A quiet day in Malvern for Lois and me, as we surf the internet to monitor the rising river at Upton-upon-Severn, the result of the heavy rains caused by Storm Babet over the last few days. On Thursday our daughter Alison is coming to us from her home in Hampshire for 2 nights, with her son Isaac (13), and one of her daughters, Josie (17). And to get to us, there's no way round it, they've somehow got to cross the River Severn.
What a crazy planet we live on !!!!!
On the web today, I find that my fellow-members of Lynda's local U3A "Making of English" group are trying to manoeuver me into leading the group, now that Lynda has resigned. I don't mind too much, although it's annoying to be so blatantly "manoeuvered" into something like that - on the other hand it's a lot of fun being a group-leader and getting to decide what the group studies next. So we'll see!
Lois and I have had just one visitor today - a second "shed man", Adrian, who is hopefully going to give us a quote for laying a base for a tool-shed in our back-garden. Ian has already had a look and he has promised us a quote some time this week, although it hasn't arrived yet, which is a pity.
Adrian is kind of a shy, lonely kind of a guy, we discover, and a bit cross-eyed, but both of us - Lois and I - find ourselves silently rebuffing his unspoken overtures for friendship. Lois doesn't want to start an affair with a shed-man, and I don't want to start a "bromance". My goodness, no, not just now, we've got too much "going on" ! Later perhaps haha!
We remember that awful case recently, reported on the local Onion News, and subsequently going "viral", about a local dad being put in the embarrassing position of having to chat about the potholes on Newport Avenue, the least said about which the better in our view !!!!
So ladies! Don't let your man be conned into developing a "bromance" with a shed-man or any kind of tradesman, come to that. Before you know it, he'll be thinking that it's somehow "okay" to talk about things like "widgets" or "grommets" over the dinner table, something which is definitely NOT okay, to put it mildly!
GREAT MALVERN, Worcestershire —Describing how the routine
cost estimate rapidly blossomed into something much more, sources confirmed
Friday that local dad Mark Baker immediately developed a deep friendship
with the guy giving him a quote on laying a concrete base for a tool shed.
“At first, they were walking through the house discussing whether Dad should spring for double panes, and then all of a sudden they were standing in the middle of the kitchen talking about the kind of gas mileage the guy gets on his truck,” said Baker’s son Cameron, observing how the profound bond that had quickly formed between the 48-year-old father of three and the local contractor intensified as they commiserated about how the city council wasn’t fixing the potholes on Newport Avenue.
“Somehow, they ended up out on the back deck, and the guy was complimenting its size and craftsmanship; he seemed really impressed after Dad told him he built it himself. Then Dad recommended a deli nearby, and the guy said he always gets the Reuben there, even though he doesn't really know what a "Reuben" is, and he's trying to guess the answer by repeated orderings.
They wound up talking in the driveway for another 10 minutes before he finally left.”
What an awful warning !!!!
And incidentally, did you know that for centuries, millennia almost - because the problem was first formulated by Aristotle, believe it or not - people have been wondering what the difference is between an estimate and a quote, and for many years, the problem was thought to be insoluble.
In the 1980's, however, the question was finally coded and input to the giant Cray supercomputer at CERN, Switzerland, and after several years, the Cray came up with the following answer, which was actually classified "top secret" until relatively recently (2017).
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