#snowploughs

[feigeroman]

Saturday Movie Night: Snowdrift At Bleath Gill (1955)

On February 24th 1955, while hauling a goods train between Bishop Auckland and Kirkby Stephen, BR Standard 2 #78018 found herself stuck in heavy drifts of snow just below Stainmore Summit. Engines with snowploughs were dispatched to dig her out, but the snow turned out to be so bad that they found themselves stuck. So began five arduous days and nights of digging, ploughing and thawing - compressed for our benefit into just ten minutes, in what has become one of BTF's most iconic productions

[icedsodapop]

[scavengedluxury]

BHÉV snowplough, Cinkota depot, 1932. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[lomotunes2008]

Someone's grumpy

[putuponpercy]

I bet Thomas has successfully managed to convince Cranky to yeet his snowplough into the ocean at least once

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[mysharona1987]

But this headline reads like Jeremy Renner regrets saving his nephew in sad snowplough accident.

Which is not true. It’s the opposite.

But that poor nephew.

His villain origin story.

[shadowsandstarlight]

Local man with chronic pain has just shovelled snow off of entire very large back deck solo. Whole thing was covered in 6 inches to a FOOT of snow. I love Canada. This all showed up literally overnight, by the way, the deck was completely snow-free before yesterday afternoon.

[shyyysstuff]

:/

[misforgotten2]

“Let it snow, let it snow, let it-- **bbrrrrzzzttt** Whoa! I sure hope that wasn’t another cat.”

Our Wonderful World   1969, 1961, 1960, 1959, 1951    

[lizalfosrise]

Oh I’m gonna have to be so so brave when WhatTheF.. drops ughhh

[what-the-fuck-khr]

bro Jeremy Renner might never walk again if he can even keep his leg jesus fucking christ. like I heard the accident when it happened but holy shit. plus blunt chest trauma and is still in ICU…

[hiddenworldofmary]

it is monday and i bought the face cream and for now i do feel a tiny bit better

thought of a friend and cried a little, grief filled days begin again and will last for a while, i might buy a round lab face cream on monday to cope

[hedgehog-moss]

A post about Pirlouit’s debut as a noble steed! (Part II)

Our destination for this first trip on donkeyback was the nearest farm on the plateau (+ the three houses which together with it form a small isolated hamlet), to say happy new year to these neighbours. It’s not very far when I go with Pandolf because we take a shortcut through the forest and then straight across the plateau (patchworked with small pastures), slipping under every fence. But my donkey is too dignified to crawl under fences, so we had to take the road, which is a longer but also very nice itinerary. There are maybe 3 cars per day on average, but it’s a snowplough-forsaken road so in winter it’s basically zero (except the postwoman).

I wasn’t riding him at first because he didn’t want me to—I tried and he instantly stopped and turned back towards his pasture. I think he was a bit nervous about being on the road, and preferred to follow another animal. I was saying in the previous post that I started riding him in the past year, but as I don’t have a bridle for him and he’s terrified of riding crops (or any sticks), it’s hard to make him do things he doesn’t want to do (I suspect it would be hard anyway).

So my strategy has been to treat him less like a car and more like a bus—i.e. I hop on when he’s going somewhere I also want to go. My first attempts to do so were when we were at one end of his pasture and he saw the llamas at the other end looking interested in something (food?? visitor?) and wanted to check it out too (visitor = scary, but could be bringing food. Worth having a closer look.) At first Pirou was like uhhhh no and just stopped walking when he realised he had a hitchhiker on his back, but after a while he started tolerating me for these short trips across the pasture.

Step 2 was taking him on a walk (by foot) in the woods behind my house, letting him eat brambles and clean up the place along the way, and when he started showing signs of wanting to return to his pasture I’d climb on his back like “don’t mind me, live your life!” and he would grudgingly resume walking like okay, since you’re not making me do anything you can stay.

Then I started tying his rope to the side buckles of his halter so I could tug his head left or right (+ encouraging leg squeezes) and make gentle itinerary suggestions. When he was in the mood for it we could do little slaloms around trees; when he wasn’t (if it was too close to dinner time) he’d just ignore me and dash straight ahead so the llamas wouldn’t eat all the hay. (I’ve tried to explain to him that there will be no hay if I’m not here to give it, and his FOMO is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of my role in his life, but to no avail.)

He still very much interprets my tugs on the ‘reins’ and hip- or leg-based indications re: direction and pace as humble opinions from his rider that he has the power to veto since he’s the one walking after all, and I think that’s fair. It wasn’t a problem for our trip to the farm because there’s just one road to go there, all you have to do is follow it without any directional fine-tuning. After a while walking on that perfectly quiet road without coming across a single car, Pirlouit started looking more confident and I tried to hop on his back again, and this time he was like pfff okay, and kept walking :) But from then on he viewed himself as the de facto leader of our trip. His first executive decision was to walk on the side of the road, where there’s grass under the snow, rather than on the snowy asphalt—I think he worried about hidden patches of ice.

Sometimes he’d stop for a few minutes to contemplate the horizon and think about life. I figured he’d walk faster and maybe even trot once we were on our way back and dinnertime was approaching, so I didn’t mind the leisurely pace.

At one point he wandered off the road and I dismounted to lead him back in the right direction, but then realised he’d heard water sounds and had decided to stop for a drink in this rivulet. I was like “there’s a communal water trough at the hamlet but you don’t know that, so, okay.” But when we got there, the trough turned out to be frozen so Pirlouit was right to play it safe!

He also stopped every so often for a snack, I assume following the same approach of “better safe than sorry, I might never find food again.” I had a book in my coat pocket so I would read a few paragraphs while he ate. He always picked the thorniest bushes and prickliest brambles he could find. I ended up getting the feeling he was showing off a bit—maybe donkeys dare each other to eat thorny bushes the way humans do with spicy food.

I dismounted again to take a picture here because this rare, straight portion of the winding road really made me wish I had a sleigh! Imagine Pirlouit all festooned with bells too, he would hate it <3

As we found the first pasture that belongs to my farmer neighbour, Pirlouit stopped, looking mesmerised. Maybe it smelled good? He stood there for a bit like “Look! A mountain of hay bales! This road led to donkey heaven and I had no idea”

When we reached civilisation (i.e. 3 houses) I dismounted for good as Pirlouit got very hesitant. He’d forgotten the existence of houses that aren’t ours.

He was also a bit terrified by the concept of chickens that aren’t ours. He refused to take a single more step in the direction of Unknown Chickens so I ended up backtracking and tying him to a post next to a suitably thorny bush, before going on my social visits.

I used to know the farmer on the plateau because Pampe eloped to his farm a lot when she was a kid, but then he retired and sold his farm to a young couple, and I kept thinking, “Well I’ll meet them next time Pampe escapes” but she never escaped that far again! So I finally met the new neighbour (I only met the guy, his wife wasn’t here) six months after he arrived, and I explained my llama-based reason for not visiting sooner, and he basically said “yeah I’ve heard about your llama menace. I’ll be happy to meet her if she ever feels like hiking all the way to my farm again!” He was very nice. I also went to wish a happy new year to the other neighbours but only one of them was home. I left my New Year card featuring baby Poldine at the other two houses—I placed one of them in a garden gnome’s hands which made me feel like an Austen character paying calls and leaving calling cards to the servant.

Pirlouit was quiet and patient at first, but then he finished eating his shrub (I assume) and started braying indignantly. Clearly I had left him here to die of exposure while I feasted inside a warm house and it was getting late and he was going to miss hay o’clock and he was the loneliest saddest hungriest donkey in the whole world and oh, you’re here! (stops mid-bray)

He was very eager to go home before the llamas ate all the hay (again—without me there’s no—oh, never mind) and didn’t even stop to grumble when I climbed on his back again, he was like fine whatever but HURRY!, and walked at record speed on the way back. But didn’t trot, because icy ground.

He didn’t stop to contemplate the horizon and his place in the universe this time around, but I still managed to capture some lovely pink and gold skies here and there :) (and the fires of Mordor after the sun disappeared for good) (and then it got really cold and Pirou & I were united in our haste to get home.)

[checkoutmybookshelf]

You Have My Attention: Discworld's Death Books' First Lines

The wonderful Sir Terry Pratchett needs no introduction. Introductions do help with books, though, so let's see how the five Death books catch their readers from their very first lines.

This is the bright candlelit room where the lifetimes are stored - shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person. pouring their fine sand from the future into the past. The accumulated hiss of the falling grains makes the room roar like the sea. This is the owner of the room, stalking though it with a preoccupied air. His name is Death.

-- Mort

The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse. It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it's springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. The imperative is felt by deep-sea being who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycle of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep.

-- Reaper Man

Where to finish? A dark, stormy night. A coach, horses gone, plunging through the rickety, useless fence and dropping, tumbling into the gorge below. It doesn't even strike an outcrop of rock before it hits the dried riverbed far below, and erupts into fragments.

-- Soul Music

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of the words. Yet there is the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, ravelling nets of spacetime on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate that here, here, is the point where it all began...

-- Hogfather

According to the First Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he had received enlightenment and into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life. He stared at the rising sun for some time, because he had never seen it before.

-- Thief of Time

[katzenprinz]

More Say Nothing extras!!

This time a rundown of our beloved team’s callsigns.

So, for Salim and Jason, we address theirs and explain them in the fic. We chose Buffy for Salim for obvious reasons and Sweet Tea for Jason because it’s such a Southern American staple. (And delicious!)

We explained Nick being Sommersault in the fic, too. The way he dives into that roll to pick up Joey in the firefight, that man has absolutely pulled moves like that before.

Now, for the Goslings~

Palmer is “Casper” because he sees ghosts. Even though he stated in the fic that most ghosts are angry, if not outright malicious, and Casper is a friendly ghost, it just fit. Palmer has definitely been the most friendly of the Goslings toward Salim, after all, due to him admiring Salim a lot.

Elliott is “Broadway” since he loves his showtunes. We like to imagine that Rana has been subjected to Elliott softly singing through entire musicals while he helps her in the artifact room. And this boy absolutely sings in the shower. ALSO, extra fun fact: he is named after TS Eliot, who wrote the poems which were adapted into the music for CATS~

Mosson is “Dipper” because ????????? Ask Gabe.

And then there is Jones, who was dubbed “Moose” due to him being from Alaska. He probably told the Goslings about having plenty of run-ins with dangerous animals after him comment about the sling they used to airlift the vampire out for SOCOM, and the Goslings pounced on the fact that Jones has seen a lot of moose. He is also the largest member of the team, both in height and muscle.

We also gave Dr. Kim the callsign “Snowplough” because we decided that she is from a very snowy area of Colorado and really enjoys spending her time out in the winter weather.

Rana does not yet have a callsign, but she may get one in a future chapter!!