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As a kid stationed in the State of Georgia for AIT 11 months after the third month the treated almost like regal soldiers! As a squad leader my battle buddy was Black kid and we became friends when I found out his father was farmer too! So he had a small sub pickup that GM built in 80s! well one weekend he suggested we go to town to see a movie at that Mall! So we went, eating lunch then going to movie! I always rubbed him because he drove so slow often below the speed limit! Well when finally came back to Gordon Base and should our IDs at the gate we were let on! then after we left less then a mile an MP pulled us over! He came to car trying to super rude asked for IDs and we did! He then said he thought we didn't belong on base (you still see the entrance gate we went through)! Then he let us go and he looked at me and said the MPs always harass him because he is Black! As a republican I had my eyes opened at driving while Black in America was real problem still!
 
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Work. Just finished my evening shift. Clocked up 76 hours overtime in January so far. Back in the day I’d have received time and a half. These days I’ll be lucky to get paid for more than a week of it.
 
Madhatter32 said:
I enjoy several cups a day but only in the mornings. I have read that the caffeine takes 12 hours to leave your system. So, limiting coffee intake to the mornings seems to work for me and does not seem to effect negatively my ability to sleep. It certainly did when I used to drink it later in the day.
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Oh, much longer than that. A long time ago I was a target shooter (smallbore - 22's). I did some tests over a few months and found that one bottle (600ml) of Coke on a Thursday was enough to drop my score by 10 points out of 500 on a Sunday. That was enough to drop me from 1st to 10th.
 
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Thanks to the little ones, hamster mazes are on my mind. And diaper changes.

Oh, and occasionally Aes Sedai.
 
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Dealing with the cold here in southern Virginia, particularly with respect to doing physical work outside. There are a number of projects and activities that need to be done around the farm, and waiting for spring to do them isn't a viable option.

I still have a lot of winter gear from my time in the central Rockies of Colorado, but said gear was more suited to skiing and other outdoor recreational activities that don't involve fixing wire fencing, building construction, goat wrangling, or riding on a tractor with no cab.

I find the cold more penetrating in Virginia. I blame it on the higher humidity, and possibly the excessive atmospheric pressure of living near sea level. Anyway, yesterday I finally broke down and ordered a set of insulated bib coveralls from Duluth, which I expect will help make the outside work at least more tolerable, if not enjoyable.
 
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We have been having "Rainageddon" here in Aus. The main road and rail links from South Australia to the Northern Territory have been cut, trains can't get through and trucks* have to make a 3,000 km detour through New South Wales and Queensland. Townsville in northern Queensland and Melbourne in Victoria have had 1 in 100 year rainfall events, up to 3 inches of rain/hour.

* Some of the trucks are road trains, with 3 trailers. However, in NSW and QLD, they can only have 2 trailers, so they have to stop, get the company to send up another driver and prime mover, split the train and move on.
 
The English language can be pretty challenging. There's the whole spelling/pronunciation thing, the punctuation thing, etc., etc...... Underuse or inappropriate use of punctuation can be a real headache, too, to those native English speakers and writers who are purists. Ditto for overuse of any particular form of punctuation. Seeing this can be really frustrating, even irritating, but realistically it is part and parcel of being online these days...
 
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Clix Pix said:
The English language can be pretty challenging. There's the whole spelling/pronunciation thing, the punctuation thing, etc., etc...... Underuse or inappropriate use of punctuation can be a real headache, too, to those native English speakers and writers who are purists. Ditto for overuse of any particular form of punctuation. Seeing this can be really frustrating, even irritating, but realistically it is part and parcel of being online these days...
Click to expand...

It’s entertaining and telling at the same time to see how many mistakes are done by what one would assume is a native speaker. And I don’t really think that English is that challenging compared to a few other languages.
 
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Yes, it is interesting how many supposed "native English speakers" struggle with both the written and spoken versions of a language they've presumably experienced from birth. That's a whole other issue which probably is best not addressed here inasmuch as it's a political/sociological/educational/cultural, etc., scenario going beyond the scope of this thread.

As for people posting and writing in what is their second or maybe third or fourth language, all I can say is that I am in awe of how deftly they manage English, both the words and the punctuation, and, yes, often better than some native English speakers. I would be very, very hard-pressed to try and express myself coherently and accurately in another language. (And, yes, that, too, is rather an indictment on the US educational system going back some years, which again is a topic which goes beyond the scope of this thread.)
 
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Clix Pix said:
That was "Snowmageddon," if I recall correctly, when we had the back-to-back storms. The whole area was walloped.
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Yea remember driving home during that second storm from work! I was going down Route 1 in right hand lane doing around 30MPH at best with there cars right behind me! then a four wheel drive SUV speeds past us doing 50MPH. Then just before Telegraph road is cover going ip small hill Traffic light! that SUV was in side grass having not making the corner! Us three cars just kept going 30 because in Snow conditions slow and steady Wins the race!
 
Back in my working days there were times when a snowstorm would hit and the library wouldn't be able to close right away (had to wait for official orders from the county) so that by the time we did close and get the few patrons who were still in there out so that we, too, could leave, the weather had inevitably gotten worse.

Thankfully during the time I was working at the Martha Washington Library (in Fairfax County, just outside of the City of Alexandria) we didn't have any major storms and I was always able to safely get home from there to where I was living in Vienna, VA. Dealing with Rte 1 and also the Beltway during that kind of weather would have been a huge stressor! It was bad enough during good weather....

Another time, a few years prior to that, we had a nasty snowstorm and I had a real struggle after leaving the Kings Park Library (in Burke, VA) and trying to get home. Finally, I just gave up and was able to maneuver my car into a parking space in a street mall in a location not terribly far from where I was living at that time -- maybe a mile, mile-and-a-half? Possibly two miles? -- and walked the rest of the way home. By the time I actually got there, my eyelashes were frosted with snowflakes, my outerwear was soaked and I was definitely very, very cold. My husband was astonished that I'd walked all that way with snow coming down and ice forming everywhere. He was happy to see me arriving home safe and in one piece. That was many years ago.....now, no way I'd even dream of attempting that! The next morning we drove in his car to retrieve mine from where she'd been spending the night.

These days, I'm enjoying the benefits of retirement and one, of course, is not having to be at work or worrying about getting home from work when there is a snowstorm.
 
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Regarding expressing ourselves in a non-native language, I owe most of whatever quality and lack of fear to make a fool out of myself, to an American spiritual teacher and well published author, I was studying and hanging with for some time in my life. Not telling whom.
She was an amazing teacher and friend during a period of expansion, excitement and lots of travel, where I explored the world and my own place within it. ?

Most part of communication, in general, I learned from my mother who was a business woman within the hotell and restaurant area all her short life. Not very good at any English however, she was a lot more fluent in German. A language I myself stand as a question mark before. I studied some French in school, but never used it much. I have visit France shortly a few times, unfortunately I didn’t manage to handle a lot of the communication in French at those times ?
But Mom was still one of the most brilliant communicators I’ve known, in her sincere interest to understand the person she was communicating with. In real life that was.
On internet communication can be a lot more difficult, and not always recommendable to put any effort into either, in some situations.

What most work against me in writing in 2 languages on the web, especially on the iPad, not the Mac as much, are the dreadful thing of dealing with keyboards in 2 different languages. The autocorrections are worse than horrible at times, and sometimes it corrects back to whatever it want, or to the other language, even after I’ve changed something. ?
Ah, well communication are much more than words for me, it’s connection, or the lack of it.
If there’s connection, communication have a much better chance to survive and evolve, fail, grow and transform us people. If there’s not much real connection, communication seems to remain flat, crawling and gasping for air, until it dies. ?
 
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Clix Pix said:
The English language can be pretty challenging. There's the whole spelling/pronunciation thing, the punctuation thing, etc., etc...... Underuse or inappropriate use of punctuation can be a real headache, too, to those native English speakers and writers who are purists. Ditto for overuse of any particular form of punctuation. Seeing this can be really frustrating, even irritating, but realistically it is part and parcel of being online these days...
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Part of the problem is that the current English language is a Creole, with bits from --
  • Ancient Briton
  • Celtic
  • Latin
  • Nordic languages
  • Teutonic languages
  • French
  • Other Romance languages incl. Spanish, Portugese, Italian
  • Bits and pieces from Arabic, Indian, Chinese, etc, etc.
The grammar is an imposed one, devised by scholars in the 17th(I think) C to be more like pure Latin.

Spelling is a mixture of tradition, phonetics and imposed rules.

No wonder it is said that English is the easiest language to learn to use badly, and the hardest to learn to use well.

And who knows when to use "its" and "it's", FFS!!!
 
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Well, this has been a fun day.
Woke up intending to go to the doctor (nothing urgent, just a report)

Wife is working from home. Turns on computer. Gets "Windows failed to start. We will restart for you" and a magic QR
code. Wife is not happy...

Cancelled Dr's appt.

Tried various things. Booted from another drive, but Office won't work.

Went back to the first drive, booted up after repairs, but other things don't work.

Gave up.

Rang son, who said we could use his gaming machine that he left behind when he left home.

Installed new SSD drive in gaming machine, booted off USB drive with Windows on it. Installed Windows on new SSD drive.

Went and bought Fish 'n' Chips for lunch (nice crispy battered Whiting).

Spent the afternoon -
  • Configuring and updating Windows
  • Installing and updating Office
  • Configuring Office to work with wife's work account.
  • Installed and configured other software needed to work remotely.
  • Tested all software.
  • Got wife to test all software.
  • Tested all software again
  • By this time wife has finished work so I replace old PC with 'new' PC, plug in and configure Monitors, keyboard, headset for remote meetings, etc.
  • Tested all software again.
  • Got wife to start up, log in and test all software
  • Finish (by now cold) coffee.
Wife is now happy.
 
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DaveFromCampbelltown said:
Well, this has been a fun day.
Woke up intending to go to the doctor (nothing urgent, just a report)

Wife is working from home. Turns on computer. Gets "Windows failed to start. We will restart for you" and a magic QR
code. Wife is not happy...

Cancelled Dr's appt.

Tried various things. Booted from another drive, but Office won't work.

Went back to the first drive, booted up after repairs, but other things don't work.

Gave up.

Rang son, who said we could use his gaming machine that he left behind when he left home.

Installed new SSD drive in gaming machine, booted off USB drive with Windows on it. Installed Windows on new SSD drive.

Went and bought Fish 'n' Chips for lunch (nice crispy battered Whiting).

Spent the afternoon -
  • Configuring and updating Windows
  • Installing and updating Office
  • Configuring Office to work with wife's work account.
  • Installed and configured other software needed to work remotely.
  • Tested all software.
  • Got wife to test all software.
  • Tested all software again
  • By this time wife has finished work so I replace old PC with 'new' PC, plug in and configure Monitors, keyboard, headset for remote meetings, etc.
  • Tested all software again.
  • Got wife to start up, log in and test all software
  • Finish (by now cold) coffee.
Wife is now happy.
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If you loved your wife you’d buy here a Mac! Glad you got it working.
 
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