At one point we had five dogs in the house (to be fair 1 was a foster and 4/5 were greyhounds, who tend towards the “living furniture” style of dog).

Folk having difficulty with “regular” rescue rules might have a chat with their local retired racer rehoming charities, as the “parameters” are a bit different.

That’s how we ended up getting our first GH (we both worked, though were able to come back at lunch, and that ruled us out for a lot of the regular rescue places).

Don’t get me wrong, there will still be needs the dog has to have met, but … different ones.

Very short run yesterday – crunchy knee said it didn’t fancy more – and a quick (~1.5h) spin on the bike this morning.

Deep fried everything and fine dark Belgian chocolate.
And gin
Source: have been vegan forany decades.

Technology Connections – a delightful chap doing things like analyzing antique toasters or explaining how oldskool twinkling Xmas lights work – covers all sorts of different areas and very clear & engaging.

Wintergatan – or “One man’s descent into madness” as it’s known in our house! – this musician built a marble driven music machine. Then decided to build V2, bigger, better, to be taken on tour… Watch from the beginning, you can actually see him aging! The sort of thing that makes you want to learn to weld / get a CNC machine.

Running club last night, weights club tonight. Nights are drawing in but I retire about a week after the clocks go back and one thing I will be glad of is being able to make the most of winter daylight!

Mine was bloody handy when my Mum was dying in hospital – emails & texts/calls with her OH, satnav to & from the hospital redirecting me round smashups, paid for the parking and my lunch and any little things she needed, took photos and videos of her, set reminders for everything and anything so my life didn’t go completely off the rails. The day she died I played her music on it.

That said I totally see how “teh socials” can be a toxic timesuck and I’m as susceptible as anyone. I took the FB icon off my phone’s “front pages”!

Findagrave.com is worth a punt.
Otherwise, first Ancestry to get an idea of where people died and then either look round the local churchyards and cemeteries or write to whoever holds the records for them.
It’s pretty cheap to get copies of wills and they can include instructions re burial / cremation. Local crematoria should also (???) have records.

Scrambled tofu. Fry leeks or onions. Add turmeric. Mash up block tofu. Bung into fried stuff together with soy sauce and mustard. Stir, heat, serve with potatoes, veg, toast, baked beans, whatevs man.

Veg & bean curry.

Pasta & vegan pesto. Sling in some veg and a can of chickpeas.

Bean & veg stew with dumplings (veg fat obvs).

The frozen falafel (“me too” iirc) you can microwave in a min & serve with salad, tahini and some flat bread.

Pasta sauce – basically fry up some garlic onions peppers, add tin chopped toms, 1tsp marmite 1 tbsp peanut butter, add veg/beans to taste.

Rice ‘n’ Dahl

Slice up a bit of tempeh, microwave-marinade in soy sauce or sherry, dip in flour & fry

HTH

Sometimes monkey. Local gym. You book into a sesh, limited numbers, and have to use a particular changing cubicle…one-way systems…pool divvied up into 3 big lanes, everyone swims clockwise.
Main issue for me is the variation in speed in those in the slow lane with me :)
(FX: thinks longingly of sea swimming in warmer weather)

Luckily the only murine corpse that made much of a smell was under the utility room floor – which we’d just had fixed, so we were buggered if we were just going to have it up again!

@globalti I really sympathize about the mice, is there any way you can move out if you can’t get all the holes blocked and get pest control round to **do stuff** (lay poison probably) in the attic?

I bet if they were sorted you could get better sleep and things would start to look brighter.

That was my experience fwiw (I had a triple whammy some years ago of an injury which stopped me doing enjoyable experience, mice, and finding our holiday accommodation had bedbugs (so were were paranoid they’d come back with us…) and I ended up really a little cracked TBH, not a happy time at all).
There’s a reason sleep deprivation is classed as torture!

Yeah, Saturday the challenge meant I did 30 mins dumbbells class on YouTube instead of nowt.
Sunday I was going to have a run but knee not happy; luckily I’d hared round the local area in the rain (on MTB – slow as all get out but disc brakes!) looking for clubmates doing the virtual LM at lunchtime which deffo counted as exercise.

You can also have a password put on some credit checking agencies so new accounts can’t be opened in your name without it.
Obvs again RECORD THAT SOMEWHERE you yourself can find it in 2 years when you take out a new credit card!

If you’ve not got 2FA set up on all the accounts that support it, now’s a good time to use the adrenalin from the shock to get that done.
Get a notebook and sort out one a day, stapling a printout of the backup codes to a page per account.
Day 1: main email
Day 2: PayPal
Day 3: Amazon
Day 4: Facebook
Etc
1 a day is nice and manageable and by the end of a couple of weeks you’ll have a lot more peace of mind…
Oh and put the notebook somewhere safe where you won’t forget, it won’t be lost or damaged. And email yourself where you put it :D

Ex runner turned jogger here. We’ve been running c25k courses at our club for over 8 years now and ^^^^ what they all said.

It does start easy and we have occasionally dropped w1 (e.g. when otherwise the end of the course would be on Boxing Day and something had to be done!) as we’ve found that people of all shapes and sizes can start at week 3 and still be fine.

I’m now not entirely sure I’m fit enough to lead a course as I’ve only just got back to 3x5k /week and am v v ploddy. KOKO

*gnu* comfort eating is better than drinking, smoking or the bottle or pills tho! I am grateful to crisps and toast for getting me through the loss of both parents within a few months and …the help just came with a spare tyre I guess.

Doing it in kg helped me not fret too much about the actual starting numbers.

*monkey* it’s a weird cognitive dissonance, as for many years I was really pretty fit, and it came screeching to a halt about five years ago and what with one thing and another I’ve never quite clawed my way back and it’s starting to dawn on me that aging is kind of happening… Nooooo can’t quite believe it.

An hour on the MTB enjoying the last of the sun for a while, kept bumping into people I knew so rather less was actual exercise but there were some big-ass hills in there so I do feel very exercised!

Weights class today – puffing away red-faced being shown up by either sprightly septuagenarians and/or tiny teenage girls made entirely of muscle

Will be interesting to see if I can drop weight more easily once retired or whether I end up spending more time baking…

Citywide forums and Moneyvator are interesting reads, and I found the book Smarter Investing by Tim Hale quite useful.

Because the challenge means you’re supposed to do something every day, I wonder if my exercise pattern is changing – so as to not wear myself out for the next day. Only did a quick hour on the bike today. Bit as the nights are drawing in I had to go out straight after to walk the reluctant hound immediately afterwards. More for our benefit than his, he’s a lazy bugger, sorry I mean economical with his energy output…

Pook that sounds grim, hope a fix is found soon.
Appear to have put ON weight, which of course just resulted in disgruntled biscuit-eating in friends’ back garden, counterproductive I know.
But, ran on Thu & today, went out for a quick MTB potter on Sat, and on Friday walked to the next town & back, about 12 miles.

I have not yet mastered the art of saying, “later maybe” to the homemade bread, ice-cream and pancakes that the OH has been producing which I guess doesn’t help. Moah Cycling maybe. 25 years ago I was commuting 18 miles a day on a hybrid and could eat ANYTHING sooooo

Had this afternoon off and the weather was fantastic, so walked up the river to the next town, sketched in the museum for an hour, and walked back in the sunshine #retirementpractice

doomanic, I put on nigh on a stone when my Mum was dying (about a year ago now :( )

It’s …sort of… going now, though my preliminary weighin today seems to have gone up a kilo (WOT!!).

Weather looks good so may walk into next town this afternoon.

I remember doing a bit of the Oxford canal, Tackley->Oxford iirc, a few years ago and some bits were narrow & rutted and I felt lucky to not have fallen in – was on a Birdy tho!

Well as I am a space cadet who doesn’t read emails thoroughly I turned up to running club 10 mins late on Tues ! Nobody left! but this kept me honest and I went for a plod on my own. Weights class on Weds. Having physio in (literally) a minute so who knows what today’s 30″ will be once I’ve been “done”.
Also this made sure I got out Monday albeit for 45 mins potter round on the hardtail.

Sorry to hear that.
Don’t worry too much about the comfort eating btw.

Went for a jog first thing so that’s the first time I’ve done over 10 miles a week in almost a year.
God it tires me out these days though!

Half day at work so eventually turfed myself outside for a couple of hours going hither and yon on the road bike (have been off it for a couple of weeks and shoulders and undercarriage have forgotten what it’s like!).

Then the Mi Band 4 arrived and has already encouraged me to go about twice as far as we would have otherwise walking the dog, so I guess it’s doing the job already!

Reading all this with interest as I’m going in 6 weeks!

Day 2 done, yesterday was a weights/fitness class, and today, which otherwise I *might* not have done, I’ve just been out for a 5k jog. Knickers to Strava (for now) but I have ordered a Mi Band 4 to encourage me to keep on my feet.

IIRC poor old Lydon is looking after his dementia-suffering wife, if that’s true he’s got every reason to hit the pies and dress for comfort (eating is pretty effective for stress reduction and kills you a lot slower than the alternatives!).

If you like what you see in the mirror go for it… Life is too short FGS

And socks. Seriously I got a long service award at work and asked for socks. They wear out.

Harsher sentences for parole violators… And, World Peace!

I saw this lot http://www.pubandpaddle.com/ doing trips a week ago when I was on hols, would have given it a go myself if we’d had more time

Rent a canoe or kayak? Lots of riverside pubs…

I’m in – I wanted to do this last year but my Mum promptly went into hospital – although I have now lost both parents, why not tempt fate re. the remaining oldies by signing up…

So the intrusive thoughts – are they like some nutter wandering into your head and banging on about suicide methods etc, rather than you yourself feeling “this is all terrible, I want EVERYTHING to go away”?

Probably still something to be cautious about. (I got the suicidal nutter in my head thing in my late 40s & HRT fixed it for me which shows it clearly had a biochemical component).

You’d be surprised by how much dumb stuff like good diet, 8h sleep at the same time, regular exercise and half an hour a day talking to family & friends can kick misbehaving thoughts and feelings back into shape, plus a bit of mindfulness, which can be as simple as telling yourself, “FFS me, put down the phone for 5 mins, you know it doesn’t make you happy!”.
Lots of us don’t get our heads on right until our 30s or 40s mind so you’re not particularly odd if that helps?

Preliminary weigh-in suggests I *still* am on a plateau. Currently tired and cranky (I am very much exercising and eating sensibly).
Will do the usual thing of a Sunday postride weigh to see if that helps… Bah

Running buddies are great for this, something about being side by side instead of face to face.

Used to have all sorts of chats at the work coffee station – life, death, everything in between – there’s a little of that on the zoom meetings before we get started but it’s not the same.