31st March 2106 - Just a thought and a little grammar

Thought for the day:"Met a bloke who measures the world's tallest trees. Lost his job because of the cuts!"

Time for a bit of grammar fun...

Busy today - off to Chepstow and back for St Teilo 3rd Degree...  Ho Hum ...

30th March 2016 - Could be an expensive week !!

Thought for the day:"I admire the guy who invented socks but the true genius is the man who decided to sell them in pairs! "

So I saw this sad story today about a "meeter and Greeter" at Tesco's ... I will let him tell his own story ..

 "So after landing my new job as a Tesco meet and greeter, a good find for many retirees, I lasted less than a day.
 
About two hours into my first day on the job a very loud, unattractive, mean-acting woman walked into the store with her two kids, yelling obscenities at them all the way through the entrance. I said pleasantly, “Good morning and welcome to Tesco. Nice children you have there. Are they twins?’
The ugly woman stopped yelling long enough to say, “Hell no, they ain’t twins. The oldest one is 9, and the other one is 7. Why the hell would you think they’re twins? Are you blind, or just stupid?”
 
So I replied, “I’m neither blind nor stupid, ma’am. I just couldn’t believe someone slept with you twice. Have a good day and thank you for shopping at Tesco .”
 
My supervisor said I probably wasn’t cut out for this line of work."

Meanwhile the scaffolding is going up at the house front, but the builder tells me that the entire guttering at the back of the house is in need of replacement and will require a complete set of scaffolding again !!!

The Head is off the Terrano and being "engineered" and "skimmed" but still not sure exactly what the problem is - so may get it back on Friday ...

The tree is down ....  so that is one job completed ..

So ...   everything is moving at last ...

Been to the warehouse and sorted some stock for the weekend - more arriving later on Thursday ... 

Busy Busy Busy ...

Maybe treat myself to a glass of Chateau 41 tonight - just for a change
Cheers!

29th March 2016 - Of Wet Weekends and Empire

Thought for the day:"Your overuse of correct punctuation and capitalisation on Facebook  is really showing your age"

So, back to normalcy - or something like that ... Up early to get onto the Winery to get stock for the weekend. Of course it is a new financial year and the winery has decided to change all their labelling so they are short on a number of lines - but they can do a fast delivery for the weekend so we will have some meads to work with... seems we will be restricted to Blackberry, Gooseberry, Rosehip, Sloe amd Quince... Oh well.

Cider coming through the post - hopefully to be here by Thursday as well as we will be on the road Friday.....

A badly stormy weekend though we missed a lot of it here. The people in Empire suffered another disastrous weather storm at yet another site. Was glad that the team were inside this weekend with Curious Pastimes.

Lovely shot here form Beth Dooner ..

Here is a shot from before..

and after ..
Photos from Tom Garner...

I wonder why I like my hobby so much .....
and from Paul Wilder

Still - nice and sunny today and the scaffolding is going up the front of the house..
Cheers!

28th March 2016 - Happy Monday

Thought for the day :"I saw ten Easter Bunnies walking backwards - I think it was a receding hareline"

A reconstruction of what Jesus may have looked like ...
A group of medical experts have got together to recreate what they actually think he looked like by studying Semite skulls.
Retired medical artist Richard Neave came up with this illustration showing curly black hair, a tanned complexion, and a wide face.
It is believed to bear more of a resemblance to what Middle Eastern Jews looked like in what is now northern Israel.
Popular Mechanics said that Dr Neave used forensic anthropology as well as information he gathered from the Bible to get a more accurate view.

and found from Sean Gladding - a copy of the obituary...

"JESUS of Nazareth passed away on Nisan 14th in Jerusalem.
He is preceded in death by Joseph bar Jacob, who raised him as his own son. He is survived by his mother, Mary; brothers James, Joses and Judas, and his sisters.
Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem of Judea. His family fled to Egypt when he was two, seeking political asylum.

They returned to Nazareth in Galilee after the death of Herod the Great. Jesus was apprenticed as a carpenter to Joseph, and worked in the family business until he turned 30.
He was baptized in the Jordan River by the prophet John bar Zechariah, his cousin. He spent the next 3 years living as an itinerant rabbi, with a small school of 12 disciples. He received the patronage of Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, Susanna and many others.
He devoted his life to serving the least, the last and the lost, wherever he found them. He proclaimed that the kingdom of God has drawn near, and bore witness to it through liberating people from the demonic, from disease and from the slow death of social exclusion. Despite our repeated warnings, his teaching, his work and especially those whom he chose to call friend inevitably drew the attention of the authorities.

The family wishes to make it clear that his arrest and immediate trial took place without due process. The charges of blasphemy and of being a threat to national security were not corroborated by a single witness. He was humiliated and brutalized in custody before his execution by the State.
He died as he lived: extending forgiveness to those responsible for his death.

He will be greatly missed by his family, his friends – the “sinners” – and by the poor.

The family wish to extend their gratitude to Joseph of Arimathea for covering the funeral expenses."

And since the clocks have gone back yesterday ....

and so we get the final picture of the day which has nothing to do with Easter at all..

27th March 2016 - Happy Eostra

Thought for the day; "Is a dumb Easter Bunnie a hare Brain?"

And for Easter Sunday, a bit of pagan ...

Eostra waking

As the story goes, Eostra, was late bringing spring one year. As her energy swooped across the land, she came upon a little bird whose wings had been frozen in the snow. Filled with compassion for him since he could no longer fly, she turned him into a snow hare and gave him the gift of incredible speed, to flee from the hunters. In remembrance of his earlier form as a bird, she gave him the ability to lay multi-colored eggs on one day of the year, the day of the Easter festival.

Eostre is the Anglo-Saxon\Norse Goddess of Spring and of the East. The new Christian religion took the name and direction to make their holiday of Easter. As with many a God and Goddess, she has a special time, Dawn. “The dawning of a new spring day” is a saying that incorporates the Goddess’s time with the reason for the celebration, anew and rebirth. Her symbol is the Egg and her favorite animal is the Hare.

Of course, we have to have the Green One Facebook update ..

Vollsanger

Crimson Moon

And the real meaning of the Easter bunnie

Have a  good Easter Sunday ..
 
And for those who wondered..

And a thought to ponder...
Cheers !

26th March 2016 - New Uses for Whisky?

Thought for the day:" Remember.."I before E" except when you run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbour…."

And now the technical bit...

As a whisky drop dries, a combination of molecules in the liquid ensure a spatially uniform deposition—a finding that could inspire coating technologies.

Whisky Stain - without the Marangoni effect?

Surface engineers might prefer whisky over coffee, at least as a model liquid for creating films and coatings. Unlike coffee, whisky tends to leave uniform deposits when it dries. Hyoungsoo Kim and Howard Stone from Princeton University, New Jersey, and their colleagues explored whisky’s secret by measuring the fluid motion within evaporating droplets. The results showed that a combination of molecules—surfactants and polymers—help guide the deposition process in whisky.

Many solutions produce an uneven stain when they dry out on a surface. This so-called “coffee-ring effect” arises because evaporation is faster at the edges of a drop than at the center. When liquid flows outward to replenish this loss, particles in the solution are dragged along and deposited at the edge. This nonuniform residue is undesirable for many applications, including 3D printers that build layer upon layer using liquid deposition.


Researchers have previously found that mixing solvents (such as water and alcohol) can reduce the coffee-ring effect, but only for submillimeter drops. Large drops of whisky, however, appear to produce uniform stains, as revealed in recent images taken by Phoenix-based photographer Ernie Button. Intrigued, Stone’s team used florescent markers to track the motion of fluid in whisky drops and observed inward flow that partly countered the outward flow from differential evaporation. They explained this behavior as due to fat-like surfactant molecules that lower the surface tension. As a drop evaporates, the surfactants collect on the edge, creating a tension gradient that pulls liquid inward (the so-called Marangoni effect). In addition, plant-derived polymers stick to the glass, helping to channel particles to the substrate where they adhere. To confirm this picture, the researchers showed that whisky-like liquids lacking either polymers or surfactants did not produce uniform stains.


This research is published in Physical Review Letters.

I'll drink to that ...

And if we are to be so exact - let's pelt the Pedant
Cheers !

25th March 2016 - I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay

Thought for the day: "9 times out of 10 - when I lose something - it's because I put it somewhere safe"

Looking for my wallet and my car keys

So - we took a tree down today in the back garden, We have been meaning to do it for years but normally leave it too late into the Spring, and the birds are nesting and we decide to leave it another year - but this year we found a Lumberjack ( or tree surgeon if you prefer ) and we ended up doing the "carry - out" of the branches and logs...   Only took a couple of hours.  But sheer skill in getting it taken down ..

So I took a couple of photos of the progress..

So another day - well actually it is Good Friday - but that is another story ..
Cheers !

24th March 2016 - A few Photos of LARP AID '16

Thought for the day: " An apple a day keeps the doctor away - and orange a day keeps the postman away - that's it - Just throw fruit at people !"

So added a few photos from the recent LARP AID event ..   Our new Servers in the Crimson Moon Tavern... 
This year was an interesting game where the comabatants were blind folded andhad a heavy sack as a weapon. Rules were simple - a hand must always be on the box ... One combatant politely asks the other if he may hit him  - the opponent has to answer - giving a clue as to location and the first strikes with his sack... Of course the second combatant moves as soon as he has spoken...
First to connect wins...

A bit of fun...

And then the next day we had the single handed weapon competition to start the arena games - and the first onto the arena was our youngest competitor...

A veritable kill!!!

and so - on we go...
Cheers