Always makes my heart sink when Herself makes me take her there. I sometimes think she's trying to kill me.
Yesterday was even worse than usual. She wanted garden manure which comes in slab-like plastic sacks. There are blokes and trolleys but you can reverse up to the stacks of substances and lift the sacks into the boot of your car. Didn't want the faff of waiting for a bloke and I'm a geezer, right? She wanted three - THREE! - of the malodorous slabs which weighed 50 kilos each I would think. They felt like hundredweights, no kidding.
It was easy at this end: one could slide them out into the wheelbarrow. I did it for her. she spent a lot of the afternoon putting piles of it round her many rose bushes and going round watering them.
Seems unfair that I'm the one with the aches and pains when she's the Stakhanovite.
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>> - of the malodorous slabs which weighed 50 kilos each I would think.
Man-up AC - more likely to be 50 litre bags, and <20kg each :)
(Amazon give the 'boxed-product weight' of various such items as 18kg)
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50 kilos is the weight of a bag of coal.
50 Kilos of dried manure would be very bulky - you would need a small van at least to hold it - it would not fit in a car and you had 3 x bags!
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>> 50 kilos is the weight of a bag of coal.
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The weight of an old bag of coal - the long open-topped ones that grimey coal men would hump down off an open lorry and plod up the drive with and tip into the coal bunker.
Modern bags that you buy at garages are much smaller.
"Bags" of things have got much smaller. A bag of cement is only half the size of the old kind.
H&S I suppose.
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Currently coalman delivers to me 10-12 bags each of 50Kgs (~110lbs which is 2lbs less than 1 cwt) Each bag of anthracite is £15.00 which is not cheap!
Advantages over other boilers - no maintenance other than a fan, 30+ years service. 5 mins per day to fill/empty so not really a bother.
My neighbours upgraded to gas 2 years after me but that was not an option when I bought my coal burner. Some of my gas boiler neighbours are on their 3rd gas boiler.
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>>Stakhanovite
:o}
You're lucky you didn't end up on the hernia thread Sire ... or in a ICU.
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Stuff seems to come in bags of 25kg or less now, still heavy enough when you have to lean into a car boot with it.
I thought when I saw "garden centre" that you were going to tell us you had been inculcated into one of the pastimes of the retired, a visit to the garden centre caff.
The boss comes home regularly from the farm shop with the springs sagging under the weight of 3 or 4 80 kilo bags of compost that I have to unload. How the garden has managed to take so many without raising the ground level past the windows is a mystery.
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I'm grateful to everyone for giving me the benefit of their expertise, and flattered of course by those who imagine I can't tell the difference between a hundredweight and fifty pounds. Alas though chaps, I have been a son of toil in my time, and the body has a long memory.
If anyone is still interested, I dug one of the bags out of the garbage and checked. They contained 50 litres of Scheiss, so top marks to that man. But it wasn't dry stuff, it was soaking wet. A litre of water weighs a kilo. Those slab-like bags weighed 50 kilos near enough.
There are bags of other stuff - potting compost for example - which are smaller and weigh less.
Yah boo sucks to those who think I can't tell the difference.
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>> Yah boo sucks to those who think I can't tell the difference.
Accepted :)
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And by the way, the aches and pains have already gone. So perhaps having a hard taskmistress is in my best interests.
I won't stop complaining though.
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>> Yah boo sucks to those who think I can't tell the difference.
Sorry. The 25kg feel like a cwt to me, maybe you're fitter than you think.
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The question of heavy everyday objects occurred to me this morning. I woke up too early and couldn't get comfortable to go back to sleep. Instead I amused myself wondering what our mattress weighs. It's 2m x 1.8m and about 0.2m thick, pocket sprung and packed with cow (?) hair and wool. It's quite a piece of work, and what I do know is that it's all two of us can do to flip it over every other month.
If it was full of water it would weigh over 700kg. It isn't, and there must be a fair amount of air in there, but I reckon it could be 200-250kg but I have nothing to weigh it on - and would struggle to get the thing on to any instrument I did have.
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>> Instead I amused myself wondering what our mattress weighs...
>> It's quite a piece of work, and what I do know is that it's all two of us can do to flip it over every other month.
>> If it was full of water it would weigh over 700kg. It isn't, and there must be a fair amount of air in there,
>> but I reckon it could be 200-250kg but I have nothing to weigh it on
I spent a little while delivering beds and mattresses a handful of years back. All the mattresses were wrapped and labelled; the heaviest Queen-size ones were about 85kg, King-size more like 65kg.
I was shown how to lift one onto my shoulder so I could carry it from the lorry to the front door of the house on my own. Quite impressive to watch, less so to execute.
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>> 25kg feel like a cwt to me, maybe you're fitter than you think.
I must be. So far so good.
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"Stuff seems to come in bags of 25kg or less now, still heavy enough when you have to lean into a car boot with it."
I made the mistake of putting some big bags of either compost or bark chippings in to a supermarket type trolley at B&Q. Sliding them off the pile into the trolley was easy, but trying to lift them out of it back at the car was rather more difficult.
Last edited by: Skip on Thu 19 Mar 15 at 18:03
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Tsk...come and live in the country...our nearby garden centre would have delivered that !
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>> Tsk...come and live in the country...our nearby garden centre would have delivered that !
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As you own a Volvo they probably assume that you are too old to be able to lift them yourself :-)
Last edited by: Skip on Thu 19 Mar 15 at 18:22
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:-)....it's a very quick one though !
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I don't need to go the garden centre, I just need to shovel the winters worth of dog mud out the back.
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Everyone delivers round here too, Garden Centre included I think. But not always as soon as you want, and that was the case with us.
There's a colossal pile of peaty earth stuff round the corner in the carpark that must have filled a tipper truck. The gardening women and their helpers have taken a lot away but it's still enormous. Stone, chalk, crushed concrete and bricks in another pile for the potholes in the drive which get worse and worse. All we need is a roller, a whacker and three brawny chaps with shovels for a couple of days to make all a-tanto. The cost of all that is too rich for my blood.
Give us baksheesh, Effendi! We are hungry and roofless! (no, not greedy and ruthless Dog).
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>>We are hungry and roofless! (no, not greedy and ruthless Dog).
I watched the King of Africa last night but I can't think right now of a word worse-than evil to describe Mad Dog.
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>> I watched the King of Africa last night but I can't think right now of a word worse-than evil to describe Mad Dog.
Charming little turd wasn't he? Must have seemed pretty evil to those under the lash, hung up by their balls and so on.
You have to take the place and time into account though. A lot of that stuff seemed pretty normal to those who lived in those parts. Not really evil in my book, like Saddam and some of these Islamist beardies... aged 29 when projected as front man in an officers' coup against the then monarchy, and then having the sense or advice to eliminate potential rivals for top slot. More an ignorant country boy learning on the job, quite original to start with but going increasingly with the regional and global flow. Nothing like that for turning innocent young colonels into evil monsters.
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Build your own compost heap. Works for me. 400 litres a year. But you do need to be retired to have the time to look after it. And a shredder (mine came from freecycle) helps.
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>>Not really evil in my book
>>Nothing like that for turning innocent young colonels into evil monsters.
He was quite dashing as a young man, but he looked evil in his last years on earth.
As a commentator said, he was spiritually dead - he had no soul.
Many of the things he did, or ordered others to do, was totally evil in my book, but I suppose he was no better or worse than many other dictators such as Mugabe, Hussein, Assad ... Blair ;)
I'd love to hear Gaddafi's side of the story though.
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Garden Centre - Focusless
