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Busy, busy, busy
Had to work for 7 hours on Sunday. For some reason movements of spacecraft worth tens of millions by road on different trailers from the originally designed ones, gets people quite nervous. And as the transport container designer, I get asked to do the tiedown calculations. Shame I didn't get called in earlier and so didn't need to work silly hours.
The real problem is that the box is around 15ft wide, 14ft high and 33ft long, weighing 21 tonnes. It has to go on a low loader to miss motorway bridges which are 16ft high in the UK and lower on the continent. The low loader needs to run with 6" ground clearance and that only leaves 9-12" for the thickness of the low loader bed, otherwise there will be a nasty bridge shaped hole in the box and there will be lots of people gesticulating wildly and shouting.

Regards,

Richard

Gack! I hope that's what you get paid the Big Bucks to sort out...!

Nice challenge I hope they appreciate you putting all that work in!

I doubt if anyone in the company knows except my team. So, the only people who matter. I do prefer to inspire them working hard by doing it more than my team.

As for big bucks.. not really. We're 'comfortable' rather than rolling in it. That makes a huge change from the past when we had two young kids, our current house and a barely affordable mortgage. At that time we easily met the then Labour government's definition of child poverty of having 'Less than £800 a month after housing costs'. However, we never appeared in any government poverty statistics. It is nice now Orianna is now paying for herself in terms of power, hot water & food and we have paid off the mortgage.

Regards,

Richard

Sounds familiar! It was pretty squeaky in these parts when the boys were bairns. For several years the only new stuff they ever had were knickers and shoes! But DH made his way up the university ladder and here we are, all's well. Never rich; generally comfortable. Eldest Son now has his own flat. Happy days.

Another weekend doing hours & hours of calculations in the heat.
On Saturday we had an amber heat warning over us, and yesterday wasn't exactly cool.

However had a bit of time helping relatives. On Saturday, an hour pulling out Bindweed from MIL's garden (she was compus-mentus enough to know who we are this weekend) and on Sunday, spent over an hour mowing Orianna's garden & pulling Bindweed out from the grass. Previous tenants and general neglect before she bought it have allowed Bindweed to create a great net of stems across through the grass and the thatch below the grass. One day it'll become a lawn again, and Tracy's helping create flower beds on one side of the lawn (small steps so far).

Regards,

Richard

Bindweed is my Nemesis MIL and Orianna are very lucky to have your help!

We had it in our last garden where it had become established in the hedge between us & our next-door neighbour. We largely eradicated it over 12 years of regular attacks. It ended up so weakened that it wasn't an issue and couldn't compete with everything else in the hedge, and in the last 2 years we were there we didn't have to deal with it.

At our current garden, I don't recall any in the main part of the wildlife garden, only in the areas around the house where we try to have some control over what grows (Murphy's Law in action..). Most of the garden is left to its own devices, and under those circumstances a balance develops, with bindweed being a very small part of the balance - if it can compete at all. Closer to the house, where the soil is richer, it does pop up in the flower beds, but removal every time we see any keeps it small and weak.

The three plants that mildly niggle me in the wild part of the garden are the dog roses, stinging nettles and brambles. The don't seem to know that they should only grow more than 3ft from the paths. I'm happy to leave them alone so long as I can walk round the garden without getting stung or shredded by thorns.

Regards,

Richard

No bindweed here, mercifully. Couch grass. Everywhere. Also sticky willie. Brambles and nettles, of course, but I try to find space for the latter. The former tries to find space for itself.

Went mowing paths in the garden yesterday and came across two nice surprises.

The first is that one of the saplings growing up in the garden has has fruited this year for the first time, and it's the same type of plum as our marvellous and very ancient Cheery Plum at the front. It now means there is a tree slowly developing to enable jam makers in 80 years to have wonderful plum jam. I have never seen this type of Cherry Plum anywhere else in the area. That was wonderful to see and I'm glad we didn't prune it before.

The second good news is that our accidentally crossed Loganberry/Tayberry (caused by allowing Raspberries to cross with Blackberries) are having a marvellous year and we could well end up harvesting quite a few pounds of Loganberries/Tayberries this year. Looking forward to it because the fruit is absolutely delicious.

Regards,

Richard

Congratulations on the plum, and I commend you for being so kind to jam makers 80 years hence. I hope the tayberries make up for not being able to harvest great quantities of the plum yet.

We do have the original & ancient tree still, so we'll happily keep with that for years.

A few years ago (around 2010) Tracy was asked by a lady by the name of Denise in her mid 80's if the tree was still there. She could remember it and the jam made from it from her childhood. Her family lived 4 doors down from our house and moved to another part of town when she was 8. Anyway, next week Tracy took a jar of jam I'd made from the year before, gave it to Denise. Denise got Tracy to pop the vacuum on the jar and ate a teaspoon of jam on its own, then she burst into tears. The taste was so distinctive and well remembered, she was transported back to her childhood and memories of everyone around at the time, her parents, her neighbours and elderly Mr Prideaux (who owned the tree at the time), his gypsy caravan and his gentle old donkey all flooded back and overwhelmed Denise for a few minutes. She left the church clutching the jam to her body like a talisman. Unfortunately Denise is no more, but she gifted us that little story.

Regards,

Richard

What a lovely story it is - how kind of Tracy and how sensitive to realise that it would be such a treat to her, reviving all those memories. She obviously has a pastoral heart.

Richard, it's truly wonderful when that happens.

We had a similar experience up north. The house we were renting in a very small township (as they are known up there -- not big enough for a village, I guess) was built in about 1880 with a garden and numerous fruit trees. The old apple and a plum were bearing exceedingly this particular year, and the owner begged us to take as much fruit as we could manage. Well, we were visiting a couple who had owned the book store in the place (most northerly!), she also being a marvellous photographer and who had moved up the coast a couple of years before. Prior to their move, they had known everyone, of course, because they had lived there forever. We thought about what to take her, and my sister (who was visiting) and I decided the best thing was a basket of these plums. Well! Agnes' reaction was just about the same as Denise's, and we had stories about the lady who lived in "our" house whom we knew as Aunt Mary (but had never met) and how the two of them used to sit at the kitchen table, pitting plums and all the adventures. It was wonderful.

Long may your cherry plums flourish!

I had a few days off. Time in lieu of weekends worked through...

Tracy & I went to the Royal Engineers Museum in Gillingham on Thursday. It was both fascinating & horrific. They have a huge collection of VC's and a short description of how each was deserved, and the equipment & techniques on show were remarkable. There was a bit of kit I've never seen before - a V2 from 1945, sectioned so the motor could be seen, and a Harrier jump jet amongst a lot of smaller bits of kit.

I was most taken by the simplicity of a modern take on defensive gabions that are filled with earth, rocks & sand. The mesh is pre-formed into flatpack linked boxes in a shipping container on the back of a truck, which are deployed simply by anchoring the first to the ground and then driving away. Up to 100m can be deployed and then filled with sand, rocks and earth by a digger. So much faster than ever before.

Unfortunately we had a problem with Toby on Friday Night/ Saturday Morning. With the hot weather the cats have been indoors during the day & out of an evening. Toby usually checks in at around 10pm, but we weren't bothered much when he didn't. At 00:45 Ozzie woke us up and took us to the back door. There was Toby collapsed on the ground. He couldn't put weight on his back right leg. He'd been hit by a car and broken his Fibula (the small bone next to the shin bone). We rushed him to the emergency vets who made him comfortable etc and got him home Saturday evening. The break is in two places and quite displaced. Due to the weekend there was no-one to fix available. So.. our vet needs to look at two options, amputation or set the bone today. One is going to be silly money, and the other even sillier money. We want the bone to be set by preference, but it depends on whether the vet thinks it's something they can do.

Lots of fun.

Regards,

Richard

Poor Toby! He's not had it easy, has he. I am sending gentle kitty scritches for the poor thing.

Thank you. He is surprisingly perky, eating well, drinking well and doing his business in the trays, so that's good.

We got the news that the surgeon thinks they can do him, so he's booked in for a leg repair Thursday next week (after surgeon returns from holiday). We can cross our fingers until then.

Regards,

Richard

IMO, I think you are doing the right thing to try to repair the leg. I just hope it all works well. Poor puss!

We do want to give him as big a chance as he needs. He's a very sweet, adorable cat, and incredibly good natured. We thought Ozzie was good natured and the best natured cat we'd had, but Toby, just wow.

Strangely, he's actually quite bothered by having seen a Pigeon explode in the garden (with the aid of a Hawk) about 30ft from his bed. He now seems to think that any bird that tells him off will lead to the same result for him and is very bothered when he gets told off because he can't run away. This is the second Pigeon to have been got by a hawk in the last week or so, so the garden is obviously a very dangerous place.

Regards,

Richard

Difficult decisions to be made, but Toby is in good hands with you as you will always strive to find the best solution for him.