It’s the only way to make a Christmas tree ferret resistant (I hesitate to use the word proof as they’ll find a way)

Boilerman is excellent, turns up on time and sends proper quotes and invoices.  Electrician is just the same as is our builder.  The same can be said for the flat roofing company we used to replace our felt roof with GRP.  It has taken many years to find people I trust though.

However on the flip side the two companies that I tried to hire to install our wood burner were rubbish, one no show and no answer to calls and the other did such a crap job when he turned up I had to rip it all out and do it myself and the company that I hired to install our conservatory that then leaked were rubbish in sorting out the inevitable leaks and had to be chased continually.

👍

Bugger all…….again, my luck is a disease.

That was good, total left field with the Elephant and the Life on Mars at the end, beautiful.

We had to do this with an elderly neighbour who had become a terrifying driver too watch.  The conversation didn’t end well and after he came out of hospital after sepsis a few months later he was even worse.

I emailed the DVLA confidential concerns about a driver address for want of a better term.   He had to go and see his GP, who signed off on the paperwork as safe to carry on without checking him over.  By this stage he was doing 20mph tops in the middle of the road, going round corners at walking pace and braking when he saw oncoming traffic.   This let him carry on driving for another few months till he saw a new GP who recommended he stop after he went to see him about another matter.

I had a 36 air which I’ve converted to coil as it was very stictiony which got worse when it got cold (I’m about 11st)   PUSH coil conversion made all the difference.

-2C on the motorbike commute home form a night shift, heated gloves were on max for that.

TIME, used them for decades on and off and still have reasonably good knees at 50.  Pretty bulletproof (old ones lasted for ages, the newer seem a bit cheaper bearing wise).  Loads of float and mud tolerance, easy to clip in and release, the only negative is the cleats are brass so wear quicker.

Under no circumstances, whatever you buy, should you try to ride it, especially in front of mini csb.

35% off at Castelli if you have a login and ordered from them till Thursday 28th Nov

Simpsons Lynch mob?

Not sure it’ll grow very well due to cold temps and how waterlogged is the land?

6 miles, felt really hard work but times were rubbish, ran out of puff on second climb soi sacked it off and went home to care for Mrs M who is suffering with child cold/superflu which I’m coming down with.

ohh UHVDC, the future of power transmission.  Less transmission line losses, no frequency matching issues, slightly offset by more expensive transformer/inverter assemblies and the switch gear is more complex as you have to do it electronically and mechanically.  Remember no convenient zero point unlike AC.

@BigJim, hope your’e XLPE is better than ours, we’ve got some 22Kv stuff from the 80’s that’s bloody awful (trips the protection regularly) and the old 50’s vintage oil filled stuff is out lasting it.

I’ve used the motorcycle cable oiler and graphite spray lube to great success on motorbikes in the past.

Keep typing RJ.  Not much I can add but man hugs etc.

Mrs M is full of cold, which I appear to be coming down with so no riding for me.  That and it’s grey and particularly uninviting.

Pfft, I’d do that on an inflatable unicorn……..

NOT.

Want.

But I’ll wait until the Tesla Coil car jacking defence system, front and rear rail guns and EMP mines are optional extras.

Feline Ebola.

It’ll be the usual wet and pissy, cold and damp miserable winter we always have.  We may get a day or two of slushy snow when the world stops in the SE.  They days of heavy snow and hard frosts are long gone down here on the Sarf Coast.

Mrs M has bought me some new Lake 304’s.😁

Santa can sought out the whole Brexit debacle with us staying in and Europe rising to meet the challenge by modernising their crazy inefficiencies, bullying and preparing for the impending global climate apocalypse.

Season 4 opener followed by Pickle RICK!  😁

ASX dropper here.  Lovely bit of kit.

Oh my……….

that was FAST.

Try a 2mm thick neoprene insole in your shoes as it adds a layer of internal insulation between the sole of your shoes and foot.  I think I found them on amazon

non stealth edit 3mm zwolfender

In best Jack Sparrow voice

‘That would be an ecumenical matter’

Ewan, Doves do a GF flour but TBH Genius Multiseeded GF loaf is fine for sandwiches etc.

On the cereal front I have chocolates stars from Doves and Choco Chimps from Tesco’s.  Waitrose do a good GF porridge with coca nibs.

So far the GF bread in our Panasonic SD2500 either turns out like Madeira cake in consistency if using Doves or the bread mix I’ve found online only seems to half rise.

I believe Thames Water used an ozone plant to sterilise water.

LAME.   Very LAME.  For me it fell apart with the whole spinning globe bit.

I do like the red head though (Mrs M, also the red head will murder me to death if she finds out😂)

Yes AndrewH too make a nuke go bang you need a very very precise sequence of explosives to go off to light the nuclear bit.  Should the nuclear “pit” come together without the explosive squish it’ll be a horrific nuclear accident with a blue flash and a local painful death over a few days (see tickling the devils/dragons tail) so even if the weapons corroded and the nuclear bits came together at most you’d have an unpleasant accident rather than an explosion.  Also the tritium spark plug of fusion nukes (h bombs) needs a periodic top up due to decay, same goes for the fission starters, some bit of the initiator will need a “top up” periodically, so over time the weapons become at best accidents rather than a mushroom cloud.    This is one of the problems all nuclear states have as the last crop of weapons engineers are dying/retired and a fresh crop need to learn the techniques without repeating the mistakes of the past.  Hence the US are refurbishing/ building fresh warheads and the Russians are building their terror weapon nuclear torpedo and the dirty nuclear dirty engine cruise missile that exploded near Murmansk earlier this year

I’ve said it before, but Man and all his terrible works will be a thin toxic plasticky, mildly radioactive seam in the geological record.

My theory:

I suspect most wildlife in general would recover very quickly, most domesticated animals would revert to feral within a few generations after die outs of the initial populations.  Certain areas around chemical plants and waste tips may suffer long term genetic damage but that’s only small area’s of the planet.  Worryingly the large sea mammals and fish may suffer the worst as PCB’s and heavy metals like mercury will persist for many years so we may succeed in killing them off after our Ton initiated demise.

In answer to Andrew H, nukes are designed to be hard to go off by accident (though worryingly a few got dropped by accident in the 50’s and two were very close to going pop properly).  So even when the casing cracks open the radioactivity will be confined to a local area, no mushroom clouds, not even a fizzle.

Power stations should safe themselves without human intervention but even if a few do go bang and China syndrome it’ll only be a relatively small area that is poisoned lethally (compared global surface area).

Hmmm, a stiff Gin, a bowl of warm saline, stick your finger in it to increase the pressure to near bursting and then stab randomly with a clean needle till rewarded with a green fountain.

But don’t leave it too long going to A&E like I did…….9 days on IV antibiotics, 3 tendon flushes and a permanently wonky finger!

How much do they need ?

Tell him its yours and you work in a Govt ebola lab, there has been a contamination incident and he really needs to go and get himself checked out (include description/pictures of Ebola victims).

Chewie (fastest hound on the Kessel run) in his heyday (3-9 years) would do approx 20miles of single track around Friston as his top end mileage, usually we’d do around 16 miles of stop start singletrack which better suited him than long XC runs.  We’d do the occasional 20 mile days across Dartmoor as well but at a stop start pace.

Top end was 40mph and he’d snake bits of singletrack and Strava line to make sure he’d pop out at the end of the trail just in front of you.

https://vimeo.com/21609478

https://vimeo.com/22994165

Fastest sledge we had as kids was one of those Davos wooden sledges but because my Uncle had brought it back from Germany it had plastic runners rather than metal.  Blisteringly quick.  Funnily enough when my Dad and Uncle went down the hill on it, when it hit a bump and took off  my Uncle’s legs came off the runners and somehow he managed to get his ankles between the runners and the ground when it landed.  Managed to break his ankles.

Last bad crash was a few years ago, last gasp of summer in Friston, sunlight flickering through the leaves and coming down “Doris and Burt” trail at telephone numbers when I spotted something ahead that my brain couldn’t figure out what it was.   My closing speed was massive and I realised rather late it was a bloke walking up the trail dressed in woodland camo!

I managed to steer off the trail with a flick and miss him but as I turned back onto the trail the tyres cried enough and I high sided with most of my horizontal speed being translated into UP.  I smashed into the floor on my head and side.  As I sat there waiting for my eyes to look in the same direction woodland camo man didn’t even look back to see what the horrible noise was…..GIT.   I got back on the bike did another 10 miles or so before starting to feel very sore and odd.  Got home to find I had cracked my helmet and couldn’t sleep properly for months as one side hurt from Sternum to bottom of rib cage every time I turned over.

This year was a stupid OTB as I rode over a block of granite on Dartmoor showing off to Mrs M (I’m 50, we’ve been married nearly 30 years………..)  Basically the bike wedged itself on the granite and I pushed myself OTB.  Whacked my elbow really well and crunched the carbon lever of my SRAM Ultimates.  This may well have been a Gin hangover  fuelled incident.

My mates got one, very fast down hill, it’s a bit heavy (we call it the leadsled) and it has tried to kill him a couple of times when he’s pussy footed around or got it up to speed and stopped concentrating😁