A random thread for small things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[T42]

Dr Beardy (Mrs) was a nurse in a former career and was brought up by ax nurse and a doctor. As a consequence if you are especially unwell you are allowed three days of sympathy after which you are expected to be well again. She sent our then 7yo son to school with a ruptured apendix ( well about to rupture, but that doesn’t make as good s story ). To be fair, a few years later she did go to work with a perforated appendix of her own.

Yep, sounds like an ax nurse! (And a hatchet doctor?)

Sounds like the old saying about the shoemaker's children going barefoot.

[SteveC]

Dr Beardy (Mrs) was a nurse in a former career <snip>

The first MrsC was the daughter of a GP and a nurse. The only reasons for being allowed off school sick were actual vomiting or a temperature measured by one of the parents (to stop dipping the thermometer in tea and such like). However ill you complained of feeling otherwise, you still had to go to school.

[Thing2]

Reading about the proposed re-opening of the Queensbury tunnel for cycle traffic started me thinking about other tunnels, which led me to half-remember something i'd read donkeys years ago. Google found it for me...


http://www.forgottenrelics.co.uk/tunnels/cliftonhallcollapse.html



Warning: Trainiacs and Civil Engineering nerds may feel the need to bookmark this site!

Thanks Guy. I seem to have lost a few hours from my day....

[Torslanda]

Me three . . .

[Cudzoziemiec]

I read in the online edition that the Grauniad has gone tabloid. I'm genuinely surprised it was still a broadsheet. I thought it had made the move to a smaller format about five years ago!

[ian]

I assumed it had too.

[PeteB99]

I read in the online edition that the Grauniad has gone tabloid. I'm genuinely surprised it was still a broadsheet. I thought it had made the move to a smaller format about five years ago!

It did. The format up to Saturday was Berliner, about halfway between broadsheet and tabloid. I think it was more like 20 years ago though when it changed..

[citoyen]

The switch to Berliner was early 2000s. I started commuting after we moved out of London in 2002 and I used to buy the Guardian to read on the train. It was still a broadsheet in the early days - and the trains were still slam-door cattle trucks. I remember both changing around the same time.

[Moleman76]

Someone has invented The Luggage.  I do not think this will end well.

Some airlines  will refuse such as hold luggage due to the fire hazard of lithium-ion batteries

[ian]

Ah, I didn't realise there was a distinction between 'berliner' and 'tabloid.' Mind you, it's been a while since I bought a paper on actual paper and obviously a boy like me only looks up when he walks into a newsagent. That's another modern surprise, those magazines are still often there. I still can't reach them though.

[T42]

So that's what Kennedy meant - not a sticky bun after all.

[T42]

Yesterday Mrs. T42 translated the Inlaw Paw's English birth certificate into French against a translation of her own. She noticed that they had both been signed by the same registrar, 28 years apart.

[ian]

Our binmen (well, they are all men) are late. I can't even hear them down the valley which is a bit unusual, Wednesday mornings are usually filled the delightful crash and grind of rubbish being munched and beep-beep-beep-shuuuusshhhh of the ever-hungry lorry.

This could be the harbinger of the bearapocalypse here in the sultry jungles of Death's Waiting Room.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Aren't they still catching up with the Christmas-New Year backlog? Always strikes me as unfortunate that those two holidays are exactly a week apart, meaning double lost days at the time of the year when there is most rubbish.

[ian]

No, they should be back on schedule, they just nudged it a day back for Christmas week. They like our house because our workman once made them all a cup of tea (a feat never repeated by me, ha, but they were stuck behind a car or something).

They do sometimes get stuck, the road below ours is narrow and bendy is significantly overparked, and must be a nightmare to get a lorry through, it's hard enough in a car (apparently they take off a couple of wing-mirrors every week). But generally, I can still hear them if they're within a mile or so, I live in a steep sided valley and sounds, like the locals, don't escape easily. Not even of a hint on the breeze today.

I'll be most annoyed if they don't come on the grounds that as I switched my bedside light* off about 12.45am my wife uttered the words 'did you put the bin out?' which of course, neither of us had (which, further of course, she knew), and which further further of course, involved ian going downstairs and wheeling the damn thing to the bottom of the drive in the sinister dark. It's quite spooky with no streetlights (and our lights go off at half-midnight).

*strictly speaking it switches itself off, it's one of those sunset/dawn clocks.

[ian]

There was a notable lack of sympathy for my bin collection plight (or indeed, the potential ursine plight of the binmen).

Anyway, just for the record, they did turn up in the end. At lunchtime. Which meant that I needn't have got up and taken the bin out in my jimjams at 1am. In the dark, cold, and wet.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

Ow!  I've just fallen off an A frame ladder.  Not far, but managed to fall heavily onto loads of stuff and get my legs tangled in the rungs, which didn't do much for my landing position.
I'm resting for a bit to see which, if any, of my hurty left shin, rear right thigh, banged head and upper left arm needs attention.
I say again.  Ow!

I know, I know.  It was my fault.  I wasn't wearing a yellow florescent jacket.

How's the ladder?

[Wowbagger]

*ring ring*

Me: Hello?

*pause*

Voice: Hello, I'm calling you from [forgettable generic company name] because I understand that you were involved in an accident that wasn't your fault.

Me: No, it was my fault. Totally. In fact it wasn't an accident, I did it on purpose.

Voice: *carries on reading now irrelevant script* When did this happen?

Me: When did what happen?

Voice: Your accident.

Me: Well, which one? Last week? The week before? And I said it wasn't an accident. I did it on purpose. I go out every week and injure myself on purpose.

Voice: OK. Thank you. We will take you off our mailing list. Have a nice day!

[Cudzoziemiec]

Ha! It'll be interesting to see if they actually do take you off their calling list. They didn't take me off even when I tried to claim it hadn't been an accident but an attempted assassination! "...so we missed him. And of course, they didn't pay us, at least not until we got him two months later."

[mcshroom]

"Did I survive?" is my current stock response for those calls.

[Beardy]

My current stock answer is to agree and claim that I died. 

[ian]

These days if there's a pause when I pick up the phone, I use it to hang up. Life is too short.

[hellymedic]

Our local Tesco is closing. http://www.harrowtimes.co.uk/news/15813828.tesco-metro-edgware-to-close/?ref=mr&lp=7
which reduces the number of local supermarkets.
I'll only have Morrison's, ASDA, Tesco Metro, Bucovina, Tigris Supermarket and more left within half a mile.

I've been inside that shop about once in the last ten years...

[Cudzoziemiec]

Bucovina's an odd name, is it to do with wine or does it take its name from a rather specific area of Eastern Europe (or perhaps most likely neither of these things?)

[andytheflyer]

These days if there's a pause when I pick up the phone, I use it to hang up. Life is too short.

+1 for this technique.  If the caller takes more than a couple of seconds to day something when I pick up, they'll be talking to a disconnected line. 

I still don't understand why my wife takes a minute or two to say "No thank you".