Broithe

Flocking marvellous!

I see they've moved the road sideways to go round that big pothole, rather than fill it in.

The UK did the same when there was a £15 threshold before you were hit for import costs. I paid £14.90, including p&p, for a CD from Japan. By the time it arrived, a change in the exchange rate made the 'official' total £15.03. This meant that I was hit for £3.00 and another £8.00 for the privilege of paying it. At total of £11 extra when I had paid actually less than the threshold for the item, including postage.

Captain Canary.

Consultation survey is available here. https://www.irishrail.ie/en-ie/news/Timetable-Consultation-2024?

I wonder if you could use an old 'black' inner tube, cut into thin rings and then snipped into sections to represent each sod? That might be a bit thin for your scale, although a bike inner tube would be about right for 00. It's a long time since I saw a car inner tube, but they should be thicker. Doing it this way would also produce the slight arc that you usually get as the sods dry out. It would be a tedious process, but not too bad, if you're just wanting to produce the visible top layer -but, doing a whole wagon-load would take a while, without some sort of automation of the process. Doing it by hand, though, would produce some of the variation that you would get naturally.

The pictures are all very nice, but we need to hear the squeak as it turns, that's the important part.

I'm just glad there isn't a picture of the photographer's situation...

Lie down on the (ground) floor and look at this with one eye.

I'm not a fan of heights. My bike ride home from work on the Big Island had about a mile along a straight road, with double yellow lines along it. I would try, and usually succeed, to ride the full length with my tyres within the outer limits of the lines, a path a foot wide. I would generally be able to do it, even on a fairly windy day and with traffic whizzing past. If I attempted that 100' up in the air, I wouldn't get a yard before I was plummeting earthwards. There is a risk/consequence balance, and we all have different biases. Remember how fast everything seemed to happen when you started driving - now, people hardly bother, once they are used to it... You can, especially if you have an element of personal control of the circumstances, acclimatise yourself to most situations, with adequate time to do so. But, it would probably be several lifetimes before I could do this.

I was once roped into replacing a flat roof on the end two garages in a run of eight, they were all owned independently and I could foresee 'awkwardness' from the owner of the third garage, should we provoke future issues for him. I laboured the point about this and the fact that we would have to do a really neat join, where the new roof met the old, over the partition brick wall. I was trying to get out of the whole job, by raising this risk, but I ended up doing it. As I removed the failed roofing felt, it started to become clear that it had been done before, and badly, including replacing the rotten roof sheets, which had rotted again. I was now even more nervous about the joining issue when we reached the existing good roof at the partition. As I carefully peeled back the felt, I could see where the original roof had been cut and the new roof fitted to it. The boards were chipboard and had been rather roughly cut - with a hammer. You could see the individual 'bite' marks as the 'craftsman' had worked his way along. Luckily, our roofing material top sheet was not the usual felt, but stuff that was liberated from the nearby Evode/Bostik factory, basically metre-wide rolls of Flashband, which covered the dodgy joint up very well. No issues were ever reported.

We would need to make sure that the snipers had adequate hearing protection and were located a good distance from anybody reciting James Joyce at the offenders, or we may find that they would change sides.

I've been mulling this sad news over all day. Ken's workshop thread was, in equal measures, both inspirational and intimidating. It showed the quality that could be achieved, if you had the skill and put in the effort. A sad day.

We really should be a bit humane about this. I would give them a choice*. A, Being locked in a room with @jhb171achill explaining the entirety of Irish railway liveries since the beginning of time, until they can recite it word-perfect. Or. B, The lump hammer. * I would take the lump hammer.

In the days when I used to travel backwards and forwards between the islands by train and ferry, it was quite common to 'get pulled' at Holyhead. On one occasion, I was stopped by a very English customs bloke who wanted to empty my rucksack himself, quizzing me about things as they emerged, to get the timing of my answers, in the hope of spotting a hesitation. In the bag, wrapped in two pages of the Leinster Express, was a sod of turf that I had found in the road outside the house one day. I had a friend in England who worked for a wildlife trust and was very anti-turf cutting, so I had decided to bring it back to annoy her with. As he extracted the parcel from my bag, he asked me what it was, but, at one o'clock in the morning and faced with such an English gentleman, the only word that I could think of was 'sod', and that seemed not fully appropriate, in the cross-cultural situation. This hesitation signalled a potential 'find' to him, and he carefully unwrapped it, to find a large block of dark brown fibrous material. At this point, his eyes lit up and he broke a piece off, to smell it, much to the amusement of his co-workers, who did know what it was...

These don't look quite right to me.

My crows take advantage of the footwarming and delousing properties of the shed stove emissions.

I have several pairs of identical socks, in an effort to just simplify the whole situation. Once, when hanging out the washing, I noticed a single sock on the top of the pile - "Oh, well, I've lost one, but it'll turn up eventually". When I got to the bottom of the pile, there was another matching solo sock there - "Imagine that - I have lost two identical socks on the same day!" After a bit of thought, I realised that I could just put these two socks together, to form a 'new' pair, then, as I found the other two missing, but identical socks, I could do the same with them and all would be back to normal, as though nothing had ever happened. About half an hour later, having felt pleased with myself that the whole plan had worked so efficiently, I realised that I hadn't actually lost any socks...

It's for the Lartigue option.

To be fair, I had to look pretty hard. It is on the 'Contact' page, but a good way down after some blank space.

It is actually there on the website, but well hidden. 136 Oliver Plunkett St., Cork. 021 4277100 OPEN TUESDAY TO SATURDAY 10AM TO 2PM 2.30PM TO 6PM CLOSED ON BANK HOLIDAYS

And it's not always the usual suspects that are doing it...

Graffiti is a strange 'culture'. I know of a distributor road in a city on the Big Island, built in the 1970s with acres of concrete 'canvas' easily available on bridges, embankments, etc., and not a single spot of paint anywhere, in a city which is not 'unadorned' in general. I only noticed this situation about a decade ago, but there is just nothing sprayed anywhere along the ten miles, and it is not due to any obstructed access. I suspect that, if some ever does appear, there would be a rapid avalanche of other 'work' by 'competing artists'. I am careful about who I mention this absence to, but nobody else has ever agreed that they had already noticed - you just don't spot what's not there, I suppose. I did once spot a small paint mark at the base of a bridge parapet, but it turned out to be a road maintenance mark. I considered suggesting to the council that they might be careful, so as to not set off "tag wars".

It can vary over a few miles. I had a lot of deliveries on the Big Island last month and everything worked exactly as it should. People I know, literally a mile away in a straight line, moan continuously about some of the services - it may just depend on the actual people who are involved in your provision.