Happy St Weaseltine’s, y’all
Old hands will remember this is sweasel.com’s blogaversary. The 15th, in fact. It started out as a blog about the process of immigrating to the UK and afterwards – I’ll be perfectly honest with you – I didn’t know how to stop.
Thanks for commenting, lurking, paddling in the Dead Pool – I was going to say trolling, but we haven’t had a good troll in years – hanging out and generally making this place a bright spot in a weasel’s life.
p.s. Oh, yes – Uncle B and I have been married thirteen years today, too.
February 14, 2022 — 6:37 pm
Comments: 30
Balls, you say?
On my way into work, I go over an unremarkable steel bridge. This morning, perched on the bridge’s railing, were two small white spheres like the ones in the picture. Surreal.
So I looked around and found a man in a Highways Agency van and gave him my best “what gives?” face. He held up a contraption on a tripod and said, “do you know what this is?” A theodolite, I guessed.
Not exactly. It was a 3D laser scanner and he was scanning the bridge. He had no idea why; probably for some maintenance purpose.
The spheres are a reference point. The way he explained it, the spheres can be seen from a long way off. The software knows to look for a white sphere, knows they are spheres and so can calculate the exact center as a precise reference point.
His ones were magnetic (no tripod), so he could stick them on the bridge where he liked. And very odd it looked, too. I wish I’d taken a picture, but my phone was in an inner pocket.
This site, owned by a scanning service, explains how to use multiple reference spheres to survey a large building in chunks. In their example, you use six spheres. All six spheres must be visible in each shot, but you can only move three of them at a time between images. In the end, the software can cut together an accurate picture from aligning all the references.
If you want to know more, useful search terms are “Laser Scanner Reference Sphere” or “White Sphere Scanning” (I got a lot of stupid 3D models of spheres before I found the right words).
February 10, 2022 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 10
The doctor will see you now
This is in an abandoned veterinarian’s office and I just realized I’m posting it specifically because I thought Uncle B would find it interesting because we pass by this building whenever we go through Hastings to get to things in the Eastern part of East Sussex.
I am using a multi-billion dollar satellite system to show a thing to my husband sitting six feet away from me on the sofa. What a time to be alive.
But perhaps you, dear reader, will also find it interesting. I notice the building every time we drive past because I thought it looked neat and a little sad, but I didn’t realize it had been abandoned for longer than we’ve lived here.
I’m amazed it hasn’t been thoroughly looted. Hastings is not the most savory of towns.
The building is a last little intact surviving bit of Ore Place, a 16th or 17th C building that was sometimes a religious building and sometimes a private home. I’m guessing this bit is from the rebuilding in 1874 for the wonderfully named Dowager Lady Elphinstone.
.
The bed was very comfortable, thank you.
February 9, 2022 — 8:25 pm
Comments: 15
I am intimidated by the new bed
The new bed arrived while I was at work today. Uncle B had to face the Horrors That Lay Under the Bed all by hisself. He phoned me up in an agony of embarrassment at the sheer quantity of old tissues, dust bunnies, dead batteries, reading glasses and a pair of my panties that were under there when the workmen lifted the old bed out.
Let the record show, it was not a pair of panties. It was one of these. I got it to keep my face warm riding my bike but soon discovered that I flip right the fuck out if you put a mask over my mouth and nose.
Oh, yes…the last two years have been fun for me.
But I digress. The new bed is hand made by elderly English hobgoblins. It has 1,476 springs hand stitched into muslin pockets and filled with horsehair, English wool and faery farts. Some of those statistics are even true.
They had Visprings in the luxury suites on the Titanic. Is that a recommendation? I guess it is. They obviously can’t be used as personal flotation devices, though.
We didn’t get one of the super fancy ones, which Uncle B tells me cost in the tens of thousands of pounds and are the province of movie stars, oil sheiks and royalty.
No indeed. It was dear enough, though.
You can read their origin story here.
I had a lie-down on it earlier and the whole bed went whizzing across the room on tiny casters. Whee!
I’m’on have to be on the right side of a couple of gins to face this.
February 8, 2022 — 8:31 pm
Comments: 7
Huh. There was a mirror under there.
Huzzah! We have bought a new bed. I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS. A decent mattress is flippin’ expensive and my old bones hurt. It arrives tomorrow.
Which means I did a deep dive bedroom clean over the weekend. Hoo boy! I own the Museum of T-shirts. Also, hoodies. What is a woman my age doing with so many t-shirts and hoodies?
Answer: wearing them. I defiantly threw out all my business clothes when I moved across the sea and decided it was nought but jeans for this little weasel, forever.
I draw the line at baseball caps. Nothing says “outpatient psych clinic” like an old woman in a baseball cap.
The best things, though, are old notes. I write myself notes all day (because I have a crap memory) and squirrel them away in my pockets as I go. If I don’t toss them soon after, they become cryptic within days. You know, crap memory.
My favorite so far: “skeleton heater”
February 7, 2022 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 15
Wait, what?
I mean, yeah – she follows a lot of people. She doesn’t follow-back everyone, though. I guess I followed her for a laugh one day and then she followed back and now it’s too socially awkward to unfollow.
Folks, I’ve had a pig of a day. I had to go in early to let workmen in and it’s just continued to be Monday ever since. It ain’t over yet.
Dead Pool Friday. Responses were mixed but I’m a creature of habit. Habit, not rules. Hates me some rules.
January 31, 2022 — 6:32 pm
Comments: 13
But is there a Plan C?
Plan B expired today. That’s an end to England’s requirement to mask up or work from home. I almost said legal requirement, but it was never law. Every time a fine was challenged in court, it was dropped.
That means take off your masks and go to work, people.
Of course, there’s a significant chunk of the population who won’t take off the masks today and may never. I was about to make unflattering assertions why that might be, but I won’t. The past two years have been rough on people; I won’t judge.
I bumped into a shady character of my acquaintance today. I mean, I don’t know he’s ever done anything criminal, but if asked, he could play one on TV. I was surprised to see him sitting outdoors in the sunshine all by himself, fully masked. I was like, “dude – you don’t seem the type!” And he said, “it’s the cameras, mate. Used to be illegal to go inside anywhere with a mask, now nobody blinks an eye. I’m going to wear this mask forever.”
Unintended consequences. Thinking out loud. Say they do succeed in imposing restrictive biometric ID on us to control every aspect of our lives. Isn’t that – theoretically – the end of illegal immigration?
I knicked the illustration from an older Telegraph article on masks. It’s in a loathsome style of editorial illustration I’ve come to think of as ‘blob people.’
First of all, you have to include minimum four up to infinity people, to make sure you get in enough ethnics. A few exotic wardrobe signifiers, like turbans or headscarves. AT LEAST an equal number of women to men. Skin colors like Skittles – purple, green. Maybe shades of brown, if you’re aiming for realism.
The worst have featureless faces, wavey lines for arms and blobs for hands and feet. Women without breasts, men without broad shoulders. Monsters. This kind of thing.
In order to avoid offense, we have dehumanized humans.
January 27, 2022 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 9
Planned obsolescence
This is the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse tower, Eastbourne. There’s been a lighthouse near this spot since the 19th C anyway, but this one was built in 1971 with a planned life of 50 years.
It’s neat how they did it. They floated a big square concrete pad out and then sank it. They floated the big concrete cylinder out and fitted it into the pad. Then they floated the platform and tower out, attached them to the big cylinder. The little cylinder – which was inside the big cylinder and works a giant hydraulic lift – raised the whole thing above the water.
At least, I think that’s how they did it. I can’t find the diagram I saw explaining it.
It was manned until the Nineties. It looks comfortable inside. It’s been automated for twenty years, though.
If you counted, you’ve guessed it was supposed to be decommissioned by now. They’re going to take it apart all the way down to the sea floor and it was supposed to start in 2020. But. Well. You know.
It’s finally due to come down this year. You can still take a boat tour to go round and round it, for a limited time only.
I think the idea of a disposable, prefab lighthouse is neat. Trinity House, who built it, is a charity, not a government department. Like the lifeboat people. That’s a very British way of doing it.
By the way, the best picture I could find to show the undercarriage of the lighthouse is actually from Microsoft Flight Simulator.
January 26, 2022 — 7:22 pm
Comments: 4
This is what I’m doing tonight
We got a quadruple load of wood today. We’re expecting high winds and heavy rain tonight. My job is to check the CCTV from time to time to make sure the tarp hasn’t blown off. I’m just about up to it.
It dipped into the low twenties last night. Very unusual here – it does it maybe once or twice per Winter, if at all. I had to boil a kettle to unfreeze the chickens’ water this morning.
That wouldn’t be impressive in Rhode Island, but a 500 year old house on the shores of the English Channel gets cold. I mean, really cold. I don’t know what the insulation R-value of wattle and daub is, but it can’t be good.
No power on earth could drive me out of this comfy chair with my two (2!) hot water bottles and my large fat cat.
Dead Pool tomorrow! Be here, but bring your own hot water bottle!
January 6, 2022 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 13
Does this look lucky to you?!
So, a seagull shat on me today.
I was walking past a lady talking on her cellphone with a nice little dog at her side. I bent over to say hello to the dog, and seagull dipped out of the sky and strafed down my back.
The horrified look on the lady’s face almost made up for it.
Then the whole rest of the day, everyone consoled me by saying getting shat on by a seagull is good luck. You ever heard this? It is not part of my store of legends.
Poking around the web, it does indeed seem to be a thing. In Britain, it’s seagulls. For the Russians and the Turks, any old bird will do. It generally means money coming your way (a Turk buying a lottery ticket with shit on his head is a cartoon staple). This article is representative.
My grandfather took my grandmother on a first date on a river boat in New Orleans. 1920 maybe. Something of a dandy, he was wearing an all-white suit. Right off the bat, a seagull pooped on his knee. He spent the rest of the date strategically holding his Panama hat over his knee.
Was it lucky? They got married. That could go either way.
That same grandfather never once, since he was weaned, missed eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s day. For luck, if you don’t know. He had a bowl brought to him in the hospital. Then he died.
No comment.
January 4, 2022 — 8:10 pm
Comments: 10