The Nice People Thread, No.16: A Universe of Niceness.

seven-day-weekend

LydiaJ wrote: »

Thank you. Yes, I teach physics at an independent school. I'm going for the opposite strategy from him - I'm intending to work until my state retirement age but all but 5 years of that have been, and are going to continue to be, part-time. I also had 4 years off with my kids when they were tiny.

He couldn't carry on because of his mental health. His last few years were part-time.

Physics, wow, I wish I'd learned more about it but at my Girls' Grammar School in the 1960s, the only Science they taught in any depth was Biology.

Nice to see a real-life Scientist with a faith! . Although I have never found the two incompatible.

Conrad

Pyxis wrote: »

That's right! People would put their glad rags on, and joolery. Long dresses, or at any rate posh shorter dresses, or fancy trousers, etc., and men would be really smart. Not necessarily dinner jackets, but suits or smart stuff.
In other words, an effort was made, in recognition of the effort the hosts would be making re. the dinner.


But you're right. I think that sort of thing isn't done any more. It's all super caj now.

So when I say dinner parties, what I mean is we routinely go to various neighbours houses for dinner and larks.


My wife puts on her glad-rags, not usually a flowing 1970's dress though! I will put on better clothes than I would ordinarily wear but not a suit or anything.


This Saturday is our turn - I'm firing up the fire pit (cooking fire pit) again which I posted pics of a few months back. It's been a huge success, people raving about it. My wife said it was madness when I was building it (surrounded by mud and rubble for weeks), and even the first time we used it she said she had no idea what I had in mind as people will not want to sit round it all night


WRONG! Guests end up raving about it.
Changed how we use the garden and you cant get people back in the house for love nor money


You sit round it all night and cook when and what you want (we provide all the items to be cooked)




So there

Conrad

Even the dog likes it, kept cosying up to it's warm walls as it 'p!!£sed down' outside of the awning thingy we erected.







Next day he licked all the spilt grease off the fire pit (many a drunken spillage occurred), saved me a job!

LydiaJ

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

He couldn't carry on because of his mental health. His last few years were part-time.

I've seen it happen. It's not pretty. That's basically why I'm part-time, although my burnout wasn't actually work-related.

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

Physics, wow, I wish I'd learned more about it but at my Girls' Grammar School in the 1960s, the only Science they taught in any depth was Biology.

Shocking! But all too common in those days. Stopping schools from doing that was part of the rationale for the national curriculum making all three sciences compulsory to 16, although you don't have to do 3 whole GCSEs if you prefer to do just 2 or even 1 GCSE with bits of each.

Conrad wrote: »

Even the dog likes it

I think the dog can smell what's on top of it and is hoping some sausage might come in a doggy direction soon!

silvercar

PasturesNew wrote: »

If it's a small space, just the hallway - living alone he won't need a radiator. Just leave the door open and make sure the front door's a good fit.

Or, just leave it out and accept "it's a bit nippier when I dash through there".

How often are you actually IN the hallway?

When you live alone there's nobody else coming in/out and leaving doors open etc. You're in control of your environment.

I'd just "do without" most likely.

I'm disagreeing here on 2 counts. Firstly, if you heat the 'hall' the rest of the flat will retain it's heat far more than if every room came off a cold area. Secondly, if you want to use it as a room it needs to be welcoming and that means warm.

Our second home had no heating in the kitchen and it was cold.

LydiaJ wrote: »

It's huge, especially in the context of the rest of the flat - it's slightly shy of 200 sq ft, which is about the same as the living room or else the bedroom and kitchen combined. To make the downsize feel less drastic for him, I am encouraging him to think of it as "a room that has the entrance in it" rather than "a route from the front door to the actual living space", so he's decided to have it as a library. He'll potter about in it, looking at the books on the shelves and deciding which one to read next. We're not putting any chairs in it, though, so he'll need to take the book to one of the other rooms to sit and read it.

It needs to be warm because part of his rationale for moving is that for the last few years he's found the cold harder and harder to cope with. He was fine until about age 85, but his metabolism has obviously changed since then. He accepted this flat rather than holding out a bit longer on the waiting list in the hope of a 2-bed flat, which he would really have preferred, because he doesn't want to spend another winter in his uninsulated and only partially heated house.

Definitely heat. Any reason why you can't design a seating alcove for it? Be nice to be able to sit with your books.

silvercar

LydiaJ wrote: »

Including the one he took last summer, DS has...

done really really well...

.....
He's happy. He says most of his friends are happy. I'm happy.

Well done! To you and your DS. :T

My (not so) little niece, has also done really well. Hope this will boost her confidence as she has had a few mental health issues this year.

Doozergirl

LydiaJ wrote: »

Thank you. I agree that fitted shelves would be what a "normal" 21st century person would do. However, he is still firmly in the "make do and mend" mindset of 1940! This is the man who thinks it's shockingly extravagant and wasteful that when one of the taps on the basin in his bathroom at home died, he had to buy a PAIR of taps and not just a single one. He couldn't see any reason to replace the tap that hadn't failed! Most of the plumbing and electrics in his house are exactly as they were when he bought it in 1959, although they did get a small boiler fitted and downstairs radiators only when they wanted to let the house for a year in 1975/6. Also, some of his bookcases are antique glass-fronted ones that are rather beautiful. Some are merely old and not beautiful at all. A motley collection of bookcases of wildly differing styles will express who he is, though. To say he doesn't have much of a "developer" approach to his living space is a bit like saying that Avatar Dog wasn't much good at nuclear physics. He's also feeling old, vulnerable, and rather overwhelmed by the prospect of moving. I think I can persuade him to let me organise getting the [STRIKE]hallway[/STRIKE] library radiator moved/replaced by telling him he'll be able to fit more bookcases in if I do. There will also be no trouble persuading him to put reflective panels behind any radiators on outside walls - he's quite eco-conscious. I doubt very much that anyone could persuade him to get anything more complicated done.

I'd be interested in your opinion of extra thick radiators like this. Does the extra volume give more heat than a double-double radiator of the same height and width, or is it outweighed by the less efficient convection? There would be space for one of those under the window, and even at that thickness it wouldn't stick out into the room any further than the bookcase beside it.

GCSE results still not on website. It obviously wasn't 8am. Perhaps it's 9am. Or maybe something's gone wrong - perhaps the person who's supposed to upload them to the school database is stuck in traffic or something.

I'm really not good at physics, but those radiators are pretty I have always been told that the old style ones are not as efficient. They are better than they were a decade ago, certainly. Dad may well be fine with an old style one if he's old style. My in-laws bake themselves constantly - too hot in their house! There are some websites with really good BTU calculators that will filter down radiators based on your needs. I think Best Heating is one of the better ones
http://www.bestheating.com/btu-calculator

GCSE Results day here too. We did it the old fashioned way and went to school. DS has a sea of Bs with two C equivalents in English. He wants to re-sit Unit 3 in each of the sciences as he got As in all the Units 1 and 2s (meaning he'd have two As if he'd gone for the double GCSE award instead of individuals) He's 4 marks off an A overall in Biology and not too far away in the other two.

Not needed for anything other than his own satisfaction of course, but I'm glad that he wants to try as it says a lot about his mindset these days over previous years!

Doozergirl

Nikkster, I'm really sorry to hear that news.

I do have three friends and one relative on the other and right side of breast cancer treatment. I do hope that yours is just as successful. Are you still in your house? Do you have help and are you being looked after? Chemo is the worst.

Nikkster

I hope so too Doozergirl. That's what I'm aiming for.

Yes, still chez Nikkster Hoping to keep it that way! I'm home alone, though I have plenty of visitors/ callers/ lunch dates etc. And so many people offering to help

Chemo has been fine so far (very early days, I'm sure it's going to get a lot worse as it goes on). The bit I'm dreading the most at the moment is the mastectomy I think. The thought of it makes me feel a bit sick (the op, not the living with it afterwards, which I'm sure will also be challenging). I'm trying to focus on one thing at a time though.

Still feels really strange talking about all this stuff happening to me rather than someone else.

LydiaJ

silvercar wrote: »

Any reason why you can't design a seating alcove for it? Be nice to be able to sit with your books.

What a lovely idea. I'll have to give that some thought. The room is more than twice as long as it's wide, with a bite taken out for a cupboard that holds the boiler and meters etc. Then there are far too many doors - the front door, and the doors to kitchen, bedroom, living room, bathroom, boiler/meter cupboard, and fire escape. I imagine a seating alcove could be managed without too much difficulty, but it would probably involve sacrificing a bookcase so he may decide not! I'll ask him what he thinks, and in the meantime I'll introduce more options to my scale floorplans to include some with seating alcoves. I'll find that fun to play with whether he picks that idea or not! The living room has an absolutely stunning view whereas the hall library window just looks across a bit of a gap at the wall of another bit of the building so he may prefer to sit in there anyway.

silvercar wrote: »

Well done! To you and your DS. :T

My (not so) little niece, has also done really well. Hope this will boost her confidence as she has had a few mental health issues this year.

Thank you. Here's hoping her mental health picks up next year. Is she staying at the same for sixth form or going somewhere else?

Doozergirl wrote: »

I'm really not good at physics, but those radiators are pretty I have always been told that the old style ones are not as efficient. They are better than they were a decade ago, certainly. Dad may well be fine with an old style one if he's old style. My in-laws bake themselves constantly - too hot in their house! There are some websites with really good BTU calculators that will filter down radiators based on your needs. I think Best Heating is one of the better ones
http://www.bestheating.com/btu-calculator

Thank you - very useful. I put in the numbers as best as I could - I've no idea about the loft insulation, for example, and although I know how wide the window is, I had to guess its height, although I can measure it tomorrow. (Oh, and it didn't give me an option to say that the exterior wall, although solid, is 50cm thick!) Assuming there's at least some loft insulation, it seems to think we should be OK with two smaller double double rads - one under the window and the other either on the other side, where the coat hooks are where the front door opens, or up the other end, beyond the boiler cupboard. How much space do we need below and to either side of the rad for the TRV and pipework etc? I need to know how to relate the size of the rad to the size of the space, please.

Doozergirl wrote: »

GCSE Results day here too. We did it the old fashioned way and went to school. DS has a sea of Bs with two C equivalents in English. He wants to re-sit Unit 3 in each of the sciences as he got As in all the Units 1 and 2s (meaning he'd have two As if he'd gone for the double GCSE award instead of individuals) He's 4 marks off an A overall in Biology and not too far away in the other two.

Not needed for anything other than his own satisfaction of course, but I'm glad that he wants to try as it says a lot about his mindset these days over previous years!

Yes that sounds like a very promising sign - for how he'll approach sixth form as well as for what he wants to do with resits. Good for him! What are his school advising?

If he's only a few marks off, it's always worth getting a marking review. While you can technically go either up or down on a review, in practice if you are only just below the boundary, you won't go down enough to change the grade, and you might go up a grade. At the school where I teach, we routinely put in for mark reviews of all students who get just below the boundary for anything. I had a student go up a grade at A-level this week after having narrowly missed it when the results came out last week and had a mark review. There may be a fee, but it's generally considered worth it where the mark is close.

DS got his at school too - I wasn't allowed anywhere near the place, but he texted me the results once he'd opened them. He walked in with his usual "walk to school friend" from round the corner. My school's a boarding school, with students who've gone off all over the world by the time August happens, so electronically is the only practical option.