Thread 18 - TalkLair: "That's no moon. It's a space station!"

[RasaSayangEh]

(Previous thread 17)

We've had our heatwave - is this it for the summer? All is lush and green in our LairGarden, flowers are blooming, berries are ripening...

In the TalkLair, all the windows are open, the Pimms is chilled, the MN massive salad is ready to serve. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

This is what happened with ours, so it may be ok now, fingers crossed!

I am now home, and bizarrely awake since 6:30am (DH still snoring) having been awake from 5am UK time yesterday until 3am US time today. I did doze on the bus for a couple of hours which may account for it. Glad to hear your functioning dishwasher news @RasaSayangEh

We have had black cats for many years because they are always the last in the shelter, apparently because too many people think they are unlucky.

If I were to get a cat then its colour wouldn't come into my choice, I'd be more concerned with what the cat was like and if we got on or not.

We returned home after a six week absence in the early hours of this morning and the cats were touchingly pleased to see us, despite being very well cared for at home in our absence . Weirdly, they appear to be getting on much better with each other, having been mostly at daggers drawn for the first eighteen years of their lives.

Phoebe looks very lovely in that photo. Such pretty colours. I can't understand how anybody could not like tortoiseshells, or black cats, or any cat at all.

I wouldn't feel very happy about leaving Kasper overnight on his own. I know he'd be fine but I'd feel bad thinking of him sitting by the door waiting for me. I'm well past the staying out all night phase of my life so it's a good excuse to get home to my own bed. Well, I say my own bed...

Oh Kasper! 😻

I agree about not caring about cat colours. They're all lovely! <Gavel>

On kitchen appliances -

I spent nearly three hours scrubbing every accessible millimetre of my washing machine trying to get rid of the musty smell. Whoever designed these machines clearly never had to clean one. And it still smells! My next thought is the filter and pipe thingy which I’m not looking forward to at all, not least because in eight years I’ve never cleaned it (and didn’t even realise there was anything to clean until recently).

Does anyone know what the benefit is of a front loading machine? Is it so it fits under a kitchen counter? Top loaders make more sense surely? And don’t even get me started on having to listen to the machine whirring away in my open plan kitchen/lounge

Front loading washing machines seem to be a very 'European' thing, for the UK it's so we can jam them under a worktop in the kitchen, in Europe they seem to go for a laundry nook approach, with the washing machine and tumble drier stacked on top of each other in a shelved area.

As a short arse, top loaders were the devil, always nearly climbing in to find the sock at the bottom of the drum.

My friend has her washing machine in the bathroom, because she has an open plan kitchen and didn't want the noise.

A lot of Americans have top loaders but I’ve always preferred a front loader. We have a utility room so noise isn’t an issue, but my DIL’s top loader is noisier than my front loader anyway.

Re smell - would it be worth running it empty with an extra strong slug of bleach in the water?

Isn't there some kind of calgon washing machine cleaner you can run through it? Or maybe something like this? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dr-Beckmann-Service-Washing-Machine-Treatment/

The advantage of a front loader is you can leave the door a bit ajar when it's not in use, and this really helps stops musty smells building up. It's more annoying to leave the lid up on a top loader. Doing a long, hot wash with the machine empty and then leaving it open should help, once you've wrestled with the filter.

There's a cleaning cycle on our machine that I run if it gets whiffy. I usually put washing soda in for that and it helps a lot, plus we leave the door ajar.

I've done two very hot washes, one with a tablet cleaner like the one @kittykarate linked to. For some reason it smells worse now than it did before! I always leave the drawer and door ajar, although Kasper enjoys closing the latter. I'll see what's lurking in the filter.

I mostly leave my washing machine door closed as otherwise I keep bashing into it. I would like a bigger kitchen really but failing that a smaller table would help. My washing machine doesn’t smell though so that’s something.

I hate to say it, but it's probably worth taking the filter out. It may contain something smelly, e.g. the remnants of a mouse that Kasper disposed of in the machine months ago. In his defence, he probably thought it needed a wash.

I remember reading ages ago that top loaders last a lot better and are more efficient because front loaders are going against gravity every time they spin, so need more electricity to give the same extraction of water, and there is more wear on the parts. It sounds plausible but we of course have a front loader because we have nowhere to put a top loader.

I assume people have top loaders because of space constraints. So they can fit under a counter or be stacked with a dryer. We've had washer-dryers for about 20 years, I know they're not as good as separates and definitely don't last as long, but I feel we really can't do without the dryer function especially in the winter.

PiL had a narrow-sized top loader in a tiny kitchen though - they had a removable section of worktop!

Edit: About 10 minutes after I'd posted about my dishwasher the other day, it stopped abruptly and began beeping It's definitely dead, Jim!

Weird thing just now. A knock at the front door, and I debated whether to answer it at this time of night, had a look through the door window, and there was a guy with a dog. So I opened the door, and he had this very handsome puppy on a fancy lead, and he said, I just found this dog on the green out front, and I wondered if you knew whose it was? I'd never seen the dog, but it is dog-walker central out front. I was a bit suspicious, because there are scammers out there looking for what they hope will be easy pickings from doddery old pensioners. And I wondered how he just happened to be on hand with this smart lead. But then later realised that could have found the dog with the lead on it. It didn't look like the kind of dog you'd want to lose. So, I dunno.

I wonder what happened to the dog. Hope it got home okay.

That does have scammy vibes though @moto748e

Have to say the guy didn't look dodgy (not that you can really tell, of course). he was quite nerdy and diffident in manner, didn't have the big smile and confident patter of a scammer. I shall enquire of the neighbours.

I'm wondering how the dog scam, if it was one, would unfold. I suppose the thing is that scammers would take things in an unexpected direction, that's how they catch people out.

In a similar vein, there's been a buzz on DC school parents' WhatsApp group. Apparently there have been a few instances people knocking on doors saying they're from X Council and checking whether DC are working (or carrying on to 6th form). Somebody got alerted by a neighbour (they're on holiday), somebody else had a partially handwritten note through their door (while they were out), then somebody else said they'd had a visit the same day and in their case it was genuinely a person from X Council. These are all families in a neighbouring council, haven't heard anything from within ours so far. I'm a bit puzzled why the council would need to check, in person, what a post-16 child is doing.

Spooky (not-spooky) goings-on here last night. Yes, I know, this needs an MN diagram, but you can whistle for that!

We live on a crossroads. As I was heading for bed last night, in the back room furthest away from it, I heard a very loud noise. So I looked out of the windows at the front and on the side road, saw nothing, went into the back garden to check the roof was still on, concluded I was losing my marbles or that Concorde had made an early comeback, or perhaps we were at war, shrugged, went to bed and forgot about it.

This morning we went out to discover that some lunatic driver had taken out most of the front wall, ploughed up the (formerly) beautiful front garden and the front door of our neighbour on the other corner of the side road. It's all police-taped off, and the neighbour (in her 90s and recently widowed) can only get in and out via the back door. The local paper reports - with a photo taken in the dark 😆- that police, fire brigade and ambulance attended (nobody was hurt). I didn't hear any of it! And MrG - who was asleep in the front bedroom - hadn't even heard the crash.

Come Armageddon, we'll just sleep through it.