Month: March 2021

They’ll not be happy . . .

/ Tony / 4 Comments

Opposite our house is a small parking area. Beyond that there is a medium sized (whatever that means) field. there is a sort of path that runs along the edge of the field, but I have been informed that it is not an official footpath. however it seems to a haven for the local dog owners. Dog ownership in the village seems to have increased over the past few months, which is probably due to the pandemic.

Last year the farmer grew nothing in the field, which happens every few years. About three weeks ago we noticed that the field was being sprayed with something. This usually happens before the farmer starts planting. The very same day saw at least 3 dog walkers in the field. Now I don’t know what the spray was, but I certainly would not walk my beloved pet anywhere that has been sprayed with anything.

Today, I noticed some people in the field with a commercial digger. They appeared to be picking up some of the rocks that lay scattered around the field. In the past half hour, I watched as the small ‘entrance’ to the field was blocked with soil an some of the rocks. I’m now of the opinion, that the farmer is going to graze sheep on the field, as the ‘entrance’ was blocked a few years ago when sheep were grazed. What now for the dog walkers. They will have to use the proper public paths to walk their animals.

They’ll not be happy . . .

Is it panic buying . . .

/ Tony / 2 Comments

I think I may be in a little bit of bother when my wife gets in. You see I have this habit of buying things when I think I should buy them, rather then knowing we need them. Take today as an example. I was doing my usual weekly shopping trip to Aldi.

© Aldi

I had traversed isles one and two and was making my way up isle three. After passing all the soft drinks we come to the ‘household’ shelves. This is where I came unstuck. I had reached the kitchen rolls, which I knew we didn’t need (just yet) and was progressing towards the toilet rolls area. That’s when what could only be described as a little bit of panic. Our usual toilet rolls come in a four pack, a nine pack and more recently a good value sixteen pack. Trying to remember if we needed any, I suddenly became aware, that there was only one sixteen pack and only two four packs on the shelf. What should I do?

Well of course, I picked up the sixteen pack. Only sensible thing to do. Better in my trolley than anyone else’s. Now the bit of bother I was referring to is this. I came to unpack the shopping and to put the toilet rolls in the cupboard. It was then that I realised that we still had twelve rolls left from a previous shop. A total of 28, and that didn’t include the ones in the bathroom cupboards.

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Mrs H is working on the garden at the side of the house. When we moved in, nearly twenty-eight years ago, there was a hedge that ran down the whole path. Over the years she (along with a bit of help!) has transformed in into a little flower bed, which looks really good.

However, not all the hedge was removed, and it has now come to the time, when the rest has to go. I made a start yesterday, but I think it will be a long job. I managed to get rid of about a fifth of the upper branches, but now the garden waste bin is full. The really hard part will be digging out the root system. What I think may be the best idea, is to dig down and severe the root system below the soil surface. I have this theory from somewhere, that without any light getting to the plant, the roots will simply die off. Well that’s what I’m hoping anyway.

Who’s calling . . .

/ Tony / 1 Comment

I got one of those calls again. I may have mentioned before, that I have a policy of not answering a call, if I don’t recognise the number. I work on the basis that if the call is important, then they will either call back or leave a message. I started this policy some years ago, when I got a call, which started with the caller saying “We are sorry to hear about your fatal accident …” Over the past few months, I have had a number of calls starting with the same four digits … 0758. As I understand it, these numbers are allocated to the EE network, but can be transferred to any network

I spoke with a former colleague a day or two ago, who indicated, that these calls are probably from ‘claims experts’, wanting to help me with my claim (that I don’t have.) Another possibility is that they are crooks posing as Amazon couriers. This works on their hope that you are expecting something from Amazon. They tell you that they have tried to deliver a large parcel, but you were not in and as this was the second attempt, there is a charge before they can deliver again. The charge is usually minimal, say £1.00 but it is so they can get your bank details. A third idea is that they are just ‘phone harvesters‘. These ring random numbers and when you answer, it tells the ‘harvester‘ that yours is a live number and can be sold on.

My wife will answer any call that she gets, regardless and laughs at me when I don’t answer. But I think it is better to miss a call than to get scammed.

Random tech problem . . .

/ Tony / 6 Comments

© Microsoft

I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my OneDrive. I have two laptops. My main one is downstairs but when I bought it, I decided to keep the previous one upstairs as a kind of back-up machine. It is a bit slow, but it was a good machine. I did want to try and connect both as a home network, but that doesn’t seem to work with Microsoft Home edition. I had ‘misplaced’ a couple of files that I now need to use. They were not big or even complicated files, I just didn’t want to re-write. I thought they were on my OneDrive, but I could not find them. I then had the idea that they may just be in the documents folder on old laptop. And they were.

© Microsoft Office

I copied them into my OneDrive, along with some video files that I had forgotten about. Must have spent a good couple of hours opening, and copying the files, or so it seemed at the time. I shut down the old laptop and trotted off downstairs ready to work with these newly found files. But … they were not in the OneDrive I was accessing from downstairs. I ‘ummed and ‘ahhed for a while before deciding that I must have two OneDrives. Seemed reasonable as the Office package on the upstairs laptop was Office 2013 and downstairs it is Office 365. All I need to do is copy the files I wanted onto a Flash Drive and then onto the downstairs machine. Problem solved … or not.

Try as I might, I could not get the files copied and was receiving an error message:
Error 0x8007016A: The Cloud File provider is not running …
Restart after restart would not cure the problem and in the end I gave up for the evening.

© SanDisk

This morning, after a lot of Googling, it came to light that I must not have signed in to my OneDrive on the upstairs Laptop. In fact, the service was not even running, I must have disabled it in Task Manager. More clicks and reboots ensued and finally I was able to copy the files to the Flash Drive and onto the main machine. Then I found that they had synchronised and so all the copy and pasting was a total waste of time. Thankyou Google and all who sail in you. If the fact that I was not signed in to the OneDrive upstairs reason had been one of the first in the Google search screen, I could have saved a lot of time and unnecessary brain work!

Not really retirement, but . . .

/ Tony / 5 Comments

This post is an attempt at a response to the Weekly Prompts Wednesday Challenge (fingers crossed I get this right)

Back at the beginning of 2016 our Head of Service, brought our team together for it’s monthly ‘Team Talk’. The theme, if you could call it that, was staff cuts. There had been a lot of hushed chatter among some of the more senior members of the team regarding the reduction of office staff in the department. The Council’s solution was a programme called ‘Early Leavers Initiative’ or ELI. What people liked to think was that it was Early Retirement, but was actually Voluntary Redundancy, with the benefit of being able to draw down the works pension scheme early, albeit slightly reduced.

It was made clear to everyone in the room, that the Department were looking for ‘volunteers’ to take advantage of this. It was also clear that this was a case of ‘jump before you are pushed’. If that had been the case, then it would have been compulsory redundancy, with no arrangement to take the pension early. After a lot of discussion at home, I decided I would go for it.

Not the real cake!

The day came, and it seemed to be just like any other day. I was taking calls and trying to keep my excitement under control. My manager asked what time I wanted to leave, and I had worked out my hours so that I could finish at three pm. At about half past two the office manager appeared with a large cake which was shared with the staff on duty. It was significant that my line manager and the service head weren’t present.

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I decided that I would have a couple of weeks living the life of luxury, then get a part time job. It took a lot longer for something to come up. After about 18 months, my current part-time job suddenly happened. Now furloughed (as at 11/03/2021) I am now just waiting to return. It is not looking god, but I will have to just wait and see. But . . . on the 19th April this year (2021) I will have reached my state pension age and will have to decide the future. Do I carry on with two days a week? Or do I cut down to one day a week? Or . . . do I just stop all together?

It’s not the way I’d do it . . .

/ Tony / Leave a comment

I had a need to find a post for someone to link to. I did not know the title or the category and the only information I had was that the post was from the end of 2009. I could not find a way of doing this, except by going to the My Sites > Posts section and scrolling through page after page. This would not be so bad, but with a large number of posts it gets a little tiresome. I have nearly 1000 posts to scroll through (not boasting … really) and to find the correct post too a good 10 minutes.

I then found it. Just by accident. There was some posts in the ‘Trash’ folder and I usually delete them regularly and I know how to do this. That is when the fog cleared. I went to ‘WP Admin’ and selected the ‘Posts’ option and it was there. All the posts were listed and I was able to list the posts by month, using the ‘All Dates’ drop-down box.

I did log a call on the WordPress.com forums, but have now closed it as resolved. Just got to try and remember for the next time.

It ain’t going to work …

/ Tony / 4 Comments

We have had a 20mph speed limit in the village for about a year now. Maybe a bit longer, but I would say that well over 80% of drivers take no notice at all. The problem is, and this is my opinion, there is no enforcement. None whatsoever. We have the main 20 mph zone signs as you enter the village together with smaller repeater signs, but that’s it basically. There is one of those ‘smiley’ face signs near the school, but that is mainly ignored by the majority.

A great deal of the time, these “speed merchants”, (and again, my opinion) are local people. People who know that they are not going to get caught. I was at the local bottle bank last week, when a van went past. The sign showed that he was travelling at 35mph. The lady who was walking past stated that “… they should not be allowed to enter ...”. I had to explain that the van and driver was from the village and in fact from the same road that I live on.

It was announced in the Parish Magazine, that the Parish Council was putting a bid to purchase a Mobile SID (Speed Indication Device) to raise speed awareness in areas of concern. I don’t think it will have any effect. If drivers already ignore the sign near the school, are they going to take any notice of any signs. Back to my opinion again, but the only thing that will stop this is proper enforcement. Signs at the entrance roads saying that mobile Speed Cameras are in use, together with a Police Office with a Speed Gun would be the better idea. Nothing gets a message home better than a fine.

However, the latest idea is to have a sticker on your refuse bin that tells drivers to slow down. A sticker! On a bin that is only put out one day a week. Really? Is that the best they can come up with?

Higher than expected …

/ Tony / 4 Comments

I had my INR (international normalized ratio) test yesterday and it was a lot higher than I expected. My range is 2.5 to 3.5 with a target of 3.0. Yesterday it hit an all time high of 4.3. I have put a short guide to INR on a page on this site for those who are not aware of what the INR is.

I take Warfarin, which is an anticoagulant (commonly known as a blood thinner) to control my INR and I have a regular test to ensure that it stays within the range decided for me. I have been on Warfarin since my Mitral Valve replacement back in 2014. As I understood at the time, the surgeon has three options when performing the surgery. The ideal option is a repair, then the next option is a replacement with an organic valve (usually from a pig) or a mechanical valve. The surgeon will decide when the chest is opened which option is required. For me he opted for a mechanical valve. As it could be dangerous if blood clotted in or around the valve, an anticoagulant is prescribed to increase the time taken to clot.

For a long time, my test has been within the range and often hitting my target. Back in August last year, I had a small infection on my leg for which anti-biotics were prescribed. I was advised to get an INR test after taking the anti-biotics as they are known to have an effect on blood clotting times. And indeed this proved to be the case as my INR went as high as 3.9. It seemed to take a long time to get back to ‘normal’ but by the end of the year it was looking better.

I had my previous test mid January this year, and whilst it was in range, it was only just. The nurse decided to increase my Warfarin from 15mg to 16mg (3mg Sunday and Tuesday, 2mg every other day). Not a huge amount, but I think it proved a significant change. After yesterday it is now back to what I was taking before, which is 3mg Tuesday, 2mg every other day. I’m back for another test in three weeks and we shall just see what happens.