What makes you grin? Antidote to grumpy thread

[NorfolkNWeigh]

Look at this!

Alf Roberts had a Mazda 929, how cool is that?

[DodgeRover]

  On 18/04/2018 at 13:43, SierraMikeHotel said:

Thank you! It's a scary sum, but after so many years renting it feels good to be paying something towards my future rather than the landlord's.

 

I'm 38, which is late for a first-time buyer, so I'm very keen to put as much as possible into it so that I've got a chance of retiring at a sensible age. Definitely planning to overpay as much as we can while we're relatively young and both working full-time.

I don't know if it's possible here in the uk but when I worked for Westpac Trust you used to be able to treat your mortgage a bit like a current account, have your salary(s) paid direct to the mortgage account, live off your credit card for the month before paying the card off from the mortgage account, you obviously need cast iron discipline with spending but it made a huge difference to repayment times. As long as you spend less than you earn minus the minimum repayment all is good.

 

Anyway congratulations on your first home! I hope you will be very happy.

[SierraMikeHotel]

It's bad enough here, but London prices are just insane. Sister-in-law and her fiancé are buying their first place, somewhere near Brixton, and they're limited to part-buy, part-rent schemes - and really poky places even then. They're younger than us but I don't see how they'll ever manage to own a place in its entirety if they want to stay in London.

[PhilA]

Parents have flown in to visit. Yesterday mother gets a mosquito bite on her leg; last night she panics and shows me her foot has gone all red.

 

I suck my breath in through my teeth and tell her she's caught a terrible affliction she'd never get back in the UK.

 

Colloquially, here we call it "sunburn"...

 

 

Phil

[vulgalour]

Sunburn?  What on earth causes that?  Sounds terrible.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

  On 18/04/2018 at 14:10, Datsuncog said:

^^^ Well, exactly! We found our mortgage payments to be less than what we'd been paying in rent, so put the difference in, then upped it once Mrs DC found permanent employment... it's making a brave difference, much as we'd like to have the cash here and now!....

 

Remember: once paid off and the mortgage redeemed, a rosy future of pure autoshite begins!

[Datsuncog]

^^^ That's very much the plan!

[meggersdog]

  On 17/04/2018 at 18:28, meggersdog said:

My old Mercedes coupe often gets compliments about how nice it looks.The same car some dickhead at ACA couldn't understand why anybody would buy a 28 year old car with 200k on the clock. Anyway, today a customer , bloke in his forties, said " that old Merc looks proper gangster" just made me smile.

 the car spent today as background fodder for a skillshack video . (practical classics webcast/podcast)

[Aston Martin]

  On 01/04/2018 at 16:07, Aston Martin said:

I’m watching Ozzy and Jacks world history road trip adventure tour... or whatever it’s called.

Anyway, Ozzy insists they use one of these GMC Motorhomes.

7.5L V8 and front wheel drive? This must be bastard miserable to drive. It does look fabulous mind.

It's the best show on TV.

[catsinthewelder]

The weather is making me grin. Finally managed to build some raised beds for a customer today that have been on the list for nearly 6 months but endlessly put off due to soggy ground. Think I might have a bit of sunburn though.

[Eddie Honda]

  On 18/04/2018 at 14:12, NorfolkNWeigh said:

Look at this!

Alf Roberts had a Mazda 929, how cool is that?

I only remember the MG he had.

[Ghosty]

Mum's gone to London until Monday for her sister's birthday.

 

It's a grin because it's the first time she's left me and my dad alone in fucking years, the break from having to deal with her mental health and digestive issues is more than welcome as it puts a massive strain on me and my dad, as there's barely anything she can do for herself, through a combination of lower back issues and compulsions meaning she refuses to user her hands properly.

She also had to let Old Man use her Cooper S - OCD wouldn't permit this up to now, but she can't get into the Prelude so he had to give her a lift to the station in it. 

 

I came along for the ride as I knew Old Man was going to give the Bini some much-needed excercise, and sure enough as soon as the mother was out of the way he proceeded to let the car do what it does best

[Keymaster]

  On 18/04/2018 at 14:16, DodgeRover said:

I don't know if it's possible here in the uk but when I worked for Westpac Trust you used to be able to treat your mortgage a bit like a current account, have your salary(s) paid direct to the mortgage account, live off your credit card for the month before paying the card off from the mortgage account, you obviously need cast iron discipline with spending but it made a huge difference to repayment times. As long as you spend less than you earn minus the minimum repayment all is good.

 

Anyway congratulations on your first home! I hope you will be very happy.

Yeah, they are available, known as offset mortgages. The most well known one is the one account, but there are loads of options. Paid my house off in 7 years instead of 25 and along the way saved tens of thousands in interest.

 

Youre right about needing to be disciplined to make it work, you effectively have a massive overdraft facility secured against your house, which gives you a lot of spending power.

[The Moog]

Or just move to Accrington - £40k for house and 5 year mortgage. 

[Guest Hooli]

Yeah but you have to live in Accrington.....

 

 

 

Mind you I'd have to be paid (a hell of a lot) to live in London too.

[wuvvum]

On the run home from work in the 45 this evening I was sat behind a modern convertible Maserati thing.  For the first part of the journey we were stuck behind some dithering old coot in a Mondeo, but when he finally turned off and the road went back to NSL the Maserati owner started to drive a little* more enthusiastically.  And fark me did it sound nice for a modern.  I had my windows down, and even over the bellow of a redlining L-series I could hear the snarl of his exhausts and the popping and crackling on the overrun quite clearly.  I thought exhaust notes like that had been sanitised out of existence - evidently I were wrong.

[Jams]

What makes me grin?

 

Sunshine!!!!!!!

[DodgeRover]

I got overtaken by a modern mustang with 'loud' exhausts on, no idea what they were supposed to be like but it sounded awful, I was really tempted to ask if it was the 2.3 Ecoboost to piss the guy off but he had his window up in the queue.

[wuvvum]

You may have seen it already, but someone at work showed this to me today and I honestly laughed until I had tears in my eyes.  Genuinely the funniest thing I've seen so far this year (deceased moggy aside obvs).

 

[Wack]

  On 18/04/2018 at 20:05, Hooli said:

Yeah but you have to live in Accrington.....

 

 

 

Mind you I'd have to be paid (a hell of a lot) to live in London too.

What's the attraction , living in London I mean , people who live there rave about it , until they leave and realise how shit it really is , dirty, cramped, expensive , impossible to travel across , nobody speaks until they leave then you can't shut them up.

 

Every time I've been to London I'm fucking glad when the train door closes on the trip home , and that 1500 people stood watching the platform boards at Euston waiting for the announcement then legging it to try and get a seat , no thanks

 

53 murders so far this year I heard today and we're not 4 months in yet

[Guest Hooli]

I have no idea what the attraction is, after all the quality of life anywhere is directly proportional to the lack of people there which is mathematical proof London is a shithole.

[Wack]

..

[Tadhg Tiogar]

  On 18/04/2018 at 21:40, Wack said:

.... 53 murders so far this year I heard today and we're not 4 months in yet

A lot of them teenagers.

 

Stabbed by other teenagers.

[STUNO]

Two things.

I am an old giffer, my car has no dents other than those supplied by doorflingers in the supermarket car park. There is no badly oversprayed repair anywhere on MY car. I do not habitually use other cars and road furniture to slow me down at intersections. I have been recently stopped for speeding. 

These "old Giffer" things make me grumpy. 

My first house. 

Purchased when inflation here was at runaway levels. the interest rate was around 17%. 

In the next few years that was stopped and the interest rate dropped slowly to around 5%

I did not reduce the payments so huge grin which overrides any grump 

[AMC Rebel]

.

[DodgeRover]

  On 18/04/2018 at 22:14, AMC Rebel said:

On the way home from my sister’s saw a bloke riding a motorbike and sidecar outfit - kid in the sidecar. I thought I had slipped through a hole in the space time continuum back to my childhood.

It's a good job you didn't spot Bub on the trike - you might have thought you had slipped into the Mad Max alternative reality.

[Datsuncog]

You know it's nearly summer when Tesco drops its unsold Christmas stock to 50p, just to get it out of the bloody store.

 

 

I don't even particularly like these things, which remind me of the compressed contents of a Ped Egg coated in fibreboard, but come on... 50p.

[LightBulbFun]

big fuck off ballast arrived   (has the same density as a black hole...)

 

 

so I can now light up my big fuck off LightBulb 

 

 

the picture does not do it justice how Bloody bright this was (and the heat it kicked off) the Lamp is a US Spec Philips 1000W metal halide lamp used in such places like US sports stadiums.

 

I actually have a second 1Kw ballast on its way which I can put in parallel with my 1st 1Kw ballast which will enable me to be able to light up my even brighter big lightbulb which is my 2000W European sports stadium lamp.   I might end up blowing a few 13A fuses....

[Pillock]

I guess if you've always lived in London, grown up in London and have mates in London, then London is OK.

Those thousands of people on Euston station, well firstly they don't know about realtimetrains website that tells you which platform to be on long before the boards to.... secondly, they're at Euston - they don't live in London! They're trying to have the best of both worlds which is to live as far out of London as possible for cheaper housing, but work in London for more money. That way madness lies, you end up with every day leaving the house at 6am and getting back in at 8pm.

 

Whenever I've worked in London, the only downside has always been having to get home instead of just going to a pub after work. I really like the place and I'm sure there's bad bits I wouldn't want to live in, but there's also really nice areas. And lots of pubs. 

[dollywobbler]

And ten million people live there. That'd a lot, and not that many get stabbed in percentage terms. The whole of Wales had three million people. I much prefer that, but I always enjoy my (admittedly brief) visits to London.