I would say check out Benenden as a “plug the gaps” option, as actual private insurance is £££ (hence why people tend either to get it through work, or self-fund).

Pays for diagnostic appt with a consultant (which is often the slow bit in the NHS) and may also then offer you an op if the NHS wait is long & you’re in distress.

Being “young retired” I am going to go for Benenden + NHS + self-fund when I lose coverage from the OH’s health insurance upon their retirement.

No worse, at least.
Trying to think of what’s behind the mini-manic phases where a bit of my brain goes,
LIFE IS FOR LIVING!!! HAVE A….
(Insert food and/or drink item here) and it feels like absolutely the right and natural thing to do.

As opposed to the “bored/tired snacking” thing where more of you knows what you’re doing isn’t the best.

The “shedloads of fruit” thing has been reasonably effective. I might try making up little pots of bean salad as a savoury equivalent and see how that goes.

Anyway I now have half the fridge filled with good quality fruit so when I got snacky-snacky last night I had a plum and that worked. Small victories!

Couldn’t hack Dickens back in the day but in my 50s and with a better historic background it’s a whole nother story. If stuff doesn’t float your boat now just pick up something that does, it’s still going to be there later if you change your mind ;)

Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell – I’ve been “getting into” the C19 classics now I have more free time. Having been cycling round the countryside a lot in the last year, they make a lot more sense to me now as I’ve been riding past villages not *that* much different from the settings of a lot of these.
I always like a good Dorothy Sayers too but possibly too modern / genre to be considered classics?

@Morecashthandash I feel your pain, I was doing ok but have put on half a stone in the most recent phase of chub club. Bummer.

It’s like the bit of my brain which goes “just think how happy your crumbling joints would be if they had less of a burden to bear” is torpid and powerless in the face of the bit of me that walks over to the kitchen for a handful of peanuts / slice of toast / etc. I feel like I’m sitting there like a passenger in my own body. I know I do it, I don’t know the ultimate reason why nor do I really know how to steer myself into better ways. Sound familiar?

Wonder if there’s also some unconscious resentment at the current pandemic-related situation and so lizard brain is compensating thru snax.

Anyway next week:
– buy absolute shedloads of NICE fruit. Grapes strawberries nectarines bananas blueberries grapefruit … Anything that’s a treat.
– moah running and cycling.
The “big” (for me!) events (50 mile sportive, long distance walks @ 14 mi/day, a half marathon) will all be ticked off by tomorrow afternoon so I won’t be semi-consciously “saving myself” and so can do an hour or two a day. Running in particular seems to help control the snacking!brain

– look up more interesting salad recipes – salad & falafel does fill me up and is actually satisfying but not every blooming day – something with a mix of textures and tastes, that takes a while to chomp through.

At least I’m still weighing myself rather than giving up and going full ostrich.

Bizarre a relative who is a medical writer by trade appears to be “agin” – so that is a topic that (like politics) I steer well clear of.

The thing is, surely if they truly believed that the best thing for them is to not be vaccinated, why wouldn’t they put their reasons to me, as we are pretty *physically* similar (same sex, similar age, weight, fitness etc) and so the same reasons would apply to me.

So I do suspect a certain amount of cognitive dissonance – I wonder if decades of sorting out people’s shitty papers and dodgy research has just kind of pushed them over the edge IYSWIM.

I just figure that at least they’re up-front about it so I know they might be plague carriers…

I’m finding that my lizard brain is demanding food and overwhelming the faint cries of, “but you’re trying to control your weight” and so I’ve found the weight creeping back on.

I am mainly still exercising and that seems to trigger the EAT EAT EAT mode – has anyone got tips on when and what to eat while trying to control weight when you’re doing extensive exercise (e.g. spending 2+ hours running, 3+ hours cycling or walking)?

The EAT EAT EAT danger period appears to be evening when I’m tuckered out from the day.

I have greyhounds who often seem to have sh*t teeth. Electric toothbrush with just water on, then I just have to expose the gumline and move the brush head along it – much easier. A treat after (usually a dentastik).

Not all my dogs have had horrid teeth though so I suppose there’s a genetic component.

Current hound gets ostrich bones (blech) but I still have to brush as he has nooks and crannies that gunk builds up in otherwise.

Worth sorting though as gum infections can cause kidney problems and special kidney food is £££

Watching this as am thinking of getting a kayak or similar. Live very very inland but by the Thames.

Hired a kayak for an afternoon on the canal – admittedly not an inflatable, but the idea is to hire a canoe in a week or two and compare how the two feel.

People are right about non-inflatable kayaks being just drop in and go, but I don’t fancy getting one on top of the car (not v tall or strong) and a two person kayak would be … quite big. Whereas an inflatable would go in the boot, even a two person one – could take friends out, do a little bit of camping etc. Ofc there is all the faff with drying.

Gumotex do an inflatable canoe I see, so I have gone from “cheap arse blowup kayak” to maybe something more…

The kayaking was ok though so we’ll see how the canoeing goes.

Huh, mine (Hungarian Black + Hungarian Hot Wax) said “harden off and plant out” on the side of the seed packet, so I did.
They’re still alive and some appear to have tiny flower buds on…

Awful situation.

You didn’t say in your post whether you’d had the dog checked by your vet – if not, that might be an idea – eliminate any possible physical cause – e.g. a hidden injury that is very painful to touch.

They may also know about trusted local behaviourists who could advise (and by that I mean anything from explaining what’s going on in the dog’s head and how things can reasonably be turned round, to, well, giving you more peace of mind with what actions you take).

Boop

Amersham. *Amersham*!!! Good God.

*rsl1*, my OH is from there and says (while chortling) similar.

– Previous MPs well liked, one-nation/Wet types.
– HS2
– Old people dying off and their big suburban houses being knocked down and replaced with flats for people who would (normally) be commuting into London – replacing one or two true blue Tory voters with 6 younger Remain voters unimpressed with the current unbusinesslike shenanigans.

.

Stephen Milligan was just enjoying some harmless (if unsafe) “personal time”. Pity they don’t put out public health commercials after hours about it really, he’s certainly not the only poor soul to have met his end that way.

Now who. Was. The balding politico who hired people (?men?) to poo on top of a glass coffee table while he watched from underneath, **and blamed it on the turmoil of his hair loss**?
What I want to know is who cleaned it up later and how. And was it his own coffee table, in which case I imagine the rest of the household were not best pleased when they found out ..

Before I retired I worked at a security software (antivirus, firewall etc) company and one of our products did web control (so you could block gambling sites, smut, etc) and another data control (which to an extent helped stop people emailing lists of customer credit cards out of the company etc etc).

Sounds like that’s what you want.

And a code of conduct that says stuff like, work email is for work, we can look at it any time. Set up a non-work wifi access point for people to connect their phones to.

Then it’s down to the managers to “have a quiet word” if Chris from accounts is spending too much time on FB or worse…

PS exercise is important
– controls mood & sleep => better food choices
– builds muscle => better metabolism
– o yes does burn some calories
– can be down with a buddy in lockdown => more socialization => better mood => better food choices

Back in the day the SW “green” plan was something like
– as much fruit and veg as you like
– ditto plain boiled rice/pasta
– a certain amount of lean protein without “it counting” including beans
– careful control of fat (so if you make pasta with tomato and bean sauce, the main thing you’d do is carefully measure the olive oil)
– a certain amount of low-fat dairy “for free”
– careful control of bread, cake, pies, booze etc

Suited me as it meant I sacked off the toast and just ate lots of healthy stuffsoup, salads, pasta’n’sauce, curry, stew etc

Saw a family of mink running along the bank of the Thames in Goring and we definitely thought they looked cute (appreciate that is really not the whole picture!).

Conversely though when I hear cuckoos I think of the baby birds kicked out the nest to their deaths and am not inclined to believe in a benevolent deity! Pretty vile when you think of it.

Look, running buddy of mine went in for an MRI for his “groin strain”, turned out he had metastatic prostate cancer. (Happily the expensive spiffy drug he was put on means he’s still alive and healthy-ish several years on
but how long that will work, nobody knows :( ).

So even if you think it’s just a scan for your broken collarbone or whatever, there is the thing that, well, outside office hours the pros are going to be reluctant to look, in case what they see is on those lines. People make their own choices but I’d not want to be in that position personally.

We had cleaners for years, but as others have said it can be tricky getting good ones. On the one hand agencies mean it’s easier to complain and ask for someone else because this lot didn’t do a good job or left the windows open, but OTOH using agencies means you get a variety of standards…

Our last cleaner it was the madness that we couldn’t take any more – we found she’d been going on one of the computers (that took a bit of unwinding as she didn’t realize you had to be logged in to FB *as you* so she’d friended all these people…), taken the dog (30+kg, high prey drive breed) out for a walk, used our washer and dryer (alien black lace underwear found in dryer) and left a growing pile of shoes in our cupboard.

We dispensed with her and the shoes and spent the money on supermarket deliveries, robot hoover + mop, and packets of wipes and bottles of Viakal everywhere.

Oh and she used to perfume the dogs (!)

I’m a crumbling plodder now, but over a decade ago I trained hard to reach the giddy heights of, well, mediocrity ;)

Anyway the point being that the harder I worked, the simpler and cheesier my music choices became.

Like that thing in Good Omens, mixes would have originally been Welsh indie pop and Radiohead but, with buckets of training, would all mysteriously mutate into Best Of Queen…

Hopefully I may feel like getting back on the wagon this week.
The ice-cream should be all eaten up soon!
I’ll go away and have a think about new sensible meals. New *different* salads & so forth. I mean, salad and falafel and flatbread is lovely but I can *feel* my brain craving novelty!

DezB haha both! We don’t spend money for the sake of it but don’t have a problem with splashing the cash for something we actually want, few regrets so far!

So I could go to Wickes and get them to design the bathroom? (I’d like an idea of whether some of the stuff we have in mind like niches and sliding doors are possible, and also there is the advantage of getting a picture so you can go, yeah looks good or errrr need to try something else).

Then get personally recommended firms to quote once we have something we can point to and go, “that pls”?

To earlier posters. We are both in IT and both, er, not natural interior designers. This is why we didn’t bother touching the bathroom until the tiles literally started falling off! But we do know whether we like stuff or not when we see it. Have seen plenty of friends & relations bathrooms that we DON’T want :D

Orkney if you like megalithic tombs & standing stones etc. Literally you might be walking across a field to see something, realize the field is suspiciously bumpy and that there’s something else underneath just waiting to be excavated…

Will be windy tho!

Or does that include builders merchants like say Grant & Stone?

Btw the bathroom people we’ve had recommended aren’t showrooms.

So I (sort of) get the “go to showroom and they do everything” (at which point do you commit?) but the people I know who do that are the sort who think nothing of paying £15k for the world’s smallest bathroom 10 years ago.

So the design/3D render – who does that when, is it free, is it not?
I have been schlepping glumly round bathroom showrooms, builders’merchants, tile places and I’ve got an idea of what we *might* like, but until we see an actual mockup I’ve 0 confidence of whether it’s a crap idea or not.

You know that thing where people’s brains don’t quite “do” faces? I have that a bit, and the “how can you not know what the bathroom would look like” is a bit like that too.

I have at least seen tiles I think we could live with for the next few decades which is progress. But which to choose. It’s a small bathroom so at least we can afford whatever tiles we like.

It’s kind of up to her Mum.
You stick to
– setting a good example in your own behaviour (model what you want the kids to grow up to be like)
– backing up her Mum (“I can see you’re upset SD, but I do think your Mum has a point because X”)
– be calm and civil and if in doubt bite your lip and say nothing!
– be aware that because she’s your OH’s ex’s kid, it’s pretty common to find her hard to tolerate – the natural “I see my younger self in you” feelings that help parents tolerate teenagers aren’t there. Not your fault or hers, just how the cookie crumbled.

Oh and maybe work out how to put a timer on the router and convincingly claim you know nothing about it ? 😈

I’m in. Going for a nominal loss this time as I mainly want to keep off what I’ve lost.
I’ve gone a bit mad this last week with the OH,s sourdough, home made ice cream and have also had a glass of wine a few nights this week (it all adds up :/).

I’m up for a continuation – don’t want to lose much more, but the discipline of having to put a number in a spreadsheet every week should help me not gain back!

Absolutely reminds me of the late 80s early 90s crash.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/18/housingmarket.houseprices
^^^ for those too young to remember!

The “must buy now or will never be able to afford to buy” cries make me wince – that was a (very young and naïve) me in ’89.

We sold it six years later for about 3/4 of what we paid for it, and could only do that because we’d been paying extra on the mortgage and taking in lodgers to do it. I didn’t even put money into my workpension which I now hugely regret as it was a good DB scheme (hey ho). Neighbours from hell. Awful time.

***If nobody can afford to buy then prices come down***. There are always some people who can sell – people who’ve lived there a long time/died and the life insurance pays off the mortgage.

In the early 2000s house prices were stagnant and not a lot of houses sold, but there wasn’t a big drop.

This feels like a feverish game of musical chairs and heaven help people when the music stops.

Think of it as the sweet sweet smell of victory

I had similar, in that a few years ago, coincidental with feeling v flat and detached, I started to get alien thoughts.
I mean they didn’t feel like me, it was like some nutter marched into my brain and started going, “hey that door handle would make a great ligature suspension point!” and ‘me’ would just think WTAF this is so unwelcome I cannot even….
*I* wasn’t suicidal at all, but it was like someone else was in my head wittering away that I couldn’t boot out, like a drunk uncle at Xmas IYSWIM.

I went on a type of HRT (obvs assuming you are a bloke this will not exactly work for you!) and was surprised and enormously relieved to discover that *within half an hour of the first pill* I felt ‘like me’ again.

Point being, anyway, that – brain chemistry baby – not saying necessarily “go on meds” as IANAD but – if there *is* stuff you can manage to regulate sleep, diet, exercise then worth sorting them all. And then go to GP (book double appt if poss?) and write down stuff beforehand like “Don’t want to rush to meds because *last time* I was given X and this triggered Bad Thing Y” and practice handy phrases like “can you talk me through what you just said again because I’m not sure I quite follow” or whatevs – things to press pause and rewind on the consultation.

+1 for the Steve Peters book.

If you liked them and would take the job if offered, no harm in asking when you’ll hear.
My last job, the HR department were (possibly still are!) not the best at actually offering people jobs when the decision makers have said yes. I’d had to enquire whether I should be continuing with my other interviews before they pulled their finger out.
Then a few years later they interviewed a friend of mine for a job she was ideal for – I asked the relevant manager if he’d found anyone for the post, he said yes and confirmed it was her, and I let him know that she’d not had an offer – he shot off towards the HR desks straight away to put a rocket under them!

I was there many years and HR had quite a lot of good people but this was always happening!

You are not alone in feeling and doing what you did. I have two relatives who made unsuccessful attempts and both are fine now after treatment. 3am is a very dangerous time because the sensible bits of your brain are still asleep even though you feel awake.
Best of luck with your recovery.

Martymac my (over 80, now) uncle got caught out by a phonecall claiming … I think something to do with Sky boxes/subs … And realized the second he’d put the phone down, and he spent the rest of the day sorting that out, cancelling card etc.

On the upside, hopefully the shock will mean he’s more alert next time.
Very smart man, just one of those things where he had a lot on at the time and just wasn’t thinking and it was mildly plausible…

Sounds like the team aren’t the problem.
Bet if you got them all together on Monday and said,

“Work diligently on the most important thing for your allotted hours and then go home. Any questions about priorities, resourcing, etc, come to me and I will make a decision and find you something you *can* make progress with.
I am aware that we have additional needs and am pulling together a proposal for senior management, so any low hanging fruit you think I might not know about, pop over this week and talk me through it”.

AND THEN DO IT and let any management griping stop with you…

On Friday spend a short time summing up progress (sure, some will be “eliminated X as a possible cause of the problem” but still).

Longer term if you can fulfill genuine training needs that’s always good – change of scene and perspective but clear business benefit. But clear up the worst of the shitshow before sending people on soft skills courses, as nobody likes being sent on an assertiveness course because they were doing overtime for two weeks and oddly enough shouted at someone on Day 10 eh.

Still a kg up on target bit let’s see if next week can bring a leaner me.
I have just finished off the Xmas chocolate so that’s one temptation gone I guess!