pheloniusfriar | Reading

Remember how I was being salty about our lack of "significant" snow? Well, it all arrived at once last night. We got hammered. The picture is my view as I stepped off what would transpire was the final service to arrive at my home station last night. All the trains were cancelled today.

However, the children were furious this morning because despite the high school and the other middle school in the area being closed, their school was...open. And, cruel parents that we are, we made them attend. A third to half of their classes were missing, some of whom we know live within walking distance of the school. (Our children don't.)

I'm not sure how long we can expect to be in the doghouse, but I suspect it's going to take more than a packet of Haribo to get them to forgive us.

nanila

via

antisoppist

Grab the nearest book.
Turn to page 126
The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.

The first book nearest me is Metallurgical Assessment of Spacecraft Materials and Parts by Barrie D. Dunn (1996).

The sentence is: "Special fibres giving more options in strength, stiffness, light weight, and endurance against heat have been developed (Klein 1988)."

The chapter containing it discusses composite materials and ways to control their properties. The thing that makes me happiest about that particular sentence is the use of the Oxford comma.

The second book nearest me is The political diaries of a chief whip by Simon Hart (2025).

The sentence is: "It feels like authority is ebbing with every hour."

The chapter containing it is titled "April 2021-January 2022" and I think we probably all remember painfully well the fiasco that was the handling of pandemic restrictions to which this sentence clearly relates.

Cue hollow laughter as I realise the sentence is applicable to both work and home life. Particularly with a teenager and a tweenager incessantly challenging boundaries.

nanila

Do you mostly drink tap, filtered, or bottled water?

Tap water. I drink bottled water if I forget my refillable bottle, which isn’t very often.
Is it safe/recommended to drink tap water where you live? If not, why?

Yes, it is safe to drink the tap water here. It’s pretty soft water as well.
What does the tap water taste/smell like where you live?

Nothing, which is how it should be!
Do you collect rainwater? If so, what do you use it for?

Yes, we have a water butt in the back garden. We use it to water Keiki’s collection of carnivorous plants all year round, and for the indoor plants in summer.
Do you/have you ever had restrictions on water use where you live? What did you have to change about your lifestyle?

We haven’t had water restrictions here, even when a lot of the rest of the country did last summer. I have lived in places with water restrictions previously (southern California). It taught me to have short showers and/or turn off the water when, say, shampooing or conditioning my hair, which I think are generally good habits anyway. Dishwasher appliances also use less water than hand-washing dishes, which took me a while to accept but once I did, that also reduced my water consumption.

In other news, it has got quite cold here, by UK standards. Scraping off the car in the morning and ice on the roads is what defines "quite cold" here. Those, and the eternal promise of "significant" snowfall. Certainly there has been in a number of places, some of which are a handful of miles from my location, but the photo below shows the extent of the snowfall we have experienced to date!

nanila

Watch on YouTube

Somehow I was under the impression that I didn't do much travelling in December. Making this video reminded me that I went to London twice as well as Harwell and then Norfolk for Christmas. I didn't fly, but I certainly spent a lot of time on trains and in the car.

The full year video reminded me that I flew to new places for conferences: Hamburg (Germany), Nicosia (Cyprus) and Larnaka (Cyprus). I visited my parents in the USA. I went to Paris (France), Darmstadt (Germany), and Frascati (Italy) for workshops. We travelled as family by train across Western Europe to go to a conference in Vienna (Austria). We holidayed in Wales and Norfolk. I went to Maui (USA) for a conference. It was an incredibly busy year.

( Full year - 12 min 30 sec )

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

EDIT: Большое спасибо всем за помощь друг другу в комментариях! Я ценю каждого, кто предоставляет нашим новым соседям информацию, понятную им без необходимости искать её в Google. :) И спасибо вам за терпение к моему русскому переводу с помощью Google Translate! Прошло уже много-много лет со школьных времен!

Thank you also to everyone who's been giving our new neighbors a warm welcome. I love you all ❤️

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It's only funny if you're in the audience...

Reading

Snow, but no Snow Day

Book fortune-telling meme

The Friday Five on a Sunday, and the promise of snow

1SE for December 2025 (and all of 2025)

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