What's on your mind?

[RelentlessOblivion]

On 4/24/2022 at 2:39 PM, KillaKukumba said:

95% 1st and 93% 2nd isn't too bad. I didn't see third listed but in Victoria the tick app to show you're vaxed apparently didn't have provision for 3rd jabs so when they started the third round the Vic government acted all confused about what to do and they fixed it by removing the first dose and only counting doses 2 and 3 as 1 and 2 respectively.

No number has come up significantly since I last looked at it then, I know at one point there when New South Wales and Victoria were in the low 90% range we were daily in the 70% for second dose. Also no symptoms as of yet not Collingwood, but I’m the only person in the house who doesn’t have Covid right now. 

[AlSymerz]

I think once the media stopped reporting on the numbers in every news break they did creep up everywhere. WA was really behind for a while, hence why McGowen wouldn't open the borders, but once he started threatening to keep them closed if people didn't get the vax the numbers jumped. I know my stupid relos over in Perth were just 'waiting until everyone else got the jab' to get theirs, but as soon as the idea of the borders remaining closed was thrown at them they booked appointments. I think all states used threats to jump their numbers and that's not a bad thing, but it meant numbers would plateau eventually and there would be a number of people who would remain non-vaxxed.

I know a few houses were all but one person got coivd, no rhyme or reason why, kind of like asking why one house in the street is spared after a bushfire. Just weird luck I guess.

[RelentlessOblivion]

My theory at the moment is because I’m basically in a granny flat out the back exposure is very limited, chances will be even lower if my previous landlord wasn’t an arsehole. Very much looking forward to the day I finish my journalism degree so I can afford to live independently again.

[AlSymerz]

Get one of those huge bio-tents and put it around the house

 

[blaaacdoommmmfan]

On 4/24/2022 at 12:52 AM, KillaKukumba said:

It did work, but it wasn't really fit for purpose. It was a drunken idea that we took too far and once we started we couldn't let it beat us.

I don't mind the pink jacket and shirts. But the pink tools were a solid pitch towards getting more females into trades and it did work because plenty of women and now taking up all manner of trades and it's good to see.

 

There is a lot of myths around batteries and what makes them die prematurely and most of them are exactly that a myth. Most 'cheaper' ones can be a risk but with a little research and following a few simple steps you can be relatively sure about what you're getting. The first two basic steps are just because it's got a brand name on it doesn't mean it's great, and if it doesn't have a traceable name don't trust it there are plenty more choices out there.

I don't mind pink hi Vis really. No issue to me. I wear alot of hi Vis orange at work so the pink stuff is just another colour. 

Ok I gathered as much after I spoke to my dad re the mower with the pickup engine. He was convinced it would have issues. My dad does get things totally wrong sometimes so I was hoping this would be the case

That's good to see more women taking up the trades. In UK I've not seen any women on the sites. I'm not a tradesman but when our sites are done up alot of tradespeople turn up and I can't remember any females doing the work. There's even a Google advert on you tube where a female bricklayer moans to a copresenter why there are not more women in construction. 

 

[AlSymerz]

Yeah colours are just that. I don't care what colour I wear in general but when it comes to safety I'd rather be seen than worry if someone is judging me.

The lawn mower was too fast to cut grass properly, even on idle, but there was no way we could keep cutter belts on it for more than about a minute without it shredding them. The old Greenfield ride on lawn mower was already a shit for shredding belts but trying to make them turn with more than the 15 horsepower it came with was never going to be successful. Not to mention the 2 litre fuel tank wouldn't have gotten around our yard

Australia has had a good push on women in nearly all the trades, it's good to see for many reasons. My niece is 23 and she's already qualified to drive 300 tonne mining trucks and 100 tonne dozers, while at the same time licensed to drive a skidsteer and control traffic.

 

[RelentlessOblivion]

Still Covid free, I’m doing well at dodging this thing like… Well like it’s the plague. In Open News I have a couple more things to add to my diary of unexplained events, just being a kitchen timer which I’ve been meaning to replace the batteries for about a week is it wasn’t working, deciding to go off of it are in a quart in the middle of the night. Second thing waking up to find a football, Australian football I should process this actually, lying in the middle of the floor and I know I didn’t leave it there since the last place I thought it was in a bin we keep a low Power Verious balls and  miscellaneous backyard objects in. 

[AlSymerz]

On Tuesday I replaced all the smoke alarm batteries (fair enough it's been 2 and a half years since I did it). This morning at 1am the one down the far end of the house starts screaming its tits off. I woke up to the wife yelling at the thing to shut up because she'd bashed it with the boom stick three times and it wouldn't shut up. She did check for any reasons for the alarm before she tried to turn it off. I tried pushing the button to shut it up. I even tried to bash it. In the end I just ripped it off the ceiling and took the battery out. Damn things are a good idea but when they false trigger why does it always have to be in the middle of the night?

 

[Thatguy]

32 minutes ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

Still Covid free, I’m doing well at dodging this

Me too. My daughter is in the throes of her second dose as I write though. Pretty sick this time, poor little thing. She is in a high risk occupation but takes all the appropriate precautions...    

In the future we will understand why some get it and some don't, why it is no big deal for some but fatal for others even if their general health seems to be the same. It's fate of course, which is the non-scientific way of saying it's yer genetics, innit?

[AlSymerz]

Ozzy has it now too

[RelentlessOblivion]

In my case I’m definitely benefiting from being separate to the rest of the house, so if I do have to go in there and mask up, sanitise my hands in mediately are coming back outside, and I’ve basically been living on Uber eats for this past week I’m sure my bank account doesn’t appreciate it but my health sure does

[RelentlessOblivion]

Finally out of quarantine, and as an added bonus I managed to not catch the plague while in isolation. Between the back injury and needing to hide myself away from the world for a week though my fitness is definitely suffering. Just when I was starting to make progress too.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

My buddy Wayne texted me just this morning to say that he's on the couch with a 103° fever and that he and his wife have the Covid. She had it first, was home sick from work with a fever as far back as last Tuesday or maybe Wednesday and then she tested positive Saturday. Now it's Monday and he has it. Guess I'm lucky that he didn't spend too much time here at the end of last week. He never showed up last Thursday as he had food poisoning or something and couldn't get too far from the dunny. Friday he went and did an estimate for a deck at 10am and didn't show up here til 11:30. We put a couple of kitchen cabinets together and then he left at 1:30 to drive one of their kids to the airport. Now that kid (I say kid but he's 22 actually) is out in Vegas with his friends laid up in his hotel room bed with a fever from what we assume is Covid, and he doesn't know if they're gonna let him get on the plane Thursday to return home to the east coast.

As for me I'm fine so far, it's been over 82 hours since I was near him, don't know if he had it yet or was contagious yet last Friday. I'm really not sure how long it usually takes from time of exposure til you might start developing symptoms. Of course I am vaccinated while they aren't, which could explain why they got it and I haven't. But that was an entire year ago now, I don't think Omicron (the prevalent strain here in the states) was even a thing yet back then last April/May and I've never bothered to get boosted. So who knows? Guess we'll find out soon enough. Another buddy of mine had it at Christmastime and he said the worst of it came on at right about 3 days after exposure. So I'm hoping that if I don't show any symptoms by tomrrow night at this time (100+ hours) that I'll be in the clear. Not super worried though, I reckon we're all gonna get it sooner or later. 

[FatherAlabaster]

Running to the toilet was part of the good old Covid experience for me too. The whole thing sucked. Booster shots are a good idea. I hope you're in the clear, and good luck to your friends. When we had it, it was a solid two weeks of misery, but the people I've talked to who got sick more recently had a shorter time of it. We've had a couple garden variety colds recently, and my wife and son were laid low this past week with some shitty tummy bug, but knock on wood we're all ok now. I've started wearing a KN95 when I go to the store again. Felt ok taking it off for a little while but we can't afford to get sick right now and definitely don't want the baby sick either. I guess this is just how it is now.

[AlSymerz]

So hoarding dunny paper was a good thing? I thought toilet frequency wasn't a covid thing and that's why everyone hoarding bog roll got laughed at?

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Yup, it's just gonna become one of the standard perils of everyday life that need to be accounted for, until the next big virus comes along and smacks us down I guess. But as I've read that viruses generally mutate to become more contagious but less severe (killing the hosts isn't ideal for the virus either) I suspect that going forward new Covid strains will (hopefully) eventually become more like the flu in that they can usually be weathered by most at home, rather than being something requiring hospitalization or causing severe long term health problems or possibly a death sentence. I've gotta say this long Covid thing man, that's bullshit, that's not even fair. And it's a little scary knowing that random younger healthy people will also occasionally drop dead from Covid, it's not just the obese and sickly and older folks who are at risk. You just never know. I don't bother masking up tbh but I don't go out in public all that much and I do practice social distancing. I respect people's space and I expect them to respect mine, I don't get up in anyone's face. Of course all that will be out the window at MDF in a few weeks, won't it. Rubbing elbows with thousands of dirty, sweaty, stinky metalheads, yay.

1 hour ago, KillaKukumba said:

So hoarding dunny paper was a good thing? I thought toilet frequency wasn't a covid thing and that's why everyone hoarding bog roll got laughed at?

 

Even if worst case scenario you have to spend a few days tethered to the shitter, how much extra toilet paper does that actually require? An extra roll or two that month over what you'd normally use in a month? I don't think we use more than 2 or 3 rolls a month here as it is, but I guess that's because we don't have any women living here. It's been my experience that most women tend to go through a ridiculous amount of toilet paper as compared to most men.

[AlSymerz]

We've still got massive bog roll shortages here in Oz but apparently it's not due to hoarding it's due to shortages in the workforce. Most supermarkets have one or two brands and only one or two different size packets. That's not to say we as people need 15 different choices in bog roll but it is strangely only the most expensive bog roll that's on the shelf at the moment. They have changed just about every rule related to isolation and close contacts but some how we still have problems getting bog roll out of the factory and to the stores.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

We had toilet paper shortages 2 years ago but seems they got it figured out within a few months, it's been back to normal for at least a year now. Our shortages are rolling, seems to be different stuff all the time, no apparent rhyme or reason to it. They tell us it's transportation related, ships waiting in port to be unloaded and trucker shortages. I don't notice it so much at the supermarket these days but at the buillding products stores or the hardware stores you never know what they'll be out of next, even on their websites. I wanted to buy some Quickcrete countertop mix last week and our two big chains were all sold out for pickup or to ship. Gonna have to call around to mom and pop hardware stores and see if I can find some. I need 14 bags, so I just hope I can find 14 bags all in one place and won't have to run around all over the place to get a few bags here and a few bags there. The lumber shortage is perplexing as well, they claim the sawmills are cranking the stuff out just fine, they just can't seem to get it where it's needed. Prices are still insane for common items like 2x4's and plywood, like double and triple or more from what they used to be, I don't know if they'll ever come back down to normal. But at least I don't have to worry about wiping my ass.

[AlSymerz]

Our dunny paper issues got solved but then came back. In the shops it's random stuff, one week it will be a flour or drink flavouring, the next it will be rice and frozen goods, but every week it's dunny paper. The randomness of it goes along with the excuses the media give us, just like the price hikes seem to happen when the media tell us. We have had about 4 months of floods up in the north where a lot of produce comes from and that's made it even more expensive for weekly food bills.

Our steel and concrete production seems to be okay. Steel keeps going up in price but I had no issues getting enough to rebuild a patio over summer. I haven't had a massive need for concrete but whenever I drive into the hardware store delivery bay there is maybe a dozen pallets of different bags. But we've been struggling with timber since before the pandemic, especially structural timbers.  There has been a shortage on shit timber like plywoods and particle boards but that comes and goes. However pine trusses and general building timber has been very low for nearly two years. At first we were told it was because our chain stores were importing cheap timber and undercutting the local market so the local market stopped their supply. But that quickly fell by the way side as other countries also started reporting issues. Once again though it was like there was no shortage on expensive short length dressed timbers just the cheaper (and larger sized) stuff tradesmen and handymen use.

[RelentlessOblivion]

Okay not to get political here, I’m sure we are all pretty tired of it at this point but America, UK, what the actual fuck are you doing? Hell’s bells I had to pinch myself to make sure this wasn’t some horrific human rights nightmare, at least Australia failed to pass anti-human rights legislation lucky for us because the High Court probably would’ve ticked it off as being fine. Shit it says a lot when failing to pass the legislation can honestly be viewed as a good thing in comparison to what just happened stateside, not to mention in the not so great any more Britain. Rant over while I’m still somewhat in control of myself.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

8 hours ago, KillaKukumba said:

Our dunny paper issues got solved but then came back. In the shops it's random stuff, one week it will be a flour or drink flavouring, the next it will be rice and frozen goods, but every week it's dunny paper. The randomness of it goes along with the excuses the media give us, just like the price hikes seem to happen when the media tell us. We have had about 4 months of floods up in the north where a lot of produce comes from and that's made it even more expensive for weekly food bills.

Our steel and concrete production seems to be okay. Steel keeps going up in price but I had no issues getting enough to rebuild a patio over summer. I haven't had a massive need for concrete but whenever I drive into the hardware store delivery bay there is maybe a dozen pallets of different bags. But we've been struggling with timber since before the pandemic, especially structural timbers.  There has been a shortage on shit timber like plywoods and particle boards but that comes and goes. However pine trusses and general building timber has been very low for nearly two years. At first we were told it was because our chain stores were importing cheap timber and undercutting the local market so the local market stopped their supply. But that quickly fell by the way side as other countries also started reporting issues. Once again though it was like there was no shortage on expensive short length dressed timbers just the cheaper (and larger sized) stuff tradesmen and handymen use.

The only thing that saved me last year was that most of the larger sized lumber like the 20 foot 2x10 rafters (35mmx240mm) we needed for the new roof hadn't really gone up too much, they were still around the same price as they'd always been. It's those damn 8 foot studs, they went from around $2.50 up to about $12 each then came back down to about $4 last fall and now they're back up to $8 or $9 again. And that's when you can even find the decent ones that aren't all twisted. Sometimes we'll go to get some and then just walk back out because all they have is shit grade corkscrew lumber so we'll decide to pass on that and take our chances next time. If you've ever tried to put sheetrock on a wall that's been framed out with twisted studs you'll understand.

 

4 hours ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

Okay not to get political here, I’m sure we are all pretty tired of it at this point but America, UK, what the actual fuck are you doing? Hell’s bells I had to pinch myself to make sure this wasn’t some horrific human rights nightmare, at least Australia failed to pass anti-human rights legislation lucky for us because the High Court probably would’ve ticked it off as being fine. Shit it says a lot when failing to pass the legislation can honestly be viewed as a good thing in comparison to what just happened stateside, not to mention in the not so great any more Britain. Rant over while I’m still somewhat in control of myself.

Pretty fucked up. Never thought something like this would actually happen. If my wife was still alive she'd be losing her mind today over this news. I have to assume you're talking about the Alito leak saying there could be a vote to overturn Roe v Wade (1973) which would free up the more ignorant states to make all kinds of anti-abortion laws again. Crazy. Why can't people learn to just mind their own fucking business? You're against abortion? Then don't get one!

If you were referring to something else with "what just happened stateside" then please disregard this message.

[AlSymerz]

3 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

The only thing that saved me last year was that most of the larger sized lumber like the 20 foot 2x10 rafters (35mmx240mm) we needed for the new roof hadn't really gone up too much, they were still around the same price as they'd always been. It's those damn 8 foot studs, they went from around $2.50 up to about $12 each then came back down to about $4 last fall and now they're back up to $8 or $9 again. And that's when you can even find the decent ones that aren't all twisted. Sometimes we'll go to get some and then just walk back out because all they have is shit grade corkscrew lumber so we'll decide to pass on that and take our chances next time. If you've ever tried to put sheetrock on a wall that's been framed out with twisted studs you'll understand.

We could get stuff like Oregon and heavier timbers, but yeah it was cuts like studs that were hard to get. Several times last year I went to get 2x3's, or 2x4's in varying lengths and it was impossible to get. When the stores did get it in it was often short listed for builders first, (which isn't entirely unfair), or like you says, the only shit that was left was bananas. I was lucky in that I wasn't building a house so I could get away with not always using framing timber. At one point I was even considering buying garden sleepers and cutting them to size for a job. I did build a tool cabinet last year which didn't need heavy framing but because I couldn't get 2x1's I ended up having to buy 2x4's and cutting them down.

When I was at the hardware store the other day they seemed to have fairly good stocks of timber so I'm not sure if things are on the improve or it's just a good week.

[markm]

9 hours ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

Okay not to get political here, I’m sure we are all pretty tired of it at this point but America, UK, what the actual fuck are you doing? Hell’s bells I had to pinch myself to make sure this wasn’t some horrific human rights nightmare, at least Australia failed to pass anti-human rights legislation lucky for us because the High Court probably would’ve ticked it off as being fine. Shit it says a lot when failing to pass the legislation can honestly be viewed as a good thing in comparison to what just happened stateside, not to mention in the not so great any more Britain. Rant over while I’m still somewhat in control of myself.

It's beyond fucked up. We've got the less popular of two large parties making decisions that in this case go against some 80% of the general population. Somehow we've permitted a large minority to jerry rig the entire system in their favor. It's enough to drive you nuts. Minority rule? 

[MacabreEternal]

Invited out to Florida in mid-June by the new owners of the company I work for (loads of us going - not just a special invite for me).  9-hour flight from the UK but get there mid-afternoon on a Saturday and no "work" related stuff until the Monday.  Unexpected trip and given the company now has US owners could become a regular thing.  Going to have to learn to sleep on planes for a 9 hour flight home that touches down 9am UK time.  Hate flying but getting better as I get older.  A colleague has refused the trip as he is proper "bang on the doors and let me off" scared of flying.

[AlSymerz]

6 minutes ago, MacabreEternal said:

Invited out to Florida in mid-June by the new owners of the company I work for (loads of us going - not just a special invite for me).  9-hour flight from the UK but get there mid-afternoon on a Saturday and no "work" related stuff until the Monday.  Unexpected trip and given the company now has US owners could become a regular thing.  Going to have to learn to sleep on planes for a 9 hour flight home that touches down 9am UK time.  Hate flying but getting better as I get older.  A colleague has refused the trip as he is proper "bang on the doors and let me off" scared of flying.

Having to sleep on the plane would be my issue. Multiple times I've come off a 12 hour night shift of driving, driven 4 hours to the airport, got on a plane for the 5 hour flight to Perth and not slept a wink. I love planes, although I hate the lack of leg room, but even watching a crappy movie doesn't put me to sleep. Yet put the TV on at home and I can be asleep in about 3 minutes.