Haironyourchest

Story: In the summer of '07 an English guy appeared in our wee village looking for an old girlfriend from many years ago, who was long gone. In his early sixties, been a long distance lorry driver most of his life. Low size chap, hips and knees shot from too many years of sitting at the wheel, heavy smoker, and hard boozer. Pleasant company and intelligent. So this guy, lets call him John, found a job hauling crushed stone for a local quarry. Only worked a week and the quarry closed. He was casually renting a room from someone he knew distantly through this long-gone girlfriend. When he ran out of dosh they put up with him for a couple of weeks then kicked him out. So a friend of mine sorts him out with a job in the local hotel sweeping up in the kitchen. I got a job that summer in the same hotel as a night porter. At 2.00am John and me were the only staff around, and I'd chat with him in the kitchen. The poor guy was sick. He had weeping sores on his arms (?) and could barely walk. Absolutely pitiful to see him pushing the mop around, with his buggered hips, tottering and wincing.... So John got sicker and sicker. I suspect he wasn't eating as well. And one afternoon he doesn't show up for his shift. Basically he just refused to get out of bed. So he squats in the staff house for a week, bed bound, and the management throw him out. So I find him sitting on his duffle-bag outside the pub and he tells me the story. Ok, so me being the good samaritan, I give him twenty bucks for supplies and tell him he can doss in the wee A-frame shack in our woods for a couple days till he gets his strength back. He comes back with (drumroll) baccy, a bottle of wine, and cupcakes!! I drive him up to the shack, sort him out with water, toilet paper and candles and he's wincing and grunting in pain as he shuffles over the forest floor, roots that we wouldn't even notice being physical obstacles to him... He can't mount the steps into the shack and I have to help him. At this point I'm thinking "Jeezuz, what have I done??" "Are you going to be ok John?" "Yeah mate, I'll be fine in a few days, thanks ever so much, I'll just get on with writing me memoirs now..." So I check on him in a few days and he's still there. Wine and baccy gone, and two or three out of the dozen cupcakes eaten...It's obvious that left to his own devices he will die in the shack, so I make a few calls and for fifty bucks a friend (bless her) will put him up for a week in the nearby town, where there is a social welfare office and maybe they can hep him. I haul him out of the shack, drive him to town and shove more cash into his hand. So he stays with her for a week and she phones me: "Haironyourchest, you have to come and get John. He's a lovely guy but he's doing me head in. The dole office wont help him and he does nothing but lie on the floor all day and drink..." So into the car again. I drive him to the next biggest town and dump him outside the social welfare office there, give him four hundred quid and tell him to ask the dole people to help him go back to England. He promises to repay me some day (!) So a couple months later I get a text message. He's living in a homeless shelter and loving it. "Three meals a day, a safe-ish place to sleep, medical treatment and €50 a week pocket money!!!" Eventually he makes his was home and gets work driving a lorry for a tarmacking firm and that's the last I ever hear from him... Of course, I never see my money again....but whatever.

Wow....I thought this was gonna be a thread about delicious mushrooms....

Someone should start a thread: "Photos Of Your Fry-ups" !!

Tea, Coffee, and Milled Linseed with Juice for breakfast. Linseed sorts out any potential reflux for the day. Maybe biscuits with the tea. I find it doesn't matter what I eat for lunch provided I give it a minimum of half an hour to go down. Generally its whatever's leftover from last nights supper in a locking camping pot, supplemented with field rations of tinned fish, organic baked beans (cold from the can) tinned chickpeas, salt and pepper, And at least two litters of water, four on a hot day, with packets of electrolyte salts. And a liter of goats milk on the drive home.... No tea, except of very cold days maybe.

....... ....Hita.......never mind........... .....Sigh......

Read the whole thing. Interesting though and glad I did...

The Billion Dollar Pee..... well that was a shaggy dog story if I ever heard one!

"To the seeing eye, decay is as beautiful as growth, and death as birth" - William Blake

Mike, there's a guy near here who's been milling since forever.... His technique is to have the chain so loose it nearly hangs off the underneath of the bar. I know what you're saying about the chain catching the mill, the centrifugal forces forces it away from the bar. The looser it is the more it travels and trashes the teeth on the mill. Our mill has a nearly sawed-through 8mm bolt in evidence of this. Thus the overtightened chain. I have in mind to modify our mill so it doesn't do this anymore. Maybe your mill could be modified? Also have you considered an auxiliary oiler on the return after the bar nose? Also (am I teaching granny to suck eggs?) wedge the planks behind you as you go.

I vote take him to court. Even if you lose the case or he turns out to be bankrupt or whatever, you stood up for yourself (well that's how Id feel about it anyway) Its the principle of the thing. I spent for too long treading on eggshells around people out of a sense of 'benefit of the doubt' that in retrospect turned out to be just pathologically self serving... ... Haul him over to coals and maybe next time he'll think twice about contracting for work he has no intention of paying for.

Mick - :lol::lol: (picks self up off of floor and recovers) - may we all learn from the mistakes of others and may others learn from ours.....god that was funny!!

There's an auld guy lives in the hills near the village, a cantankerous Cork farmer/fisherman/jachtsman/former fencing champion etc. A character, in short... Fixing his roof one day he told us the story of his prostate exam. I can't remember if his GP or some clinic did the exam, but whatever, it turned out he knew the guy from years past (small country). So the doc is there performing the examination, and your man cranes his neck to make eye contact and says (with a heavy Cork accent) "Y'know doc...they say it's only a sin if you enjoy it !!"

....I hope he flushed.... Not sure I can really commit to believing this story (it's a good 'un though!) for reasons of basic physics. But then again there were some pretty radical individuals in the first wave of eastern european migrants...

Was the younger guy a pin-headed giant with a cartoonishly outsized chin? Some years ago I worked for a guy and we needed a gennie. We went shopping, and driving through town he spots these scoundrels selling "Honda" gennies out of a big white Renault. Dressed to the nines, like they were headed for the ambassadors's party or something... So he makes for the van as I try to caution him, he says "Ah sure they're Honda's, it'll be fine..." So he buys the gennie for half the cost of a real one and we bring it back to the site. No prizes for guessing what happened next....

Gotta be chain then I suppose....cant go far wrong with chain.

Many years ago there was a famous tree guy near where I live, Dan-John by name (if memory serves). He was completely fearless, but he couldn't climb. His method of getting into trees was to climb up his wooden ladder, stand on a branch and pull the ladder up after him, then foot the ladder on the same branch and go up again. He would, so they say, do that three or four times to get as high up as he needed to be... My pal was negotiating some insurance cover for a job with a broker, and he asked the broker "Do you know Dan-John? Does he ever get insurance?" The broker allegedly replied: "Dan-John has an arrangement with God..."

At the risk of teaching my gran to suck eggs - - consider what you are using to attach the snatch block to the digger. If its chain, I should think it would be fine. If wire rope, be very careful of where and how you attach. Too tight bends, edges, etc will damage and potentially break the rope. Same for nylon strop. I should think the geometry of a digger blade is not very forgiving to those kinds of things. If you lucky the digger may have rated eyes built-in somewhere.

Does he get a two-hour lunch break and bottle of house red with his hot meal?

Seems like a lot of support for using the vehicle... with a big van its obviously the way to go, but when you drive a kangoo? I could open the back doors, stand in and leave them slightly closed behind me I suppose. I'll have to rig up a solid bulkhead though, as can be seen through the windshield. Will try it later.

Some years ago I built a tree house. Eight standing spruces in a rough octagon, topped them, and used them as the corner posts. While working on the project, I noticed the wood wasps doing their thing. I lived in that treehouse for eight years. The first couple of years were like the inside of an alien infested spaceship. Lying in bed and then suddenly a flyover by massive scary wasps. You reach for your beer and:(shriek) !! big wasp !! It got pretty stressful. I figured eventually they'd stop emerging, and they did, but f***K there were loads of them. I took to picking them up with a feather on the end of a long stick and chucking them out the window, then into the fire, to try keep their numbers down. They are harmless, but so huge and scary. Any they don't get less scary with time. If anything I got more and more sensitised to them. And they trashed the posts of my house. Massive quarter inch holes all over the place. Inside I just whacked nails into the holes for hanging things on. Outside water got in and started the rot. Should have plugged the holes asap but didn't bother.....

Brilliant input fellers! I just read all of your comments to my girlfriend over coffee - they made her day, especially Starscream's story about the blower :lol: Pretty much everyone I've worked for has offed the use of their water closet, but as has been said, one doesn't want to have to brush down, de-boot etc every time one has to pee. I carry bog roll and a folding spade in the van for emergencies, but only for use in remote and john-less situations. Also handy for shifting animal droppings.

I have been doing thinning and maintenance at two or three suburban properties in the same street, over that last few years. They are all around a acre, lawns and trees, generally pretty scrappy and rugged woodland with a fair amount of undergrowth, fallen trees with overgrown rootplates, ridges of fern covered bedrock etc. Whilst working, I have always picked my spot, where I'm fairly sure I will not be seen by the owners or by neighbours. So far so good. But being that I like to keep hydrated and will normally get through three or four litres a day in the summertime, I can't help but wonder if the odds are against me that some day I will eventually be spotted. From my favourite spot in two of these sites I can see three or four houses, albeit through the bushes, and at some little distance. I have tried to judge the angles and lines of sight as best I can, to occlude my activity from the waist down. Trouble is as I clear more ground, I am eroding my own privacy. Anyway thats my experience. Anyone got any stories, thoughts? Should this be a moral debate? Googling "I pee in my client's yard" brings up some interesting stuff, mainly from the States. Some people have strong feeling about it both ways...... If this is inappropriate Im sorry and I wouldn't blame anyone if it gets deleted....

Has anyone tried a home brew attempt at removing the ethanol from pump petrol?

Horribly horrible stuff... try pure undiluted Lidl rapeseed oil instead. Its the panacea for bar, chain and conscience.

You may have hit dirt or metal on the start of the 2nd cut! Then it's all downhill from there! Saw heats up, starts getting blunter and so on. That's exactly what I thought. Have you closely examined your chain. Are the cutters on one side blunter? Maybe there was a stone or a nail embedded in the tree on your first cut. Grazing something like that will trash all the cutters on one side of the bar and the saw will not cut straight...