Had it about an hour ago: a sort of one-pot pasta and lentil stew thingy, made in our slow cooker. I wouldn't call it it a particular favourite of mine, but it has the advantage of being dead easy and surprisingly substantial.

Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!

I'll be keeping my eyes open for further news.

Jona Lewie - Stop The Cavalry. Apparently not originally intended as a Christmas song anyway.

That good eh?

Hopefully the weekend will improve things.

With us, anything that is/would be smelly goes in some kind of container.

Cleaning - I would say once every 3-4 months or so in normal circumstances. Quite possibly longer.

I am not a dog lover. I find them needy, melodramatic and hierarchical: some of the features that I try to avoid in humans.

I work in an office around one day a week which often has more dogs than humans - since one of the regular staff has two dogs. In general, however, they aren't much of a problem. One frequently nudges people's elbows to get attention and howls whenever a phone rings. Another gets in the way of the door an awful lot - resulting in the owner installing a child gate at an inner doorway, and another has been traumatised in the past and needs to be taken out whenever a fire alarm test is due. However, this is not more that the needs and quirks of other people, really, and is fairly easy to work around.

I am glad that I do not have to work in that office all the time, but overall it is not a big deal.

I'm going through Robert Brightwell's Flashman tales: prequels to George MacDonald Frasier's Flashman book, featuring the original protagonist's uncle.

They are very well researched (as were GMF's) and generally engaging, but having just finished Flashman and Madison's War, I found it to be the waekest so far - lacking a strong narrative thread to tie the scattered, episodic historical events together. The next in the series is Flashman's Waterloo, which shouldn't have that problem.

I am very pleased to see how Brightwell has updated the original conceit - taking the bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays and using him as a mouthpiece to entertainingly deconstruct the Victorian boy's-own colonial genre - to fit a more modern audience, whilst retaining the spirit of the originals.

Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.

Working from home today - or supposed to be. I finished a couple of Big Things at the end of last week and am really struggling to get stuck into any one of the dozen other things that are on my list now.

I've deleted a lot of photos and sorted the recycling though. I'll be sharpening pencils soon...

I did get out and do a bat monitoring session last night - part of the national waterway survey in August each year - without getting wet. There were a few pipistrelles about and a couple of noctules and serotines passing by, but no Daubenton's which is what this particular survey is looking for.

Today will be getting the chores out of the way then - if the rain shows any chance of dying down - out to an open air Shakespeare this evening. It will be 'Exit pursued by a very damp bear.' I expect.

Tomorrow: third attempt to get these shelves up. It has been postponed twice so far.

Sounds blissful to me. I can't recall the last time I had a complete weekend reading.

They always say that you should stack up everything that you think you'll need and then put half of it back in the wardrobe. The problem is working out which half, of course.

Hope it all goes well anyway and that you have a good time.

you also haven’t addressed my reasons for doubt.

A) When did you ask me to?

B) By pointing out the cost/benefit to both sides, I would have said that I did anyway.

However, if you would like me to go into more detail: this is a property that was not occupied by the PM or his family - Greenpeace have stated that they were aware of this. The 'high security' was evidently provided by the police - who would also have been aware of this. Even at the best of times, given a little advance planning, avoiding a routine police cordon - routine being the key word - is not exactly difficult.

I struggle to see why Greenpeace would take the route that you are suggesting (a literal conspiracy theory) and decide to take the risk of losing credibility instead of doing as they have frequently, attestably, through court records, done and evade the existing security.

Relay (Pro) when using my phone although most of the time I was using RES on a laptop.

You haven't addressed the critical point:

What would be the consequences for both when the co-ordination was leaked/revealed?

Both would stand to lose vastly more in credibility than ever they might gain.

Whilst that might not matter to Sunak - a lost cause politically anyway, and clearly someone who values money highly - Greenpeace thrives on commitment to the cause.

It certainly seems to me a highly implausible scenario.

So, you're suggesting that this was co-ordinated by Greenpeace and ...the Prime Minister? To keep up whose appearances exactly?

What would both parties stand to gain from this?

What would be the consequences for both when the co-ordination was leaked/revealed?

You say that you found out that lemmy.world had disabled downvotes. Where did you you find that out? I'd certainly seen nothing myself here - I know that some instances have - and can certainly see and use the downvote arrows.

I'm on lemmy.world. This thread is on lemmy.world I have just downvoted you successfully as far as I can see.

Ha! I can see that you have a particular connection.

I'm glad you like it though.

Rosetta Stone ...or Shibboleth???

The issue with being poor is that you don't get to save a lot - if any - whilst you are paying for rent and the basics. That is a large part of the reason that the housing co-op that I mentioned has housed so few after so long.

Yes, in the right conditions it will work, but there are a lot of situations that don't leave people with access to those conditions.

My initial thoughts would be that the priority for most poor people is housing, followed by food and keeping the lights on.

My experience of mutual aid groups is primarily in the form of local exchange trading schemes (LETS), which typically provide services such as cake making, aromatherapy sessions, bicycle repair and maybe garden maintenance etc.

So although you may be able to deal with the food side of things through that to some extent, there really aren't many landlords who will take rent in the form of aromatherapy and almost no utility suppliers will accept payment in bicycle repairs.

I have known a group to establish a housing co-op, which is great and all, but that, after around a decade, has housed around 8 people in total, which leaves a very long way to go.

Overall, I am in favour of the idea, but it is easy to see the issues that leave most people stuck in some job that actually pays the rent.

One of those mornings where the fruit, the cereal AND the milk all ran out while getting breakfast, so the worktop was strewn with open boxes and containers and debris by the time I had filled a bowl. Plus the other half's usual morning tea wasn't there so I had to guess which of the dozen other fruit or herbal teas would be acceptable.

And then, we had had a new food and milk delivery thing and they had left it all (how many boxes? can we really eat all that? what the hell are half of these things?) over by the woodshed, and it's raining, so a damp two-part excursion to retrieve it - and I needed some of that milk.

All before I had actually eaten anything or fully woken up.

Stuff going to work. I just want to get back under the duvet now.

Should you try going to the cinema? It's not a big deal, but I'd say yes at some time in your life. If not, you will always be askign this question.

Alone or with friends? Whichever you prefer.

And CF the British comic strip "Jane" - which ran from the 1930s through to the end of the '50s.

It's my SO's birthday tomorrow, so we are off out to her chosen museum followed by a meal - and, apparently, potentially picking up a chest of drawers in between.

Nothing much lined up for Sunday, but I have agreed to do a mock interview for a friend sometime in the next few days. The real one is on Weds.

Some might say the lawn needs mowing again, but with rain a foregone conclusion, that's out of the question now. What a pity.

Looking remarkably like a trireme here, with struts in place of oars and the anchor hole in place of a painted eye.

That's a really difficult one. The book Bond is a snob in a way that doesn't really translate to the later culture in which so many of the films are set. Plus, I stopped watching the movies after Quantum of Solace - and had only been slightly interested from around Licence to Kill onwards, until Casino Royale.

If I had to say then perhaps a mix of Craig in Casino and Connery in the very early ones. Book Bond was a bit rough around the edges and definitely not dropping 'witty' one-liners all the time.

Yes, they are. They are stylish and pacy and all the rest. They are also very much of their time and, as well, are a completely different beast to the movies: they are spy stories primarily - not action adventures (though both of those are still there), and are much more low key overall.

In the immediate wake of the first Star Wars film I was soaking up everything I could about the film and its influences. Taoism was mentioned in relation to 'the force' of course and that sent me straight to a three volume Readers Digest encyclopedia that we had on the shelves, which had a brief but informative entry on it. I didn't go a lot further for a good many years, but it was the first spark.

I spent some time when most of what I was doing was leading volunteer groups and giving talks and tours etc, some years as the only permanent resident on what was effectively an island and quite a range in between. It would depend entirely on where you are, I think.

Either way, I had no regrets and wished I had made the change some time earlier.

When I left IT and changed careers, I became a tree surgeon for a while and then a wildlife ranger, which I stuck with for 20-odd years.

It has to be said that you need a particular motivation to work as a ranger though - at least in the UK. You certainly don't get into it for the money.

Not upside down - this is a juvenile, and they have these markings. Females may retain them, but adult males will lose the darker markings.

Slow worms are legless lizards rather than snakes. They have eyelids, unlike snakes, for example.

That's a slightly different tale. M.R.James was very much in favour of the Three Crowns of East Anglia, which includes the arms attributed (much later) to the Wuffing dynasty which ruled East Anglia a couple of centuries earlier - and who seem to have come from Sweden - which also uses these arms - and based his tale on those arms.

Evidently a crown was dug up near the Wuffing palace at Rendlesham in the C15th and melted down - as in James' tale - but, according to legend, Edmund's crown was recovered soon after his death. The legend tells that a wolf guarded his decapitated head until it was found - still wearing the crown, according to most depictions, however improbable that seems.

Bafflegab's Baker's End series and Radio Static's Minister of Chance are two excellent Doctor Who adjacent shows. The BBC podcast The Whisperer in Darkness is a great Lovecraft adaptation.

There isn't a lot of today left here in the UK, but I'll be getting bed early and listening to an audio drama shortly.

Tomorrow, I have some shelves to put up, and there may be some clearing up in the garden after the winds today.

From an outsider's perspective it would be the places that I work - which I am not going to reveal in any detail to avoid doxing myself, but include nationally and internationally important historical and archaeological sites.

From my perspective, although they are certainly interesting and I love working at them, it doesn't play a particularly prominent role in what I do day-to-day, so it would be the wide range of problem solving involved: I lead a team dealing with maintenance, compliance and health & safety for a national charity.

I'm in my 50s and have started seeing eqpt that I was still using some years after starting work in museums now.

I can now sympathise with my dad who used to be the same with agricultural museums and steam rallies back in the day.

Most recently finished: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher - an enjoyable, but not exceptional, folk horror.

Currently in the middle of: Finnegans Wake, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Flashman and Madison's War by Robert Brightwell, and a collection of Para Handy tales by Neil Munro.