You might want to keep an eye on wheel size. I had a leaflet from the train station a few years back saying any bike that folded could be taken into the passenger compartment. The modern version of the leaflet says that NO BIKE can be taken into any passenger area unless its wheels are LESS than 20″. Oddly enough, Brompton seemed to be sponsoring the leaflet as it had their logo on it. I am sure there is no connection to the wheel size rule change at all…

Enough height adjustment to be able to sit on a chair when doing repairs or stand up and have the bottom bracket near eye level (I am not all that tall, so maybe this would be hopeless for 6 feet plus people). Being able to set height at any point between these.

A clamping multi positon/height light.
A clampint multi position/height tool tray.
Something to stop the front wheel flopping from side to side.
Good padding on the clamp.
Wide clamping range from thin to thick and coping with odd shaped tubes.

I wonder if it is worse for dogs for some reason? My friends cat gets scared. However our 1st cat is asleep on the bed, having sauntered into the house, the 2nd cat demanded to be let out into our conservatory so it could watch the goings on and chat (?) with the cat that lives over the road from us, who is also lounging on a chair in there. The stray cat who is temporarily living with us has vanished into the rain (no idea why anyone is letting fireworks off in this downpour, unless its a weird personal challenge to light stuff that’s sopping wet?) but a few rockets went off last night when he was sat on my lap and he showed no interest and we were outdoors, so he could have just gone for a walk. Hope so. I will go out and look for him again in a moment. I nearly drowned the first search as it was raining so hard.

Its legal to marry a cousin. That’s all that matters.
Go for it. Be happy.

Many many royal and/or moneyed families have over the century’s, though for cash and land rather than happiness.

What’s the stability like?

Would it be any easier to just think of them as random strangers you are meeting at any old event?

Remember that they may have had a very good reason for disappearing. They could have been hurt or frightened or embarrassed by something or they may have been trying to protect somebody else.

Lots of horrid issues and bizarre rules go on in families that people outside of the house/family group (and sometimes those inside of it) either deny or don’t realise, so dont assume these visitors have behaved badly. People dont usually vanish on a callous whim without there being a problem background.

They may also be afraid of trying to talk to you. Worried you will ask them things they are apprehensive of talking about. Worried you will not like them. They too are probably thinking ‘What do we say?’. But to be honest, what do any strangers say when meeting for the first time? Generalities. You might find you like them and have loads in common. Be kind though and remember they may make up some trivial reason for departing all those years ago, cos the real one is too hard for them to tell.

Why do so many people leave important orders to the last minute? It seems to happen on here time and time again. Puzzling.

Tescos sells pink screenwash.

Try websites for Airnimal bike dealers? Airnimals run on a variety of 24″ road tyres, I think not all their rims are the same spec of 24″ so you might find one that fits your bike.

AVC at Bath
Spa cycles
bound to be more of them

If your mum gets really interested in cycling, depending on what her health problems are, there are adapted bikes she might be able to use. Also there are schemes about I think where able bodied people and people with difficulties share a bike. I don’t know the names of the charities or company’s that do these, but I expect an internet search or asking a charity would get you some info.

This guys done a couple of nice modern cycling books
http://www.alastairhumphreys.com/

If she likes computing she can download Thomas Stevens “Around the world on a bicycle” for free at
http://www.archive.org/details/aroundworldonbic01steviala
http://www.archive.org/details/aroundworldonbic02stevrich

He cycles around the world on a penny farthing in 1870 or so. You might need to be a keen sort of reader to get through it, but I found it very interesting – lots of stuff on how local people lived at the time. You can also get it as a paperback from Amazon.

http://www.archive.org do quite a lot of interesting downloads related to cycles, so worth searching on there. Also for other topics you mum may be interested in, esp if she likes the past/history/how people used to live.

Harry Spider, I really like the colour you used on the shed.

Is it just the very matt colours that scuff?

After seeing the film some time back, I recalled reading what I suspect was the book it was based on. That too ended abruptly and sort of left you feeling a bit cheated somehow.

I have seen (twice) canal narrow boats making thier way from Portishead/Mouth of the Avon (coming down from the Kennet and Avon canal?), presumably to travel upriver and enter the Gloucester ship canal at Sharpness.

If you ever want to see something that looks like a sure suicide mission, check out that design of boat attempting that trip. It might be safer than it looks but I would not do it for anything, its terrifying just to watch them try to turn in the current to even start heading up the Severn.

How very thoughtful of his wife to ask you to post, esp at such a difficult time for her. Please thank her for her consideration.

Perhaps when someone loved passes away it is best to remember that they are completely safe now and nothing can ever hurt or frighten them again. Its how I like to think of loved ones I have lost. Somewhere protected, where I can think of them with love.

I have to house a pet out of doors in a shed. I dont want it to be cold and I dont want to heat the whole shed as I cant afford it. Would you want to sit in an unheated shed through last winter? It will have free access to the outdoors but its even colder out there!

I know they do heated pet beds for cattery and kennel facilities – so they must be in fairly common use.

To add to my last comment, the kitchen fitting took many days, spread out over several weeks of deliveries and fiddling about. I did not mean they fitted it all in a single day.

All the sub-contractors were from different firms too, so communication not great between floor fitters, plumbers, unit fitters etc.

A relative used them about 5 years back. It transpired B&Q did not have thier own staff/fitting teams they just subcontracted to others. Part of the result of that was the kitchen being finished off after a lot of blundering around, then a couple of hours after the staff left they came home to find all the floor was flooded. Big issue with B&Q over getting people back out to deal with the water, getting money from them for the damaged units, ruined new flooring etc.

It put me right off them.

What sort of owner would leave a cat to suffer from an easily visible tick for any length of time? Sort the cat out, it needs help and is not being cared for enough.

I have had a variety of pets over the years. More recently cats as I have posted on here before. I have come to realise that cats are only ‘borrowed’ and not owned and now realise that if my cats become unhappy they will find a way to move out and live somewhere else, just as one of them choose to come and live here. I don’t want them to leave, but they are not creatures you can forcibly keep for any length of time.

If the cat wants to move in with someone new, it will succeed in the end. If its you or someone else. Its not happy where it lives, if it lives anywhere or it would not be trying to re-locate.

Our vet told us it is difficult to legally claim any ownership of a cat even if it is chipped as the law for cats is different to dogs. You can be sued if your dog bites someone as you own that dog. You cannot be sued if ‘your’ cat attacks someone as technically a cat cannot be owned in law.

Some cats just like to visit. They will hang around with a ‘friend’ cat for a few hours and then go home and this will never become ‘moving in with you’ even if it happens every day.

People who have to try to force their cats to stay with them are getting something wrong and need to change the house environment to something the cat is content with, or accept it will leave in the end.

As they say “If you love something let it go free, if it comes back its yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.”

Well, his lifestyle might be uncommon (generally) but its harmless.

Therefore the truly useful question is not ‘is it weird?’ but ‘can I live with or adapt to this lifestyle and can he live with and adapt to mine without one or both of us being miserable?’

People dont change, we just think they might.

However much you might like him if he lives like this and you cant hack it then it will grind you down long term.

Where I live looks a bit like your description and I am female and like living among my interests and pets. Reality is, I will never become a tidy person who lives in a version of Architectural Digest with white carpets and palid furniture. There would be too much grease!

A friends 2 children both did 4 year degrees, finished only recently, in Chemistry and Physics. Both of them said there was no point at all in getting a standard degree as they would not even get job interviews for the better jobs as there were too many ‘plain’ degrees already in the market, so they were worth nothing to good employers.
– So an extra years tuition fees/living costs already on top of 3 years standard debt.

Where I work 10 years ago to do the bottom level jobs you needed just normal school exams. People who applied who had degrees were weeded out by the management and laughed at for being pathetic enough to have ‘such low expectations’, combined with the solid unmovable belief that graduates were too bright to do the bottom level work and would leave the job rapidly due to ‘boredom’as they were special people, elite and above any ordinary job.

Today the same job is targeted at graduates and anyone without a degree is very rarely interviewed on the grounds they are not bright enough and would not engage fully with the job due to not being intelligent enough !!!!

Frankly, anyone with a moderate intelligence level could do the jobs perfectly well at any point from then to now as its only basic admin.

I hope this works out well for you, but you are expecting an awful lot from someone you have only met twice! You have a broken relationship and 2 kids trailing behind you and also seem a bit unrealistic and insecure – almost like any woman will do, so long as there is one – and the ‘any woman is better than no woman’ approach really does not impress women at all.

Of course she is going to be cautious in these circumstances, cautious being normal. Women cant really win can they – if they act at a moderate rate they are ‘playing games’ or ‘not interested’ if they sleep with a guy on the first or 2nd date they are viewed as cheap.

Questions worth considering –

Do you see any risk of you and your partner drifting apart, and would you mind if that happened?

What social life do you have other than contact with your partner – are any of your friends able to do social stuff with you day time on weekdays on a regular basis?

How will you feel about your friends doing stuff at weekends and on evenings that you can no longer go to for the foreseeable future?

How do you feel about your partner possibly doing the vast majority of her social life without you? Will you cope with feeling left out? Do you want to build up a day time social life your partner cannot be a part of?

You might be someone very independent and who loves lots of time on thier own, so there could be a lot of good aspects for you – but if thats not your style, it could get lonely and isolating very fast.

What is your partners view of the changes to how much you see each other and having separate social lives for possibly years? Whats her view on the money front?

Maybe look into the Steiner education system? That seems to be confidence building, flexible and caring.

I would keep well away from boarding schools – I have met a lot of people who were sent to boarding school (one from age 5, the oldest at 12, several in between this age range) I would say that all of them are emotionally screwed up. Almost unfailingly their family/partner/emotional life has been something they seem unable to cope with or enjoy. I am sure there are a few exceptions to this, but its not worth the risk in my opinion. Its not just your child who will pay, but its partner and offspring.

You can get cars ‘compression tested’ where each individual cylinder is checked by the garage to see how much power goes to the engine and how much blows back down the sides of the cylinder (sorry if someone has already said this above, not read it all).

They will have a table that says what mark you car should hit.

Mine got a ‘very good rating for its age’ at around 200,000 miles. Its age at the time being around 16 years. Its loosing power now at 220,000 but not sure if thats the cylinders or some other issue messing stuff up a bit.

http://www.woodenart.org.uk/

http://www.tigersheds.com/product_detail.asp?prod=115

http://www.yorkshirepetshop.co.uk/outdoor-cat-kennels-runs-c-188_219.html

Other links as promised, in case they are useful to other people:

http://www.pet-supply-store.co.uk/products.php?cat=520

http://www.wildstore.co.uk/comfort-outdoor-cat-house-with-cat-flap—uk-made-29-p.asp

http://bradshawtimberanimalhousingspecialists.webs.com/dogcatkennels.htm

http://www.stusanimalhousing.co.uk/cathouse.htm

http://www.happyhutch.com/ListProducts.asp?categoryID=1

http://www.framebow.co.uk/cat_houses_and_runspens.html

Having kids is a privilege. Many people never even get to choose whether to have kids or not as they have health issues or social issues that preclude any option.

There are too many humans on the planet using up resources. Eventually we will destroy ourselves due to hitting ‘plague’ number levels of people. Having more kids is hardly an achievement in itself. Its a greed position.

Some people work really really hard all their lives and never manage to earn large amounts of money – care workers, nurses, lots of people with low paid jobs in a society that really needs their contributions but fails to honestly value them.

The greedy selfish ‘I am entitled to kids/extra money when I am already well off’ people on here should get over themselves. You sound well beyond terms like ‘selfish’ and ‘self absorbed’. Take a look at yourselves.

Yes, Strange indeed! Cat behaviour is hard to follow and fascinating. We started with 1 rescue cat, he moved a friend in. Another one visits and sits with them in the garden. Now this stray. Strange indeed. The more cats that visit, the more curious I get about their social world.

I have been thinking about someone above saying it will be the Tom cat starting all the fights, but I watched them for a while last night and this morning and its our younger male neuter that is starting all the aggressive moves. He and our other cat are both able to best the Tom. Our older cat though is not interested in starting issues, just growls if the Tom (or any of the local cats) gets closer to him than he considers acceptable, then carries on as normal.

Mr Tom is consistently doing the ‘I am not here, you can’t really see me’ sort of moves, and will retreat into the safety of his bush if he sees the younger male about.

1) The people on here are nice.

2) At least its not Facebook!

Thanks everyone for all the responses and helpful comments. I have found a couple more links to cat houses and will try to post them later this weekend as the page refs are on a different pc to this one, so look again later in the weekend or Monday if you too are looking for cat homes. Will also check out the rabbit hutch option.

Thanks for the link to the recycled houses – particularly liked the site header as it has a nice pig arc on it as well. I really like pigs.

Yes, might be worth getting Tom done, but I would need to be sure for totally certain he is not someone’s pet before doing something so irreversible. I guess a rehoming centre would ‘do’ him anyway.

He does eat in a different area, as he lives in the garden under his bush (which has proved surprisingly rain proof given the weather today) and so I feed him out there. Our 2 cats eat in the (human)house.

I found this link the other day – check it out if you want to see how bright a cat can be, its quite amusing.

http://cats.about.com/od/behaviortraining/a/cattools.htm

I prob will call a rehoming centre or rehome it to a friend but I need to make sure it is homeless first (looks very probable it is). I would be pleased to keep the cat, he seems very nice and also very desperate. Its my cats that are the issue. I suppose it could go on living outdoors but that seems a bit lonely for it. Plus cold in winter.

Funny, I had been wondering if it was any cheaper to get some stuff and build something.

The dog kennel looks indeed very nice. Thanks.

SillyH – interesting what you say. We are worried about our own cats feeling put out or worse moving out if they feel overcrowded (v small human house!).

I dont know much about cats getting used to each other, so advice on this welcome – Our orig cat choose his housemate himself.

The new stray is a proper Tom cat, not a neuter like the other 2 so not sure if that has a bearing. At the moment all 3 are stepping very carefully and (literally) slowly around each other.

I was told by someone, don’t know if they are correct yet, that the stray was left out in the snow all last winter 24 hours a day. I think he would come in the house but as the cats are not actually fighting at the moment, I dont want to escalate the situation or the stray might end up not able to come for food either.

I like the baskets image. I used to have a rescue pigeon that slept in a cardboard box of old paint cans on a shelf in the garage. Dunno why it chose there, it had plenty of other options!

I don’t want to spend tons as its temporary and also I know how awkward animals can be over housing, hence asking for your experiences with this sort of hutch.

A stray cat has moved into a bush near the house, trying to keep warm and dry. Obviously though it is dryer than being out in the rain it is also draughty and cold. The cat cant come into the house as our cats wont let it, so it just huddles under the bush. We are trying to trace the owner – the person who is rumoured to have owned it but moved house, in case they gave it to anyone or to find out if anyone else in the area has tried to take it in – it may just have got lost if so.

I figure if I get a cheapish ‘cat house’ I can always re-use it for another pet at some point or for our own cats.

I thought the cycling governing bodies wanted Landis banned from speaking about drug use at the recent Australian conference as it might detract from the racing going on, yet the Contador result, which I have seen was known in August is released to the world now in the very same time period?

Given how potentially tarnished cycling’s governing bodies are beginning to appear, could they have been hoping the big news on Contador would detract from Armstrong’s problems (given the possibility they may have done all sorts of things to keep Armstrong protected in the past)?

Were they worried Landis would distract from their own attempt at distraction rather than from the racing? Can’t help but wonder just a little.

http://www.bicycles.net.au/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=31968

“There’s no point trying to appeal to tradidtional Labour voters because they’ll vote Labour anyway.”

Err, no. Not always. I come from a background of Labour voters. I am left of centre myself. I never voted for Labour while Blair was leader because I did not trust him and I am unlikely to vote Labour if this set of candidates is the best they can field. To me they all look as shallow and self serving as Blair. No one seems to be seriously taking the line of ‘lets move away from Blair type policies as they were immoral’. It just seems more ‘follow Tonys example’ as despite all, the high ups in the party still seem to revere him and his betrayal of the UK.

I was relieved when they were chucked out despite hating what has replaced them, as I was fed up of feeling ashamed of what the leader and cabinet and indeed, most of the labour MPs had become.

“In Oz, people who are interested in sport get organised, raise their own money, and set up their own facilities. My local town in Oz has a velodrome owned by the club. Why can’t that be done in the UK?”

We do have this in the UK!

Such groups have set up such communal facilities all over the country. A long time back large numbers of people got together and contributed financially and also elected committee members who would oversee the creation and maintenance of the facilities that people wanted. This process brought about many hundreds if not thousands of sports fields, tennis courts, swimming pools and sports centres. This process is called The Local Council. All districts in the UK have these councils. On the whole, its been very successful over the many decades its been running.

Unfortunately, although the population choose the committee members and provide all the money for the running of the Local Council via taxes, some people seem to believe that using a communal service the general population have actually paid for (and paying is no longer an optional subscription!) is viewed as ‘relying on the nanny state’ or as ‘being given handouts’ they have not contributed to.

If you pay for 6 cans of beans at the supermarket – do you then view them as a free handout by a charity? I think not.