[Richard]

To be fair the tine was more air than pain by the time it was put away, it had not shown any sign of skinning over, except for the skin of mould, so out it went. It is a problem with tins kept for years and only used for odd touch ins. Another tin is down to the last half inch or so in the bottom of a large 5 litre container, that does need a small amount of water to loosen it up, it has been used once for the full use of wall painting, but probably 15 times for the odd touch in job during the past quarter century.

Ed P wrote:

Titanium Dioxide used to be the go-to to keep things white and was used in just about everything from nylon shirts through white paint etc. It worked by absorbing the UV part of sunlight which was the main cause of white things going yellow. There was a bit of a health scare over the compound a few years ago link, and I’m not sure if the Nanny State has banned it since then. If so getting a good stable white may have become a lot harder!

As far as I can see it is still just as widely used in paints and many other products including cosmetics. Like many other substances used in cosmetics its application there has good and less good aspects. As far as I could see the concerns were expressed about its airborne particle ingestion to the lungs where there is very limited evidence of its effect but it was in the ‘might’ pile. The dust levels at which it appeared to be likely to be an elevated risk were said to have caused most wise animals to leave the space, rapidly before high levels were reached. Dust in all its forms is poorly understood as a risk factor. Limits should be set and masks or other protection should be worn. Almost every form of dust carries risks, many of them down to the risk of fire or explosion. A combine and a number of acres of growing area were caught up in such an event yesterday. I saw just how dusty harvesting can be this year when taking a relative for hospital test. The combine had raised a dust storm that blanketed a wide area with a mixture of fine particle dust and heavier particle short length straw the dust air mixture probably fell slightly short of an explosive mixture when it reached the road, but made visibility close to zero and might have loved to find a spark with which to play.

There has also been concern expressed that anti pollution paints might not be the sin free answer some had hoped because the titanium dioxide might also trigger other reactions that both age the paints and give rise to the production of other pollutants. The binders and varnishes to be used in paints clearly needed more care than some elements had allowed.

[Richard]

Frankly we are not used to high temperatures for any length of time. It come in here wham and dumps us on the floor. If you live in warm places there is a build up before the high spots are reached. I well remember having to shut car windows in company cars which lacked A/C because at 45 degrees the air was burning my arm, yet we carried on and did what was needed 24 hours a day. Mind you there was a steady build up of heat from about February through to May when we usually had our highest temperatures. Then the humidity came up to about 99% and temperatures north of 38C degrees day and night through to about October. The humidity stayed high ranging from perhaps 95% as a low during the odd days right up about as far as it could go, day temperatures were usually lower than the May maximums but in the high 30sC to low~40sC. We simply got used to it then, – but not now.The rats used to come across from the Ministry of Health building to drink from the outside of my air-conditioned office windows as they would be covered in condensation. Sometimes we shivered at the cold of some buildings, they were only 30C…

I am very seriously considering getting some cooling for the bed room to cool and dry the air as the heat and humidity is driving may wife nuts with her chemo treatment. I might hire in a temporary unit for the next few weeks to help her through this challenging time.

[Richard]

To be fair they had been crowing in the trees above and wheeling in the sky above while all the excitement was being played out on the ground. Perhaps this was one clumsy crow that did fly into a branch or something.

[Richard]

I don’t think that idea that the ‘ban’ was an EU conspiracy case that should be nailed to anyone’s door. The volatile organic components of paint were banned a while go, perhaps 6~10 years back now, but that was almost certainly in everyone’s  interests. After that many paints were reformulated some more or less well and for a short while all appeared OK, that did not last when many showed colour shifts as the varnish part aged very rapidly. For a little while some other own goals were scored when an additive to stop fungus was also left out of, was it Valspar?. This resulted in a rotting cat pee aroma three months after places had been painted. Not what many people wanted.

We have also used the Satinwood Brilliant White style paints for recent jobs and they appear more stable, at least for the past 18 months ~ two years since the woodwork was painted. Various makes exist and to be honest all have performed equally well from a colour stability point of view.  As far as I have seen there have not been any problems with emulsion paints for walls or ceilings – though one part used can had to be discarded as it was growing a distinct crop of interesting fungus when opened up to do some touch in work.

[Richard]

Steve, I am not sure if you are tracking us or we are tracking you but the temperature is about the same with my office being a degree or so hotter.

Time to give up, the dogs and everybody else appears a bit stroppy tonight, fed up with the heat perhaps?

[Richard]

Thank you Bob and to the others. One lesson I take out of this is:
<p style=”text-align: center;”>DO NOT IGNORE ANYTHING THAT IS NOT RIGHT</p>
<p style=”text-align: left;”>Sorry to shout, but I was darned lucky to get it caught and hopefully sorted while it was still an itty-bitty bump brooding and not a systemic problem. So do not volunteer to be a dead hero.</p>
Sorry not to respond to your white blood cell saga, it does show the value of the blood tests and why they are not to be missed. My wife gets some self administered injections after each round to bring her bloods up to par. She was worried tonight about how exact the timing for 24 hours between shots needed to be, seconds, minutes, hours or what? Having read the long document in tiny type there was nothing about the timings worth noting. As for anything else the mental filter just screened out anything that was not timing related.

[Richard]

The Duke wrote:

Great news Richard. Pm I was about to say “How Much!” untill you said about your no claims. I’m about to go from a personal car to a motability car. So I may have to get a second car just to keep my insurance NCB running. Looks like your NCB vanishes if you don’t use it withing two years. So I could have an excuse to buy a little old hot hatch or maybe even an old MX5. I’ll sell it the wife as it’s saving money long term ???

Steve, it might be worth getting something on which your daughter would be a possible second driver as very much a second driver to avoid the problem you/she had before. Anything cheap and above all insurable for the two of you with you clearly main and her very much a legitimately second driver, especially after she has at least her first year NCB. You do not have to rush the choice the clock has not started on the two years.

[Richard]

Thank you Bob, I had some good news today, I saw the consultant and it appears that when my sample hit their laboratory it was an instant hit. Because it was a very rare example everyone was keen to look and study the thing. Happily it is still in the early stage and considered encapsulated so there is no indication of any spread from the initial site, by implication the margins are intact which is good. The senior specialists all signed off on that analysis, so I appear to have dodged the bullet there. I will have to have some regular monitoring for a while to ensure that no active sites appear again which is always a risk with this type of problem. With the schools on holiday the traffic was quite light so the cross country run only took about an hour.

My wife has not had such a good time, the chemo has interacted with her various issues and her feet are now very painful to walk about on and her hips are not sending her love notes. We will have to go back to the unit this week to have the PICC line cleared as it is currently blocked and not usable. Still only 11 more weeks then a few weeks rest before the knife person will be on stage. The outline plan was set up during a Saturday appointment when there was a request for reconstruction surgery. That  should result in a meeting with the plastics surgeon – if they have not melted in the present heat, (sorry old joke.) No one has slept well with all the stress, heat and drugs my stomach has made itself a real pain, adding to the nigh time disruption. I still got the dogs out for a walk before leaving for the hospital, though it was already hot and I had the unfashionable boiled salad look before I set off.

I celebrated my today’s good news by fitting a new fuel pick up for the garden vacuum, I decided it was too hot to try it out at the moment so then cleaned the bathroom floors, only with the household vacuum clearer. If it cools down again I will try to steam clean them later, I think they need to attention.

[Richard]

Steve, I guess we are all as guilty as each other of not using cash for petrol. I first use cashless means back in the 1960s when cheque payment became possible. Certainly its various cashless forms have usually increased the ease and happily, like you, I have not been caught out by the various problems that have been happening this summer. No one is pushing to have the cashless option withdrawn, I am only saying that options up to and including cash are something I like on my side. I would be mighty peeved if a filling station several hundred miles away from home asked me to pop back later to pay as their system was having a rest day. It is not such a likely current situation these days as both of my parents are dead and their house has been sold; but at one time I was a more frequent traveller. Happily the systems were off line ones then, more store and forward not instant success or failure as now.

I trust that Keith was advised up front about Kew Gardens limited payment options, though it was not clear if it was bonk-and-go only or one of the more traditional methods of card use. I have not been there since probably the 1950s when it was cash only.

[Richard]

It would worry me a bit having read so many tales of woe over the past few years. This old dog is not too well adjusted for learning new tricks, so good luck with that one.

[Richard]

I use a shirt pocket mark I where it is out of sight and not a temptation to use it or interact with it, so I cannot help you. Any call answering is done via a Bluetooth headset which allows for almost hands free operation where ever I am, out dog walking or in a shop for example. In fact without the headset I have no idea how to answer a call. The MK I shirt pocket ensures the phone goes with me when I move about.

I have found many such gismos are built to a minimal price rather than to the highest standard so I might be reluctant to on-pass details of any I knew about. I suspect this affected your previous example.

[Richard]

Tippon, that is absolutely fine…until you end up cold wet and possibly hungry with an almost empty fuel tank for you and the bike and find that the network has taken a holiday and your token is less useful than a yack cow pat. Having had to bail out others with my personal credit card when their corporate cards suffered that fate in Japan, I have always been super wary of the all your eggs in one basket syndrome. That is why I never go out without multiple cards and cash, including the road side assistance card as well.

[Richard]

blacklion1725 wrote:

PM unless an emergency I always wait for a staffed till – hate the self-checkouts but they hate me even more and I always end up needing help. Quite often do a crack-of-dawn shop at my local big Tescos and the bloke who monitors the self-checkouts (no tills open then) sees me coming (probably groans) and then puts the checkout in some special mode that just lets me scan and bag everything with no errors. Hate, hate, hate self-checkouts…..and as an aside it is also another tier of jobs disappeared.

I only ever use the self abuse sorry self service when there is someone who looks as though they know their way around the ‘facility’ supervising what is going on. I have a sort of way with new things like that, they tend to fall over and do all sorts of things that no one likes them to do. I only ever use them if I am in a hurry, I have only a few items and other options look a bit on the slow side. Otherwise I enjoy the moment to chat with the staff, well those who can understand me anyway, at a normal till. Our local Tesco has two basket tills half a dozen self service and up to a couple of dozen normal tills that can be staffed, though only at really busy times are they all in use. A normal busy time might see a dozen in use. So I do not feel any pressure to downgrade my experience. However, I do understand the pressure to reduce costs by shifting work practices. At my age and dexterity I only want so many changes in lifestyle thank you. Having to find, buy and fit a new kitchen door hinge for the outside door was my challenge of the day. The door is partially double glazed and wider than standard to it is heavy, thank heavens for wedges and hammers to do the lifting. I had a time limit as my wife had a hospital appointment set for the afternoon. Still both problems are now fixed.

[Richard]

An interesting range of views which suggests to me that rather than being forced on unwilling punters, in many ways some (me?) are being dragged along by those such as Steve and Dave who are far more keen. I have used cards for most shopping for sometime. In the UK I used to believe that up to £10 or so was a cash amount and then it depended on what cash I had on hand. One card does not do contactless at all, five others will do contactless but so far I have only used it that way for hospital food (M&S snack shop) and parking using ‘credit cards’ not debit cards, it keeps cash available for other uses. In all cases, cash or credit card  I take the paper receipt, for our records since they are a shared resource between my wife and self. It also stems from a long held desire to have clear proof of ownership. In the past that was an essential for insurance and travel expense purposes and for settling monthly accounts in both the Middle and Far East, so the habit has stuck after nearly 45 years. Cash has one undeniable value, it does not need a working network to allow its use, something the banks cannot ensure exists and that the financial regulator believes will become less assured as all banks start to replace and modify their ageing systems as TSB recently faced doing – arguably using a less than stellar method.

[Richard]

Addendum to the above, Lloyds and that includes the others in the group are having a few issues tonight with so called faster pay systems. I understand that is is unsure whether to be a slower pay system or a do not pay system, but it is not well. I do not think this is affecting normal card systems – yet or at all.

[Richard]

I have not noticed the problem you have noticed but that might be because my usage patterns are different. I sometimes use the self service till and have noticed that sometimes one or two might be card only or just as likely cash only as the reader has gone AWOL. Usually I use the attended tills and I often see people take cash back but if they are paying with a credit card that can be an expensive option. If I want cash I use the machine for that. Several times recently the machine networks have gone into holiday mode so cash was the only option, Visa wiped out everything, Mastercard wiped out a lot and BP could only take cash – though their cash points were still delivering cash for punters to try to use to pay for petrol. As for TSB, their fiasco was a warning not to rely on any single system, methods or untested software. The term, single point of failure haunts me over the electronic payment methods as there appears to be no redundancy or store and forward aspect to their unstable offerings.

[Richard]

Thanks for asking Bob. Getting by would sum it up. My wife started a new group of chemo, four of a new kind, one every three weeks so a little more ‘rest time’, not the accelerated version she had been having. Her reaction to this one is not so easy for the moment, strong nausea which the are just tablets managing and the steroid effect is strongly noted. She get a bit manic for a hour or two then settles down again.

I took the advice when phone calls went unanswered and spoke to PALS, ten minutes later I had a phone call for 10:00 Monday for me so that was sorted. Tomorrow is an appointment for my wife to see her specialist, not the oncologist this time. It could be interesting as future plans need to be drawn up. No holiday for us this year, but with all the day trips out to half the hospital in this county and the one next door, who needs a holiday?

Keep smiling and keep happy.

This what happens when a dogs gives a carpenter instructions for a new door, not quite what she wanted.

[Richard]

Bob, I’m glad you were able to get away and have such a great time of things. You certainly made those places sound really appealing, are you sure you were not sponsored by the tourist board?

I missed your well composed responses and had forgotten you were on holiday.

[Richard]

Result! Persistence does pay off in the end.

I had a phone call just now and on after a flaky call on the mobile, I now have an appointment set for Monday so hopefully they will have all the papers and I will know what really gives this time. The call the department received from PALS was noted at being my 4th attempt to get some information about Monday’s ‘promise’, so I was pleased to finally get somewhere.

[Richard]

But will they walk the dogs when I do not feel like it? Given that the other tasks are nearly impossible, dog walking should be easy.

[Author]

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