Poor little Shrew...but I have to say that the Common Shrew is a Voracious killer.
The common shrew's carnivorous and insectivorous diet consists of insects, slugs, spiders, worms, amphibians and small rodents. Shrews need to consume 200 to 300% of their body weight in food each day in order to survive. A shrew must eat every 2 to 3 hours to achieve this goal. A shrew will starve if it goes without food for more than a few hours. They do not hibernate in the winter because their bodies are too small to store sufficient fat reserves and as they have a short fasting duration.
We had mice in our attic. We had to put traps down as they were getting into the larder downstairs. One day I found the remains of a mouse in a trap. Next day there was the culprit. A Shrew!
Enough detail!!
@ Poppy
So self Isolation means learning French Grammar....Oh Dear.
I studied French at school from age 7 to 16 and never was much good at it. I can speak very little - I think in English and that gets in the way, and the smattering of German I have seems to come out in the wrong places . I cannot understand much spoken French, but the last time I went to France for work I was pleased to be able to put the subtitles on on the television and understand the written subtitles at spoken speed even though I couldn't understand the speech that originated the subtitles (mostly coverage of election debates between not-yet-president Hollande and his opponents). I suspect I need to get my 'ear in' to be able to correctly understand spoken French.
Could do with lessons really, but in all honesty the chance of me going to France before I could forget everything are vanishingly slim.
Mabel, Don't worry too much about the date on the flour unless you have bugs in it. I have some cake flower which is best by November 2016 and when I used it a few weeks ago I couldn't tell the difference. Cake flour is low protein for a softer crumb, so Richard's extra protein would defeat the purpose.
When I was a kid we would pick up two 25lb (10kg) bags of wheat from the mill in the middle of farming country where my grandparents lived. Whenever we got low on flour we'd grind up some more. This makes it hard for me to understand why we can't at least get whole wheat flour back on the shelves in short order.
Richard, I do have some history with this sewage pipe. They are galvanized metal and 59 years old, a good 9 years past their life span. Several years ago the clothes washer would overflow its drain pipe when running due to a partial clog. I eventually cut out about a meter of drain pipe to get access to the crud gumming up the pipe and reducing its effectiveness. I replaced that section with plastic pipe and joined it to the metal with Fernco shielded couplers. About a year later we had the kitchen floor up to install some oak flooring and could hear water dripping in the crawl space. This was from holes in the pipe where it had just rusted through and looked like Swiss cheese. Again, I cut out a length of metal pipe and patched in plastic. It is that second repair that is either leaking at a coupler or the metal pipe has rusted through near it, based on what my wife could see without crawling across a puddle of waste water. It has been our intention all along to hire a plumber to replace the whole lot, but what you can't see (or smell) never seems to be a priority.
What I'll probably end up doing is hiring a plumber to fix the leak, and while he's down there he can give me a quote to replace the whole pipe. I know I could probably patch it up again myself, but I figure I need a plumber down there anyway for the bigger job so I may as well involve one now.
I was just looking at my work calendar for the week and I've got no meetings shown except for a 30 minute check-in with my manager. It seems like everyone got through their scheduled meetings and have reached a point where there is little new business to bring up in a meeting? I don't mind except that it makes work even more abstract and isolated as the work shifts from larger collaborations to projects that we can all do in isolation.
I cannot remember a time in the UK when galvanized was used for waste water pipe. There was a certain amount of 2" iron barrel pipe used (galvanized, but only thinly, mostly relying on the slow rusting rate of the iron), but it was generally considered too difficult for frequent use, which may explain why we mostly went straight from lead pipe to pvc. On the larger above ground sewer pipes (4"/6") we have a lot of Victorian cast iron around still, and I need to replace some on our house. The below ground Victorian stuff is all salt glazed stoneware, and that seems to be good for several centuries.
Richard, I don't understand the mindset of building a house with plumbing having a 50 year life expectancy when longer lasting materials are available without necessarily costing a great deal more. They even used galvanized steel for the freshwater pipes, but those are fairing better due to less air and probably thicker walls. Maybe when the plumber is out I'll get their opinion on re-piping everything.
Slightly off-topic... I've always hated how Pattern Maker turns dark areas of the original image into DMC 310 Black even when other dark colours would have been a better fit. I had always blamed the PM conversion algorithm, but in actuality it seems to be caused by the colour pallet. I don't recall the exact numbers, but PM has DMC 310 RGB as something like 40,40,40 and DMC 3371 Black Brown as only a bit lighter at something like 48, 42, 42. The net effect is that anything darker than about 40,40,40 gets turned into 310 and there is a very narrow band of dark colours that will get converted to 3371. PM lets you change the colour definitions of the palette so I set 310 and 3371 to what you use in your program and the tendency towards 310 went away, but now 3371 was dominating instead as there was now a large gap between it and the next lighter shades.
I have no doubt that DMC 310 isn't actually 0,0,0 but when you convert from an ideal colour space to a compressed one you have to make some adjustments. It makes me wish I knew more about colour theory as it relates to colour spaces and conversions. It's almost like each thread needs two RGB definitions; one for representing what it will actually look like when stitched, and another to fool the colour mapping process into picking the correct thread from a compressed colour space. Now do I play around with that idea tonight or do some stitching? Hmmm.
If you look on the latest version of my program (not sure if you have it, it's dated 2018 though my website says the last update was 2016 due to one of those friendly hackers who wrecked the update list which I had no spare record of due to a memory stick failure), I did a 'Chestnut Pens DMC' thread definition. To get the thread definition, I took a single photo of the whole 2017 DMC sample swatch card, did some overall colour adjustment with a custom program for that one use, as my camera seemed to give a small radial colour cast with the corners bluer than the middle, then did a white balance with Gimp. After that, I then extracted the colours from the corrected image. I think that will be about as good a definition of the colours as I can get, not having a calibrated camera. You may find the results a little closer to the actual threads than the normal thread definition range. Beyond that, I think we have gone almost as far as is possible without altering the thread range itself.
I was aware that you were working on that effort, but don't recall if I had ever downloaded the newer versions with it or not. I had a small computer incident about a year ago so many of the various copies of your tool were lost and the ones I have found scattered on various computers are older, circa 2015. Thankfully I did not lose my Ionian Mission chart as I had multiple copies of it scattered about. I spot checked a few of your values and those looked reasonable to me. Maybe I'll write a Perl script to extract the colour info from your file and generate a PM colour pallet and import it and see if that helps to fix PM or not. The other day I found a list of cross stitch software and yours was listed and highly rated.
Today was a rough transition back to work for me and school for the kids. It was just tough to change from fun to work when nothing about the day differentiates it from any of the other days. We have a plumber coming out tomorrow to fix the leak, but he better hurry and get here while we still have money because I'm working on filing my taxes and it says I owe. Nothing to worry about, we consistently owe a some each year rather than getting a refund on purpose. Hopefully I can get the taxes out of the way and leave enough time to stitch again this evening.
Managed to get a couple of hundred stitches done on Gryff. If all goes well, I may finish the page tomorrow, and will then have to find somewhere to upload a picture to. I haven't used PostImage yet, because, frankly it's a bit seedy. However I haven't found a real alternative yet. It's a shame the forum gallery can't be reinstated.
We've just been down to the village to collect our bread plus a couple of croissant. Tried out the masks I made yesterday.
Not bad! They are made from an old heavy linen sheet which had been washed so many times that it was soft and a bit thinner than it used to be.
D/H found some wire in the garage to provide an insert over the nose. ( he tried to bend it into shape whilst I was wearing the mask....but my yelp of pain soon stopped him doing that!! )
The linen provides a good enough barrier but isn't as good as a proper surgical mask of course. It doesn't steam up the glasses either which is a real bonus.
We have a New App on our Smart phones instead of the paper Virus Visas...haven't tried them out yet as we didn't see any Gendarmes.
Clever husband! (Except the bit about trying to bend the wire over your nose...)
Richard, I've heard people mention the seediness of PostImage, but all I can say is that using it with an ad blocker I've never had any problems with it - the only things I see are my images, which are all wholesome and pure
I have just spent an hour digging out Bamboo Roots!!
When we had our new Septic tank installed the contractor kindly dug out and removed the bamboo which we had "foolishly planted"! Also he said that he didn't want it to 'interfere' with the Septic tank!
Sadly though all they did was drag it all out and spread the roots and now what's happening ???
It's starting to GROW!!! EVERYWHERE!
I have decided that it's not that there are not enough Hours in the Day....IT'S NOT ENOUGHSTAMINA!!!
Glyphosate weedkiller does work. Eventually. Bamboo is very determined. Saves digging your back into oblivion. We rarely use weedkiller at our place (not in 3 years) but once in a while it has a place.
Yes, thanks Richard. We have been using the Glyphosate weedkiller and it is working on the finer 'french' bamboo but we brought some Spanish Hefty variety back from Spain one year...yes I know, not the wisest thing we have brought back from Spain!!
It soon took over! It got chopped back to the ground and the contractor took all the bamboo poles away. If we had had time we could have eradicated it where it was planted, but the 'helpful' operator of the JCB when digging the hole for the septic tank dragged out the roots. Most were taken away but a good number of them were liberally spread over the rough ground after the septic tank was installed. It's those roots, some of which got buried, and are now Bursting Forth!
I've been able to get the surface ones out but the buried ones are sprouting. It's those I was trying to dig up. The ground is now baking in the sun so that makes it so difficult.
I've stopped spraying and I'm anointing each shoot as it appears now with a concentrated solution.
Well, missed the forum for a while,but, got to Waitrose door at 0705 this morning - third in queue- sadly elderly lady who was first collapsed with dizzy spell, staff soon on hand to comfort her, manager did her shopping. I'm a qualified first aider, in theory, but what to do in that situation? Fortunately it turned out OK, and she sat inside to recover. Went to allotment after shopping, Waitrose queue was about 50 long by then - 3 hour wait. (one out, one in)
Edit - yes, of course I could have placed the lady in the recovery position, which the Waitrose staff did immediately. The sad thing about all this, is that my wife is older than me, and vulnerable,so it adds a level of concern - I pray and pray that I don't die before her.
Last edited by Sojourner on Fri Apr 10, 2020 4:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
WIP: Van Gogh "Fishing Boats", Another Bayeux scene
Sojourner, I think we are all finding the positive (helpful people, spring) mixing with quite a bit of "very difficult", and personal worries for loved ones are a particular burden to bear.
I am lucky in that I did have a really positive experience today, baking bread with a friend via Zoom! Friend had complained that the few times she'd tried baking the rolls came out as doorstops, so we had a number of sessions (stopping for proving time) and she's just posted pics of her rolls which are perhaps a little idiosyncratic in shape but beautifully risen and, she said, delicious! (Mine fortunately came out all right as well - would have been a bit embarrassing otherwise...)
_And_ we had a good natter all the while!
Our plumbing crisis is now resolved, just a little wall patching to do then we'll be done. We had a plumber out and he gave us an estimate of the work, but wouldn't go anywhere near it until we had a remediation company come out and clean up the mess first. Thankfully the remediation company was able to come out the next morning and our insurance covered all but the deductible. The plumbers then came back and replaced the entire main drain line and brought it up to size to meet current code requirements, increased the slope to improve drainage, and since the kitchen sink connections also had to be redone that cleared up the nasty mess of undersized pipes under the sink that would occasionally leak. It was a fair chunk of money all told, but we are pleased to have it all taken care of properly.
I was able to get in stitching two of the past few evenings and tonight I'm going to get in another. Maybe in a few day's I'll have finished the page that I've been working on.
. I cannot understand much spoken French, but the last time I went to France for work I was pleased to be able to put the subtitles on on the television and understand the written subtitles at spoken speed even though I couldn't understand the speech that originated the subtitles (mostly coverage of election debates between not-yet-president Hollande and his opponents). I suspect I need to get my 'ear in' to be able to correctly understand spoken French. 
)
