The General Chat Thread (2016-2022)

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SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
Congrats...

I'll must drop hints to a certain hubby of mine for Christmas. It's a special wedding anniversary for us along... the key will be timing and planning. The chocolates will be coming from Tasmania if the guy had survived the covid shutdown. Fingers crossed. His chocolates are stunning.
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Our Christmas chocs will bring from Hotel Chocolate.
 
Been annoyed the last half of the day.

We're doing an afternoon tea tomorrow. First, stopped by Meijer for a jar of Branston pickle...shelf was bare. That means I have to get up very early tomorrow and go to another shop somewhere else to try and find it. It's not impossible, but it's not the easiest thing to find at times.

Second, I replaced all my hardwired smoke detectors with battery-powered models with 10-year batteries, all in an effort to cut down on 3AM false alarms.

Nope. They're still registering false alarms monthly, at all hours, and these permanent-battery models will not shut off! There's no silencing them.

I even called the company and the best the customer service rep could tell me was to jiggle the "permanently disable" button and hope that that shuts it off without actually permanently disabling it.

It seems to be there's no real solution to ending smoke detector false alarms. I'm currently down to one working smoke detector out of three...and it's just a matter of time before that one effs up. :mad:

Lastly, I went to make my orange-chocolate mousse for tea tomorrow...and I someone forgot and used my second orange for something else the other day.

I was really hoping to get most of the food worked out today, but now it looks like most of my cooking is falling to tomorrow.
 
Morning Glory said:
One thing I've recently discovered (don't know why it took me so long) is using 'speech to text' when writing text messages on the mobile phone (click on the little microphone symbol in the message toolbar). Its not 100% accurate but its really not bad at all. Its faster and saves typing with fiddly phone buttons.
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That is the only way I send text messages. Typing with my thumbs on that tiny virtual keyboard is not a skill I have ever acquired. I also use Siri to make phone calls. "Hey Siri, call dad."

CD
 
TastyReuben said:
Been annoyed the last half of the day.

We're doing an afternoon tea tomorrow. First, stopped by Meijer for a jar of Branston pickle...shelf was bare. That means I have to get up very early tomorrow and go to another shop somewhere else to try and find it. It's not impossible, but it's not the easiest thing to find at times.

Second, I replaced all my hardwired smoke detectors with battery-powered models with 10-year batteries, all in an effort to cut down on 3AM false alarms.

Nope. They're still registering false alarms monthly, at all hours, and these permanent-battery models will not shut off! There's no silencing them.

I even called the company and the best the customer service rep could tell me was to jiggle the "permanently disable" button and hope that that shuts it off without actually permanently disabling it.

It seems to be there's no real solution to ending smoke detector false alarms. I'm currently down to one working smoke detector out of three...and it's just a matter of time before that one effs up. :mad:

Lastly, I went to make my orange-chocolate mousse for tea tomorrow...and I someone forgot and used my second orange for something else the other day.

I was really hoping to get most of the food worked out today, but now it looks like most of my cooking is falling to tomorrow.
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Smoke alarms are designed by evil engineers who intentionally program them to dead-backup-battery beep in the middle of the night, and only if you are asleep. Middle of the afternoon? No way. They must make you get out of bed, get a ladder from the garage, and climb the ladder half asleep.

Sometime last year, I replaced ever smoke alarm in my house. They are still hard wired (so if one is triggered by smoke, they all go off), but they have those ten-year batteries in them.

BTW, I have found that it is quite cathartic to take a beeping smoke alarm out to the driveway, and run over it with a car. Throwing one at a brick wall works, too. :ninja:

I had one go off at 2AM in a hotel room once. I had to stand on the bed, remove it, and put it in the trunk (boot) of my rental car for the night.

CD
 
caseydog said:
BTW, I have found that it is quite cathartic to take a beeping smoke alarm out to the driveway, and run over it with a car. Throwing one at a brick wall works, too.
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I've found that smashing them with a small-but-heavy sledgehammer works, as well as throwing them against the wall or knocking them off the ceiling with the ladder. :laugh:

What royally cheeses me off is, I've followed all the rules for placement and regular cleaning and testing and all that, and the little 🤬 still go off, at all hours.

I just spent a good deal of time re-researching smoke detectors, and there just aren't any that don't do that, even if perfectly cared for.
 
I'm back on track with my cooking for tomorrow, though. I made my mousse anyway, with just the OJ for orange flavoring. I'll grab an orange tomorrow morning when I'm getting that jar of pickle and just put some grated zest on top...or make some grand marnier-flavored whipped cream to top it... 🤔
 
TastyReuben said:
Second, I replaced all my hardwired smoke detectors with battery-powered models with 10-year batteries, all in an effort to cut down on 3AM false alarms.

Nope. They're still registering false alarms monthly, at all hours, and these permanent-battery models will not shut off! There's no silencing them.
Click to expand...
ours was replaced after the smoke alarm failed to go off at the start of august after the chimney fire. The RFS (rural fire service) actually asked us if we had a smoke alarm - which we had. I even took him to it and got them to press the test button which went off. sadly, as I said the alarm had not sounded despite my asthma playing hell and there being a very definite smoke smell...

About a week after the chimney fire, in the middle of the night (not joking, it was 2am) the alarm sounded. Full on fire, not the battery is flat, but full on fire... now given that we couldn't use the stove and were relying on electric fires and our Dyson hot & cool fan to stay warm, I wasn't impressed. It was duely ripped off the ceiling, screws and all and all batteries removed (this was a fire alarm that came with our tenancy and was serviced and tested annually and had been tested the previous April). We had always found it odd that even burning toast never set it off.... so we asked our landlord for a new one. They are surprisingly expensive...

The new one is one of these 10 year battery models (in fact we now have 3 of them). And yes, even the airfryer sets it off despite it being in the hallway. But it has a 10 minute silence mode (and no it doesn't stay silent for 10 minutes either! we get about 5 minutes peace from it as we found out last night when hubby added oil to the airfryer for the chips... and it smoked rather badly (I suspect he used the olive oil again rather than canola or sunflower oil...).
caseydog said:
I had one go off at 2AM in a hotel room once. I had to stand on the bed, remove it, and put it in the trunk (boot) of my rental car for the night.
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I have also had the fire alarm go off in a hotel once (roughly 3am) and it was the middle of a bitterly cold Welsh winter. The owners of the hotel having emptied everyone from their rooms, however, kept us all in the lobby because they also couldn't locate a fire. (It later turned out to be CO rather than a fire).

But you also reminded me of the time my ex-step-father came creeping up the stairs to the 2nd floor (UK naming here, so ground, 1st then 2nd) and crept into my room shinning a torch around. I had heard him coming up the stairs (I'm an exceptionally light sleeper and even a vehicle driving passed our home here in Australia will wake me at night because it is such an unusual occurrence). Anyhow, I had to ask him what he was looking for. the reply was the fire... why? well the fire alarm was bleeping... It was, but only 1 short beep every 3 minutes. He had assumed that meant there was a fire and in the middle of yet another very cold night, had been creeping around the house with a torch looking for a fire. I being a typical teenage girl with very little respect for him anyway, retorted that 1) the fire alarm wasn't going off - no way would that wake the entire house, 2) he'd smell the smoke, and 3) as just an after thought, that perhaps fire meant light and he wouldn't need the torch.... he left. Guess he never actually read the smoke alarm instructions when he bought them and asked me to install them! (this was back in the 80's when they were a new concept).

You also remind me of the number of times the chemistry labs had to be evacuated when I was a PhD student.... it got that bad that having evacuated us on another bitterly cold sub zero morning in the south of England, we were standing out in T shirts and a lab coat... no house keys for those who lived locally (not me), no coats, no food, no money, no medication.... and the list went on. Several students ended up in hospital for mild hypothermia and I ended up at the site's medical facility trying to obtain an emergency inhaler. After that incident, the fire brigade actually recommended that I always get my bag before leaving the building rather than evacuating directly (especially if there was no obvious smell of smoke) because my need for my asthma medication was actually more significant than the need to get out immediately when there was no obvious cause for the alarm (there were only 2 real alarms and once of those was actually raised by me when one waste organic bottles called a Winchester, exploded in the room I was in at the time. It had been boxed, along with 3 others, and the contents were written on the outside where they had been declared by the students so I knew that the contents of the box that went were not good or safe, but I figured this time around that given I was in the room when the incident occurred, and knowing that it was going to be many hours before we were allowed back into the building, I went via my room and then my locker and got all my belongings out. I also told students around me that this one was for real and they also should take their stuff with them so they could go home... only 2 listened. That time around it was the volatile nature of the waste products that was the problem because it was a gloriously sunny day in the middle of summer, in a room that was a wall of glass on the south side and these bottles had been sealed shut ready for collection later that day. (usually these bottles lived on lab benches to be filled as waste liquid was created - there was a system to what went in what bottle, but the key element was that the bottle never ever had a lid on it so that it couldn't build up pressure inside and explode...
 
We had a fire alarm go off at midnight while staying at the moathouse in Kensington London about 20 years ago, we got in the lift and went down, all staff were outside, apparently it was every man for themselves.
We shouldn’t have taken a lift. Lesson learned for next time.

Russ
 
rascal said:
We had a fire alarm go off at midnight while staying at the moathouse in Kensington London about 20 years ago, we got in the lift and went down, all staff were outside, apparently it was every man for themselves.
We shouldn’t have taken a lift. Lesson learned for next time.

Russ
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Funny thing, now that you mention it, I have had to evacuate a hotel two times in my life, and both of them were in the UK. One was at a very posh, 600 year old manor house hotel in Stratford. I don't recall where the other one was. The one in Stratford was a chimney fire. The other one was a false alarm, probably a prank.

CD
 
rascal said:
we got in the lift and went down, all staff were outside, apparently it was every man for themselves.
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its a problem when you are in a wheelchair. I have had that happen to us. they wouldn't let us use the lift at first... in the end the fire brigade intervened. even if I could have walked I would not have managed that number of staircases... hubby refused full stop to leave me. there was no obvious fire or smoke (my asthma is better than most smoke detectors as detecting smoke!).
 
It's warm and muggy. we went to bed with it being 17°C outside, woke after thunderstorm had rattled around for hours to 15°C . It's 19°C outside now despite heavy cloud. It's due to rain heavily today but hasn't yet. I'm at a loose end... hubby's working (as in work, work) and I've done what I intended to do today (make 3 different vegan cheeses for Christmas ). I'm going to make a lemon polenta cake tomorrow.... that way I have a small something I can eat in hospital but it must wait until tomorrow because that way there will be some left to take to hospital with me. Luckily it needs to mature for 24hrs so...

So I'm bored. I know I could be doing all sorts including work on CB but I really don't feel like doing anything and I've done all of the gardening I could possibly do. Everything that needed planting has been planted. The veg plot has been dug over and planted out fully. The new border has been dug, plants dug up, divided, replanted, rescued, and even a wood border constructed to remind the grass where the lawn ends and the border starts.

I've sewn 5 types of potatoes, broad beans, Climbing red beans, runner beans, peas, New Zealand Yams, artichokes, tomatoes (2 lots), basil, coriander, aubergine, Okra, Orach (don't ask), sorrell, cabbage, beetroot, leeks, carrots, and so much more I can't remember. Raspberries have been transplanted, Strawberries divided, Red currants planted, parsley, thyme, rosemary, dill, winter savoury, and more thinned, moved or just given more space. the passion fruit relocated, the garlic weeded, then there's a few regional bushtucker leaves and some bushes for edible white berries. Then the Fruit trees have been cut back, topped off to restrict height and make it easier to put netting over them later in the season. and finally various areas have had flowers planted as well! And the lemon 🍋 tree 🌳 has been tamed... Did I include the fig trees? the rhubarb? the 4 olive trees? The apricot tree? And yes, It has taken weeks and weeks... and I'm sure I've missed things... Ah the grape vine...

Yep, all so I can be ready to go into hospital and now i'm almost there, I'm bored! I don't want to start another knitting project but will, but I also need to wind up several skeins of yarn... That's what I can do... Yepee I've found something to do...
 
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