General Chat

No strike here Joan I had post.

Watching Masterchef right now, the final.

Quite warm today but hazy sun and cloud. 17 degrees. So I did do an hour in the garden cutting a lot of honey suckle and early clematis which has finished flowering, back.

Good morning all.
Well its foggy, misty and very wet here today. I cant even see the hills across from me!

Was up early as my friend is coming at 12 so table all set, made some fresh Tzatziki(greek yoghurt, cucumber & mint sauce) as a nice dip. Just need to make the sandwiches but I shall leave that until last minute to keep them fresh.

Joan it was on the news about the PO strike, about 14000 did strike over a ray rise. Heres hoping something comes today. I dont mind if its the little brochures as sometimes they do have some great things in them.

Hope everyone else is well and have a good day.

Florence in the hebrides

Hi all,

Yes you were right about the strike but obviously our delivery postmen didn't strike. I think it may have been post office counters that were striking which is the post offices. And, as it happens ours is shut today. However, that may or may not be down to a strike, that one is a law unto itself, they can't seem to get the staff for it and it is often shut.

I have had my hair cut this morning which feels a lot better it had got really long and needed doing.

The weather was like that here in Yorkshire Joan. It was incredibly dark, then the rain was beating down. Then it was nice and warm, so I took a parcel to the delivery drop off.
I was just going to post this when the heavens opened again. Still it has filled the bird bath up on the patio and there is a male robin splashing about in it.

I went to the supermarket earlier to do a big stock up because my little granddaughter who lives with us has had Covid for two days. This morning my daughter tested positive as well. They are keeping out of the way, staying in their bedroom and the upstairs study which is now full of toys.
So far OH and I haven’t got it. We didn’t get it a while back when my oldest granddaughter had it, so fingers crossed for this time. Having said that, for two nights in a row, I spent an hour snuggled up to Esme looking at photos of her on my iPad ( a favourite thing to do for her), when she was most infectious :-(

Good afternoon peeps.
Another dull and damp day with a cold stiff easterly breeze so definitely not stepping foot outside.

Oh Linda, poor granddaughter and daughter. Hope they are not too ill and hopefully you manage to not catch it. My only advantage of being housebound is that because Im stuck indoors and rarely see many people, i have managed not to catch Covid. My 2 friends who pop in now & again do tests regularly because of their jobs so i feel safe with them.

I did enjoy lunch with my friend yesterday and was great to have good conversation and a few laughs as we always do.

Postie just came but only a box for daughter and nothing for me!

Hope your weather Joan is better today so you can carry on tidying up your garden.

Was feeling a bit sicky earlier and stomach unsettled so not sure what i shall eat today maybe a chicken cup o soup and some brown bread.

Hope everyone else looking in is well and keeping safe.

Florence in the hebrides

It was a sad day today, well for my oldest granddaughter because the last of her four gerbils finally died. It outlived its brothers by a whole year and was incredibly old in gerbil years.

It was getting to be a smelly old man, so we were rather pleased at its demise, though of course we couldn’t say that.

They had gone over the top with the other three, they have a special board, a bit like a picture frame. Each gerbil has its name and photo, underneath that is a plaster cast with its paw print, then a little silver urn with its ashes in clips to the board.

We had a cremation in the garden this evening. To get the ashes, the temperature needs to be very high, so you need a special chemical which terrorists use. You can buy it on Amazon! In London, they used a metal garden incinerator, but we don’t have one, so had to cobble something together. I am hoping once it has cooled down and we look in the morning that it has worked and we just don’t find a barbecued gerbil :-(

When my children were little, they had gerbils, but we didn’t go through all this palaver, they were just buried in the garden with a little wooden cross.

Sorry to hear granddaughter and daughter have Covid
Linda. Hope it is just like I had it, a nasty cold and cough and really tired. Hope you don’t catch it but it is difficult once in the house.

Oh dear a gerbil cremation, whatever will they think of next. Hope it worked

Those are the symptoms they have Ann, my daughter feels very tired, but she is holed up with Esme, so can’t get much rest. I did a test today, but it is clear. I have bad hay fever symptoms which is par for the course at this time of year. Annoyingly, I can’t take my hay fever tablets because they stop another of my medications from working properly
The gerbil was just half cremated this morning, so OH tried a different method and he has gone now. We just have to put his ashes into his tiny urn. What a fuss, I don’t want this when it is my turn :-)

Linda -
I've been puzzling over your photo!
What is it, please?

To me, it looks like a window frame hanging from a rack - but presumably it isn't.

Oh yes, you're correct, Joan. Thanks!

There's a photo showing the sign here:

https://tinyurl.com/2rasnskp

Well researched everyone it is the Herriot museum sign, or at least the original one. The council used to run it, but when they stopped funding the library, tourist office, etc, they sold the museum to a group of local businesses called the Herriot Attraction Group, or something like that. The new people changed the branding from the tasteful green to a garish bright red. I just live a few hundred yards from the museum

Well folks that was the afternoon that was!!
The day started off ok.Up at 8am, had a coffee etc, showered and washed air.
Checked on computer as wanted to see a flight leaving Corfu, there is a live webcam...so amazing.

Saw the plane take off and then printed out a returns form as the clothes I ordered were absolutely dreadful!! The tops were more like tents, the nightshirts material was hard and not lovely & soft. So packed them up and have a parcel ready for the PO now.

About 3pm, I came on the computer only to find....no internet yet i had it on my phone. I tried everything, restarted it twice, looked at the settings etc until i was exhausted with it.

So I phoned my Broadband provider and a lovely helpful lass went through it all, basically doing what I had done already and some extra things. But at 5.45pm, i decided that she couldnt do anything else, there was no problems in this area so it had to be the PC.

I decided to do a system restore back to yesterdays date. I have done this before and lo & behold....yayyyy it worked.

I immediately did a full scan and no viruses thank goodness. But why oh why did i lose the connection and network????

Just as well i had the time & patience but I could have been doing something more productive :-S :-S

Anyway all's well now so off to make something light as i still feel a bit sicky just not sure why.

Glad everyone having a nice day and good weather. After a misty day the sun has now decided to get up!!

Florence in the hebrides

That must have been a frustrating afternoon Florence.

My WiFi kept cutting off yesterday, it just means switching the router off and on again to get all the devices to reconnect. Some days it is fine, but on other days, it needs restarting three or four times.

Good morning .
What a gorgeous day it is too. Warm & sunny for a change. I went for a walk around to the back of the house and inspected my plants around there.
My beech tree is now in full leaf. I was given it about 5 years ago and was tiny, just a small plant really.
But now it is at least 12 inches tall and growing year by year. I shall leave it in the pot until it really is too big.

Ive ordered some bedding plants today to put in these little metal pots. They will hang on my little fence. 20 mixed violas, so heres hoping they arrive safely.

Computer seems to be ok today Linda and yes it was very frustrating and time consuming. When your Wifi/internet dies, just shut down the computer and restart. You dont need to turn off the router box to do this and is a bit quicker too.

I had to buy a new computer last year as the old one was so slow in starting up, but was 8 years old!! But Openreach are forever on this village road doing some work. Think they are trying to upgrade the network but it does mean we are up & down.

Hope everyone else enjoying good weather.
Hope your Ginger loaf turned out ok Joan. I used to make that. It was like a thick batter when you poured it into the tin?

Off to be busy for a bit, might look in later.

Florence in the hebrides

Linda, ours does that frequently. Nobody seems to know why, but I sort it by right-clicking on the little wi-fi symbol at the bottom of the screen and then clicking on troubleshooting. It then sorts it out, usually very quickly! :-|

It is very chilly here today. I have been batch cooking soups this afternoon for the freezer.
We have five iPads, four phones and three laptops all connected to the WiFi. When tbe WiFi goes, all of them disconnect at the same time. Trying to reconnect individual devices in their settings doesn’t work. The only thing to do is to switch the actual router on and off. It only takes a minute, then everything automatically connects once it comes back on. We usually tell it needs doing when Esme starts to shout and complain that the WiFi is broken again. She loves her iPad and gets very cross when it doesn’t work. Actually we have six iPads because Esme has two! As well as her home iPad, she also has one supplied by the school which she she used to use to construct sentences from pictures. She needed that before she started to speak. We can mainly tell what she is saying now, but she still resorts to it when we don’t understand. The school mainly use it now for her English and maths lessons

Linda, just a thought. My son is a gamer and when he was in a tournament live on the net and i was also gaming which was live, our net used to cut him off!!

The reason was, our line speed was only 1.5 mb. So we both need 1 to operate and when 2 of us were on at the same time, the speed would cut in half which wasnt enough and disconnect one of us, usually him! So if you have many devices and you are all on the internet together, check your line speed to see if it can cope.

I be back in a tic with a link to check your upload and download speeds.

Florence in the hebrides

Here is the site to test your internet speed.

www.speedtest.net or speedtest by Ookla

Florence in the hebrides

Edit:
I just tested mine and this is the result

Download speed 10.41 Mbps Upload speed 1.05 Mbps

Thank you for that link Florence. Just out of curiosity I checked mine as I am always saying how slow my laptop is , but maybe I should just be grateful it works as the results look ok.

Download 44.43 Mbps Upload 10.46Mbps
And then there's ping :-S
Whatever that is it's 23.6

Wow, they are good speeds!