How was your day? (Random off topic chat)

I swear they park half way down the road and then crawl up your path to deliver those when you've been sat on your door mat all day.

Oh hurrah anita I am pleased there's some good today.

Amongst covid, a lowering of our food and welfare standards, crappy work and a leaking roof I needed something positive. I do hope you'll have many a happy trip out.

The foxes are terrible around here! Between them and the squirrels it’s like a constant fight to keep plants/ bulbs in the ground. We have a couple of foxes who seem to like sleeping on our garden shed a lot.

The only mammals I get in my garden are the local cats and me. Loads of birds, though — mostly crows, wood pigeons and house sparrows — and quite a few bees.

Combining two threads, my two most recent encounters with foxes have both involved gennels.

The last time I saw one in the flesh was one Saturday morning as I walked to the railway station. I don't do early, especially at the weekend, so even though it was daylight, there it was as I turned to walk up the gennel at the end of my road. I'm not sure which of us was most startled!

And the time before that was in Green Park in that London. I was walking along one of the gaslit paths when a fox ran in front of me and scurried down one of those gennels that lead to St James's. I suppose if you're going to hunt for titbits, that's the place to do it.

You never know what overly zealous filtering is going to do on the Internet. (The other day I saw someone fall foul of a filter by typing "... had a go".) Which is how this morning I ended up having to express my startlement at something with the phrase "Spot the actual duck".

Was enjoying the ham and cheese panini cooked in my new panini press until I got to the cherry tomatoes which were approximately the same temperature as molten lava.

Came home to great clouds of smoke billowing across the garden, so think you couldn't see through, as my mother burns 7 months of hedge clippings etc. I really hope the neighbours have their windows shut I think and go in to find that ours windows are open and everything stinks of smoke in there. My mother says she can't have possibly been expected to have foreseen that would happen or that moving a small pile a tiny space from the giant pile would result in the tiny pile going up and the shed almost with it.

and herons, she's got a thing about herons. Yesterday pre eat life saving toothpaste moment she noted that the heron had come down in the garden in spite of the fact that she had left her spade out. Why would that have made a difference I enquired, it's just an inanimate object to a heron. It didn't know it wasn't a tank she responded.

I think on days where I doubt my sanity I need to remember I have some way to go to catch up.

kathryn that's awful and I know there's nothing to say to soften the blow, really. 
Under normal circumstances I could say that things will get better but this is a luxury that the current crisis doesn't afford. 
That said, sending a big virtual hug your way. (And fingers crossed that things perhaps don't end in the worst case scenario.)


peggs, your little stories both make me smile and sometimes completely baffle me.
But your sanity seems to be firmly in place. :) 

It infuriates me that companies are allowed to call it "redundancy". The point of redundancy is supposed to be so companies can shed staff when there's no work for them to do, not so they can treat people like crap and get away with it.

I've only seen one genuine redundancy in my life, when a colleague's project came to an end and he refused to retrain in any of the company's other products so he had to be made redundant because the company had no other work that he was willing to do. (That was a good company. He was the only redundancy in the entire history of the business under its founders and original owners, so I tend look askance at management who claim that cost cutting staff reductions are an inevitable part of running a company because I worked at a counterexample.) Every other "redundancy" I've seen has either been the company screwing up and being unable to pay everyone or the company wanting to pay people less money to do the same work. In all those cases there was plenty of work to be done but the company wanted it done on the cheap. That's not redundancy.