Piglet....so sorry that you are wrestling with fussy bureaucracy and a stinkin' & illogical website! Grrrrrrr!
Boogie....and I am deeply sorry that you feel so depressed about our situation. A lot of us do of course, but to the extent of wishing you had moved to Germany when you had the chance to do so must be incredibly dispiriting ((((Hugs))))......
Yep @Boogie I'm in the same boat. Most of my friends seem to have ancestry that gives them a way out with the possibility of a passport from another country. I'm British through and through.
And its raining again. We're off to see the mother-in-law tomorrow. She was worried we wouldn't get there because of the weather. I thought that unlikely till I read this was what was happening up the road from her. My husband and I curled up in bed last night and were very grateful our festival going days are over,
Red tape - grrr @Piglet - I hope you get it sorted soon.
This morning I was on a working party at a wonderful nature reserve near home, and it was the easiest working party I’ve ever been on because all I had to do was watch someone wading to cut back reeds so there is more of a view of the water - I have no idea what I’d have done if he’d fallen into the water, but watching him was my job for the morning!
Good on you, Sipech - hope it all goes through smoothly!
I think the lady in our lawyers' office in Orkney is going to try and work something out for the ID thing - I've suggested sending them the stuff by snail-mail or even bringing it with us when we're planning to be in Orkney in August.
In better news, I had an e-mail from the estate agency branch of the office this morning, and they've already had two quite positive viewings, both by people with connections to builders, who can see the potential (although it's in a really nice area, the house is very dated and needs a bit of TLC).
In less good news, the Wee Bitey Thing season is in full swing, and I'm covered in horrid, itchy blotches. 😢
We were at the local organists' association annual dinner this evening. Very good company, rather ordinary (and rather overpriced) food, in a venue that's stuck in a 1970s time-warp.
However, the organist of the church where I've applied for a job was there, and said she'll put in a word.
One of the others said that her church (Baptists this time) was also looking for a secretary, but I've just looked up their web-site and they want the applicant to become a member, which would interfere with my choral activities ...
One of the others said that her church (Baptists this time) was also looking for a secretary, but I've just looked up their web-site and they want the applicant to become a member, which would interfere with my choral activities ...
I am a little surprised at their expectation of membership. I once applied for a position as a parish administrator (didn't get it), and my personal position was that I shouldn't be a member, so that I would have no direct interest, loyalties, etc., but have a cold eye on finances, maintenance, promotion.
Hang on I am surprised they are advertising and it is paid. How long has this person been a Baptist?
Baptists often work the same model as the Congregationalists when running a congregation. The minister is a paid employee, the Church Secretary is their elected senior lay member and though unpaid often wields considerable power. This is partly true as the minister is often an incomer while the Church Secretary will have worshipped there for years.
This is why in Baptist and Congregational churches (as well as URC) the nearest to Church Secretary is the Church Administrator. It is quite possible that the congregation would have a minute secretary as well who would be a less senior layperson.
I am a little surprised at their expectation of membership. I once applied for a position as a parish administrator (didn't get it), and my personal position was that I shouldn't be a member, so that I would have no direct interest, loyalties, etc. ...
That would be my position too, PG, although if the Cathedral secretary were to retire (which she's considering) I'd take the job in a heartbeat!
From my memories of the Baptist church where I grew up, the church secretary was a gentleman in the congregation. I don't know if they had a secretary of the sort that does the typing and filing; if they did, I'd be surprised if s/he was paid.
It's a very warm, rather close day here today (25°), and we went out to a little roadside caff for lunch (well, breakfast really but it was lunch time), and afterwards I took advantage of a 40% off offer at my usual clothes shop and bought a nice pair of white linen trousers.
At this time of year, I usually live in cropped trousers, but I decided a pair of full-length ones would (a) hide the work of the Wee Bitey Things; and (b) make it a little more awkward for the little b*ggers to take any more chunks out of me.
We definitely seem to be in full-on summer now: the forecast for the next week is all temperatures in the mid-20s, i.e. approaching too hot.
Can't speak for Canada, but larger British Baptist churches may well employ an administrator, who may or may not be a church member. The Church Secretary however is an unpaid officer, elected from within the congregation.
Good luck with the house move, Sipech.
No church for us today as my husband is away with work (at a dog festival!) and I don’t drive so can’t get to our indie church. I’d go to the local parish church instead but they have their alternative service today which isn’t really our scene; I like a good sermon and my sons don’t like having to talk to people.
So after my walk I’m going to spend the day reading David Olusoga’s Black and British book.
The weather has not been conducive to enjoying the great outdoors, I'm even quite glad that other things have meant I couldn't sign up for various folk festivals this summer, as I suspect camping in a field won't be much fun in these conditions. But it has meant that I am working my way through various UFOs. Particularly as the South American river company is holding out on free deliveries.
We have a part on order from early last week, now not due to be delivered until next Wednesday, to fix the kitchen sink. Neither likely local shops stocked it, so it was travel or online. It makes cooking less than enthralling when everything has to be rinsed or washed up in the bath. Having said that I made pear and blueberry drop scones for a late Sunday breakfast
Having to wash the dishes in the bath is the best excuse I can think of for eating out (not that we need an excuse).
We had a visiting preacher from Australia this morning - the author of a book called Surprise the World about missional people - and though I wasn't expecting to find his sermon to my taste, it was actually very good.
We visited my mother in law this weekend and took her out to a local pub past the site of the Download festival. It was raining very hard at the time, but the people we saw wandering around looked surprisingly cheerful. So glad camping in mud is not my thing.
Unfortunately, I don't get a say in the naming of the house, as it's a flat within a freehold owned by someone else.
More unfortunate is that the name is a name that I am often, erroneously, called. More unfortunate yet, is that it uses a very unusual variant spelling, so I expect my address to be misspelled frequently.
@Sipech good luck with the house move. Our previous house was one of three on the footprint of a much larger house so our address was 1, The Blank, 5 Blank Road. That confused loads of people. Various organisations assumed it was a flat and as there was no sign saying 5 Blank Road friends got lost trying to find us. I swore never again, yet we now live at 1 Blank Villas, on a road where we haven't even got a road number. Add in that the villa four doors down has a similar name and I've become very friendly with the person there as we swop over each others misdirected parcels, not to mention the guy who answers the door in his underpants every time who lives at 1 Our Road and also gets stuff meant for us. As long as the flat is what you want it really doesn't matter.
Having been occasional viewers of Last of the Summer Wine, when we noticed that one of the roads in the estate where we were looking was called Jessie Drive*, we laughed and said we'll maybe give that a miss. Guess which road Château Piglet is in.
* I understand it may have been named after the daughter of the original owner of the land.
Three cheers for the UK's online passport application site. D's passport expires in October, and it took him no more than about 20 minutes to fill in the form, including online payment and uploading the digital photograph he'd had done. So much easier than the faff we had renewing our PR cards! It cost a fortune to post his old passport back to the UK by Priority post, but as we're planning to be over in August, and the website said it should take about four weeks, we didn't want to take any chances.
The forms didn't ask what colour he wanted though ...
As of a few weeks ago, they're still maroon - but all references to the EU are gone and the only languages to feature are English, Welsh and Scots Gaelic.
No - you're both still British citizens, I assume, so you should be fine. I admit, I was puzzled by the halfway house approach. If you're going to strip all references to the EU, why not go the whole hog and reintroduce the blue as well?
Has anyone been watching Cardiff Singer of the Year? The quality has been phenomenal. I nearly booked tickets for tonight, then backed off as they're quite expensive and the weather is so dreary. Now I wish we'd gone!
On the Sunday episode they announced they'd be playing sessions 2-4 on BBC Wales and iPlayer only and it listed Lucy Worsley in my TV paper, but they played a round tonight and they're doing the same tomorrow. Either there have been complaints or someone's has thought better.
Extremely muggy here in Continental WesShire, humidity seems to be about 95% (!) at this matinal hour. No wonder the done laundry hesitates to dry!
While muggitude might recede to 50-ish % as the day goes on, we'll have another 28 to 30C today. Rain and thunderstorms forecast for later in the week, and slightly lower, i.e. more bearable temperatures in the mid-twenties. Or so we hope. The weekend should be sunny and over 30C though. Gaaah.
It's still miserably cold for summer in UKland. Last week everyone I know put their heating back on as the temperatures were below 10°C. This week we are now back up to 16-20°C but it's still not warm. Lots of rain too, which isn't bad news after recent droughts.
I finished my exam marking last week so am currently in limbo. I am only officially employed and paid from October to June (though I end up having to do a little admin over the summer and actually start new term work in September) so am in wind down mode. I have some training to do today and have just had a welcome reminder to submit some claim forms for a few day contracts.
Oh, and I have had an informal acceptance onto the doctorate in education programme, I start in October. So this summer will be spent reading and putting together ideas for that.
Friends returned from Northern Cyprus yesterday. It has been a wet and stormy winter in Cyprus (some houses washed away in mudslides, and rebuilding is going on) but the last three months have been fine and mostly warm. Now they come home to this.
I'm finding the temperature recently is more than usually dependent on where you are stood. It's windy and damp, but in protected areas pretty muggy. An umbrella seemed an essential piece of kit this morning, but am in the library at the moment and they have a fan on. The weather at the moment is officially baffling.
You'd think with all the rain the hayfever levels would be low but no. For the first time in my life, it is not small bouts. My hayfever tends to be highly specific and so once out of the region of said allergen, I am fine. This results in me normally getting bouts for between ten minutes and half an hour. Today I woke up with eyes that did not want to open and I can still sense it despite dosing. So either I have developed a general form or someone locally has caused one of my allergens to be released in quantity. Both are possible there has been a lot of replanting over the last year by the local road contractors.
I think I may have had hay fever today - I get it slightly sometimes, but not usually very much, but today I've had itchy eyes and a runny nose and have been sneezing all day. It doesn't feel like a cold, so I guess hay fever. It was raining all morning. It dried up later but wasn't particularly warm.
It's particularly warm here: 26° but feeling like 29 with the humidity. This is a pain in the arse because the porcine grass could really do with being cut, but neither of us feels inclined to do it in that kind of heat.
We have the keys to the new Rouge Heights . Yesterday felt a bit like a holiday in some ways, even with all the admin. The whole business was going to be long and boring for Captain Pyjamas so we left him with the nanny. We signed the contract in the morning, and then while we were waiting for the afternoon appointment for the inventory we went for lunch and ate enormous cheeseburgers. We don’t often do things like that with just the two of us anymore so it was quite nice.
Yesterday was a hot sticky day here. Good news is that being so high up plus close the river, the new place is quite breezy so doesn’t feel unbearably hot. We’ll see how windy it gets during the middle of a winter storm – could be quite, er, thrilling.
Parents en rouge arrive this evening, and my brother and sister-in-law on Saturday. Actually the latter is the cause of the former, IYSWIM. Paris being much closer to Blighty than California, when my parents heard that my brother and sister-in-law were going to be here, they decided to come at the same time. This way they can see everyone without having to go on an eleven-hour flight.
For entertainment value, I have to co-opt my brother into pushchair pushing. This not being an activity you generally associate with my brother. (Actually despite claiming not to be a children-person, I think my brother quite enjoys being an uncle.)
Comments
Boogie....and I am deeply sorry that you feel so depressed about our situation. A lot of us do of course, but to the extent of wishing you had moved to Germany when you had the chance to do so must be incredibly dispiriting ((((Hugs))))......
O to be out of England, now that Boris is here!
@Bishops Finger that’s an excellent reference. 👏🏼 I’m properly impressed.
And there’s good news on the elm-trees too!
And its raining again. We're off to see the mother-in-law tomorrow. She was worried we wouldn't get there because of the weather. I thought that unlikely till I read this was what was happening up the road from her. My husband and I curled up in bed last night and were very grateful our festival going days are over,
Link fixed - Piglet, AS host
This morning I was on a working party at a wonderful nature reserve near home, and it was the easiest working party I’ve ever been on because all I had to do was watch someone wading to cut back reeds so there is more of a view of the water - I have no idea what I’d have done if he’d fallen into the water, but watching him was my job for the morning!
All good luck with your offer going through Sipech!! Exciting times!
Excellent.
My little brother is a first time buyer - aged 60! A lovely little cottage in Crawshawbooth.
(I'll see you on the house moving thread
I think the lady in our lawyers' office in Orkney is going to try and work something out for the ID thing - I've suggested sending them the stuff by snail-mail or even bringing it with us when we're planning to be in Orkney in August.
In better news, I had an e-mail from the estate agency branch of the office this morning, and they've already had two quite positive viewings, both by people with connections to builders, who can see the potential (although it's in a really nice area, the house is very dated and needs a bit of TLC).
In less good news, the Wee Bitey Thing season is in full swing, and I'm covered in horrid, itchy blotches. 😢
Wits' End is my preference.
However, the organist of the church where I've applied for a job was there, and said she'll put in a word.
One of the others said that her church (Baptists this time) was also looking for a secretary, but I've just looked up their web-site and they want the applicant to become a member, which would interfere with my choral activities ...
Mr Nen is out for the day so I'm taking myself off to my favourite coffee shop for breakfast with my books and journal.
I am a little surprised at their expectation of membership. I once applied for a position as a parish administrator (didn't get it), and my personal position was that I shouldn't be a member, so that I would have no direct interest, loyalties, etc., but have a cold eye on finances, maintenance, promotion.
Baptists often work the same model as the Congregationalists when running a congregation. The minister is a paid employee, the Church Secretary is their elected senior lay member and though unpaid often wields considerable power. This is partly true as the minister is often an incomer while the Church Secretary will have worshipped there for years.
This is why in Baptist and Congregational churches (as well as URC) the nearest to Church Secretary is the Church Administrator. It is quite possible that the congregation would have a minute secretary as well who would be a less senior layperson.
From my memories of the Baptist church where I grew up, the church secretary was a gentleman in the congregation. I don't know if they had a secretary of the sort that does the typing and filing; if they did, I'd be surprised if s/he was paid.
It's a very warm, rather close day here today (25°), and we went out to a little roadside caff for lunch (well, breakfast really but it was lunch time), and afterwards I took advantage of a 40% off offer at my usual clothes shop and bought a nice pair of white linen trousers.
At this time of year, I usually live in cropped trousers, but I decided a pair of full-length ones would (a) hide the work of the Wee Bitey Things; and (b) make it a little more awkward for the little b*ggers to take any more chunks out of me.
We definitely seem to be in full-on summer now: the forecast for the next week is all temperatures in the mid-20s, i.e. approaching too hot.
No church for us today as my husband is away with work (at a dog festival!) and I don’t drive so can’t get to our indie church. I’d go to the local parish church instead but they have their alternative service today which isn’t really our scene; I like a good sermon and my sons don’t like having to talk to people.
So after my walk I’m going to spend the day reading David Olusoga’s Black and British book.
We have a part on order from early last week, now not due to be delivered until next Wednesday, to fix the kitchen sink. Neither likely local shops stocked it, so it was travel or online. It makes cooking less than enthralling when everything has to be rinsed or washed up in the bath. Having said that I made pear and blueberry drop scones for a late Sunday breakfast
We had a visiting preacher from Australia this morning - the author of a book called Surprise the World about missional people - and though I wasn't expecting to find his sermon to my taste, it was actually very good.
More unfortunate is that the name is a name that I am often, erroneously, called. More unfortunate yet, is that it uses a very unusual variant spelling, so I expect my address to be misspelled frequently.
But them's the breaks.
* I understand it may have been named after the daughter of the original owner of the land.
Three cheers for the UK's online passport application site. D's passport expires in October, and it took him no more than about 20 minutes to fill in the form, including online payment and uploading the digital photograph he'd had done. So much easier than the faff we had renewing our PR cards! It cost a fortune to post his old passport back to the UK by Priority post, but as we're planning to be over in August, and the website said it should take about four weeks, we didn't want to take any chances.
The forms didn't ask what colour he wanted though ...
While muggitude might recede to 50-ish % as the day goes on, we'll have another 28 to 30C today. Rain and thunderstorms forecast for later in the week, and slightly lower, i.e. more bearable temperatures in the mid-twenties. Or so we hope. The weekend should be sunny and over 30C though. Gaaah.
And now back to the studio.
Oh, and I have had an informal acceptance onto the doctorate in education programme, I start in October. So this summer will be spent reading and putting together ideas for that.
Hurrah for air-con!
Yesterday was a hot sticky day here. Good news is that being so high up plus close the river, the new place is quite breezy so doesn’t feel unbearably hot. We’ll see how windy it gets during the middle of a winter storm – could be quite, er, thrilling.
Parents en rouge arrive this evening, and my brother and sister-in-law on Saturday. Actually the latter is the cause of the former, IYSWIM. Paris being much closer to Blighty than California, when my parents heard that my brother and sister-in-law were going to be here, they decided to come at the same time. This way they can see everyone without having to go on an eleven-hour flight.
For entertainment value, I have to co-opt my brother into pushchair pushing. This not being an activity you generally associate with my brother. (Actually despite claiming not to be a children-person, I think my brother quite enjoys being an uncle.)
Said niece and nephew are in their late teens now, so I can't annoy my brother and his wife in this way. I have to think of other ways...
Hope the move to Rouge Heights goes well!
Indeed! And may the Heights not be too wuthering / and (winter) storms not too weathering. <votive>
Have fun with the Paris Meet, LVER!