peds

Sorry, I might be missing something, but you'll have 15m of steel winch rope that you'll be using to pull, incrementally, a second rope attached to your log, for the distance? What size and material is the second rope? Depending on the materials involved, anywhere a shunt can be used as a rope grab, a prusik can too, and is arguably a lot better in many ways. As for progress capture at the top of the system when you are resetting each 15m, an ID would be fine as it's the winch doing the pulling before the device, so efficiency isn't really an issue, but if you want to splash some cash you could upgrade to a Petzl Maestro or a Clutch... Or... a pulley and a prusik...

Chips are a vegetable. It's all good.

It's possibly like "fishes"... multiples of multiples.

I started making a yule log table centrepiece out of a nice holly stem I knocked before Christmas. I stopped very quickly indeed. Horrible stuff!

I just saw that, I came here to post the same lynk! Funny stuff, really. I can just imagine some fella hidden out in the middle of nowhere with a puppy mill style breeding centre, churning out thousands of baby lynxes over the next few years. Can someone remind me why I'm supposed to ignore the success of reintroducing apex predators into ecosystems that once had them? I'm sure there are good reasons... Edit Ah, new page, we've got a missing lynk. Here it is again: Two more lynx spotted in Scottish Highland woods after pair captured | Scotland | The Guardian WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM Police urge public not to approach illegally released animals understood to have been spotted... ...and in keeping with the theme, here is another lynk: Two more lynx spotted on loose in the Highlands WWW.BBC.COM The sighting follows the capture of two lynx in the same area on Thursday. There we go, a pair of lynx. Maybe they can breed now.

Alder is a beautiful bright orange when split, you'd have noticed and remarked on the colour I think.

Right, stop that. It's silly. And now for something completely different.

Topping and dropping some more spruce and cypress. Chilly out there today! 20250109_091118_3.mp4

I love seeing people better than me leaving stubs as handles. I feel validated. I've only ever worked in one graveyard, big bough caught horizontal between two sycamore over a few graves. Climber either side, rig each end, snip away until free then lower both ends simultaneously. Tidy up a few others while there. Didn't wake a single zombie.

Common thing all over the world at various times of the year... before a 20p coin it would have been a sixpence or a thruppence or something. In France and Spain, I think, there's gateaux de roi (or the Spanish version, which isn't gato del rey), or king cake, which is an almond sponge and pastry tart with coins or a silver token in it, and whoever finds the treasure is king for the day. I forget what time of year. There's almost certainly a version in eastern and northern Europe too, but I don't know the details.

Oh I know Ted, your culinary perversions announced that already. I meant sime42, his ignorance of the cheese-on-cake habit shouted his origins loud and clear.

It's a whole thing. Obviously another posh southerner.

I am ambivalent about the icing, I have no strong feelings either way but I request mine without. My mother made 18 this year for various people, she offers icing and marzipan, but only 1 of the 18 asked for it this year. Being a posh southerner (Warwickshire...), I don't really go for the slice of cheese thing, but I understand how it works. It's just not for me. Although I did do a dessert for a short time in 2007 of tarte tatin (puff pastry apple tart) with a scoop of cheese ice cream in an apple crisp basket, which was pleasant. On that note... I will put some fruit jams (damson, plum, redcurrant... etc...) on cheese, but I will not put other fruit jams (strawberry, raspberry, etc...) on cheese, and those two lists may change seemingly at random depending on the cheese in question.

The secret to a good Christmas cake is for it to be as little actual cake as possible. The cake batter should just be mortar for the brandy-soaked fruit contained within. Someone asked my mother why her fruit (the someone, not my mother) kept sinking to the bottom of the cake when she baked it. Because you aren't putting enough fruit in it you dozy ****************ing wally, my mother told her, only just managing to keep the second part of the sentence inside her head. But yeah, it's a great stand-by lunch to grab quickly if there's no time to prepare much else, and it pretty much never goes off.

The Greenland thing is all a waste of time anyway, this map from 700 million years ago quite clearly shows that Ireland has the only truly legitimate claim to Greenland.

It does seem like a fairly broad term that could be applied to a variety of mindsets.

Ehh, it doesn't matter what you think, and it doesn't matter what we are "led to believe". It's cold, hard, data. The ice caps weren't melting in 1800 because we, and our industrial revolution, had not yet released enough greenhouse gasses to reach 1.5°c of average temperature increase above pre-industrialised levels. The graphs are out there, easy to find, and depressingly easy to understand. Look, this isn't the time or the place to argue about it, so I'm not going to. I had egg and tofu fried rice in the thermos flask for 10am tea break today, and a couple of Christmas cake slices for 1230 break. Didn't thaw out all day, -2°C out by us, but after my Mother's Christmas cake, I was still climbing in a T-shirt in the afternoon to top the final three spruce. No photos. Sorry.

Well, yeah... they are... among many other things. South American asparagus in our shops in January shouldn't be a thing of course, but you can't just wave the global beef industry problem away because of it.

Delicious. I used to make hundreds of those at a time as canapés for fancy weddings. Take one sparagus, snap it, peel the skin off below the tip with a y-peeler to expose the yellowy-green flesh beneath, do that for 1.4 times the number of guests (bit of a ballache for weddings in triple figures). Drop them into a large pan of salted water for 3 to 4 minutes, fish out with a spider into a large bowl of ice water, chill, drain, dry. When dry enough, wrap each spear in cured ham to hide the yellowy-green flesh you exposed earlier (err, yes, actually it was very important to peel it... don't ask questions you don't understand the answer to), line them up as you go with spear tips level, and cut them all down to the exact same length, removing the stump end as necessary. Stack the spears in one box between blue towel, put the trimmings in another box and tuck it into your go-home shoe. When you get home from work at 3am, fry a handful of the asparagus and ham trimmings, add cooked pasta, add cream, add parmesan. Egg yolk if you want. (Pro tip: save the woody butt ends and peelings, make a quick velouté soup with them, pass through a sieve or chinoise, load into a spuma gun, charge with 2 hits of laughing gas and squirt it into a shot glass or, better yet, an espresso cup with one of your dainty little ham spears on the saucer instead of the teaspoon, and you've got an asparagus cappuccino, a fancy little amuse bouche that will distract your esteemed guests from their tedious lives for just long enough for them to consider tucking a few more dollar bills into your g-string at the end of the night.

Ah, don't think I do. PM it to me there.

Planted 2 cypress back in the hole yesterday, only missing 5 of their 6 stems! They'll be fine, it's bareroot season after all...