R4 thing about WWII in Asia. They mentioned that there is no monument to the Indian soldiers who fought in WWII. They didn't mention the statue to Chandra Bose who had support from dear old Adolph & Hirohito.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Big clouds out, though more blue higher up and with sunny spells when the gaps between are in the right place, and still very breezy. The current 14°C "feels like" 10° as a result; the expected high of 19° throughout the afternoon will be accompanied by rain of some description. The barometers are down a bit at 988/996mB

Monday. But what can you do

It's also the start of meteorological autumn, I do believe. But I reckon that's just a convenience invented to make the weather forecasters' spreadsheets easier to manage, and will await the Autumnal Equinox

[NickFitz]

Time for a change from sci-fi, so tonight I started reading The Collected Stories of Rumpole by John Mortimer. The title is something of a misnomer though; according to the introduction there are four novels and eighty short stories, and this contains twenty short stories. So they only collected a few

Anyway, it's quite entertaining. I'd never read any before, and nor have I seen the TV programmes. I always assumed the TV stuff was adaptations, but it turns out the Play for Today in the mid-1970s was actually the first appearance of the character, with the written versions following from that

Monday again tomorrow, and my first Monday working since the end of July. But as I mentioned the other day, I think the stuff I'm working on now will be more enjoyable; we shall see

Goodnight all

[ladymuck]

HWMBO and I arrived in Madrid within 5 mins of each other despite us both experiencing weather related delays.

On our stroll.back from dinner, I noticed the bar next door to our hotel had a good selection of gins. One of which being HWMBO's favourite. So we stopped in for one. The free pour was exceptionally generous and with a whole bottle of tonic was still "strong". At only €12 a drink, it's now our official gin joint for the next couple of days, until we move hotels and it becomes less practical.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been Chinese leftovers

Accompanied by a bit of Police Interceptors though I'm not too sure if I've seen this one before - let's face it, there's not a huge variety of things that happen in them

[ladymuck]

Forgot to say: it's 22 degrees ('feels like" 25) and cloudy here at Schipol.

[ladymuck]

Just about to leave Amsterdam to meet HWMBO in Madrid. All uneventful so far.

[sadkingbilly]

afternoon

paid ontime, new invoice raised, 21 days to go

oh, i appear to have upset the Blessed Bishop of Basel's snowflake sensitivities again.
oh, dear. I do so hate upsetting people accidentally.

[NickFitz]

Breakfast, or possibly brunch, was a couple of croissants with my morning coffee

No strawberry jam on them today as it had gone mouldy

[NickFitz]

This morning's Amazon delivery is an HD video camera on a long semi-flexible cable, designed for poking into dark corners and hidden spaces. In my case, it's mainly to make it easier to get the washing machine hoses through the hidden and unreachable space behind the corners of the cabinets to where they need to go, and also so I can check it isn't leaking or anything once it's pushed into the recess where it'll live

In the longer term, it'll make it easier to read the gas meter. That's in the farthest recess of the cabinets right in that corner, and every month I have to get on my knees, turn on the camera app on my phone, and reach as far as I can trying to get it lined up with the dial while it takes a picture. This then usually needs to be enhanced in various ways as it's too dark back there, but not quite dark enough to trigger the flash

I have seriously considered manufacturing a small periscope, as I can remember the instructions on how to do so in The Eagle Book of Things a Boy Can Do (or some similar title; it was definitely an Eagle tie-in) which my brother received one Christmas in, probably, the late 1960s and later handed down to me. I suspect I attempted more of the projects in there than he ever did, as he's never really been much of a tinkerer

But this thing solves that problem now

[NickFitz]

Luke 12: 20 always springs to mind:

Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?

Dunno what the RC version is, but that's hard to beat. .

Yes, you can't beat the King James Version! Apparently the current RC preferred rendering in the UK is the English Standard Bible, which has it as "Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" which doesn't have quite the same ring to it

[NickFitz]

Waiting at West Ealing station for my train to Heathrow Terminal 4. Then off to meet HWMBO in Madrid where I will reside for the next week.

Bon voyage!

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

It's a sunny day out there, with just a few little fluffy white clouds drifting by like a child's picture. They're drifting quite quickly though as it's windy, though not quite as windy as it got for a while last night. It's 17°C at the moment (but "feels like" 14° because of the wind) and expected to soon rise to the day's high of 19° and then stay there until an hour or so before sunset. The barometers are steady at 990/998mB

I forgot to mention last night that I'd finally got around to having a proper look at the new hoses Miele sent me. The water hose fitted on the machine is 1.5m and needs to be 2m, so they sent me one that's 3m, that apparently being the next size up. I assumed - and the lady on the phone who arranged it also seemed to think - that the installation chaps would have to remove the factory-installed hose from the machine, and fit the longer one.

However, closer examination reveals that the longer one is an extension, not a replacement. This makes sense, as the way the hose is attached at the machine looks both sturdy and not easy to meddle with, but it means that for the sake of needing an extra 50cm, I'll end up with a 4.5m hose!

The 2.5m drain hose (requirement: 1.7m) isn't so bad as that actually is a replacement, involving removing the factory-installed 1.5m hose from the machine and plugging this one in instead. It's quite simple to do as well, though I'll still leave it for the installation folk as they're supposed to be the experts