Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

nuatha wrote: »

We aren't? That's what I spent a fair chunk of yesterday doing - and got paid for it.
And the only thing that's definitely adult about me is my clothes sizes

I hope you had the power off at the mains!

I reckon I'm mentally somewhat about my shoe size - 9, in other words. I'm a perfectly functional sensible human bean, but I still can be stopped in my tracks by the sheer random beauty of the natural world, such as a cascade of scarlet virginia creeper, which has grown for months through a tree overhanging the river, green on green, unnoticed. For autumn to reveal its presence when the leaves change colour, doubled in beauty by the river's reflection. It's one of the loveliest sights of the season and almost no one else seems to notice it.

And there are nitwits wandering around all over the place with their eyeballs fastened to their idiot-phones and no awareness of what is going on around them............!

I have attended to a couple of preptastic matters, one of which is Secret and one of which can be in the public domain (two tins of rice pud for the stash to make good ones eaten recently).

I also allowed myself an eclectic wander aroung the library and have come away with two novels of the post-apocalyptic meme; Jim Crace's The Pesthouse and Nate Kenyon's Day One.

A high speed sampling looks promising, plus I got a book on Thoreau.

Karmacat

I like the sound of the library books, GQ

Mar - sorry to hear about your new buddleias conditions must be very tough up where you are

mardatha

Been white frost in morning Karmacat, but I thought buddleia would have been ok. I not happy cos was 3 for £10 and now I only got one tiny wee one hanging on out there lol

TiredTrophy

Another way of propagating fruit bushes is by layering. Look for long branches that could touch the ground, make a wound on the underneath where the bark could touch the earth, just enough to show the green under the bark, then use a piece of wire or even a stone to keep that point fixed to the earth. You can do it anytime. You get a neater plant if it branch/twig is long enough that the far end can be tied to a cane to encourage it to grow skywards but not important. Leave for a year or more and in the autumn, after leaf fall, gently lift and cut from the main plant. No watering or drying out and mimics a natural process.

nuatha

GreyQueen wrote: »

I hope you had the power off at the mains!

No fun in that
Live 240V, proper testers and insulated gloves. found several rogue circuits, when I've finished mapping them I'll be removing them. I've one circuit that stays live when the mains is isolated which is not a good thing.
Generally I don't recommend this approach, but when you still have live connections with the mains off, you assume everything is live and take appropriate precautions (like get out of the building and get qualified personnel in).

I reckon I'm mentally somewhat about my shoe size - 9, in other words. I'm a perfectly functional sensible human bean, but I still can be stopped in my tracks by the sheer random beauty of the natural world, such as a cascade of scarlet virginia creeper, which has grown for months through a tree overhanging the river, green on green, unnoticed. For autumn to reveal its presence when the leaves change colour, doubled in beauty by the river's reflection. It's one of the loveliest sights of the season and almost no one else seems to notice it.

And there are nitwits wandering around all over the place with their eyeballs fastened to their idiot-phones and no awareness of what is going on around them............!

I've been known to stop whatever I was doing and admire clouds, sunsets and lots of other things that convince those around me that I'm "not all there."
There again the fact I don't play computer games, spend half my life on facebook, instagram or twitter has a similar effect. Using a ten year old mobile just confirms it.

GreyQueen

nuatha, glad I'm not the only one. I consider myself a cloud afficiando. The funniest one I ever saw, from a bus window coming into the hometown, was a perfect question mark, even with the dot. Wished for a camera right then.

I've been observing the human fauna of my city and have come to the following conclusion; at any given time, 6 out of 10 people walking down the street are glued to their i-phones. For persons who are stationary, the proportion is 8/10. For persons sitting with companions in cafes and restaurants and bars, it is often 10/10.

OK, I'm middle-aged, and was an adult long before mobile phones of the most primitive kind were more than very expensive executive toys, but this fascincation baffles me. And worries me. We've got people now who are accustomed to constant attachment to their friends and family, as in almost minute-by-minute real time interactions. What on earth will happen to them, psychologically, if the networks go down, temporarily or permanantly?

I could make a reasoned argument that this constant interaction is infantilising. Instead of having to cope with new or challenging situations, the i-acolyte calls for advice and input from a variety of sources. Add to that the many other infantilising aspects of the modern world, and you get a bunch of child-people with no clue how to function independantly.

Plus adults in their thirties and above having spats on FaceF@rt which would shame the primary school playground; I hear about plenty of these IRL and I'm not even on FB.:rotfl:

jk0

You know what gets my goat, almost as much as people making you move out of the way on the pavement because they are looking at their phone?

It's people carrying paper cups of coffee. Who is so dis-organised that they can't take a flask to work? Everyone has to give these people a wide berth, lest they get scalded.

[Deleted User]

Make that 3 of us!!!

GreyQueen

I'm being a bit naughty and declining to get out of the way of the i-idiots. They mostly have enough spacial awareness at the periphery of their vision to stop dead in their tracks if you refuse to step around them. And I am so tired of having to accomodate this foolishness every 4-5 meters, so will often bring an ambulatory phone user to a dead stop.

Otherwise, living and working here in a city centre, I spend all my time dodging the silly burgers. I regard it as a chance for me to educate them. Gosh, one could easily be tempted to take up mugging, these ninnies are totally helpless, arent' they? And this coffee-cup carrying annoys the heck out of me, it's so wasteful of resources. String 'em up, says I!

thriftwizard

We were sizing up a market that we're thinking of trading at recently, and I was watching potential customers walking across the magnificent cobbled medieval market square, surrounded by gracious trees & half-timbered jettied buildings, and only about one in ten of them showed any awareness at all of their surroundings! And it wasn't as though they were all used to them; some had just clambered out of tour coaches, but it was clearly more important to update their "status" than to actually look around them. Bizarre...

And worrying. They'll trot round the stalls & take pictures on their i-Phones, and exclaim with delight at how quaint & beautiful it all is, but actually buy anything? I'm not sure...