My parents were glad they’d had a survey done when it turned out that the ceiling of a room / floor of the room above was basically held up by twigs and gaffer tape.. among other issues with the house.
A settlement was reached with the surveyors’ insurers…

Love the decaff ground Lavazza.
Sometimes coffee-shop decaff seems to be less decaffeinated but the Lavazza I can have all day with no issues.
Cut down originally to deal with sleep issues (duh) then realized that the free floating anxiety I was mysteriously experiencing coincided with the few caff coffees I still had and now I’m 💯 decaff and very mellow :)

Dryrobes are built like tanks and last forever. The OH is a great destroyer of clothes but the purple dryrobe survives intact!
In really cold weather they can go over the top of the Big Coat.
I would say spend the money but just get the size you think they’ll be when they stop growing!
And get a bright colour, makes ’em easier to spot.

Seriously I got mine for using at the end of ultras when I would feel like death and need to change *all* my clothes – that was at least six years ago. Now hang out on cycling forums and moan about my knee but the dryrobe is still going strong and still is used all the time.

Not dissimilar to spooky above – thoughtlessly vaguely assented to going over to my sister’s some time over the Xmas period, before all this gubbins about Christmas Bubbles came out, am now reconsidering as OH is somewhat vulnerable and the case rates, albeit low both there and here, are higher than when we last saw them in the summer.

Could suggest going for a walk halfway between our 2 places but seems a bit harsh on the 3 infection vectors kids, who, no doubt, would prefer to be at home in the warm messaging their mates.

Don’t know what to do…

When Mum was in hospital the OTs were unfailingly cheerful and keen and went to extraordinary lengths to get her to try and walk a few steps across the ward – because her feet and legs were so swollen finding footwear was a problem but the big Polish bloke (the other one was a woman) was all “hold my beer”, dashed off, and returned with some odds and sods and bits of velcro which sorted it.

I was very touched, particularly as by then we knew (I’m not sure TBH if anyone had looped in the OT team mind!) that she wasn’t going to make it.

It may not be that high in the pecking order but these are people who literally help folks get their lives back (or as much as is possible).

Local cheap-as-chips summer race series down here in swampland (Oxon) has *a* coaster (nice slate job depicting a local notable building) as the memento for the whole series. But with 2 of us in the house and the years going by we now have … Counts … 9 of ’em (think one got broken).

Somehow it’s different if they’re meaningful to you somehow?

Email – ’89 (cix) iirc. But obvs that was internet not www.

A friend was asked by T B-L to work on the very early development of the WWW but, being a real physicist, wasn’t interested!

OH (who never chucks things out) thinks the original letter signing on with Demon is still around somewhere. (Yikes).

I certainly remember when email lists and usenet groups where where all the good stuff was – that would have been mid 90s.

I bring some hope in the form of half a kg lost. Apparently discouraging the OH from making ice cream and bravely saying “No” to more than 2 slices of the sourdough at one time has paid off.
HOWEVER
the time of Xmas cake and pudding draws near so I shall have to be very very careful in the next few weeks…

Managed to shift a bit this week – can’t have hurt dissuading the OH from making ice cream / more sourdough and leaving the wine alone (after last weekend where we got through a bottle of prosecco between us for reasons unlikely to repeat any time soon).
And salad & falafel, or soup, for the evening meal seems to help too.
Onwards!!

Put a roll trap on top of the bucket and take the cat up to the attic with you?
2nding the query about LL though – though this will pass.
You’re in Scotland, yes,? So have slightly more options.
Good luck.

No idea where mine got in, unless they snuck into the garage that evening the garage door got stuck half open (until we noticed it) – the attractive climbing plants were killed years ago.
Perhaps we need to get a roofer to redo the leading? (80s house) (will that help prevent ingress to the loft?)

OH (made of sterner stuff) claims to hear no further noises so I may return to my own bed tonight (no further corpses have been found in the loft but frankly the scrabbler may just have expired under some insulation or whatever. Or buggered off. Either does me fine).

Just retired. Best thing I did was …
* Work in software companies so what I did was taken seriously
* Work in good companies with sane management and decent human beings for colleagues (a bit of luck to start with but *then* you know what to look for…)
* Do the stuff I enjoy and find interesting, that’s worthwhile but!!! **other people don’t fancy**. Ended up specializing in 4th line support and maintenance and low level stuff – I liked the variety (short – ish – problems, customers doing all manner of odd things) and getting to do detective work with logs etc rather than write test suites in python (worthwhile but not my thang).

Bloody hell guess who heard noises last night.
I am sure people here will understand when I say
AAAAARGH
HOWEVER I am somewhat battle hardened now. Also the OH (much better at this than me) emerged from the first loft check with 2 murine corpses so the last lot of poison up there has done *some* work and hopefully whatever we heard is about to follow suit.

Poison blocks deployed in loft and garage at 1am, following which I slept on the sofa (never hear anything downstairs) with the dog (not, sadly, a terrier, but with the magic ability to make any bad situation seem a bit less crap).

**balls**

Moving may seem like a stressful prospect given you’re working such long hours…
But
If you think of it as just “seeing what’s out there” …?

I’m having nightmares that the chimney in this poxy bungalow catches fire and burns the bloody place down

Get a grip….Surely it is normally the tumbledrier that catches fire…

Is the car garage or drive btw (apols if I missed this).
Either way at least it is an improvement on the loft.
How long would it take to dig #notserioushere a moat round the car? I know mice can tread water (used to work in a converted manor house and SOMEONE – not me – would leave glasses of water, and biscuits, on their desk overnight grrr) but do they swim much?

I would have thought that the general hubbub of building activity and lack of bags of potatoes etc would put mice off. But what do I know. You could go on a forum for mad bastards who build their own homes / have them built and lay your vermin-related worries in front of them – either they’ll say nah mate, or they will have some sort of practical advice.

I have been there and *eventually* the buggers do all die or move out.

I have the Mi Band 4 as well.

Counts steps. (…Sometimes when you’ve told it you’re doing a cycling workout, even ! …)
;) Has a wrist HRM. Will make a guess at distance if you tell it you’re on a treadmill (i.e. Don’t want to lug your phone around and get the phone GPS to talk to the band via the Mi Fit app) … A guess which is a bit short (measures 5k as 4.4k) but not stupidly bad. Otherwise will use phone & its gps.

Will display notifications which is pretty useful if a text / whatsapp / FB messenger comes in, and with a cheap app will also show directions from Google Maps which is handy sometimes – not to mention that often I leave the phone on silent so the band vibration on incoming call is good. Also have used Find My Phone.

Bought a pack of 13 different bands for it for £9 so have whatever colour I like too, which is surprisingly pleasing.

Um – I have a teak coffee table with, we, toothmarks on it (young dog in the 00’s) and now have the time to try and make it a bit nicer. Handed down from someone who’s not around any more (and very solid & functional anyway).
Any tips?

Assuming the new house is being built ok WHICH MOST ARE then it will not be full of mice when you move in. And you will be motivated to ensure gaps are sealed and food tidied away!

Look the cracking up is a very very common reaction to infestation, I reacted the same way in the face of mice (+, once, the worry that we might have brought bedbugs home from holiday, turned out not but they are unspeakable buggers and only after several years am I confident that we didn’t). The way you feel is normal. Your worries about the new house are normal, I still tend to have a poke around the mattress etc in new hotel rooms five years later and (re mice) now shudder whenever I see a lovely exterior climbing plant! Still. Years later.

For me what helped was trying to get the fight reaction going – perhaps don’t rely on the landlord but get a local pest control in (again), surround the car with traps, go round the house with wire wool (and expanding foam if LL will allow), and if you smell corpses, remember that’s the smell of victory.

Make paper effigies of mice and burn them if you have to. Push on through and once you have been in your new house for a month or two and here are no *noises* etc you will start to feel human again.

But as he’s responsible for repairing and maintaining the building, not to mention has a right of residence there, and therefore if the roof blows off is most definitely going to have to shell out for a new roof and a hotel, … does this not constitute an insurable interest? #confused

Under the terms, it’s only my house insofar as it’s my name not his on the Land Registry. I can’t sell it or do stuff to it at all, I don’t even have a key. He can paint it purple and put artificial turf on the garden and stone cladding out front should (unlikely!)he so wish! Effectively as long as he keeps to the will trust terms it’s his house.

Not arguing btw just finding this all a bit of a maze IYSWIM – how does it work …

Have dropped a local broker a line anyway!

Well I don’t live there. So he’s the one who has most immediate need of the insurance – e.g. if roof blows off, he’s the one who needs alternative accommodation, he’s the one with the key letting in builders and loss adjusters.

So not only do I want to avoid being involved in the renewal every year (true but admittedly a petty point), more importantly it would be good if I didn’t have to be involved in claims (unless, God forbid, the house burned down with him in it, in which case I *would* need me to get the rebuild money rather than his heirs… (Boy, this is grim!)

If, say, he were to be flooded out while I was hols somewhere remote (hols, remember them?) the last thing he’d need is for the insurance people to say they’ll only speak to me!

But does that make sense?

…snake..?

So sorry to hear they’re still around.
Under the circs might the landlord let you keep pets…cat or jack russell?

Lincolnshire Greyhound Trust, which is a small independent rehoming charity (has a branch or 2 down south now as there’s an outpost in Oxford). Run by a very organized & level headed chap, (ex civil servant).

Met him years ago through greyhound rehoming activity and was sufficiently impressed that despite being down south ourselves, when we heard he’d set up his own rehoming org we got all our subsequent dogs (4 iirc) from them in Lincolnshire (this was before the southern branches).

How expensive seat belts are.
And, chewable.

As a PP has said have a plan for if you have a serious health problem.

I’m early 50s and a couple of younger people I know have just had stuff happen out of the blue, one had a stroke, lost a bit of sight and had their driving license removed, another had to have a major organ transplant all of a sudden, both healthy clean living folks.

I know at least three people my age living with lymphoma.

And that’s not even *counting* the friend my age who liked the booze and fags that cancer took in a few months because TBH *that* is not so much a problem – you’re dead whatever.

The general plan of finding a way to live on not a lot and have fun is 👍👍👍 tho just be aware shit happens & don’t assume “not to me!”

A friend of mine clearing out her mum’s house found a pistol – rang up the copshop and made an appointment to see the firearms officer – she was mortified to walk away with the gear all labelled “safe” by the police (it turned out it was a starting pistol, which I passed on for her to a local athletics club).
Ring up the local station and see what they say.

Jesus, are those sodding mice not all departed (in either sense)? You poor sod.

Still going – weights class Weds. Yesterday I counted the cycle to and from the pub, but today I went for a very short run (I want to see if my knee will stand more VERY short runs rather than 2-3 pretty short runs a week) and THEN an hour on the bike.
Weds showed me that I need to work on my plank :D

Probably stagnant or up but I leave it until Sunday morning for my “official” reading, best of Fri/Sat/sun weighins :)
After next week I’ll have a lot more spare time which hopefully will mitigate the effects of my OH’s ice-cream / bread making and my inability, in the main, to resist the delicious results.

Get a grip people, even in the 70s with blackouts, paper shortages, rubbish piling up uncollected and something very unpleasant happening to potatoes one year, we all survived. Hell, my old boss’s Mum back in Somaliland lived into her 90s (the kids took it turns to buy her diabetes meds in the Middle East in bulk and take them over).

That said I have a nice stock of tinned food and fizzy water in the garage and various powerbanks / windup radios / candles stashed away. And loo roll! And a lot of blankets etc. Space blankets too.

As a 70s kid I know that sometimes things do get messed up – a few supply chain issues might occur – but it’s a big world with much better resources now than we had then.

Have been thinking of panels rather than tile in ours.
A bit haunted by very slightly wonky tiling jobs that bug you more and more as the years go by, hence the interest in shower panels. But can they be cocked up in their own particular way? Will deffo be asking for tanking behind/round the bath.

We’ve never had an extraction fan, there’s a window we can open (usually just before fleeing he bathroom and shutting the door behind to keep the rest of the house stay warm). Will we have to have one?

I got stuck in a house with neighbours from hell that I couldn’t sell for six years because I bought it “quick before prices go up even more!”…at the end of the 80s. Small deposit. Took us that long to find the money to bridge the negative equity gap.
If everyone is going “buy now before prices go up more and *no-one* can afford a house…” That kind of suggests prices might fall (at least in real affordability terms).
I would suggest the main takeaway is don’t get into a position where you can’t move – if your own home is a nightmare rather than a refuge it make your whole life really grim.

You can do better than Defender and still have it free – look for free “home/personal” versions of paid-for AV as they’re often very similar to the pro version under the hood.

See if you can get anti-ransomware protection with it, some do it (though yes you *should* sort out backups properly too).

Use a non-admin account for day to day stuff to limit what bad stuff can be done by anything you run accidentally that isn’t blocked.

Keep everything patched / updated and learn how to right-click on a downloaded exe and check its digital signature is valid.

That said, if it’s for work, work might well have it managed by their own IT dept and install & manage AV, lock down accounts etc anyway. In which case just go with “don’t download stuff / open sus emails / go to dodgy websites / in general think first” :)

You can do better than Defender – look for free “for home/personal” versions of AV as they’re usually closely related to the paid-for version under the hood.
GET YOUR BACKUPS SORTED
but if you can find something that includes anti-ransomware protection, do consider that (belt and braces).
Set up a non-admin account for everyday use and keep the account (s) with admin privileges for when you need them (installing/removing stuff).
And keep the machine and all the software you have installed up to date with the latest patches.

.

Quite right, wrong dog, but looking at your link I still see two of mine (including the current lazy bugger!) are distant cousins (of Mikey) through Top Honcho :)

@squirrelking ah he’s a half-cousin of two of mine (now passed away) through Larkhill Jo

http://www.greyhound-data.com/d?d=Glendale+mick&sex=&color=&birthyear=&birthland=

Only a very distant cousin to the current hound (aka most GHs have I’m Slippy somewhere in their family tree!!)

I have no interest in racing per se but I do find it interesting seeing how they’re all related and their pre-adoption histories .

@squirrelking what was the racing name? (Current hound has over a thousand half-siblings…!)
(Current hound has lost the privilege to pee unsupervised as the little monkey has been digging up just-planted bulbs – I may have said something v rude v loudly this lunchtime when I discovered this…)

PS our loft was mainly boarded so the meeeses could have hidden from a cat or terrier under the boards in among the insulation… How much weight can a ceiling take anyway? How likely would you to get a cat/border terrier (possibly accompanied by a rodent nest) falling onto your bed in a shower of plaster?

I was being kept awake by the sods anyway (ended up sleeping downstairs as you couldn’t hear ’em there) so went for poison as the last thing I wanted was to be woken up by the bang of a trap!

Ended up getting a private pest firm in, a little applecheeked chap in tweed who pointed out all the likely ingress points (which we swiftly took care of)(fix those holes! Take down the climbing plants!) and laid special pro poison.

I was happy to endure the corpse smell as to me it was the smell of having my own bloody house back! Felt a bit bad for the mice but if they’d left me alone in the first place…