Squirrelking, stay off those roads please. They are where i do my road riding…..

I went down the route of trying to get custody of my boys. I made the mistake of letting her move out with the boys and unbeknownst to me she immediately movied in with the pr1ck she had a three year affair with.

Even with her parents on my side, proving she had been seriously morally corrupt, showing she had lied to have me arrested on two occasions and many many more things to show she was a sh1t parent. I showwed the court i provided all the boys care when at home and was part of their care almost every day after she left up to the point I discovered her intentions to emigrate to the USA.

After having half her family including her parents testify in court for me, the arsehole sheriff still decided that her happy marriage and the new husbands career were more important than keeping the boys with ALL their family. He allowed her to emigrate to the USA with them and she left the day after the judgement was made.

I am now a minimum of £100 grand out of pocket and facing bankruptcy, havent seen my children for seven months and dont know when i will next see them. And to add insult to injury the solicitor i used turned on me the week after the court process finished and has made life hell since then.

My advice is try as hard as possible to get an agreement on paper without the use of the court system – its corrupt to the core as are the solicitors who inhabit it.
Though if she is the poisonous sociopath as my ex is then I think there is nothing you can do that would lead to an amicable agreement that benefits your children.

The situation is no worse than it was this time last year when we were being told ‘everything is fine’ while the yanks knew the poop was close to hitting the fan in Mosul but in Kurdistan itself everything was OK. Though it really does depend on where you are heading, if you are in Erbil or heading east and south east of Erbil I dont see any issues. The likes of Harir and shaqlawa should be ok. The only note of worry i have heard recently was that there was a car bomb in Erbil a month ago, which i think is the third such thing since the region opened up.
I am waiting on a green light from a rather paranoid operator and expect to be there next week. I have colleagues who have been back there since the end of last year and they haven’t said anything worth worying about and one of them was in hanjeer. I would just avoid Jabal Khand and Baeshiqa until the nutters have been wiped out.

Makes me want to swap my Galaxy tab for a poxy ipad and turn off the P just to see what the fuss is about.

+1 jamj1974. Its riding your bike, having a laugh.
And as H G Wells said “my faith in mankind is always restored every time I see an adult on a bicycle”

Good on you. Keep your chin up, keep talking and putting your kids first that’s the best you can hope for.

I’m 47 and still at it, there is at least one guy older than me at the local skate park.

Oh and as many have said, be the absolute best dad you can no matter what happens.

WML, I am in almost the exact same boat as you, except she is wanting to emigrate to the USA.
Are you in Scotland? If you are then get yourself to a solicitor ASAP. You have right of parental responsibility, you have a say in what is best for your children and stability in schooling is one issue that is taken into consideration. The strongest thing I would advise is to get advice BEFORE she moves, otherwise once she has moved you will be fighting a massive uphill battle.
Mine played all amicable and made out things wouldn’t change much while planning on marrying the POS she had an affair with and then emigrating to his home country.

The strongest advice I can give is GET LEGAL ADVICE. And get it Monday morning.

On a slight aside; if you are in England you have no rights at all – sorry if that’s the case.

Fresh out of university and looking for a room to rent close to my new employers office, the older lady who’s add read “Room for rent to young gentleman” asked what I did, I replied “a geologist” she replied with “Ooooh, I’ve never had a geologist before”

That was followed by one of the most rampant sex filled six months ever.

She eventually wore me out!!!!

Oh and by older, she was late 40’s to early 50’s.

two skinny legs.

We used a black out material that was attached to the window frame with velcro. It came in a kit, simply cut the velcro strips to go round the full frame and cut the blackout material slightly larger than the frame (by slightly I mean about 1cm) It worked brilliantly and even had the room pitch black in the middle of the day.

I think this was the company I got it from http://www.easyblindsonline.co.uk/

Glen Coe and Fort Bill are my local tracks. I frighten the willies out of myself on the coe downhill track on my mega often enough as is

Cheers all. I have had my eye on the YT Tues as its a lovely looking bike and did contemplate the Canyon. I came to the conclusion a frame only would be the most sensible option as I have a garage full of bits that could happily live on a DH frame.

Isla bikes do names on frames. Both my boys have their names on their bikes and they think its ace!

Contamination from fracking fluid once the formation has been opened for production is highly unlikely, especially of ground water.Most reservoirs are far deeper than the groundwater supplies and mixing of fluids between the two is highly unlikely.
What is of concern for contamination is leaky casings, and this is what has been the issue in the USA and Canada. Poorly set production strings and leaking casings can lead to gas / hydrocarbon contamination closer to the surface. Due to tighter regulations in the UK, this is much less likely to happen here than in the US. The main concern I would have would be for surface spills of the fracking propant, due to poor procedure during transport, injection and removal from the location once production has started up. In Canada the main problems have been linked to illegal dumping of used propants.
Depending on the number of wells the rig is likely to be on location for a few months, the main impact on the local area is most likely to be noise from all the trucks accessing the site.
As an aside, did you know one of the largest onshore oil fields in the UK is nicely hidden in the middle of a nature reserve, not far from Purbeck Southampton, it has been in operation for more than 30 years and hardly anyone knows about it!

I would go for reading anything that you enjoy reading yourself. I have so far managed to get eight years out of Spike Miligans childrens poems

cant do the embassy visit, i work away month on month off and I have my kids the last half of this time home, so need to sort it this week or next. Will go through one of the agencies.
Cheers all.

I’m in the middle of all this myself and can’t say better than ninfan

A medium is probably what you need, I am 6’3″ and ride a large.

Crankset is from tweeks – they seem to be the only ones with the GRP 168 Q factor and 175mm crank arms, the rest is from Bikediscount.de

Thats what I was thinking.

Wide one is now on order – eek, that shopping basket was bloomin expensive

First one in is Dougie Lampkin, his POV has an interesting scream……..

you are pressing too hard, light weight on the bit is how to avoid chatter.

I’ve been looking at this rout for a couple of years now, I just dont seem to be able to persuade any of my mates to go and give it a try.

With electrical engineering try the wireline or MWD companies Schlumberger, Halliburton/sperry or baker hughes,you could even go as low as Pathfinder or Weatherford MWD (though I am not sure how much longer Pathfinder will be in existence with the big blue owning them). Beware though, working in wireline you will be signing your life away for the forseable future. Forget all this production tech nonsense get in to the drilling side of things. You wont get a job as a derrick man, assisant driller without doing the time working upthe ranks, unless you sign on as a drilling engineer with one of the drilling companies, then you would be sent offshore as a graduate trainee.

Go onto any of the above companies websites look up MWD or wirleine and find a contact via that route, I suspect you will find yourself in a mucky pair of coveralls before you can blink.

Nooooo, just got bumped because of high winds out here on the rig, please no snow for tomorrow. They stopped flying last week because of snow…… 😥

Mine has a sign saying “cave du papounet”

My kids thought it funny

I was dragged round last year.

It is the most unremittingly awful place I have ever had the misfortune of visiting – and that includes a weekend in Greenock prison.

I’ve got two, one on the HT the other on the full sus. The one on my HT I’ve had for 15 months and its been faultless, the one on the FS 10 months, it just needed a bleed when I took it to the alps. Low temps and high altitude seemed to make it run slow – I replaced all the hydraulic fluid during the bleed and its been faultless ever since.

They are a brilliant piece of kit.

I also had a pure racing i7 and a much earlier i850 (cant remember if that’s what it was called – it had an hexagonal shaft) both of which I had no problems with.

Best was a cracking five week family holiday to the black forest, Swiss and French alps and racing the mega (even though I did crap in that)

Worst; lost two big work contracts that would have seen me gainfully employed for a minimum of two years (I am self employed), getting back from one of the few work hitches I have had this year to discover the wife was having an affair. One I first found out about two years ago and she swore blind it was over and I foolishly forgave her. She is now forcing the sale of the house through the courts and threatening to move out of the country with the kids with her ******g yank boyfriend.
I suspect the new year is going to involve a lot of solicitors fees.

I stepped off what I thought was the bottom step of a flight of very steep stairs in an old holiday cottage of a friend, in the dark, while carrying my then three month old son. I landed on the tips of my toes and dislocated the toe next to my big toe by shunting most of the toe back up into my foot. I just about managed to stagger to a sofa and collapse before according to my wife wailing rather loud. She was less than impressed and shouted down to me to shut up as it was four in the morning.
I also discovered that the A&E on the isle of Arran isn’t that great.

First LP was on parole by Motorhead, the first single is probably something be Status Quo.

I still have the On Parole vinyl

The local Auto tyre centre came to the rescue 🙂

Soapy water, liquid latex, sore fingers and thumbs and a good track pump. Its been two evenings of fighting the bugger.

I might have to go back to slipping and sliding on the old High Roller

I have often wondered if what we see as the universe is actually the spaces between the electrons in an atom that is part of a large compound – and so on and so forth. So the universe is actually wrapped around and within itself, then it dawns on me – Ahh Uniformitarianism or what ever the term is for structural metamorphics.

Then I go back to my cup of tea.

The highland boundary fault – it runs just past the top of my garden

I would go for The Man from Utopia and Sheik Yerbouti, followed by Have I offended Someone, the some of the “You cant do that on stage” series.

No matter what your tastes or mood you will eventually find something that suits

Oooh, you want to get a longer bolt on that shackle, so you can use a nut and split pin to reduce the chance of dropped objects………..

Do you ever find any gold in there?