The "Complaints 'R' Us, complaint thread"

NVIATWAS · March 2018

Complaints!

- Legs, thighs, hips and lower back all hurt

- Shoulders hurt from overloaded pack yesterday

- Out of vodka for the weekend

- Walk to the booze store is uphill - BOTH WAYS

- Feel lazy as heck

Non-complaints!

- Cheese quesadillas came out perfectly

- Fried tater wedges were excellent

- Huge chicken drumsticks marinating in lemon juice and hot sauce

- Remembered I bought ground pork sausage to put in the beans

- Beautiful sunny, cool weather perfect for a short walk

Now if I can just get over a bad case of the lazies.. rain Saturday/Sunday/Monday so if I want anything I better get it today! :-O

TJohn · March 2018

I no grok ancient Grek.

NVIATWAS · March 2018

Tjohn said:

I no grok ancient Grek.

You telling me you've never heard of Greko-Roamin? Wass wrong wid yew? :-P

LeatherGryphon · March 2018

NVIATWAS said:

Complaints!

- ...

- Walk to the booze store is uphill - BOTH WAYS

- ...

You must live in an Escher neighborhood.

LeatherGryphon · March 2018

Back to languages for a moment. I get a kick out of Russian "Stop" signs, It's easy to figure out what it says considering that the "C" is pronounced like an English "S" and the "П" at the end is essentialy the Greek "Pi" character and is pronounced like the English "P". All they have to do now is make it bigger and paint the background bright red. It's no wonder we see so many Russian auto accident clips on YouTube showing massive collisions at intersections. Who's going to pay attention to that little white sign at an intersection. It has all the intimidation of a street name sign.

stmercy2020_9aea6b9c04 · March 2018

NVIATWAS said:

- Huge chicken drumsticks marinating in lemon juice and hot sauce

Just have to say that sounds good... I have to try that!

Also, that leads to my complaint: March Madness means I'm not allowed to eat again, this month.

manekiNeko · March 2018

LeatherGryphon said:

DanaTA said:

LeatherGryphon said:

Being such a large country, the US has a built-in disadvantage in the language department. Only in the big cities and along the borders do you find many people who even experience hearing more than one language. Much less practice one. Things have changed a bit in the last 30 years with the introduction of Spanish in large numbers. But there is a great deal of language momentum and unwillingness to learn or even accept the presence of anything but English. There is a smattering of French in the northeast near Montreal and in the south in Louisiana. Some oriental languages in small areas around the country. But for the most part I find that many Americans are smugly and blissfully ignorant of the rest of the world cultures and languages simply because most of them can't travel far enough to have had a foreign experience. (Canada doesn't count.)

I have traveled the world a bit and I am interested in other languages but I'm not much good at languages. I know a smattering of Spanish, Italian, German and Russian but not enough to be comfortably conversant. But for most Americans there is still no need or even desire to learn another language. English is too pervasive around them their whole lives. And if truth be told, I notice a great many Americans who casually slaughter English too.

In Fall River, MA, the city where I grew up, there were several languages spoken regularly. Not that I knew any of them. But I grew up in a mostly Portuguese area of the city. It's not a huge city, but it had an Irish section, a French section, a Polish and Ukranian section, and overall a large Portuguese and Cape Verdian population. As I was growing up, I was never aware of any prejudice. Things may have changed a bit in later years. Still, not so much as neighboring cities, I think. Plenty of crime there, now, though. Sadly, my mom and one of my sisters still live there. I escaped in 2001.

Dana

Yes, other languages are present around the US but not to the point where you need to learn them. In this area when I was a kid you knew that parents of other kids spoke Italian or Swedish but you never heard it in school. And the Amish around here speak something akin to German. But you don't go into shops and have to deal with another language. You don't see signs in other languages, and unless you tune into limited range radio or TV stations specifically you don't hear other languages, and why would you if you didn't have to?

I really admire people who can speak more than one language. It's like having two eyes instead of just one, you see another dimension of the world. Even just the little bit I know of Russian, gives me the ability to see a sign in a movie, and be able to pronounce the word and in many cases figure out what it is telling me. Whereas before, the sign was just wierd Cyrillic chicken scratchings.

it's exactly what you don't see much of here in switzerland - at least not out of the "biggest" *cough* cities like zurich, geneva or basel, where i've been occasionally but not enough to judge - you don't have "sections" with specific ethnic groups. you might have high rises with a conglomerate of rather foreign citiens, but not so separated into nations, same for quarters where you'd have a certain demographic, but no ghettos.
yeah i realized, watching movies featuring amish, that i could petty much make sense of what they said. all those germanic dialects are similar..
for me it's so normal to understand different languages (as many people do here). i can't fathom how it is not being able to.. then again, many people are really surprised that i can't drive, nor swim.. *shrug* - i guess that's one eye missing, i don't think mobile, and the only place i feel safe is on the ground (nope, never jumped off a plane or bridge either) ^^

manekiNeko · March 2018

Chohole said:

LeatherGryphon said:

For the people east of Buffalo in the path of that storm, hunker down! I woke up this morning to 8 inches of FROZEN WATER FROM THE SKY the consistency of cake frosting. I tried to sweep it off my porch and it just compacted into alabaster cement. No mini-adventures for me today. And it's still coming down!

I am trapped indoors. At the front, the way the wind tunnelled through it has meant that half the street is almost clear and driveable. This side of the street, the old houses have drifts caused by the wind actually blocking the front doors, well mine is blocked anyway and I can't get out to check if it has picked on me especially, and yet the other side, where the new houses have gardens they have snow drifts in their gardens, but can get out to clear it as they have porches so not as thoroughly blocked as I am. At the back I only have a 15 inch drift across the back door, but it is quite a trek to struggle out of that, find a spde or shovel and walk up the garden along the back lane, down the next road and back along to my front door. Not certain I care to try opening the front door to try to clear away a drift that varies from 2ft 6inches to almost 4ft. We are at 23f, (real feel 7f due to wind chill factor)

is this frequent where you live, or do we have a particularly harsh/weird winter? and is this a big urban area, or somehow isolated?

manekiNeko · March 2018

NVIATWAS said:

I can recognize Kanji and katakana, from my days trying to learn some Japanese to understand what the anime was REALLY saying, can't speak/understand it. I know a little Spahish, a little French, and 2 years of German in high school is still sticking with me a bit. I can read some Sephardic Hebrew and know a few words, my ancient Grek is gone though 20 years ago I could *just* read a bit. This was at the height of my study of comparative religion and I was dead set on reading as many source documents in their original language as I could. Never got to study Aramaic, a very important Biblical-era language, and I gave up on Sanskrit after 5 months - it's worse than Mandarin Chinese! Plus, the way Sanskritwords were joined changed over the years so you needed to know WHEN something was written to know what compound words really meant. German, for me, is the most logical, French is the most idiomatic. 'Pomme de Terre'? Apple of the Earth, really? :-/

No wonder I prefer computer languages.,, :-|

hiranaga is very easy, but i get stuck often with katakana, dunno why it's not even so different - and forget kanji.. german is hard for many people, even i speak/write it totally fluently, there are some tough nuts in the grammar, and i still make mistakes there, in those declinations. hebrew must be interesting.. i can recognize it is when i see a text, and have heard less than a handful people speak it, never tried to learn more. french has a lot of greek-originated words, so when you can decipher cyrillic AND speak french (with a bit of a sense for ethymology), you can hobble a bit through simple greek in print, like titles, signs etc. i wonder if learning aramaic today would help you with ancient scriptures.. does it? as to being exact, it's not like someone from back then can correct you.. generally, i find that languages that don't have clear separations are the hardest to decipher, those ligatures ones (even worse when you don't know how to interpret them due to time as you explained). german is pretty exact and practical - if it weren't for those declinations. and french.. urgh, it's my first language, and even i get annoyed by it. you need twice as much space/words to say the same thing you'd say in german/english, with all those prepositions in-between. hmm i guess it's apple of the earth, minuscule, lol. not so weird, in dutch they say aardappel, in swiss-german härdöpfel.. you should follow the path of the different words for "orange", it's quite interesting ^^
i only know html/css - WITH a reference book cuz i keep forgetting every time, and i could write simple scripts in lingo (kind of a simplified version of actionscript).. but i never tried, and probably would have no chance, with more complicated/higher computer languages. not with my focus/attention span the way it is ~ been ogling python in relation to renpy, but i think this is not gonna happen ~

LeatherGryphon · March 2018

manekiNeko said:

LeatherGryphon said:

DanaTA said:

LeatherGryphon said:

Being such a large country, the US has a built-in disadvantage in the language department. Only in the big cities and along the borders do you find many people who even experience hearing more than one language. Much less practice one. Things have changed a bit in the last 30 years with the introduction of Spanish in large numbers. But there is a great deal of language momentum and unwillingness to learn or even accept the presence of anything but English. There is a smattering of French in the northeast near Montreal and in the south in Louisiana. Some oriental languages in small areas around the country. But for the most part I find that many Americans are smugly and blissfully ignorant of the rest of the world cultures and languages simply because most of them can't travel far enough to have had a foreign experience. (Canada doesn't count.)

I have traveled the world a bit and I am interested in other languages but I'm not much good at languages. I know a smattering of Spanish, Italian, German and Russian but not enough to be comfortably conversant. But for most Americans there is still no need or even desire to learn another language. English is too pervasive around them their whole lives. And if truth be told, I notice a great many Americans who casually slaughter English too.

In Fall River, MA, the city where I grew up, there were several languages spoken regularly. Not that I knew any of them. But I grew up in a mostly Portuguese area of the city. It's not a huge city, but it had an Irish section, a French section, a Polish and Ukranian section, and overall a large Portuguese and Cape Verdian population. As I was growing up, I was never aware of any prejudice. Things may have changed a bit in later years. Still, not so much as neighboring cities, I think. Plenty of crime there, now, though. Sadly, my mom and one of my sisters still live there. I escaped in 2001.

Dana

Yes, other languages are present around the US but not to the point where you need to learn them. In this area when I was a kid you knew that parents of other kids spoke Italian or Swedish but you never heard it in school. And the Amish around here speak something akin to German. But you don't go into shops and have to deal with another language. You don't see signs in other languages, and unless you tune into limited range radio or TV stations specifically you don't hear other languages, and why would you if you didn't have to?

I really admire people who can speak more than one language. It's like having two eyes instead of just one, you see another dimension of the world. Even just the little bit I know of Russian, gives me the ability to see a sign in a movie, and be able to pronounce the word and in many cases figure out what it is telling me. Whereas before, the sign was just wierd Cyrillic chicken scratchings.

it's exactly what you don't see much of here in switzerland - at least not out of the "biggest" *cough* cities like zurich, geneva or basel, where i've been occasionally but not enough to judge - you don't have "sections" with specific ethnic groups. you might have high rises with a conglomerate of rather foreign citiens, but not so separated into nations, same for quarters where you'd have a certain demographic, but no ghettos.
yeah i realized, watching movies featuring amish, that i could petty much make sense of what they said. all those germanic dialects are similar..
for me it's so normal to understand different languages (as many people do here). i can't fathom how it is not being able to.. then again, many people are really surprised that i can't drive, nor swim.. *shrug* - i guess that's one eye missing, i don't think mobile, and the only place i feel safe is on the ground (nope, never jumped off a plane or bridge either) ^^

Two-thirds of Americans don't even have passports. The average vacation time for American workers was only 12 days in 2012. Taking the time and money to have meaningful travel to Europe or Asia or Australia is not common for average income families. Until after the 9/11 event we didn't need a passport to go to Canada (a special type of driver's license will also suffice) But going to Canada is not really a foreign experience unless you go to Montreal. Actually though, that's where I had to first deal in real-time with a foreign language. In 1967 I was 18 and I went with my parents to Montreal for the 1967 World's Fair. The fair was held on an island in the middle of the river but the parking lots were on the mainland and you took the subway over to the island. I was sent back to the car to get something we'd forgotten and this was the first time I'd been in a subway (not following a huge group of tourists all headed to the fair from the parking lot ). I got lost on the subway and when I came above ground I found myself in downtown Montreal. I eventually figured out the French signs and found my way back to the right subway line and then the car and then back to the fair. It was an eye opening experience that kindled my interest in languages despite having a year of Spanish in high school which had at that time mostly evaporated from my brain.

Chohole · March 2018

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

LeatherGryphon said:

For the people east of Buffalo in the path of that storm, hunker down! I woke up this morning to 8 inches of FROZEN WATER FROM THE SKY the consistency of cake frosting. I tried to sweep it off my porch and it just compacted into alabaster cement. No mini-adventures for me today. And it's still coming down!

I am trapped indoors. At the front, the way the wind tunnelled through it has meant that half the street is almost clear and driveable. This side of the street, the old houses have drifts caused by the wind actually blocking the front doors, well mine is blocked anyway and I can't get out to check if it has picked on me especially, and yet the other side, where the new houses have gardens they have snow drifts in their gardens, but can get out to clear it as they have porches so not as thoroughly blocked as I am. At the back I only have a 15 inch drift across the back door, but it is quite a trek to struggle out of that, find a spde or shovel and walk up the garden along the back lane, down the next road and back along to my front door. Not certain I care to try opening the front door to try to clear away a drift that varies from 2ft 6inches to almost 4ft. We are at 23f, (real feel 7f due to wind chill factor)

is this frequent where you live, or do we have a particularly harsh/weird winter? and is this a big urban area, or somehow isolated?

Not at all usual. We have a bad set of circumstances hitting the UK at the moment. What they are calling "the beast from the East" which is arctic type weather coming from Russia met head on with Storm Emma, coming the other way. Snow we are used to in this area, winds we are used to. But this particular thing is bad. The Artic blast is fuelling dry powder snow, not nice flaky moister snow which makes nice snowballs. The winds are howling around, picking up the light dry powder snow and causing the snow drifts, It is what a Swedish friend says they call snow smoke, like a sandstorm but with snow. I live in what they poetically call "the foot hills of the Brecon Beacon Mountain Range" or less poetically "the Heads of the Valleys" full of ups and downs and our street is around 1200 ft above sea level., As LeatherGryphon says, genuinely uphill both ways to the shops and our street is sort of West to East orientation, so the NorEaster drving the Artic weather is funnelling straight down the street driving snow before it. Emma is whirling the winds around making for beautifully sculpted snow drifts which look very impressive but really are a pain in the proverbial.

Mistara · March 2018

Chuckie's in love

didn't know he had it in him

woes, trying to use precious dragon in carrara, so he can party with the fairy berry dragon.
the geografts leave gaping holes in the base mesh, which mess up the uvs.
and without the verts welded, leaves light seepish, edges of the geograft dont blend perfectly

kyoto kid · March 2018

LeatherGryphon said:

Back to languages for a moment. I get a kick out of Russian "Stop" signs, It's easy to figure out what it says considering that the "C" is pronounced like an English "S" and the "П" at the end is essentialy the Greek "Pi" character and is pronounced like the English "P". All they have to do now is make it bigger and paint the background bright red. It's no wonder we see so many Russian auto accident clips on YouTube showing massive collisions at intersections. Who's going to pay attention to that little white sign at an intersection. It has all the intimidation of a street name sign.

...well if after a few glasses of wodka they misread the "п" as "л" it effectively becomes "table" so I could understand the confusion as they continue to cruise into the intersection baffled by the fact there is no furniture ahead.

kyoto kid · March 2018

LeatherGryphon said:

manekiNeko said:

LeatherGryphon said:

DanaTA said:

LeatherGryphon said:

Being such a large country, the US has a built-in disadvantage in the language department. Only in the big cities and along the borders do you find many people who even experience hearing more than one language. Much less practice one. Things have changed a bit in the last 30 years with the introduction of Spanish in large numbers. But there is a great deal of language momentum and unwillingness to learn or even accept the presence of anything but English. There is a smattering of French in the northeast near Montreal and in the south in Louisiana. Some oriental languages in small areas around the country. But for the most part I find that many Americans are smugly and blissfully ignorant of the rest of the world cultures and languages simply because most of them can't travel far enough to have had a foreign experience. (Canada doesn't count.)

I have traveled the world a bit and I am interested in other languages but I'm not much good at languages. I know a smattering of Spanish, Italian, German and Russian but not enough to be comfortably conversant. But for most Americans there is still no need or even desire to learn another language. English is too pervasive around them their whole lives. And if truth be told, I notice a great many Americans who casually slaughter English too.

In Fall River, MA, the city where I grew up, there were several languages spoken regularly. Not that I knew any of them. But I grew up in a mostly Portuguese area of the city. It's not a huge city, but it had an Irish section, a French section, a Polish and Ukranian section, and overall a large Portuguese and Cape Verdian population. As I was growing up, I was never aware of any prejudice. Things may have changed a bit in later years. Still, not so much as neighboring cities, I think. Plenty of crime there, now, though. Sadly, my mom and one of my sisters still live there. I escaped in 2001.

Dana

Yes, other languages are present around the US but not to the point where you need to learn them. In this area when I was a kid you knew that parents of other kids spoke Italian or Swedish but you never heard it in school. And the Amish around here speak something akin to German. But you don't go into shops and have to deal with another language. You don't see signs in other languages, and unless you tune into limited range radio or TV stations specifically you don't hear other languages, and why would you if you didn't have to?

I really admire people who can speak more than one language. It's like having two eyes instead of just one, you see another dimension of the world. Even just the little bit I know of Russian, gives me the ability to see a sign in a movie, and be able to pronounce the word and in many cases figure out what it is telling me. Whereas before, the sign was just wierd Cyrillic chicken scratchings.

it's exactly what you don't see much of here in switzerland - at least not out of the "biggest" *cough* cities like zurich, geneva or basel, where i've been occasionally but not enough to judge - you don't have "sections" with specific ethnic groups. you might have high rises with a conglomerate of rather foreign citiens, but not so separated into nations, same for quarters where you'd have a certain demographic, but no ghettos.
yeah i realized, watching movies featuring amish, that i could petty much make sense of what they said. all those germanic dialects are similar..
for me it's so normal to understand different languages (as many people do here). i can't fathom how it is not being able to.. then again, many people are really surprised that i can't drive, nor swim.. *shrug* - i guess that's one eye missing, i don't think mobile, and the only place i feel safe is on the ground (nope, never jumped off a plane or bridge either) ^^

Two-thirds of Americans don't even have passports. The average vacation time for American workers was only 12 days in 2012. Taking the time and money to have meaningful travel to Europe or Asia or Australia is not common for average income families. Until after the 9/11 event we didn't need a passport to go to Canada (a special type of driver's license will also suffice) But going to Canada is not really a foreign experience unless you go to Montreal. Actually though, that's where I had to first deal in real-time with a foreign language. In 1967 I was 18 and I went with my parents to Montreal for the 1967 World's Fair. The fair was held on an island in the middle of the river but the parking lots were on the mainland and you took the subway over to the island. I was sent back to the car to get something we'd forgotten and this was the first time I'd been a subway (not following a huge group of tourists all headed to the fair from the parking lot ). I got lost on the subway and when I came above ground I found myself in downtown Montreal. I eventually figured out the French signs and found my way back to the right subway line and then the car and then back to the fair. It was an eye opening experience that kindled my interest in languages despite having a year of Spanish in high school which had at that time mostly evaporated from my brain.

...very true, my last passport expired in the 80s and as I never had the funds to travel abroad at the time I never renewed it. yeah Canada was no issue made a number of trips there just showing my Washington or Oregon State ID. (pre 9-11 of course). Now there is talk about needing a passport or passport card to fly domestically from some states as their ID cards/drivers' licences don't meet some sort of TSA criteria.

Mistara · March 2018

is it time for flowers and flutterbys yet?

Mistara · March 2018

ahhh me eyes watering

heated up an enpanada for dinner, spicyyyyyy oscar m gulf

TSasha Smith · March 2018

Mistara said:

is it time for flowers and flutterbys yet?

Soon, but not Daz Soon.

manekiNeko · March 2018

LeatherGryphon said:

manekiNeko said:

LeatherGryphon said:

DanaTA said:

LeatherGryphon said:

Being such a large country, the US has a built-in disadvantage in the language department. Only in the big cities and along the borders do you find many people who even experience hearing more than one language. Much less practice one. Things have changed a bit in the last 30 years with the introduction of Spanish in large numbers. But there is a great deal of language momentum and unwillingness to learn or even accept the presence of anything but English. There is a smattering of French in the northeast near Montreal and in the south in Louisiana. Some oriental languages in small areas around the country. But for the most part I find that many Americans are smugly and blissfully ignorant of the rest of the world cultures and languages simply because most of them can't travel far enough to have had a foreign experience. (Canada doesn't count.)

I have traveled the world a bit and I am interested in other languages but I'm not much good at languages. I know a smattering of Spanish, Italian, German and Russian but not enough to be comfortably conversant. But for most Americans there is still no need or even desire to learn another language. English is too pervasive around them their whole lives. And if truth be told, I notice a great many Americans who casually slaughter English too.

In Fall River, MA, the city where I grew up, there were several languages spoken regularly. Not that I knew any of them. But I grew up in a mostly Portuguese area of the city. It's not a huge city, but it had an Irish section, a French section, a Polish and Ukranian section, and overall a large Portuguese and Cape Verdian population. As I was growing up, I was never aware of any prejudice. Things may have changed a bit in later years. Still, not so much as neighboring cities, I think. Plenty of crime there, now, though. Sadly, my mom and one of my sisters still live there. I escaped in 2001.

Dana

Yes, other languages are present around the US but not to the point where you need to learn them. In this area when I was a kid you knew that parents of other kids spoke Italian or Swedish but you never heard it in school. And the Amish around here speak something akin to German. But you don't go into shops and have to deal with another language. You don't see signs in other languages, and unless you tune into limited range radio or TV stations specifically you don't hear other languages, and why would you if you didn't have to?

I really admire people who can speak more than one language. It's like having two eyes instead of just one, you see another dimension of the world. Even just the little bit I know of Russian, gives me the ability to see a sign in a movie, and be able to pronounce the word and in many cases figure out what it is telling me. Whereas before, the sign was just wierd Cyrillic chicken scratchings.

it's exactly what you don't see much of here in switzerland - at least not out of the "biggest" *cough* cities like zurich, geneva or basel, where i've been occasionally but not enough to judge - you don't have "sections" with specific ethnic groups. you might have high rises with a conglomerate of rather foreign citiens, but not so separated into nations, same for quarters where you'd have a certain demographic, but no ghettos.
yeah i realized, watching movies featuring amish, that i could petty much make sense of what they said. all those germanic dialects are similar..
for me it's so normal to understand different languages (as many people do here). i can't fathom how it is not being able to.. then again, many people are really surprised that i can't drive, nor swim.. *shrug* - i guess that's one eye missing, i don't think mobile, and the only place i feel safe is on the ground (nope, never jumped off a plane or bridge either) ^^

Two-thirds of Americans don't even have passports. The average vacation time for American workers was only 12 days in 2012. Taking the time and money to have meaningful travel to Europe or Asia or Australia is not common for average income families. Until after the 9/11 event we didn't need a passport to go to Canada (a special type of driver's license will also suffice) But going to Canada is not really a foreign experience unless you go to Montreal. Actually though, that's where I had to first deal in real-time with a foreign language. In 1967 I was 18 and I went with my parents to Montreal for the 1967 World's Fair. The fair was held on an island in the middle of the river but the parking lots were on the mainland and you took the subway over to the island. I was sent back to the car to get something we'd forgotten and this was the first time I'd been in a subway (not following a huge group of tourists all headed to the fair from the parking lot ). I got lost on the subway and when I came above ground I found myself in downtown Montreal. I eventually figured out the French signs and found my way back to the right subway line and then the car and then back to the fair. It was an eye opening experience that kindled my interest in languages despite having a year of Spanish in high school which had at that time mostly evaporated from my brain.

sounds harsh in a way, but getting lost in an unknown environment - as long as you find your way back soon and nothing happens to you in the meantime - is the kind of immersion you need to get motivated to learn languages, to realize not everyone understands you.. i learned a lot more with people (and consolidated it watching movies) than i did at school. only good thing about lessons is you get the bases and grammar, without which you often botch a language - otherwise, nothing better than real life experience...
and speaking about travel and budget limitations, i've never been out of europe either - a good part of the countries in a little square between ireland W, holland N, slowakia E and greece S...~

manekiNeko · March 2018

Chohole said:

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

LeatherGryphon said:

For the people east of Buffalo in the path of that storm, hunker down! I woke up this morning to 8 inches of FROZEN WATER FROM THE SKY the consistency of cake frosting. I tried to sweep it off my porch and it just compacted into alabaster cement. No mini-adventures for me today. And it's still coming down!

I am trapped indoors. At the front, the way the wind tunnelled through it has meant that half the street is almost clear and driveable. This side of the street, the old houses have drifts caused by the wind actually blocking the front doors, well mine is blocked anyway and I can't get out to check if it has picked on me especially, and yet the other side, where the new houses have gardens they have snow drifts in their gardens, but can get out to clear it as they have porches so not as thoroughly blocked as I am. At the back I only have a 15 inch drift across the back door, but it is quite a trek to struggle out of that, find a spde or shovel and walk up the garden along the back lane, down the next road and back along to my front door. Not certain I care to try opening the front door to try to clear away a drift that varies from 2ft 6inches to almost 4ft. We are at 23f, (real feel 7f due to wind chill factor)

is this frequent where you live, or do we have a particularly harsh/weird winter? and is this a big urban area, or somehow isolated?

Not at all usual. We have a bad set of circumstances hitting the UK at the moment. What they are calling "the beast from the East" which is arctic type weather coming from Russia met head on with Storm Emma, coming the other way. Snow we are used to in this area, winds we are used to. But this particular thing is bad. The Artic blast is fuelling dry powder snow, not nice flaky moister snow which makes nice snowballs. The winds are howling around, picking up the light dry powder snow and causing the snow drifts, It is what a Swedish friend says they call snow smoke, like a sandstorm but with snow. I live in what they poetically call "the foot hills of the Brecon Beacon Mountain Range" or less poetically "the Heads of the Valleys" full of ups and downs and our street is around 1200 ft above sea level., As LeatherGryphon says, genuinely uphill both ways to the shops and our street is sort of West to East orientation, so the NorEaster drving the Artic weather is funnelling straight down the street driving snow before it. Emma is whirling the winds around making for beautifully sculpted snow drifts which look very impressive but really are a pain in the proverbial.

oh you're based in the UK ( i thought US). so yeah, looks like you guys are dealing with the same beast we had here - just a few days later. we had a little of this powder too a few days before the worst wind & cold sun-wed, but not much, just a fine layer, i was wondering what that weird snow was.. no drifts here, but maybe in other places higher up.. now the harsh cold is gone, normal snow has been falling again, all's back to white outside >_<
hmm.. i might even have spent 2 weeks "not too far" from where you live, not sure, but it was in wales, in a rented house near the hills with pals, near some town called kingston or something.. it was autumn tho, so no snow. anyways, this beast should be over soon i guess & hope for you.

ps1borg · March 2018

Mistara said:

is it time for flowers and flutterbys yet?

Banksias are flowering here :)

LeatherGryphon · March 2018

ps1borg said:

Mistara said:

is it time for flowers and flutterbys yet?

Banksias are flowering here :)

I'm familiar with something like that in Florida. We called them "Bottle Brushes".

Or maybe I'm thinking of Melaleuca (aka: paper bark tree) or as I called them "Mashed Potato Trees" because the blossoms smell like hot buttered mashed potatoes. The image below is a green species but the ones I remember usually had white flowers.

Ah..., Wikipedia agrees with the bottle brush name but says they are different than Banksia/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melaleuca

NVIATWAS · March 2018

LeatherGryphon said:

NVIATWAS said:

Complaints!

- ...

- Walk to the booze store is uphill - BOTH WAYS

- ...

You must live in an Escher neighborhood.

Things can get pretty Dali-esque... :-/

NVIATWAS · March 2018

Biskies!!! I just baked 5 buttermilk biscuits in the air fryer and they came out perfect!!! So happy munching flakey browned biscuits!!!

I was worried the dough would burn on the edges, but the convecion effect browned the entire outside, even the underside.. totally crispy outside and hot flakey inside. Why do people even use energy-inefficient huge stove any more??!?!?!?!?

I sound like an evangelist, sorry.... :-/ But whn I can turn corn tortillas into fresh, hot corn chips in 5 minutes I just don't understand people spending 5x as much for a bag of cold stale chips..

I feel sorry for folks that live on lame prefab food,.. :-|

Chohole · March 2018

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

LeatherGryphon said:

For the people east of Buffalo in the path of that storm, hunker down! I woke up this morning to 8 inches of FROZEN WATER FROM THE SKY the consistency of cake frosting. I tried to sweep it off my porch and it just compacted into alabaster cement. No mini-adventures for me today. And it's still coming down!

I am trapped indoors. At the front, the way the wind tunnelled through it has meant that half the street is almost clear and driveable. This side of the street, the old houses have drifts caused by the wind actually blocking the front doors, well mine is blocked anyway and I can't get out to check if it has picked on me especially, and yet the other side, where the new houses have gardens they have snow drifts in their gardens, but can get out to clear it as they have porches so not as thoroughly blocked as I am. At the back I only have a 15 inch drift across the back door, but it is quite a trek to struggle out of that, find a spde or shovel and walk up the garden along the back lane, down the next road and back along to my front door. Not certain I care to try opening the front door to try to clear away a drift that varies from 2ft 6inches to almost 4ft. We are at 23f, (real feel 7f due to wind chill factor)

is this frequent where you live, or do we have a particularly harsh/weird winter? and is this a big urban area, or somehow isolated?

Not at all usual. We have a bad set of circumstances hitting the UK at the moment. What they are calling "the beast from the East" which is arctic type weather coming from Russia met head on with Storm Emma, coming the other way. Snow we are used to in this area, winds we are used to. But this particular thing is bad. The Artic blast is fuelling dry powder snow, not nice flaky moister snow which makes nice snowballs. The winds are howling around, picking up the light dry powder snow and causing the snow drifts, It is what a Swedish friend says they call snow smoke, like a sandstorm but with snow. I live in what they poetically call "the foot hills of the Brecon Beacon Mountain Range" or less poetically "the Heads of the Valleys" full of ups and downs and our street is around 1200 ft above sea level., As LeatherGryphon says, genuinely uphill both ways to the shops and our street is sort of West to East orientation, so the NorEaster drving the Artic weather is funnelling straight down the street driving snow before it. Emma is whirling the winds around making for beautifully sculpted snow drifts which look very impressive but really are a pain in the proverbial.

oh you're based in the UK ( i thought US). so yeah, looks like you guys are dealing with the same beast we had here - just a few days later. we had a little of this powder too a few days before the worst wind & cold sun-wed, but not much, just a fine layer, i was wondering what that weird snow was.. no drifts here, but maybe in other places higher up.. now the harsh cold is gone, normal snow has been falling again, all's back to white outside >_<
hmm.. i might even have spent 2 weeks "not too far" from where you live, not sure, but it was in wales, in a rented house near the hills with pals, near some town called kingston or something.. it was autumn tho, so no snow. anyways, this beast should be over soon i guess & hope for you.

I think you may mean Knighton, which is about 60 miles North of us.

manekiNeko · March 2018

LeatherGryphon said:

NVIATWAS said:

Complaints!

- ...

- Walk to the booze store is uphill - BOTH WAYS

- ...

You must live in an Escher neighborhood.

i'd say.. ... maybe it would help waiting to open the bottle until home? XDD

manekiNeko · March 2018

Chohole said:

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

LeatherGryphon said:

For the people east of Buffalo in the path of that storm, hunker down! I woke up this morning to 8 inches of FROZEN WATER FROM THE SKY the consistency of cake frosting. I tried to sweep it off my porch and it just compacted into alabaster cement. No mini-adventures for me today. And it's still coming down!

I am trapped indoors. At the front, the way the wind tunnelled through it has meant that half the street is almost clear and driveable. This side of the street, the old houses have drifts caused by the wind actually blocking the front doors, well mine is blocked anyway and I can't get out to check if it has picked on me especially, and yet the other side, where the new houses have gardens they have snow drifts in their gardens, but can get out to clear it as they have porches so not as thoroughly blocked as I am. At the back I only have a 15 inch drift across the back door, but it is quite a trek to struggle out of that, find a spde or shovel and walk up the garden along the back lane, down the next road and back along to my front door. Not certain I care to try opening the front door to try to clear away a drift that varies from 2ft 6inches to almost 4ft. We are at 23f, (real feel 7f due to wind chill factor)

is this frequent where you live, or do we have a particularly harsh/weird winter? and is this a big urban area, or somehow isolated?

Not at all usual. We have a bad set of circumstances hitting the UK at the moment. What they are calling "the beast from the East" which is arctic type weather coming from Russia met head on with Storm Emma, coming the other way. Snow we are used to in this area, winds we are used to. But this particular thing is bad. The Artic blast is fuelling dry powder snow, not nice flaky moister snow which makes nice snowballs. The winds are howling around, picking up the light dry powder snow and causing the snow drifts, It is what a Swedish friend says they call snow smoke, like a sandstorm but with snow. I live in what they poetically call "the foot hills of the Brecon Beacon Mountain Range" or less poetically "the Heads of the Valleys" full of ups and downs and our street is around 1200 ft above sea level., As LeatherGryphon says, genuinely uphill both ways to the shops and our street is sort of West to East orientation, so the NorEaster drving the Artic weather is funnelling straight down the street driving snow before it. Emma is whirling the winds around making for beautifully sculpted snow drifts which look very impressive but really are a pain in the proverbial.

oh you're based in the UK ( i thought US). so yeah, looks like you guys are dealing with the same beast we had here - just a few days later. we had a little of this powder too a few days before the worst wind & cold sun-wed, but not much, just a fine layer, i was wondering what that weird snow was.. no drifts here, but maybe in other places higher up.. now the harsh cold is gone, normal snow has been falling again, all's back to white outside >_<
hmm.. i might even have spent 2 weeks "not too far" from where you live, not sure, but it was in wales, in a rented house near the hills with pals, near some town called kingston or something.. it was autumn tho, so no snow. anyways, this beast should be over soon i guess & hope for you.

I think you may mean Knighton, which is about 60 miles North of us.

yes! that's the name! hmm kingston is a little bit more.. south i guess *embarrassed cough* XDD.
i loved it there. lots of green, beautiful and so quiet - i remember wandering (alone) to the top of a hill, a very "naked" hill with very scarce short vegetation, no trees, and no road/path anywhere in the vicinity. and i suddently noticed... nothing. complete utter silence. no birds, no insects, no human background - and no sheep right there, lol. and nothing much to be seen from this POV either, just the grass and the sky. i laid there on the ground for a while, so peaceful.. ^^

Mistara · March 2018

happy caturday

Chohole · March 2018

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

LeatherGryphon said:

For the people east of Buffalo in the path of that storm, hunker down! I woke up this morning to 8 inches of FROZEN WATER FROM THE SKY the consistency of cake frosting. I tried to sweep it off my porch and it just compacted into alabaster cement. No mini-adventures for me today. And it's still coming down!

I am trapped indoors. At the front, the way the wind tunnelled through it has meant that half the street is almost clear and driveable. This side of the street, the old houses have drifts caused by the wind actually blocking the front doors, well mine is blocked anyway and I can't get out to check if it has picked on me especially, and yet the other side, where the new houses have gardens they have snow drifts in their gardens, but can get out to clear it as they have porches so not as thoroughly blocked as I am. At the back I only have a 15 inch drift across the back door, but it is quite a trek to struggle out of that, find a spde or shovel and walk up the garden along the back lane, down the next road and back along to my front door. Not certain I care to try opening the front door to try to clear away a drift that varies from 2ft 6inches to almost 4ft. We are at 23f, (real feel 7f due to wind chill factor)

is this frequent where you live, or do we have a particularly harsh/weird winter? and is this a big urban area, or somehow isolated?

Not at all usual. We have a bad set of circumstances hitting the UK at the moment. What they are calling "the beast from the East" which is arctic type weather coming from Russia met head on with Storm Emma, coming the other way. Snow we are used to in this area, winds we are used to. But this particular thing is bad. The Artic blast is fuelling dry powder snow, not nice flaky moister snow which makes nice snowballs. The winds are howling around, picking up the light dry powder snow and causing the snow drifts, It is what a Swedish friend says they call snow smoke, like a sandstorm but with snow. I live in what they poetically call "the foot hills of the Brecon Beacon Mountain Range" or less poetically "the Heads of the Valleys" full of ups and downs and our street is around 1200 ft above sea level., As LeatherGryphon says, genuinely uphill both ways to the shops and our street is sort of West to East orientation, so the NorEaster drving the Artic weather is funnelling straight down the street driving snow before it. Emma is whirling the winds around making for beautifully sculpted snow drifts which look very impressive but really are a pain in the proverbial.

oh you're based in the UK ( i thought US). so yeah, looks like you guys are dealing with the same beast we had here - just a few days later. we had a little of this powder too a few days before the worst wind & cold sun-wed, but not much, just a fine layer, i was wondering what that weird snow was.. no drifts here, but maybe in other places higher up.. now the harsh cold is gone, normal snow has been falling again, all's back to white outside >_<
hmm.. i might even have spent 2 weeks "not too far" from where you live, not sure, but it was in wales, in a rented house near the hills with pals, near some town called kingston or something.. it was autumn tho, so no snow. anyways, this beast should be over soon i guess & hope for you.

I think you may mean Knighton, which is about 60 miles North of us.

yes! that's the name! hmm kingston is a little bit more.. south i guess *embarrassed cough* XDD.
i loved it there. lots of green, beautiful and so quiet - i remember wandering (alone) to the top of a hill, a very "naked" hill with very scarce short vegetation, no trees, and no road/path anywhere in the vicinity. and i suddently noticed... nothing. complete utter silence. no birds, no insects, no human background - and no sheep right there, lol. and nothing much to be seen from this POV either, just the grass and the sky. i laid there on the ground for a while, so peaceful.. ^^

Ironically before we moved to Wales we lived in Richmond, which is the next biggest town downstream from Kingston on the Surrey bank along that stretch of the River. Kingston is actually Kingston upon Thames and Richmond is Richmond upon Thames. So yes further south and east, just under 200 miles away.

And yes There are some beautifully quiet spots to be found in Wales. Also some dark places, as The Brecon Beacons National Park has been awarded Dark Sky status

TSasha Smith · March 2018

It is Caturday. I am on my new computer. Hard to see how fast it is as not much is installed and the wifi at the mall is so darn slow.

I was promised 16 GB of Ram but I got 15.9 GB of Ram according to the task manager.

TJohn · March 2018

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

manekiNeko said:

Chohole said:

LeatherGryphon said:

For the people east of Buffalo in the path of that storm, hunker down! I woke up this morning to 8 inches of FROZEN WATER FROM THE SKY the consistency of cake frosting. I tried to sweep it off my porch and it just compacted into alabaster cement. No mini-adventures for me today. And it's still coming down!

I am trapped indoors. At the front, the way the wind tunnelled through it has meant that half the street is almost clear and driveable. This side of the street, the old houses have drifts caused by the wind actually blocking the front doors, well mine is blocked anyway and I can't get out to check if it has picked on me especially, and yet the other side, where the new houses have gardens they have snow drifts in their gardens, but can get out to clear it as they have porches so not as thoroughly blocked as I am. At the back I only have a 15 inch drift across the back door, but it is quite a trek to struggle out of that, find a spde or shovel and walk up the garden along the back lane, down the next road and back along to my front door. Not certain I care to try opening the front door to try to clear away a drift that varies from 2ft 6inches to almost 4ft. We are at 23f, (real feel 7f due to wind chill factor)

is this frequent where you live, or do we have a particularly harsh/weird winter? and is this a big urban area, or somehow isolated?

Not at all usual. We have a bad set of circumstances hitting the UK at the moment. What they are calling "the beast from the East" which is arctic type weather coming from Russia met head on with Storm Emma, coming the other way. Snow we are used to in this area, winds we are used to. But this particular thing is bad. The Artic blast is fuelling dry powder snow, not nice flaky moister snow which makes nice snowballs. The winds are howling around, picking up the light dry powder snow and causing the snow drifts, It is what a Swedish friend says they call snow smoke, like a sandstorm but with snow. I live in what they poetically call "the foot hills of the Brecon Beacon Mountain Range" or less poetically "the Heads of the Valleys" full of ups and downs and our street is around 1200 ft above sea level., As LeatherGryphon says, genuinely uphill both ways to the shops and our street is sort of West to East orientation, so the NorEaster drving the Artic weather is funnelling straight down the street driving snow before it. Emma is whirling the winds around making for beautifully sculpted snow drifts which look very impressive but really are a pain in the proverbial.

oh you're based in the UK ( i thought US). so yeah, looks like you guys are dealing with the same beast we had here - just a few days later. we had a little of this powder too a few days before the worst wind & cold sun-wed, but not much, just a fine layer, i was wondering what that weird snow was.. no drifts here, but maybe in other places higher up.. now the harsh cold is gone, normal snow has been falling again, all's back to white outside >_<
hmm.. i might even have spent 2 weeks "not too far" from where you live, not sure, but it was in wales, in a rented house near the hills with pals, near some town called kingston or something.. it was autumn tho, so no snow. anyways, this beast should be over soon i guess & hope for you.

I think you may mean Knighton, which is about 60 miles North of us.

yes! that's the name! hmm kingston is a little bit more.. south i guess *embarrassed cough* XDD.
i loved it there. lots of green, beautiful and so quiet - i remember wandering (alone) to the top of a hill, a very "naked" hill with very scarce short vegetation, no trees, and no road/path anywhere in the vicinity. and i suddently noticed... nothing. complete utter silence. no birds, no insects, no human background - and no sheep right there, lol. and nothing much to be seen from this POV either, just the grass and the sky. i laid there on the ground for a while, so peaceful.. ^^

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. - Wordsworth

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