What are you drinking?

[Pachyderm]

Hot sweet tea.

Just been clambering around a survey site with our intern, hunting the wily badger by application of Bronze Age skills. (See, the trails lead to the holes. No, that is a rabbit hole. You can tell by all the bunny footprints, copious piles of rabbit crap and the fact that the hole is small. The badger is somewhat stockier than the rabbit. Compare to this one you just walked past, with the sodding big pile of freshly excavated earth covered in badger prints just outside it....)


He is keen as mustard, I'll freely give him that.

[Darlica]

 

Are you sure you don't need a more shall we say stronger type of sugar in your tea with an intern like that? Like rum?

Jeebus.

Me: water with ice.

[beagle]

Look at it from the intern's point of view. He probably intended to be fetching champagne for City bankers from Soho wine bars by now, but due to a cock-up on the collateralised debt front instead finds himself in the rain traipsing after Crocodile Dundee.

Still, worse thing happen to Asok in Dilbert.

[Swatopluk]

And that despite Asok's superhuman powers. The force is strong in him but he is not allowed to use it. I think he envies Alice's Fist of Death.
---

Chamomile tea. You could have guessed it, am I right?

[beagle]

In my colleague's calendar he met a nasty end piloting Dilbert's moon shuttle, only to cloned from previously stored DNA (and bits of chocolate the jar previously held).

Actually it hasn't happened yet;I've read several months ahead.

---------

Apple juice
Apparently fruit juice weakens tooth enamel by 80%, but my dentist hates me already.

[Swatopluk]

This stuff again

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/40/105855304_bccf56c286.jpg?v=0

Dilbert was also cloned by the hyperintelligent garbage man after he was shot dead by Mother Nature in an explicitly Gary Larson inspired strip.

[Pachyderm]

Green tea.

(The intern has a Master's degree, and wants to be an ecological consultant. Gawd help us all. Still, have heard some top-class bullshit from people who are consultants. Personal favourite happened a few months ago. Consultant (not for us, I hasten to add) announced he'd found a badger sett a few metres up a river bank, with slides running from the hole to the water. Cue James and I looking at each other, and quietly telling the Uni student who was following him around for her placement that it was an otter holt...)

[Swatopluk]

Carbonated mineral water after having finished 0.3 l of black and a further 0.3 l of chamomile tea.

[Pachyderm]

Cold, cold beer. And it is goood...

[Darlica]

jeebus. again...
Nature must be something very exotic to most people in the UK even the nature that's just around the corner!


Pachy if you ever consider to start a blog or a thread there about your work I would be an avid reader.

I'm drinking water from our own well at the moment, much tastier than city water!

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Iced tea with lemon

[Swatopluk]

Waiting for the first office chamomile to cool down a bit

[Earthling]

Coffee. Black, and slightly above room temperature. I wish I had some coffee beans to munch for a caffeine source instead of this crap.

Pachy, I'll trade you one of my consultants for your guy. I inspected a ... *ahem* ... "road" ... Tuesday. Background - oy, this may go on for a bit. I received an application for a subdivision permit about a year and a half ago. The application is an inch or so thick, about normal for a five-lot Level II subdivision. The first part of the application is supposed to show that the applicant has sufficient RTI - Right, Title or Interest - to undertake the development, i.e., that he legally owns a legally created piece of real estate. There are a bunch of rules about how you can legally create a new lot without permit review, and the consultant's interpretation was that this guy's lot was OK. FAIL #1. The information they provided showed four illegal land divisions, and minimal research on my part turned up a fifth. The intervening 18 months or so has been spent resolving these illegal divisions, to the pointr where last month we (my agency) decided that we were willing to consider the applicant's lot to be legally created and properly owned. So now it becomes appropriate for me to invest my time in reviewing the rest of the application package. I find the section about the proposed road, and the consultant has cited a section of Chapter 15 of our rules to show that the road is exempt from permit review. This is a residential subdivision. Chapter 15 is specifically and exclusively for land management roads - logging roads. Facepalm. I look at the plan, figuring that we might be able to consider it to be a residential driveway with potential to upgrade to a subdivision road. The plan clearly shows a 10% slope. Driveways are allowed without a permit up to 8% slope. Violation no matter how you slice it. I visit the site. It's more like 15%. It crosses a high energy stream, 6 feet wide and at least 1 foot deep. Culvert requirements would be XC area=min3X average XC area of the stream, or 18 sq. ft. They used a 12" culvert. The road ditches are a straight shot for 420 feet, right into the stream. The culvert is hanging by 4 feet on the downstream side, completely unprotected. The side slopes on the road are about 1:3, max allowable is 2:1. Travel surface is 12 to 14 feet, for a road with that much slope accessing 5 or more lots I would require at least 22 feet. The road itself is cut int the ground, interrupting the groundwater table for its whole length. We would probably have required them to build across the hillside rather than straight up it, and to build the road on top of the pre-existing ground surface rather than cutting it in. It's probably going to take another year to get the road fixed, and then I'll be ready to look at the next section of the application. This particular consultant has been around for decades. I have yet to see anything from them that has been corect the first time. Last year I had a different subdivision application from them. I had a meeting with the person from the consultant firm that was working on it, attempting to get the plan (never mind the rest of the package) up to snuff. It took me 45 minutes just to tell him what was wrong with it. We have on our website a document that very specifically describes what is required. I had sent it to him long before he sent me the plan. I brought it to the meeting. He had gotten about three out of twenty things done. Gawd, I hate it when imbeciles get paid for screwing up.

Rant ends. Thanks for listening.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Gee! Are you sure this 'consultant' didn't have other intere$t$?
--
a sip of water until lunch is ready.

[Pachyderm]

Ah, Intern isn't too bad. Just a city boy. And while there is nothing wrong with that, it amazes me that people have no interest in the world around them. Still, I have no doubt that the "Dear God, what is that? Is that nature? What does it do? Reproduces, you say? And how does that work?" crowd are equally confused about me.

Ginger beer, with alcohol.