Noises Off
The city council are employing a contractor to install Fibreoptic Broadband*.
Consequently they have been digging up pavements locally over the past fortnight. They start around 7:30-8am, pack up around 3-4pm.
The guys doing the actual digging are on the whole a friendly lot, up for a bit of banter with householders. eg: the one who knocked on our front door early this week.
Me (smiling): Hello. Have you come to apologise for the awful racket you're making?
Contractor (all in HiVis Dayglo Orange): Ah. . . First, apologies for the noise. Second: (whatever it was he was originally going to tell me. I've forgotten!)
Our house is on a corner (intersection?) They were digging up the pavements (sidewalks) on both roads this week, using mostly NOISE (pneumatic drills & small orange digger to produce the holes; then a plate-thwacker to firm down the subsoil afterwards, angle grinders to get the paving slabs to fit, plus BIG Hammers to get them laid level. Oh, and there's their Big Lorry to get all the equipment and them here and away again.) Consequently sitting out in the yarden, or even having windows open in the house just weren't options for most of the day. It got quite warm this week!
Dear Reader, you might be pleased to know we survived. Yesterday the forecast was 'sunny, if humid - unlike today, 'cool and rain'. We decided to visit the beach. We can do things like that now H is retired. Yay retirement!
We got up, did some washing, pegged out, did the anti-mollusc patrol, watered and fed the yarden. Even harvested a couple of strawberries. Clearly arranging the strawberry pot as a hanging basket, with anti-mollusc patrols, has Worked. We've had one strawberry per day all the past week, even had two one day. They are delicious. And all the while we were bracing ourselves against the now-usual assault of NOISE.
Only it didn't come. Turned out they were in 'tidy up' mode - ensuring the new paving was level, clearing up most of their barriers, laying concrete access ramps at the street corners. (Oooh! Can I make foot or hand prints**? Please?) We went out anyway. The forecast is generally pretty accurate these days.
We had a very pleasant day out - picnic in the Rose Gardens. Did a bit of birding - including watching a Wood Pigeon demolish a discarded sausage. I'd post the video clip H took, but don't have the Tech Skilz (and anyway, my Photo website is still being updated. Or it's currently inaccessible because 'mender'. He's very busy, poor lad.)
Suffice it to say it was an amusing-to-watch process, which went a lot more smoothly when the Wood Pigeon pecked the sausage so hard it fell into a hole. WP looked a tad bemused, flew down, investigated, and continued with much more success as the sausage couldn't leap about as it had before it was confined. Score for WP.
Ummm, I always thought Wood Pigeons ate grain and greens, particularly brassiccas planted on allotments and in gardens. Now I know the traditional British sausage is mostly grain (& assorted Other Fillers) but it must contain a certain proportion of 'meat'. I suppose this is an Urban Wood Pigeon, therefore eats what it can get, bit like the other Urban Pigeons. I tend to give them my best 'Predator Stare', most of them get the message and go look for easier touches.
Then we ambled along the Front, had an ice-cream, wandered out round the pier. I wanted to go on the Pirate Ship and the Caterpillar mini-Rollercoaster. I'm taller than the minimum required height after all. There was no Maximum Height Limit, I checked. H said, "No." I suppose the alternative might have been waiting around with a 'She's not with me' expression on his face. So we wandered on.
Eventually my knee started to complain, so we sat in a shelter, had coffee, and admired the view. The sky was blue, the sea was too, it sparkled, it was beautiful. Who needs the Med or other Foreign Shores? We got there by bus. No faffing around at airports for hours, sitting in a metal tube with strangers, masked, not to mention all the extra pollution because aircraft. I knitted the current sock project some more - socks are traditionally (for me) Travel Projects. Now we can travel a bit I'm knitting socks again!
Ok, so I overdid the walking a bit. It's not just the sock knitting that needs to get back into practice! When we got back I still resisted the temptation to put a foot or hand print in the concrete ramp on one of the pavement corners! And H wasn't around at the time to keep me in order. He'd gone ahead to put the kettle on. Days like that, you need a cuppa when you get back!
Today is quieter. It's raining, so we've got most of the windows shut as well. Today we sort stuff indoors. It needs doing.
Y'all have a good day now!
* Which could be wonderfully swift, except . . . except that the connections between the optical fibres being laid under the pavements*** are joined to the copper wiring in your house. H, who Knows About these things, tells me that if that copper wiring is of any real length (in these houses?) you might barely notice the difference. I daresay they'll charge us to install interior optical fibres too.
H worked on optical fibre communications and How Best To Join two fibres with Minimal Loss of Signal forty years ago. Back when it was Cutting Edge and he worked for a company which a) believed in R&D, and b) had an R&D Department and decent sized budget for same.
** Wrestles inner six-year-old back into box! I do let her out occasionally and we ENJOY things - like sitting at the front on the top deck of a double-decker bus and 'driving' it. Or making suggestions about fairground rides to H!
*** We're amazed there's any space down there, what with the sewer pipes (earthenware, mostly, watch where you're putting that pneumatic drill), electricity pipes (red), gas pipes (yellow), BT trunking (black), TV trunking (light green) but they still found room for the Broadband trunking (purple.)
Consequently they have been digging up pavements locally over the past fortnight. They start around 7:30-8am, pack up around 3-4pm.
The guys doing the actual digging are on the whole a friendly lot, up for a bit of banter with householders. eg: the one who knocked on our front door early this week.
Me (smiling): Hello. Have you come to apologise for the awful racket you're making?
Contractor (all in HiVis Dayglo Orange): Ah. . . First, apologies for the noise. Second: (whatever it was he was originally going to tell me. I've forgotten!)
Our house is on a corner (intersection?) They were digging up the pavements (sidewalks) on both roads this week, using mostly NOISE (pneumatic drills & small orange digger to produce the holes; then a plate-thwacker to firm down the subsoil afterwards, angle grinders to get the paving slabs to fit, plus BIG Hammers to get them laid level. Oh, and there's their Big Lorry to get all the equipment and them here and away again.) Consequently sitting out in the yarden, or even having windows open in the house just weren't options for most of the day. It got quite warm this week!
Dear Reader, you might be pleased to know we survived. Yesterday the forecast was 'sunny, if humid - unlike today, 'cool and rain'. We decided to visit the beach. We can do things like that now H is retired. Yay retirement!
We got up, did some washing, pegged out, did the anti-mollusc patrol, watered and fed the yarden. Even harvested a couple of strawberries. Clearly arranging the strawberry pot as a hanging basket, with anti-mollusc patrols, has Worked. We've had one strawberry per day all the past week, even had two one day. They are delicious. And all the while we were bracing ourselves against the now-usual assault of NOISE.
Only it didn't come. Turned out they were in 'tidy up' mode - ensuring the new paving was level, clearing up most of their barriers, laying concrete access ramps at the street corners. (Oooh! Can I make foot or hand prints**? Please?) We went out anyway. The forecast is generally pretty accurate these days.
We had a very pleasant day out - picnic in the Rose Gardens. Did a bit of birding - including watching a Wood Pigeon demolish a discarded sausage. I'd post the video clip H took, but don't have the Tech Skilz (and anyway, my Photo website is still being updated. Or it's currently inaccessible because 'mender'. He's very busy, poor lad.)
Suffice it to say it was an amusing-to-watch process, which went a lot more smoothly when the Wood Pigeon pecked the sausage so hard it fell into a hole. WP looked a tad bemused, flew down, investigated, and continued with much more success as the sausage couldn't leap about as it had before it was confined. Score for WP.
Ummm, I always thought Wood Pigeons ate grain and greens, particularly brassiccas planted on allotments and in gardens. Now I know the traditional British sausage is mostly grain (& assorted Other Fillers) but it must contain a certain proportion of 'meat'. I suppose this is an Urban Wood Pigeon, therefore eats what it can get, bit like the other Urban Pigeons. I tend to give them my best 'Predator Stare', most of them get the message and go look for easier touches.
Then we ambled along the Front, had an ice-cream, wandered out round the pier. I wanted to go on the Pirate Ship and the Caterpillar mini-Rollercoaster. I'm taller than the minimum required height after all. There was no Maximum Height Limit, I checked. H said, "No." I suppose the alternative might have been waiting around with a 'She's not with me' expression on his face. So we wandered on.
Eventually my knee started to complain, so we sat in a shelter, had coffee, and admired the view. The sky was blue, the sea was too, it sparkled, it was beautiful. Who needs the Med or other Foreign Shores? We got there by bus. No faffing around at airports for hours, sitting in a metal tube with strangers, masked, not to mention all the extra pollution because aircraft. I knitted the current sock project some more - socks are traditionally (for me) Travel Projects. Now we can travel a bit I'm knitting socks again!
Ok, so I overdid the walking a bit. It's not just the sock knitting that needs to get back into practice! When we got back I still resisted the temptation to put a foot or hand print in the concrete ramp on one of the pavement corners! And H wasn't around at the time to keep me in order. He'd gone ahead to put the kettle on. Days like that, you need a cuppa when you get back!
Today is quieter. It's raining, so we've got most of the windows shut as well. Today we sort stuff indoors. It needs doing.
Y'all have a good day now!
* Which could be wonderfully swift, except . . . except that the connections between the optical fibres being laid under the pavements*** are joined to the copper wiring in your house. H, who Knows About these things, tells me that if that copper wiring is of any real length (in these houses?) you might barely notice the difference. I daresay they'll charge us to install interior optical fibres too.
H worked on optical fibre communications and How Best To Join two fibres with Minimal Loss of Signal forty years ago. Back when it was Cutting Edge and he worked for a company which a) believed in R&D, and b) had an R&D Department and decent sized budget for same.
** Wrestles inner six-year-old back into box! I do let her out occasionally and we ENJOY things - like sitting at the front on the top deck of a double-decker bus and 'driving' it. Or making suggestions about fairground rides to H!
*** We're amazed there's any space down there, what with the sewer pipes (earthenware, mostly, watch where you're putting that pneumatic drill), electricity pipes (red), gas pipes (yellow), BT trunking (black), TV trunking (light green) but they still found room for the Broadband trunking (purple.)