Nice People Thread No. 15, a Cyber Summer

vivatifosi

I doubt that there are many truly poor people living directly on the water in Sydney. If said people chose to prioritise some other spend over insurance, then that should be their problem.

There's a house in Sydney Harbour that is my dream house. It is on a tiny island and you access it by boat. I always think it would have magnificent views of the fireworks as it is right there, staring directly at the bridge. It would make a fantastic place for a party. I wonder if Gen knows the one I mean.

Pyxis

Yesterday there was loads about those floods on our news, Generali.

It must be bad, for news about a country other than the USA to hit our screens.

We are in the EU, in Europe, and have a Commonwealth of countries all over the world, yet a huge part of our foreign news is USA-based.
Makes me mad.

vivatifosi

At about 5am, Sky does a news programme that discusses Africa. I've never understood why there isn't a corresponding programme with Aussie news, given the huge number of expats here. Perhaps the time to do that has passed though, given that with a VPN you can now watch actual Aussie news.

I agree that our news is very US centric though. I'd much rather hear more about Europe and the rest of world and less from US. It's probably cheaper and easier to watch US feeds and drop them, without need for translation, into your own bulletins though.

Pyxis

I don't have Sky, or anything cabley either, so am dependent on the BBC and other terrestrial channels for news.

Given that the floods in Oz have been going for a while now, I was not only surprised to hear it on the news yesterday, but surprised they hadn't covered it before.

Your journey to Canberra and back must have been horrendous Generali.

I can remember one time, years ago,when I was on the motorway in unbelievable rain. The wipers on full speed did absolutely nothing. It was very scary. Luckily, everyone else on the road was obviously really scared as well, because we were all creeping along extremely slowly and sensibly, even though there wasn't a huge amount of traffic.

Another scary journey was 50 miles of unfamiliar country roads in thick fog. :eek::eek:

And the third scary one was blizzards. It was ok on the motorway, but once you came off, the roads were like ice rinks, (Council cutbacks), and as well as the ice rinks, there was a steep hill to go down, with a drop on one side! :eek::eek: The cars were all taking it in turns to go down very, very slowly.

Now, I can just stay in! :T

vivatifosi

Sky news is also on freeview Pyxis. Channel 132. I like to watch the newspaper reviews on there as - very MSE - it means that doing that and then checking in at google news, I don't have to buy a newspaper. I prefer the paper reviewers on Sky to the beeb, some of them are very amusing.

I would happily pay a reasonable price to read behind a paywall, but don't want the piles of newsprint to discard unread. I think the price of the Times is too high though... probably double what I'd be willing to pay for an occasional read.

SingleSue

I remember one particularly snowy night, at the time I was working an evening shift and we as the night went on we all started to worry about how much was coming down and how bad the smaller roads would be by the time we finished at 10pm. None of us were worried about the A14 as that was a major road and would (we assumed) be clear.

It got so bad that the employer decided it was safer for us all to make a run for home before people got cut off from their homes, so off we all set nervous about the last bit of our journeys after the A14....turns out the A14 was the nightmare, it was a complete white out, it was coming down so hard that the tracks from lorries in front were filled in straight away, you couldn't see the central reservation, the edges of the road, the lanes, the signs, nothing.

A normal run for me was around 12 minutes, that night it took me almost 2 hours to get home, you had to almost crawl the car home it was that bad....silly thing is, as soon as I hit the turn off for my village, the snow stopped and there was barely any snow and now ex hubby was bemused (and rather non believing) about my story of the hassles of getting home.

chris_m

Once, when I was a volunteer at the Watercress Line, we got snowed in on the Saturday - just outside the station yard there were gates to the fields either side and the white stuff just blew through them and piled up across the road, about six feet deep.
So, about halfway through Sunday afternoon we all got to it and started digging, including digging out two cars that had failed to get up the hill and couldn't turn to get back down either. Once we'd finished we had two nice tyre tracks scraped right down to the tarmac and gritted. When it came to time to leave, no problem.

It wasn't until I was halfway home I suddenly thought "Ooer, I wonder how Barry managed?" Barry drove a three wheeler and, when we saw him the next week his language was unprintable, apart from a sarcastic "thanks" and the comment that "it was a bit bumpy" :rotfl:

chris_m

And, back to the present. I have now finished sifting my veggie patch soil to extract all the grass, moss and roots - in shifts of about an hour at a time morning and evening coz it's been too hot to do any more. I had intended to let the vegetable matter rot in but we haven't had any rain for several weeks so that plan didn't work. I retrospect, I think I've done it wrong. After tilling it to chop up the mossy lawn I should have got my camera out - that always brought on rain when I was just visiting :rotfl:

There's just one snag - that nicely sifted soil is all up at one end of the patch. I've now got to put most of it back from whence it came

At least it's cooler today so, after a decent rest (and cool down), guess what I'll be doing next.

Pyxis

Once you've finished that, Chris, I have a jungle you could tackle, if you've a mind!

CKhalvashi

Pyxis wrote: »

Once you've finished that, Chris, I have a jungle you could tackle, if you've a mind!

Me too.

I'm planning to do it over the weekend, althoughin fairness was planning to do it last weekend, and the weekend before.....