Another pointless thread

Coke the drink or Coke the recreational powder for one's nose ?

More importantly what is this sun of which you speak .

Actually the sun is shining today, a brief respite from the rain, which returns tomorrow, or more likely this evening. Still cold though, a miserable 15C .

A brief respite from winter this morning, in the garden in shorts wellies and vest mowing the lawn, Karchering the bird pooh etc from the patio slabs. Weather forcast is downpours tomorrow for the "torch bearer's" very very quick visit to the village.

T'was fairly blazing in Edinburgh this morning. Gone away now. Tomorrow is not looking too good.

Sunny here also in Happy Valley but rain expected by late early evening.


Torch will make its brief visit at 7:30am on 30th.
Planned excitement for the day include :-

30 hour plus continuous rugby match with a BBQ breakfast
Car park games (the mind boggles) at the Pirelli Stadium
Gardening Olympics (throwing the fork?; running from wasps?; jumping the nettle bed?) at the Shobnall Leasure Centre

All in a typical day

regards
Bernard

The only sports Mrs Snap does are running up bills and jumping to conclusions

Better than Rowing.
Watch out when she starts Throwing (anything), or Putting the Shot (in a recently aquired gun), and then takes up Shooting.

Bernard

Taxmen

His Nibs gets a mini pension from his Research Council days. Because it is a UK government pension tax is due on it in the UK (or would be if it were big enough).
Under the double taxation agreements this means he doesn't pay tax on it here. He has been getting the pension for four years, declared it every year on the tax form as a tax free pension and filled in all the forms needed by the Dutch tax man to prove it is tax free, though he still pays insurance contributions over it here. So far so good.

Today a blue envelope (Tax envelopes are always blue) arrives. We see you aren't paying tax on this income. Provide proof blahdeblah.
Letter dated 8 June, arrives today (since they insist on using a private mail company :roll and all info has to be back to them by Monday .

So we now have to dig out all the paperwork again, copy it and answer all their stupid questions again.

It'll get even worse next year when he gets part of his state pension from the UK too.

On the bright side you are keeping a civil servant in gainful employment

We're good at that. We have just applied to cut down a tree in our garden too. So I filled in the form online, which took me over an hour because it was so poorly designed, sent it off, with the required sketch and photos. Saw our application was in the local paper, received a letter to that effect. Had a visit from the council tree expert, who declared the tree nearly dead and dangerous, and have just had the permission granted, by letter and in the paper provided no-one complains in the next six weeks. Oh and the bill is in the post - €76 .

Woe betide us if we get the thing chopped down even a day early too.
I just hope we don't get any strong winds or our neighbours may not be very happy with us.

Other councils just have a list of protected trees and you can cut down the rest without permission, but not ours .

Unfortunately it's that Osborne bloke!!

We had a protected tree, a massive Willow, far to near the house (not planted by us)and we had to plant a replacement first then apply again after 5 years. There was no charge involved and once everything was in order, the new tree, an Acer, was well established we were given permission to remove the Willow (aka Tree 51). Took me a whole morning to render it down to a 1.5mtr stump. A friend, with a landscape garden business cut the rest off to the ground, shredded the upper branches and treated the stump for free.

This monster is way too tall for us to cut it down. So it is costing us a small fortune to get someone in to do it. At least if it falls on a house while they are doing it it is their insurance that pays out not ours.

I'll do it for 20% less than whoever else you have has quoted. It sounds like fun!

Cutting trees down is fun, it's chopping the logs up and storing them for next winter that's the hard part.

Spent a good evening in Saltaire (a world heritage site) with 'spider and his camera club. Highlight of the evening was trying to get good photo's of the snails(!?).

The light was poor and the snails moved too fast for long exposures, despite the tripods and remote releases etc.

This was taken, hand held with my old K110d and new 35mm macro.




Cropped in Photoscape,but that's all.

They look nicer than the Belgium ones I ate a few years back.