(INJ) LA is an awful long way for Ms Shuko.

Ah, Yes. Still, it's not a bad idea.

[INJ] I think what you wanted to propose was NOPilg. I might sign up for that one!

Or maybe La Pilg (or should I say le pélérinage)

INJ's idea for a Pilg in Louisiana sounds great for Ms Shuko - a bit far for the rest of us though...

you're filling out a form online that requires your date of birth and when you click the drop-down box to bring up your year of birth you have to scroll down to find it.....

Kim, you're catching up. When I click on those things I get a depth reading. 6' is becoming uncomfortably close. :)

I was filling in one that offered me the opportunity to say I was born in 1900!

I still love web forms that insist on postcodes for (republic of) Irish addresses. I know of a few parcels that have arrived at Irish houses addressed to, e.g. Mr M O'Donnell, 10 Ardan Bothar an Glas, Drogheda, Co Louth, Sorry Mr Postman, Amazon wouldn't let me order this unless I had a postcode.

[Phil] Even worse are forms that insist on only allowing US Zip Codes. Or only allowing US states, even though you have selected a country other than the US.

(nfras) I've never found that, and I've bought quite a bit of stuff from the USA (music, books). In fact the last order they sent twice. Anybody want a copy of the conductor score for The Chicken, arr. Kriss Berg?

Phil] I'm surprised that the phrase fitted in the postcode box!

[nfras] which reminds me that many Irish people I know have put 90210 in the postcode section :-)
[Merlyn] Even stupider are the web form designers that don't limit the number of characters.

Yes, if I am ever going to be in the UK, I'd let you know. Though, I don't know if I'll ever be. New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Alexandria, Metairie - all places in LA that are "close enough" for me. Shreveport and Monroe are a little far, but doable. Texas - Houston, Beaumont, Orange. Far, but doable - Seguin, New Braunfels, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Ft. Worth. . .

I've sometimes seen the addresses things that can be irritating toanybody. Yep, even sometimes to us in the US. I tell things that I don't live in the Ukraine. Silly forms. However, it's not usually those for me. It's those CAPTCHAs. I've had one in Greek, one we think was in something like Urdo or Arabic . . . some others with weird symbols.

Did you know there's a country with a name that states a fact about weather? ********************** Ukraine ************************* Get it? UK Rain E (rainy)

The field that irks me when compulsory is that of "County", for counties in the sense implied by the form ceased to exist in Scotland in the 70s, and Edinburgh is one of those places (like Manchester) where the city and county are much the same thing. Or, to put it another way, they lie within Unitary Authority Areas of the same name. So in the box I'm often reduced to writing "Scotland", when they let me get away with that, or "Midlothian" when they force a choice. Perhaps in the future I should paste in what I've written here...

I'm sure I've told the story before of how my credit card company managed to have my address as being in "Manchester, Lancashire, Lancashire". When I moved to Edinburgh, it changes to "Edinburgh, Midlothian, Lancashire"...

Pilgrimage in London proposed for 24th March. See discussion here: http://www.dunx.org/cgi-bin/forum?forum=game00074&displayStyle=york&tail=40#bottom
Please keep all discussion on the Orange site to avoid cross posting confusion

You can all talk about other things here, you know! How was your week?

Hard - preparing documents for government officials :(
Next week, I start my new job though :)

[Phil] excellent!
My week started in England with shopping and the best fish and chips for lunch in Cleethorpes on Monday, sailed across the North Sea at night (failed to see the Northern Lights despite peering out from the deck at nearly midnight), busy time at work (wrote loads, organised a reception for the sustainability team at the business school). Now: finishing off more loads of writing, and trying to plan ahead.

Started a blog. It's under my Second Life identity, though, so no-one need try looking for it.

Very very tough, for reasons that I'm not going to get into. But, on the bright side, not quite as tough as the week before.

[Raak] Is that a slog?

[Phil] Ha ha, yes, a SLog, hopefully not a slog! Just a few snaps of places in SL so far.

Back after a fortnight in Ethiopia, where Mrs INJ and I had wanted to go for years. A fascinating place – the oldest continuously Christian country in the world and the only African country never to be colonised (the Italians never subdued it in the 1930s). It has a fascinating culture with a history mixed with legend. This is the country of the Queen of Sheba, who was seduced by Solomon and whose son Menelik is said to have brought the Ark of the Covenant back from Israel. It is the country of the Axumite civilisation whose trade reached as far away as West Africa, Zanzibar, Sri Lanka and the Caucasus (as well as possibly supplying some of the ‘Nubian’ pharaohs) and who raised huge pillars over their tombs (the great stele in Axum is believed to be the tallest monolith ever made – although it probably fell and broke almost immediately after it had been erected). It is a country with a tradition of building churches and monasteries in the most inaccessible places; culminating in the rock-cut churches of Lalibela, created by cutting down into the solid rock from above – if they had been in Europe they would have been as well-known as Notre Dame.
It is intensely Christian for the most part; you have to have a reasonable knowledge of Christian tradition to get the most from the cultural aspects of the country. We went for Timkat – the major festival, which is at Epiphany in the Coptic/Julian calendar and celebrates both the adoration of the Magi and Christ’s baptism with mass-participation parades, street celebrations and young adult baptism. And yet it is tolerant of other faiths – there is a significant muslim minority (10%+) and a few Rastafarians and others and no obvious conflict.
It also has magnificent and varied scenery with mountains, lakes, rivers with spectacular waterfalls (the Tissisat falls on the Blue Nile share the meaning of their name with the local name for the Victoria Falls – Mosi oa Tunya, or ‘the smoke that thunders’) and vast empty depressions where rivers disappear into salt pans. The birdlife is still abundant and varied, although much of the larger wildlife is under threat from a large population with a tradition of hunting.
The downsides? Tourist infrastructure isn’t great – hotels have irregular water and electricity, roads are mostly poor (and occasionally atrocious), there is poverty, though no famine at the moment after a very good harvest – much earlier famine was caused by difficulties in distributing food rather than an absolute lack of it. The food is OK, especially if you like injira, the staple bread substitute, which bears a certain resemblance to cold wet flannel IMO.
Oh, and as a bonus, we went to a resort owned by Haile Gabreselassie and he was there, so we got to have a chat and a photo-opportunity.
If you aren’t too insistent on comfort, then go if you get the chance.

[INJ] Really interesting, thanks for sharing.

[Tuj]Indeed.

Solid steady snow in Derby now. Started with light and gentle about 3pm - now big wetter flakes - could be interesting if it keeps up overnight.

Had a choir concert last night - everyone got there fine, but I think nearly half the choir couldn't get home.

[Knobbers] Yikes.
[INJ] it's 'only' -4C here today. (I know Néa will better this statistic). Yesterday was the most startlingly clear, bright, cold chilly day I have seen since I was in Vermont in January 1988. I put some photos on my Facebook page, if you can see that. We had a couple of inches of powdery snow on Friday afternoon, but early yesterday morning it was -12C (according to the ladies in the bakery, who were in at 5am), rising to -10C by the time the windy miller and I headed out to his mill, and brilliantly sunny - one of those winter days when you get a big and welcome dose of sunlight. Random banks of fog drifting around the area added a thick and sparkling rime to the the lines of pollard willows and alders lining the dikes on our route there. The water container inside the mill was frozen - it was -8C in there. It was a truly spectacular weather day.

Apologies for writing like Jilly Cooper. I'm having the equivalent of a guilty McDonald's hamburger and reading her latest paperback at the moment.

[pen] yeah :-)

Just about to go and have a teleconference with our Ukrainian development team. They were reporting -30 last week, but then Kiev does have a bit of a heat island effect.

I do hope Raak is not on of those SLers who has to have an SL wife give SL birth! I saw a video of that and the baby came straigh out of the stomach . . . something very disturbing about that!

Was that really Raak? Perhaps he's having an out-of-body experience.

[!Raak] 'Ere, oo are you?

[pen] The whole point of SL is to have out-of-body experiences, I think. I suspect that SLRaak has somehow got free and is posting here along with RLRaak. But, in this virtual space (where we can't see the giveaway goatee) how will we be able to tell them apart?

SL Raak isn't called Raak, of course. I think of her as an imaginary version of myself.

[Raak] So do I.

Hidden text

Just typing that gave me the creeps

She has a male shape and skin as well, but rarely wears them.

Going out to bang a few drums shortly, then various errands and home. Snow and ice is still lying here and there but the roads are all clear.

The roads are clear here too. It's bluddy cold though. I saw a small car (one of the 'moped cars' with a teeny engine that requires no proper driving licence) driving across the ice on the dog-leg shaped dead-end remnant of river called the Binnenmaas by the mill this morning. And a quad-bike doing power-slides and throwing up powdered snow on the ice too.

[Pen] This is a serious question as frozen rivers are a rarity where I live. How do the drivers of such vehicles (or even skaters and skiers for that matter) know that the ice is sufficient to carry their distributed weight? It sound rather fraught to me.

[Duj] The stretch of water I refer to *was* a river but became a lake in the 13th century when the intrepid Dutch diverted the flow of the Maas at this point into another channel to improve its navigability. It could be considered a small lake now, although it also acts as a reservoir for water pumped out of the polder on its way to the river proper. So, all these 'frozen rivers' are actually frozen lakes and canals, where water can stand still for long periods, allowing it to freeze. As to the thickness of the ice, the Dutch are very organised about this kind of thing. Every stretch of water, it seems, has an 'icemaster' who will measure the thickness and deem it fit for skating. The Dutch rarely do things independently; they love to do everything together, so there aren't a lot of daredevils going it alone in defying the icemaster. And they are aware of where the water is deep or not deep - falling through the ice into shallow water is acceptable, it seems. As for me, I discovered the other night that years and years of being warned not to go onto dangerous British ice have left me with a terror of walking on even the safest Dutch ice. That's another activity that the windy miller will have to do without me. :o/
In other news, I have been measured up for sunglasses at the opticians, and have bought a pair of summer shoes on Ebay - ones that I was dithering about in a high street shop last summer, but have found at one-third of the price on Ebay. Now, if the temperature would just lift above freezing for the first time in a fortnight...

It just started snowing again. Arse.

[Penelope] Thanks. From memory of my short time in England falling through the ice did my shoes and confidence little good. Perhaps I was a sook? I'm off now to my local bottle shop (off licence) to purchase my week's vittles. I might wobble a bit but I'm confident that I will not sink. ;)

Blimey, it's hot.

Nearly a week has passed again. Apparently it's going to be scorchio on Thursday in the UK.

[Phil] Indeed. If it carries on like this, I'll be getting the box of summer clothes out of the attic.

It has warmed up to double figures on the rock, hopefully no more hard frosts - which will encourage the bloody grass to grow.

Then you'll be moaning about mowing the stuff! :)

It's more than three years since I was responsible for a lawn. I'm not sure if I miss it or not. The house we currently live in is a bit weird and unfriendly as far as outside space is concerned. The gravelled space in the back yard is designed to be looked at rather than walked on or used; I think the person who designed it wouldn't make the same design again.

I'm sure I don't miss it. We finally took out our front lawn last year and did fun things involving boulders and native plants what have various qualities such as being interesting looking year round. I also dug out swathes of the back yard and planted a soil-improving winter crop and will be attempting some vegetable gardening this year. The purist in me wants to do it without spending as much on soil amendments as the veg would have cost in the market. The neighbor's massive fir tree dropping needles all over doesn't do wonders for the pH, so I will probably have to do something.

[Dan] Stevie probably has a chainsaw you can borrow.

This comment will only interest those of us who live in the land of drought and flooding plains.
Warragamba dam, built to act as a reservoir for Sydney's drinking water rather than a flood mitigation device, is almost at a level that will trigger the spillways to do their job. To the best of my knowledge the last time this happened was in about 1998. Given that I don't live down stream of the dam I really shouldn't start singing 'Oh, happy days', but I will. :)

[Dujon] You could sell some to the SE of England.

[INJ] It'd make a change. The spillways have in fact been actuated and the additional water added to the Nepean/Hawkesbury river system has submerged bridges and brought about the expected flooding - minor at this stage.

[Dujon] Hoping you haven't been washed off your mountain up there. Looks dreadful.

[flerdle] No, m'dear, although the world did seem to move yesterday when I was nowhere near the kitchen table! I think though that it was but the garbage truck doing its rounds. ;)

Shorts and T-shirt today and mowing the lawn for the first time.

Over any given year where I live there must be thousands of birds fly over, take up temporary digs whilst migrating or live within a territory they have staked out in which my humble plot of land exists. Why do dead birds not litter my land and the local parks? Cockatoos are blessed with long lives whilst the smaller birds such as finches and wrens are supposed to be relatively short lived (they were when I used to breed them.) Over the last ten years I have seen two (2) deceased avians. One was a parrot in the local park and the other a juvenile butcher bird which I witnessed being attacked by other local birds.
Why is it so? Are there places scattered around the world where birds go to die? Is there an ornithologist in the house?

A couple of thoughts from an ameteur birder (but not an ornithologist, still less a twitcher). The ones flying over are pretty healthy, as are the ones you see staking out territories. Ill and infirm birds will tend to hide where predators can't see them, such as in thick undergrowth. Also dead birds don't tend to last long. Generally predator birds and rodents dispose of them quickly. They also decompose very quickly, bones and all, as the bones are mostly pretty fragile. Having said that, I reckon to find 3 or 4 dead birds a year in my ordinary suburban garden, and that doesn't count the drifts of feathers left when our local sparrowhawk has caught another little bird too intent on one of our feeders to keep a proper look out.

Salient points, INJ, I have no doubt. Ants too can do a very efficient demolition job on a carcass, but I doubt (in fact would reject) the idea that bird feathers are nutriment for scavengers. The reason for that attitude is that individual feathers, presumably resulting from natural 'moulting', are common and most certainly not a part of a drift of feathers produced by either direct attack or the efforts of scavengers. Who hasn't come across a particularly attractive feather from time to time and wondered what type of bird lost it?

[Dujon] Indeed, I'm sure that in your neck of the woods ants will be particularly efficient at cleaning up. I agree feathers are a bit different, but they must be destroyed fairly quickly if only because otherwise we'd be up to our necks in them. Also they are pretty much pure keratin which, despite its toughness, is none the less protein and so crying out to be recycled. I'm now into speculation, but I would suspect insects & bugs are likely to be the cleaning crew and will reprocess the feathers into chitin etc.
Surely there's someone in the morniverse who can add a bit more scientific rigour at this point.

Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.
The_Siphonaptera