Random Announcements
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@Giles Glad your doing great and have a great nursing aide at home, making chocolate biscuits.
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When I had my Hip (H)op, I was told that after 2 weeks I would need to have the dressing removed. The post-operation notes say that I was stitched up with dissolving stitches , so I completed an online form for my local doctor. I was just phoned back:
Surgery - Is that Mr Padmore?
G - Yes (then we do the ID bit)
S - What do you need?
G - I have had a hip replacement and need my dressing removed after 14 days
S - Do you need to have stitches removed?
G - No, they are the dissolving type
S - Oh, we don't just do dressings
G - Actually, the stitches dont seem to be dissolving that well
S - Great, what time would you like to come inFFS
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@Giles congrats on the successful surgery. Your 100 meter dash time will be back under 10 seconds by mid summer.
Let me know the secret if you get the lbs off. My No Lots are so tight on me right now my voice changes when I button them up.
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This seems like the right place for this...I will be at Disneyland 4/12/24 in the evening. If anyone is coincidently going and down to take a pic let me know!
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@Giles see you tomorrow for the South Downs way 50 mile ultramarathon?
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@Mizmazzle thanks my friend! Means much to me also big thanks to @Luijim78
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I was reading up on the Baltimore bridge collapse this morning.
Jennifer Homendy is a MENSA candidate if ever I've seen one....
On Capitol Hill last week, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said her investigators were focusing on the Dali’s electrical issues, adding that her team believes there may be a connection between the ship’s lights going out and the power loss to its engines in the moments before the crash.
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Living on the shore or a major lake has many benefits and a lot of hazards with wind, waves, and erosion being some of them. In 2017 and 2019 we had major high water years causing quite a bit of flooding and damage in the area. We were lucky in that we suffered only minor erosion, but many a night was lost worrying about the consequences of being so close to the water (33 meters from my bedroom to the waters edge).
In 2018 we contacted one of the local engineering firms to come up with a plan to stabilize and strengthen our shoreline in case of future disasters. Because of the houses location, all work is approved by the local conservation authority who has the ultimate approval/disapproval for that work.
Our engineering firm working on the project had mainly their junior engineers working on the project as it should have been fairly straightforward and an easy plan for them to put in their CV for work/permits/plans files. The problem was that because they were typically junior in the firm, there was a frequent turnover of staff as they left for better paying positions and were only using this firm as a stepping stone.
Every new engineer would start where the other left off, but kept revisiting old questions that had been answered by us before continually setting us back in the processes. We finally reached a point of where everything had been answered, drawings were made, surveys were done, and plans were submitted to the approval authority.
Then COVID struck and everything went sideways. The approval authority had questions, no one worked in the offices causing delays and games of phone tag. One of those questions was what should have been a simple straightforward answer turned out to be a major hurdle. What size rock would we use in the plan? My wife and I often said the largest that we could get ahold of...that isn't the correct answer though because of all of the issues caused by coastal wave dynamics.
The engineering company couldn't sign off on the size of stone as that was not their specialty and would have to consult either shoreline engineers, or coastal engineers for the answer. Those engineers wouldn't sign off on that question as they didn't do the site plan and would have to conduct their own studies before they approved anything.
That would set us back to ground zero starting the entire process over again. So after spending $20,000 dollars in engineering fees, we were at a point of starting over from scratch. We had one final meeting with our engineering firm stating that we were unhappy with their progress, and what were our options. We reached a mutual understanding that there wasn't much more that they could do and that we may need to hire a different firm.
Fed up, we scheduled another meeting with the conservation authority and explained the entire situation (meeting lasted for about 3 hours) and how with everything we've done, there was only one question that kept holding our project from moving forward. We finally came to a compromise and our project has been approved with the plan basically being approved from a previous draft and the authority telling us what size to use. (They could have told us that years ago, saving us time and money, but...)
So 5 years of headaches, heartaches, and sleepless nights we are going to fix, stabilize, reinforce our shoreline for hopefully the last time in our lifetime (with only minor repairs as needed).
The money spent with the engineering company may be a lost cause as they did do work, submitted plans, etc. and I don't know how much if any of it we can recoup. C'est la vie.
"I don't give a shit what anyone else is doing, we will do what is best for us and our customers" - Giles P. :)
