During the Falklands War in 1982, the British forces stayed on their home time zone of +0100. The Argentineans stayed on theirs, -0300. So when the British set off at their 0700 as usual, it was 0300 for the other side…
4 Likes
Huh. I wasn’t aware of that part of the Malvinas War… is it true?
(^_^)
I actually have no horse in that conflict. My parents are from Argentina (my dad even worked for the military for a short stint doing rocket research), but they never mention it other than as a general lesson in the stupidity of war (and the Argentine military in general, who they are not fans of).
1 Like
To the nest of my knowledge; it’s in Sandy Woodward’s book, and everything there I’ve been able to check is accurate.
3 Likes
I now envision Roger having a library worth of knowledge all woven into a giant nest that he sits in and studies.
7 Likes
Real intelligence agencies have archivists and librarians. I imagine they lair in a nest of secret knowledge, which for all that actual classified material is generally as dull as other bureaucratic correspondance, still seems terribly romantic.
I’ve always thought there might be a roleplaying campaign idea, which is largely the same as an idea for a book, in the PCs/protagonists having day jobs of various sorts throughout the agency, but actually working for the Librarian, who had conceived the idea that unexplained lacunae in her files amounted to evidence of a Threat of some sort, which the politically-appointed Chief and Civil Service-minded senior leadership found it expedient to ignore.
To investigate it, she could only rely on these misfits and managerial cast-offs, whose only common ground was that they seized every opportunity to consult the Archives and tended to read much more widely than they had to in order to file a report which fulfilled all the bureaucratic criteria for closing a matter so old it had been archived.
5 Likes
In his magnificent beard?
5 Likes
Well, more or less, yeah. I seem to accrue things, especially shiny things.
“We do not raise the alarm about threats when those threats are increasing our budget.”
I need to find a clip-on model wren or similar.
9 Likes
For all the madness of the world and our lives, the rediscovery of episodes 1 and 3 of the Daleks master plan has put me in an insanely happy mood.
16 Likes
We lost power a couple of hours ago. Should come back around midnight. I’m sitting here in absolute darkness while my wife is reading a Smurfs comic book in the bedroom with our dog.
I HATE power outages. I didn’t always. The dark never bothered me. But ever since I moved here, I’ve hated them. See, we’re using a well and septic tank here, we don’t get city water or sewers. Which means without power, we have no water.
THAT’s what’s freaking me out. No showers, no toilets. No drinking. Brings me back to 1996 when we lost water at my parents’ place (I was 16 or 17) for a full week following, ironically, a flood. It’s bringing all that fear and stress back. It’s making me feel small and helpless and I hate it.
First world problems, I know.
12 Likes
If you have space for one, an emergency water tank can be a helpful buffer against both the outages themselves and the mental stress about outages. I think our one holds 200L.
(Obviously you’d also want some non-mains-power option for boiling water, too.)
6 Likes
Yeah, we kept meaning to install a generator after the ice storm of 2023 made us lose power for 36 hours. Never got around to it. Silly us.
But that’s a good idea too.
6 Likes
We had a brief power cut earlier. Short enough that I hadn’t finished pulling out the desk to access the fuse box (to ascertain it was definitely a power cut) behind it before it came back on.
Much rejoicing that we now live in a house, rather than our previous fancy apartment where the whole building’s water was supplied by electric pumps. Usually meaning that water would be out longer than the electricity was.
8 Likes
I’ll find out tomorrow whether it’s happening, but it seems like I’ll be spending a week out of town for work in a few weeks (sometime in April, it seems).
The longest I’ve been out of town since my kids were born was that day I got stuck in an elevator 3 hours away (not coincidentally, the city where I may be travelling to soon) – that time I was simply late getting home, causing a delayed bedtime routine for my kids.
If I go, I’ll be missing two different soccer (football) practices (training), a softball (softball) practice (training), and, possibly, my daughter’s 1st grade musical/performance (recital) – I may be able to cut out early and make it home for that, depending on how the week schedule is put together.
Additionally, my partner will have to shoulder all of the parenting that week, while I’ll probably have the option to be sat at a bar half the time, socializing with people I’ve worked with for 5 years and have never met (unless they were in the elevator with me that time I got stuck).
It’s that last bit that tears at me most, I think. I can only imagine the feeling of freedom of being able to stay out late and then simply go home and climb into a hotel bed- no dishes to wash, no tables to wipe down, no floors to sweep.
16 Likes
I certainly know that feeling. It is my yearly birthday treat to go to the pub and watch Super Saturday (the final weekend of the Six Nations rugby tournament, three games of rugby one after the other) and the feeling of a whole day with no kids and no responsibilities had me giddy for most of the week! 
7 Likes
My parents moved to the country when I was about 12, and we had well and septic. It was a shock to me the first time the power went out and I couldn’t flush the toilet.
Thinking about it, the longest power outage we’ve had in this house was a couple hours, when a moron landscaper broke a power pole backing out of the garage he had just driven into. It turns out that our block and the one south of us are part of the redundant circuits powering the TV station studios and university across the street. We found that out when a storm took out the power to the rest of the neighborhood for most of a day.
We’ve had five or six water outages, which is more than I have ever had in the rest of my life. None have lasted more than a few hours, but still distressing.
6 Likes
Re: Power - we were forecasted for a storm that I dubbed “the wormhole” yesterday. The schools all let out early. Meteorologists forecasted a 40 degree F (20 degree C) drop in 60 minutes, tornadoes, and at least an inch of rain over the course of the day - half of that in a single hour.
“The wormhole” because it’d rip the sky open and next morning we’d wake up back in January.
We charged all our emergency lights, filled up some pitchers, etc etc.
The wormhole was very disappointing.
The temperature drop was real, but rain and wind stayed within normal tolerances and the streets aren’t even dirty with twigs this morning.
@simfers, we have some spare water in pitchers. Sorry.
Re: business travel - I hear you. I’ve been disqualified from any and all trips for many years as the kids were just that young, but now they are old enough that if something comes up I’ll go. It’s always daunting ahead of time, for both parties, but you always make it work. People much less intelligent and dedicated than you make it work. I’ve held down the fort while the Mrs was in the hospital. And I’ve had the uncanny quiet of the hotel room that is both wonderful and not right.
…I wish these things were paced out. Like, I want a full day away from the kids every week, but then I want them to stay on as part of my life longer. Instead we get this nonstop barrage for 12 years, a liminal period, and then the uncanny, unwanted, and unbroken quiet for years and years. Can we find a way to mix it together?
7 Likes
When we finally get around to putting solar on the roof, we will also be installing a house battery to provide backup power (Note: this needs additional hardware to still work when the grid goes down, Note 2: my partner tells me that Anker just presented some new batteries that include this hardware already!) Prices per MW Battery Power have been constantly falling (unlike other hardware). Depending on how you wire your backup power you could make sure that the most important things (Fridge, Water Pumps) get most of the power in case of an outage (my colleague apparently did this, his partner works for the local power company)
While we live in the middle of the city… there have been some big outages in Germany. Berlin made headlines when the outage lasted days in the middle of winter after an attack specifically targeting power infrastructure. Locally there was one the next town over that lasted an afternoon. Here in our corner we had one that also lasted an afternoon when a local substation burned down but we got lucky that we were on the next street over that is connected to a different one. In the house power went out when our electrician messed up. Our backup for the servers and lights lasted about 1 hour before it finally gave out.
5 Likes
I have never had to travel for work, though the possibility has been there for some trainings in the past, but with the high needs of my kids, I just can’t see how I could do it. I think I’d feel guilty if I was kicking back in a hotel room on my own for a couple of nights while my wife and her brother were stuck caring for the kids.
4 Likes
Don’t apologize! I’m happy you had better foresight!
We’re back home now, power came back during the night, spent it at Maryse’s dad’s place. Now THEY don’t have power, so we’re likely to host them for the day at least.
The roads were and are a horror show. Snow, winds, ice.
6 Likes
To make matters worse for you, the Geese flew past a few days ago.
Get ready for bitchfest '26.
4 Likes