I've been in Austria over the last weekend. Karl, who taught me the basic of what I know about snow, avalanches, kicking steps, windslab, etc when I worked in Austria for a few winters many years ago died last week and his funeral at the weekend so I was off to Mayrhofen briefly.

92 and a bit and was still active in search and rescue a few weeks ago ( Read more... )

Well, there I was, deciding to try out the Ginger Cake mix I got from AP as the Chocolate Fudge Cake had turned out pretty well. Same package style, same company, same time and gas mark right?

Mixed the ingredients with water and shoved in the 9" cake tin with the removable bottom and lined with greased greaseproof paper. 1h20m later I prodded it ( Read more... )

A few words that might prove useful:

1. Biggin (noun).
A biggin is a silver coffee pot with a separate container to hold the coffee as it is heated. At dinner parties, always remember to ask your host if they have a biggin.

2. Inspissate (verb)
To thicken by evaporation. "Excuse me whilst I just inspissate the soup" may lead to unusual reactions from ( Read more... )

Not a lot I can say about this but *boggle*


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Went out 8.15am this morning down to Asda - I wanted a loaf of bread[1] and so did mum as Sis and WB have gone through vast stocks so far (something to do with 6 slices of toast each every morning). Nicely crisp as we'd had another quarter inch of snow overnight and at that time it was pretty decent to walk on as it was still below freezing. 30 ( Read more... )

Good King Wenceslas visited his local pizza shop. Owner asked if he'd like "the usual". "Yes" he said, "Deep pan, crisp and even".

Next customer to visit was a Buddhist who requested "Make me one with everything".

The Buddhist proffered a 20 pound note. He received the pizza but no money came back. He queried this and the Manager said "change comes ( Read more... )

Not me though I did manage to go A over T last week on a patch of black ice despite being careful and still have the bruise and lump on my posterior as evidence.

It's more the mobile dongle I'm using. Great at first (despite the shenanigans to get the content lock removed) but despite the nearest mast being somewhere around 300yds away, the signal ( Read more... )

Over in uk.rec.walking, bloody Angus has popped up yet again with his suggestions of walkers paying the full commercial cost of a SAR helicopter if one happened to be needed whilst everyone would get it for free.

This time though, he is also suggesting that there should be portaloos spread right across Scotland, anywhere that walkers go. He didn't ( Read more... )

Meme everyone is doing. Time for a little fun.

Rules: Use the first letter of your name to answer each of the following questions. They have to be real . . . nothing made up! If the person before you had the same first initial, you must use different answers. You cannot use any word twice and you can't use your name for the boy/girl name question.

( Read more... )

I got spam to an email address today (not unusual in itself). Not only spam but it came to a now unused business address that they couldn't have scraped in the last year from the web site so they've been buying spammer lists.

Not only that, the email was only in Welsh and sent to a web design business.

The attached PDF was in English.

"northern bloc ( Read more... )