A really quick win is a purchase of a few metres of fleece – cut slits in the top and bingo, thermal lining for eyelet curtains; get a shower curtain pole or a laundry line put above exterior doors and bung up a length which brushes the floor – makes a huge difference as long as people remember to pull the fleece back over the door…

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/jaguar-kumar-doctor-ukraine-russia-panther-b986986.html

Talking about hearts of lions…how about a couple of other big cats?
Completely hatstand

Depends. I’ve known Labs with such a large vocabulary they picked up words even if you spelled them out, but greyhounds often don’t understand a single word you say, they do best-guess based on context. And yes that can include their own name…

Little steps – identify one thing you *can* do (e.g. phone on other side of bedroom) and get it done. Success breeds confidence to build on that.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/ukraine-zelensky-assassination-attempt-wagner-group-b986057.html
Apparently the FSB and the Chechen assassins are briefing journos now (!)

With Russia’s army busy in Ukraine, how does he police the Caucuses or Kahzakstan or even Belarus?

Yeah I was thinking that too; presumably Putin believes he’s suppressed e.g. the Chechens enough (i.e. killed ’em all) that there won’t be uprisings elsewhere in the RF while the armed forces are in Ukraine…

The guy who ran the falafel shop under independence square was an Israeli who’d come to Ukraine because he thought it was safer… Now even the Yemenis are hightailing it out because it is all.too.familiar https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/3/yemen-students-ukraine-russia-war

he is acting as a Tsar ruling over an empire would.

People say this but surely he knows what happened to the last actual Tsar…

I can see why people are wondering what his state of health is. Someone who’d been given a terminal diagnosis might well no longer give a single **** and just start doing random stuff to see what happened.

How many of us still don’t make use of our rights as pedestrians and cyclists for fear of road rage? I have a lot of sympathy for any Russians keeping their heads down. Can’t do much good if you’re dead or in jail. Poor buggers.

Turns out that the Ukrainians are not living under a fascist dictator and they quite like being Ukrainian.

Despite the Pandora Papers stuff and the fact that some have taken “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” way too far and tipped over into rw nutjobbery(*), it could be worse, i.e., …. Russia!!

(*) Google Vasyl Slipak – we came across a musical memorial garden for him while we were in Kyiv – an interesting example of both how things are likely to go with keen amateurs going to fight, and what the grain of fact is that the Russians are grabbing on to for justification of their “omg they are all NAZIs I tell you” claims. TLDR He was an opera singer with a Russian girlfriend and a good job in Paris, who went to fight in Eastern Ukraine with a v v right-wing militia, got killed, was awarded Hero Of Ukraine posthumously.

Mum had a blue Robin as stepdad didn’t then have a car licence. She drove us to holidays in the mountains of Wales in it despite the brakes being dire, but it was the 70s so us kids just rattled around in the back, seat belts, what seat belts.
ISTR seeing the underside of the fibreglass so perhaps the interior wasn’t lined?

There are probably current GCHQ workers on the thread, there are a lot of ’em and definitely a few are cyclists (the ones I met were more mad “oh what a lovely dual carriageway!” road cyclists than MTB-ers tho). They will be the ones saying they do a dull office job…

For a bit of perspective on historical events which have influenced Ukrainian attitudes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

That’s just one. We were in Kyiv four years ago and I sh;t you not, we’d turn a new corner and there would be ANOTHER memorial to something dreadful where thousands (or more!) died. Poor buggers can’t seem to catch a break.

I wonder if the reluctance to suspend visas for Ukrainians is linked to a perception that a lot of Albanian gangsters arrived in the UK claiming to be Kosovan refugees when there was a lack of manpower to check their claims.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/11912667.uk-based-mafia-gangs-a-legacy-of-intake-of-refugees/

And whoever is making policy is worried that Russian criminals or secret agents might just roll up going, “oh yes I’m totally a Ukrainian refugee, me – yeah I speak Russian, just like our president!” and because they have 40,000 cases to check, well…

BTW I’m just saying – that’s what policy makers may be feeding into their considerations. Not what *I* know or think – my lack of geographical and historical expertise means I am just hoping against hope that this is stopped somehow.

There are iirc specialist laundry bags that you chuck soiled bedlinen in which then dissolve in the wash.

Or possibly £7k/year?

It’s very very individual.
About 17 years ago we did the “oh we’ll rely on savings” thing – £5k later and one dog down, we decided we preferred to lose the money at different times from losing the dogs.

It does seem a bit pants that you’re paying £1k but claims capped at 3, so tbh it might be worth spending £1.2k if claims then get capped at 2 or 3 times that and/or per condition!
We pay £131/month for our elderly dog but the cap is something like £7k/condition/year – it’s one of the higher end Petplan schemes.

In the grand tradition of going off topic, OP, how did you transfer all the 2FA stuff from your android phone to your iphone?

Level this week but at least not up! Onwards comrades!
(Shambles off to make a salad. No, really!)

Have contacted OutdoorActive support as I bought £90 of UK LandRanger OS maps for life from ViewRanger in 2020 and now it appears “life” is 2 or 3 years. Hoping I have got something wrong but not impressed they’re removing VR. Not updating it, fair enough…

Grapes? Nice sugar hit.
The parkrun managed to shift a bit so KOKO

Depressing result when I got on the scales today so I am going to weigh again after parkrun tomorrow…

I understand one can diy spatone by boiling a lump of **unpainted** cast iron (+) in water with a bit of lemon juice added.

(+) Remember those screw on dumbbell weights you bought a while back with the idea of doing home strength training…

I was turned away the day after a 20 mile run, nowt wrong with me at all, but all the training had upped my plasma volume so the haemoglobin density dropped.

Now I’m an arthritic plodder I never have the droptest fail on me, but oh my word I feel the lack of those red blood cells the week or two after donating, these days! Unless I was doing speed training I used not to notice all that much….

Probably, if you feel fine fine fine, it’s just training induced high plasma volume, but IANAD and so that opinion is worth about 7 1/2p…

I have buried the Xmas treats from a straggling visit in the bowels of the freezer and went out and exercised. Need to wrench my outlook round to enthusiasm about fat loss rather than enthusiasm about cake! At the moment I am literally drilling at the thought of those rock hard frozen chocolatey morsels. Am going to make some herbal tea….

Cheers, let’s try again for the sake of my joints!

Consistency and peer pressure.

Clubs and classes and chums.

Join a club and go out on a session or two a week with them.
And
Find local fitness classes (weights? Circuits? CrossFit? Anything tbh) and sign up for a couple of them twice a week so you get to be a familiar face there.
And
Put a call out on SM for people to take you out for a spin/swim/walk/run/pole dancing session a couple of times a week.

That should get you 6-7 sessions a week where people are expecting to see you turn up.

Show up, and stay to the end, even if at first you’re doing two reps when everyone else is doing ten. In fact, I’d *encourage* you to slack off at will in class, because if you know you can ease off if you feel like it, *you will still turn up every week* and that’s the important thing.

Keep going, complain as much as you want, and you’ll be a new man in a few months.
Once you start seeing progress you’ll feel so muchore confident and motivated and it will be a virtuous circle from then on.

Kind of lost motivation this last spell but weight is level ish and maybe my head will be back in the game in the new year.

More exercise less eating …

Get grapes and satsumas and berries in all the time so you have something when you need that sugar hit.

Frozen falafel
Have salad makings (lettuce, Tom’s, cucumber, pepper, red onion, celery, radish, red/white cabbage) in fridge all the time, big salad & falafel fills you up.

Soup esp. with beans / lentils (stick blender ftw)

Veg + stuff stew

A fuckton of veg, whatever your favorites are, get them, even if dearer. If in doubt lean protein & insane amount of veg ✔️

Make up your own muesli and have it with chopped banana & berries & Greek yogurt first thing

Get all the nice healthy things in, posh fizzy water, smoked salmon if that’s your bag, eat like a film star. Is still much cheaper than lipo or a slimming club.

Be prepared to climb back on the wagon again & again ;)

And if this is your first rodeo – expect people to do mad / irksome things.

Severe illness and death appears to bring the madness out of the woodwork, or, rather, the low level what-is-their-problem behaviour. (I had one relative have a full blown nervous breakdown with aborted suicide attempt while another was in hospital, and THAT wasn’t really a problem apart from the timing … it’s the “wildly unhelpful remarks” stuff I’m talking about, which just grinds your gears at EXACTLY the wrong moment).

Summary – expect people to say and do eyewateringly tactless stuff, but best to react with expressive silence and a private vent later.

It is a horrible situation. I am so sorry.

A technique which helped me is to pretend I was an older version of me who’d been given the chance to go back in time, see my lost loved ones, spend time with them, do what I could for them. Helped me reframe it but YMMV.

If you have older friends or colleagues, a lot will have been through similar situations. Parents die before their children, that’s the normal way of things. You don’t have to go through this alone, there will be sensible, kind people who will be happy to lend you a sympathetic ear and help you navigate this very strange and sad time.
So, ring some friends, ideally ones who have been through similar. Rant at them. Use “ring theory” – helpful stuff IN (to your Mum and Dad, the people most affected), venting etc OUT (to your friends, who in turn send their help IN to you, the next most affected). Let your friends be your sounding board so that you can be ok (ish) for your Mum.

If it helps, the body often can’t keep up strong emotions for long periods of time. So you may well find the anger fading anyway.

@ThePilot, agree, particularly a third hand middle-aged retired greyhound who’s already used to home life and who’s been returned due to divorce, death, or the owner going into a care home.

A good rehoming org will know which dogs will do well with nervous novice owners and find you one of the “2 steps up from furniture” hounds, aka too dim and torpid to be much trouble!

TBH OP that’s just a general remark, probably not quite what you’re looking for at this time. I sympathize, a couple of times in my own life I’ve made a fairly normal decision that lots of people make, and found myself waking at 5am in a cold sweat every morning! It’s important to work out *why* these emotions have come along, but once you’re sure you understand that, don’t be afraid to do a U-turn I’d that’s what’s best.

Well ideally I’d like to *not* polish off my elderly relatives (who I have plans to see soon) and to *not* get long COVID and lose my sense of taste for months on end (like the wife of the chap who’s going to sort out our bathroom).

So yeah I am reconsidering various plans in light of the fact that the latest variant is pretty easy to catch.

I am missing the various Xmas gatherings but it’s as if a voice says, “do I feel lucky?”

Do they know who *did* get a 7, 8 or 9 by the way? (That might help to reverse engineer the scoring algorithm!)

Put on half a kg a couple of weeks ago and have been level since. That said I had a minor lurgie and then a week on holiday, so hopefully getting back to doing more exercise will help start shifting the lard again.

If the kids are 13 it’s possible their say will count for quite a lot when it comes to residence and contact arrangements.

Time to fish out all the financial documents – savings, pensions, payslips, loans, for both of you – and engage a good family solicitor.

It’s a horrible situation, but you can’t change the past, only the future.

Silicone ring? Nothing says “I love you” like something that’s hard to deglove yourself with…

Get her a thoughtful budget ring for the proposal and then go shopping for the “proper” engagement ring together. After all she may decide that a titanium *bicycle* is less likely to disappear down the sink one day and cost less…

Monday yoga, Tuesday club run, Wednesday 2*30$ weights/fitness class… Started to feel odd in class…
“No it’s not COVID, I tested”
But just a dog walk yesterday as I am clearly under the weather.
See how I feel today – suspect I will have put on weight for chub club as I’ve done a lot less exercise this week.

Hopefully moved into the actual new house, left mice behind, now too busy having a good time to post!
God I felt for him with the mice tho. [Shudder]