right on Dr. Fob. How tall is he predicted to be? Does he aspire to be a professional comedian?

Being tall hasn't many advantages for me, although I am useful at getting things off high shelves.

I'm often accosted by strange ladies in Tesco for that very purpose.

Sometimes I'm accosted by perfectly normal ladies as well.

But not often.

I'm happy today because I'm done moving backwards on the bathroom demolition/reconstruction project.

Today I will sister one of the littler beams, replace the subfloor boards, including carving the cutaway for the toilet drain, tarpaper for a vapor barrier, one sheet of half inch pressure treated OSB, another layer of tarpaper, another sheet of half inch pressure treated OSB, both of which will need to be puzzle-pieced back into place under and around the toilet flange and under the remains of the vanity. Then I can bring the toilet back in from the hallway where it's been for a couple weeks and reinstall it in the damn bathroom.

That's what happy looks like to me.

Just haaad to have that hot tub dintchya?:eyebrow:

I kid.:stickpoke

You, sir,...

You'll hear the story.

For now, beam has been half-sistered!

Want coffee now.

No one has given us an adulthood projection, but he's been hovering around the 10th-15th percentile since he was maybe 5 years old. My brother is 5'7", uncles are 5'6" to maybe 5'9". My dad is 6'0" and Mr. Clod is 5'11", but it doesn't seem to have come through...

He aspires to anything that affords him tons of attention and applause. :)

Still, he may have to diet if he loves horses and wants to become a jockey.

That's Just where Goalieboy was and he ended up being a perfectly respectable averagish 5'8.5ish. And if he was any bigger he certainly wouldn't have a chance of being one of the Baja car drivers. wouldn't be able to get in it. Pologirl was always the shortest on the team by quite a bit, used it to her advantage -no-one expected her to be rough or fast so they left her alone and realized their mistakes too late. So many opportunities to use it to your advantage. Good luck to him finding his way
to take advantage of it

The seventh of seven floorboards has been hammered home.

Good night.

I managed to resolve a really tricky claim this week. Well, 3 claims with overlapping damages.

PH has been a pain in the butt throughout. Mistakes made on our side as well which meant she was even more of a pain - by the time the claim was referred up to me by the rapid handler, she was at breaking point.

Our adjustor scoped works in total for the claims at £6.5k
Policyholder has quotes - lowest of which (and her preferred choice of contractor) was a little over £12k.

She absolutely does not want us to use our network contractors (which would leave he with nothing to pay except the excess, regardless of how much the job turns out to be once work begins)

She absolutely cannot afford to make up the difference between our limit of liability and her contractor.

It's taken me 6 weeks to get this resolved - getting the contractor to requote without drying costs (we have a drying company who would deal with it separately or provide separate costs not included in the adjustor scope)

Getting chased by the customer and then chasing her contractor on her behalf.

Going line by line to remove little bits that aren't really damaged by the peril, or get him to justify why that should be included

Getting chased by the policyholder, chasing him on her behalf

Rinse and repeat

When the scope was finally agreed we were left with a £4.1k shortfall on what we could offer.

Policyholder now phoning daily and crying.

Back to the contractor.

I negotiated him down £3.5k to do the work. Got my tech expert to authorise an offer for half the remaining shortfall - then added in drying costs that had already been costed by our drying company, which in truth were probably now an overestimate given the length of time elapsed since the leak

Policyholder ended up with an offer that covered the full cost of her works, with a couple hundred left over to rent a dehumidifier for the last bit of drying, and another couple of hundred left over to offset against her £700 excess.

Policyholder has been left with only £500 out of pocket expense and I just saved the company about £1.5k once the additional costs that tend to occur when a claim goes through the network are taken into account.

Her most recent email to me had a smiley face in it.

:)

Good goin', that's job satisfaction right there!

Yeah man - I really got a kick out of that one.



Way more fun than telling 'John' (don't call him Mr) that I am not sending anybody else to his house because he got aggressive and threatening with one of the decorators :P

WTG Doc!

:) ta hon.

You do the job in return for money so you can buy food and shelter so you can do the job, that's everyone's base plane.
Above that the reward, the pleasure, comes from doing a great job which often goes unnoticed by bosses who are just trying to make sure everyone is doing their minimum.
The self satisfaction of making personal goals, from knowing you're better than the average bear :thumb:

Nice job D!

all demolition complete, floor swept.

tarpaper in house, measuring and cutting and installing tarpaper vapor barrier next

Then the same with the pressure treated plywood underlayment

Then purchase, measure, cut, install cement board.


**THEN** the toilet can be reinstalled

Sounds like a reasonable substitute for a weekend at Brunhilda's house of pain.:eek2:

I like it because it feels sooooo goooood when it stops....

I know, I had a marriage like that.

I'm happy because, as of today, I've lived longer than all three granddaddydigrs.

They all died @ 50.

I went them one better.

I made 51 today.:cheerldr:

And I don't feel a day over 80.

Happy Boithday, Mr G!

And many more of 'em! :thumb:

Happy birthday man!

Did they have heart problems?

Two did. One was strangled in his sleep with his own belt.

I know it sounds like clapping myself on the back, but you can't know how heavy this has been weighing on me for the last two years. After the turn of the year last year, I was genuinely starting to worry.

But, I'm good (enough), for now, and I think I've turned the corner on this latest experience. So...

I'm happy, for the moment.:)

I'm sure I'll be pissed off and back to normal in no time...

Huzzah!

yay!

You have company, it turns out this is a common thing that people consider hard and worry about. I looked into it when I was in my thirties, when I had a bit of it, because my dad died at age 38.

Congrats, digr! And happy birthday!

My dad felt something similar, except his turning point was the moment my marriage lasted longer than his had.

Merry late Birthday Grav

I thank you, sirs and madams.:D

I like you guys.

You are all my internet family of choice.

#prettyhappy

Sorry I haven't been around lately - it's summer pet sitting time and I'm on deadline with a book, but I just HADDA share some good news . . .

There is a For Sale sign in front of my fucktard neighbor's house.

YAY!!!

Yeah, it's not quite noon yet, but I'm gonna pour myself a cocktail anyway. And load up the bong. ;)

What are the chances to new owner could be worse? Probably pretty low. :yesnod:

Exactly. Even if the buyers are bunners too (man, I hope not), there will be no nasty history between me and them, so it's all good.

:)

Congratulations (if that's the right word) on the imminent departure of your neighbours!

We had experience of an unpleasant and anti-social bunch next door some years ago.

A couple and their teenage son and daughter moved in after the elderly widow owner died.

The contrast between occupiers couldn't have been greater.

The 'gentleman' of the household was ill-tempered, aggressive and generally disagreeable and was very rough with their dog.

The son, who'd be about seventeen, was always disappearing into the garden shed with several of his disreputable looking mates each equipped with a bulging holdall.

They'd all emerge, similarly encumbered, a while later. Heaven knows what was going on but I doubt that they were holding meetings of the Louis Vuitton Appreciation Society.

They hadn't been in the house for many months before the 'For Sale' sign appeared.

I remember returning home with my dog after a walk and seeing a police van moving slowly along the road and I instantly knew where it was heading.

Not surprisingly the police took away the son but, in a scene straight from a French farce, no sooner had they left than the estate agent appeared with prospective purchasers for a viewing.

I don't know what the boy was arrested for on that occasion but some time after they moved he appeared in court having carried out a serious assault on someone at a booze fuelled family shindig in a local hotel.

If memory serves correctly, he ended up as a guest at one of Her Majesty's 'hotels'.

Appalling bunch.

That's it, string 'em up! :mad:

Exactly! He was, and probably still is, beneath contempt.

Big pizza pie
 

This makes me happy:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/190...tonai_1280.jpg

The fact that it happens every month this year is also great, but it doesn't make me happy that I already missed most of them.

From today's
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

See those streaks? Those are anchovies like them or not. :neutral:

Just keep them off m'pizza.

Dad had his cataract op earlier this week, so thankfully that's out of the way at long last.

He was only in hospital for a few hours and was rather wobbly when he came out but when we got home he asked for sausages, baked beans and fried egg on toast and to 'put it on a large plate'. ;)

If his appetite ever falters then it's time to worry.

I had to remove the dressing the following morning which was held in place with micropore tape.

I know that he was a bit bruised and somewhat sore, but for a man who won WW2 single handed he has a remarkable repertoire of winces and general grumbles.

He has to have a plastic eye shield on overnight for the first week so we have to do the tape removal every morning.

That's a minor problem and he's already doing the crossword again so onward and upward!

Glad he's doing well!

Sent by magick

Cataract surgery is one of those modern miracles that I still occasionally marvel at--elderly folks who would have gone totally blind in olden times, just popping in for a quick procedure and back to full vision a day or two later! Glad he's on the mend, Carruthers.

Thanks, Clod!

I understand that it's the most commonly performed procedure in the NHS.
Actually, I've just done a quick search and find that approx 330,000 cataract ops are carried out annually in England alone.

Drifting a bit now, but my neighbour's son needed to demolish a substantial brick wall and his neighbour, who is an ophthalmic surgeon, offered to help.
He wielded the sledge hammer with surprising enthusiasm and said that it 'makes a change from doing cataracts all week'. :eek:

Glad to hear about Dad doing well.

what Grav said.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Dad does a lot of reading and we rely quite heavily on the TV for information and entertainment so I dread to think what life would be like for him if those two pursuits had become impossible.

Ha! Well played.

No wonder he was stumbling around, glad he'll be able to see again. Better hide the car keys though... He'll be sneaking out to pick up chicks. ;)

Better start actually cleaning the house again, too.

:p:

Be honest. You've been reading Dad's daily routine orders, haven't you? :rolleyes:

I ain't sayin'.

We replaced our air conditioner in August. And it was instantly a HUGE quality of life improvement. Our old AC was not sized correctly for our house, and we had put up with a hot house for years. The old AC ran basically continuously during the peak of the summer.

This new air conditioner actually works, and it is a pleasing temperature when you walk into the house.

Well, we got the September power bill yesterday, covering the first entire billing period since we got the new AC. The bill was less than half the bill for last September and about a third of the power consumption since last September, and you might think that it's just because it's a different year and the weather was different, but we had a hot September this year.

This AC is so much more efficient, saves money, and is way more comfortable. I'm kicking myself for not replacing it sooner.

So the thing cost a little over $6000, and we saved $60/month during AC usage so far, so we just have to use it for 100 months and it will pay for itself. I figure 4 cooling months a year, or 25 years, and it will pay for itself. Honestly though, it's not about the money. I'm much more comfortable and I cut my carbon footprint significantly.

:jig:

Cool.

it will also have increased the value of your property

You're right! :thumb2: