Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Lindy's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, November 1st, 2009
8:48 pm	Philosophied out I have been studying the ontological argument for the existence of God for the purposes of teaching, and it still does my head in. A swash of different arguments, all bonkers, and it is really hard to put the exact finger on why. The religious types who write the textbooks are easily convinced that Anselm, Descartes, Malcolm, were unassailable, even if they admit that it is not satisfactory apparently proving that God must exist according to logic. (Or in the case of the wretched Malcolm apparently proving that God either must necessarily exist or necessarily not exist.) I on the other hand, am pretty convinced by all the arguments against Anselm, and cannot quite grasp how God could have this privileged position, of existing because if He didn't He just wouldn't be God, would He.(And, would He be the God you were thinking of?) Thats philosophy for you. I really enjoyed my two years studying it. And I still miss the friends I made then. Which makes it much easier to slog through this stuff. But the ontological argument really is the basement. Sorry, St Anselm, but I'm with Gaunilo and Kant. Current Mood: sleepy (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
8:34 am	Lovely church but I'm not sure about God Three of us went to a nice relaxed harvest supper at the local church last night. Home-cooked food and a quiz. My YS likes to be at the church, there are children at a wide range of ages he can hang with. We share part of a vicar with a larger, central parish in the town, and he was there for the occasion. He asked me if YS would like to be confirmed (into the church), and we had to say, oh, well maybe, but we aren't. End of subject, vicar no doubt confused. I think the Church of England can be brilliant and really strengthen the local community. But I can't agree with all of it and I like its welcome to outsiders like me (it is my tradition, I am just not on board for a lot of the details), and I know why he had to ask. I wish I had marshalled my 'I'm your local atheist' line, but I didn't, I hadn't thought about it. Too much else to think about, unfortunately. The rest of the evening was fine, anyway, some laughs, and they didn't boot us out. Current Mood: lethargic (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
5:48 pm	Still too much ... ... but it looks like I might have fixed up an interesting work experience week for youngest. And my philosophy teaching opportunity got cancelled this week, so I can concentrate on my Contextual Studies (thats art history) presentation for next week. Only the cottage we were going to borrow has got co-opted because the owner forgot I had booked it, and I forgot to remind her, so we are scratching around for replacement holiday. I really like/need to get away, and I also like/need to get the kids out of the house and away from computer screens into fresh air and the real world. For a little time. Now, I need a shed, a bathroom, new curtains, to do some painting, photography, sort out the maths class at the univ, oh heck ..... (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
6:15 pm	October at last September is always a sudden onslaught, just when I think I stand a chance of getting on top of things, and have got quite relaxed, it is like a tsunami. This year much as usual. The kids back at school, various things to be sorted out, my partner back at work, tension racked up, computers in use whenever he is in the house, me back at college, back being a school governor (but maybe not much longer), hospital appointments piling in. It should not be so hard. Surely? I suppose the worst thing is being back in the family that doesn't talk, being the only person in the house who wants to chat, whose best friend is not the computer. I gradually lose the ability to communicate and start going mad. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
5:32 pm	The Lowest Tide I've left a long gap as I often do. Why? I'm not sure. It is hard to communicate when I get out of the habit, and sometimes I am just being lazy (or kindly interpreted: tired and stressed). I have been away from home a lot and I try to give the boys some attention in the holidays, to do what I meant to do as a stay at home mum. OS has got so huge and grown up, he mostly doesn't need me, at least not overtly, but it is nice hanging with YS and he has been a more cheerful bunny recently. Me too, I have cheered up quite a lot since a low at the end of June. It has not been a good dry summer in the UK (heavy rain is lashing the window as I write), but I have been lucky, most of my trips away from home have had some hot sunny weather. The sea scout camping week nearly drowned us all in mud, but they also had some good sailing and canoeing and so did I. My week in Argyll was mixed, several days were hot and I swam in an amazingly cold sea. Then the sunny south west was sunny as it should be, and we went to the favourite bay of my childhood three times to exploit the very low tides. (There is a radio play 'The Highest Tide' that they repeated this summer on Radio 4, I love that play, its about the coast of the North West USA, and it is very simple and not deep. But rewarding.) I went to a stony beach I have not been to for probably 44 years. That was a very weird thing. Particularly strange was that I misremembered most of the remote part of the long distant walk with my sisters. The past is a foreign country, and it seemed then that so many things would not change, that are in the process of changing. But then I go back to a place that has not changed, and it seems so different! Der. One simple reason for it seeming different is that my sisters and I walked out, those decades ago, as the tide fell, and I remember the new scenery, so near to my regular haunts and kind of like yet different. But what I remember so vividly was that particular day. When I walked round the headland with R, the tide was low, it was doing a trick of going right out and staying low for hours. I remembered a rocky ledge and an inlet full of kelp and seawater next to it. I found a very broad rocky ledge, no inlet, no kelp, the tide out exposing ridges of rock. The geometry was wrong, I had altered it subtly in my memory. And round the next small headland I had no strong memory of the place, the shore must have been fairly covered. Uncovered, there was big ridge after big ridge, and in a middle place, several ridges with many ammonites eroding out of the shale. A magical place where I remembered a featureless shore. We didn't walk as far as I had walked before. That day in the past, we had continued until rocks the size of SUVs impeded our progress (I have a photo of J and L perched on one of them), and returned,obviously not noticing how the shore looked at low tide. This summer, I had left my boys behind, and wanted to get back and not exhaust myself climbing over the rock fields on the way back (smaller than SUVs but still demanding). Also I was watching the tide. It did stay out for hours and my calculations from previous days were right, but it was kind of unnerving when it had been out for so long and shifted in and out around its low points. Good memories to take into the autumn. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
8:13 pm	Vegetating I had ideas about being productive after finishing my college course - we put everything out to be evaluated last Monday. But I have been really tired, from the last minute rushing, from the financial worries about my Mum and pressure of trying to sort out things in her house which is being sold, and I have kind of wound down and down and finally let myself be pretty lazy these last few days. The house sale, which was being done in a rush for the buyer, has now fallen through. (I told my son, OS, thatd it had fallen through, and he said 'fallen through' thoughtfully. He has a bit of trouble with odd phrases like that, but I hadn't even thought it was odd until I started to say it to him. He knew what I meant.) So I am even off the hook for driving down to pick up eleven boxes of my stuff that my sister and cousin found, and a last goodbye to the house and the bridge. I still have to do those things. But there is more time. More worries for us about finding a buyer (which is such a pain when you really really don't want anyone else to have it ....). I am typing this on my new netbook, an Eeepc, seems to work all right. The computer manager (OK, my partner) has faffed around with it for hours and it is running under Fedora 11, which maybe I will get the hang of one day. I'd be even worse with Windows. I get so frustrated though. I can't drag and drop in all the situations I want to, have to learn new ways around. It seems to have a great future as a room heating device, though. Anyway, this is being done in Firefox, which works better than most of the other browsers I seem to find myself wrestling with. And still websites hang and mess me around. (Why lots of browsers? College has PCs with Windows, and Macs, home has Risc and Linux and Windows.) The weather started very misty, then brightened up, then there was a downpour, followed by a lovely sunny evening. The sun has just gone off my garden, which is heavily overgrown. I do a little when I can, today I tied up some broad beans I surprisingly remembered to plant some months ago. Slow broad beans called Bunyards Exhibition. They should taste good when they decide to produce some produce. It will be a while. Just flowers and beginning beans today. Current Mood: lazy Current Music: Birdsong, and a cooling fan (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
9:58 am	Clock We now have three antique clocks, two of which work. The first one is a mantelpiece clock of my father's, which lived in his office, and probably in his father's office before that. It has had its mechanism replaced, but it stopped working when it got knocked off a surface ages ago. The second one is an 'English Clock', which is about a foot in diameter and looks to me like it belongs high up in a railway station (but they now have very large digital ones). These are hard to find, and we bought it in a rush and (it turned out) in slightly dubious circumstances a few years ago. The third one is a grandfather clock, it was my grandmother's after it was my step-grandfather's, and has been my mother's for years. She is moving (gulp) into a residential home, and our beautiful family home is being sold. And we get the clock. You will be interested to hear that it is currently about - ooh - 20 seconds slow. My partner is a lover of machines. He has lovingly disassembled, packed up and brought the clock up north, personally in the car, assembled it and got it going and striking all in one day, and is now monitoring it closely to get it as accurate as possible. Compared of course with one of the many radio-controlled clocks and watches in the house. I was looking at it last night and wondering why I want it in the house. The house is not big, and a clock that takes up, vertically, the amount of room that a coffin needs, is a piece of furniture whose inclusion needs justifying. But it has settled in very quickly, looks as if it belongs, and its quiet, measured tick gives the living room a heartbeat. And it is that comforting to me. And perhaps to the others. I pat it every so often. Well, I have known it all my life, and it has marked out many hours for me, sometimes sleepless ones, with patient ticking and chiming. The boys like to look inside at the pendulum (the middle part that houses the pendulum is locked with a key that stays in the ivory keyhole), and my partner is found regulating it at surprisingly frequent intervals. He has got all the information off the net. Regulating it is a bit like changing gear in a car, it requires two hands and concentration. And he tells me it was built before 1800. We didn't know how we would fit it in. We knew we had to have it. So the paper recycling station in the living room has had to go (it was not very beautiful). The DVD shelves have got ditched and the video tapes (all) seem to be about to go. It is a bit awkward launching the old papers and newspapers toward a container under the stairs, and I am not sure whether to worry about the tapes, but the house is now more homely. Current Mood: determined Current Music: Radio 4 Womans Hour (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 4th, 2009
4:37 pm	Long-Distance Homework Is No Longer Lonely We attended a session at school meant to inspire parents into supporting their children through their GCSEs, and the deputy headteacher talked about lonely revision sessions. It's not like that. My sons do their homework online, or maybe not always homework, but definitely in the company of their best mates, in the form of webcam and headphones. This is nice for them, I think. I'm jealous. It's a bit restricting for me, there is another presence in our attic, an unseen but potentially censorious member of a different family. I wondered why my YS was tiptoeing round with his fingers on his lips saying 'You mustn't say that, Mummy, Rolf can hear.' Really? Oh! My homework is so-called 'research' for my art course and it is particularly lonely because the artist I am chasing up seems much overlooked, or underlooked ('overlooked' sounding sort of wrong really). R B Kitaj - anybody else had the experience of trying to track down R B Kitaj (pronounced Kitai or Kitah or something)? He's kind of elusive. And anyway I haven't fixed up to chat to my mates on the webcam and headphones, not sure it would work with my computer. And RBK (ah! initials slightly resembling my fathers - why do these things happen? - happenstance - anyway ...) himself has passed away and cannot suddenly speak to me or put a strange software-induced hat on his image. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
9:36 pm	Relaxing A day off today after submitting all my work for assessment. Went to a gallery in the big city to see some rock album artist's work, found it much more naff than the review suggested. So bought rag rug making stuff from famous craft shop, and then tromped through the Arndale Centre to find (a) a cup of coffee and (b) food for supper. Not very relaxing, really. Home in a near to rush hour crowd. Bought the Big Issue from a vendor who had been there in the cold for nine hours, mostly ignored, and wanted to whinge about this to the only person available, me. (Note if you don't know, the Big Issue is a magazine sold by destitute or homeless people to enable them to get their life together again. Its a good idea and I buy one each week to support them.) At home, another school crisis to talk through with the boys. Oh, dear. (Not our crisis, a general one.) Not a very relaxing day. But it seems I am not ready to wind down. Current Mood: cheerful (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 1st, 2009
6:07 pm	Where Was I? Three weeks ago, I went to Pembroke on art field trip. Two weeks ago, half-term holiday, down south to my mother's home. One week ago, back here for the new half-term. I've just been putting photos from the field trip into my sketch book, some of them are really nice (it was really hard work; we had all sorts of weather including rain, sun and very bracing wind; and the place was beautiful). And I want to post pictures here, and I don't know how. So excuse me, but I am going to delve around in the depths of LJ and see if I can figure it out. Current Mood: cheerful (Comment on this)
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
10:27 am	Ah, snow ...... and art It's snowing, on and off; settling enough to be exciting to the boys, they reported two centimetres. Which I translated to less than one inch and was not impressed. I remember that even my southern county home could have a foot or more of drifting snow, some winters in the last century. But, hey, it's snowing and I'm not in college today so I am going to go out and enjoy it. College is getting hi-stress again, as we come up to review week and nominally the end of the current project. As a lot of us have had flu-ey illnesses, not to mention Christmas, the current project has not had a lot of time, so it looks like we are going to be allowed more time. I don't really want it. I've discovered that (a) I can draw and could probably do a short graphic story, but that (b) I need to practise drawing more. The young students, the nineteen-year-olds, seem to be capable of cruising along not doing very much (some of them work steadily) and then going into top gear for the last week or two. I have to work steadily, I haven't got the stamina, and there are lots of distractions at home, like supermarkets and meals and ferrying children around. There are three of us in the older mature student age bracket, a few more who are late twenties. OS's best friend's mum is Jess, who is on the course with me and we stick together and encourage each other. She is a good artist, though she can't draw and life drawing sessions give her headaches. (I used to do life drawing in evening classes and I used to be on the edge of tears with it, often, but I have got better at it, though my stuff never looks stylish or cool) The other one of this around-50 age is Aline, who used to go to the same pottery classes as me. She is driving us mad, she works hard with low confidence, few ideas and high anxiety, and constantly tries to harry the tutors into telling her exactly what to do. And follows me, and now Jess, around, moaning faintly or blanking everything out. The young ones think she is hilarious. There are forty of us, so a lot of different things are appearing. I've only caught sight of a few. One girl has been painting somebody's naked back, very large and in vibrant colours. In parallel another has been working on the subject of scoliosis of the spine and has made prints of a wonky spinal column. There was a huge face being painted on a large sheet of paper up on a wall. One of the boys has been carving a nasty robot/alien face into a block of wood, he's also done a linocut and an assemblage of bits and pieces forming nearly the same face. It seems rather adolescent to me, I thought he was more mature. He wants to be a sculptor. Maybe Henry Moore started with nasty alien faces. Another perfectly pleasant boy is said, by Jess, to be casting his genitals in some plastic medium. Continuing a theme that he has been pursuing since we were encouraged to look at Man Ray's work. Quite a lot of the students are doing textiles. The brief is 'My favourite things', yuk! But one is doing 'decay' in textiles, which is more intriguing (we are allowed to mix and match projects). Another girl, who wants to be a photographer, has taken lots of photos of her sister in urban areas. We were working in the print room on Thursday and she made a photo into a dry point plate, and the print was really good, except that she hated it. One eye had gone a bit awry (scratching out the dry point designs is hard) and gave the whole scene a nasty feel, but it was a great picture. We all leaned on her not to throw it away, and our usually-out-of-the-room (or building) tutor materialised suddenly and backed us up. So with the prospect of having to have stuff to put into Photoshop, and fight with it, tomorrow, I have been trying to work harder. Not very successfully. But let it never be said I didn't do the least I could do. (Quote from Mash.) Current Mood: hopeful (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
9:17 pm	Pictures Of Street Furniture In Bad Weather I was given, by my kind and machinery-fixated partner, a nice compact camera for Christmas. I have always wanted a camera small enough to carry everywhere, and this one about fulfils the brief. I use a backpack as a handbag these days, so its easier. The camera fits in the mobile phone pocket. The mobile phone fits in the front where I keep my glasses case. I've been glad to have the camera on hand when dramatic lighting occurs. There was a fabulous morning when I walked past the school with its shiny letters all lit up reflecting a building opposite illuminated by the morning sun. It made me even later - I had been taking pictures of frost flowers on car windows, and the icy pavements had slowed me down a lot. Our tutor forgave me as soon as I mentioned photos. He teaches photography, and photos are obviously more important than anything. But what do you photograph when there is no dramatic lighting? I have a few favourite scenes on the route of my walk to college, and I am planning to snap them every day, and see how the light varies each day. But then I have my camera out and the shutter finger gets itchy. So, I get a series of pictures of street furniture in bad weather. Current Mood: lethargic (Comment on this)
Monday, January 19th, 2009
6:36 am	Where was I? Well, ... what can I say? 36 weeks since last post. It may be a personal record. I've been pretty busy, trying to keep up with art courses (finished one, started another) at the local college of whatever it is a college of, possibly hairdressing and aero-engineering and as many students as it can pack into an inadequately designed building (don't you have one of those near you?), plus family demands. I seem to be in that sandwich situation (or is it sandwich generation, which could be a snack bar, really), where the elderly parents (just my mum) compete with the children for one's attention. And I thought you guys were all on Facebook throwing sheep at each other? What's happening now? Well, I'm sitting at my computer trying to work out what I'm doing. No, really. Trying to spin too many plates as usual. My current project for college is almost too embarrassing to mention. But I am making progress, this time last year I couldn't quite decide what project to pick. This time I picked Narrative Image Making, because I felt inspired by graphic novels, and it is interesting, but scary because I have to draw stuff from my own writing. However, I have learned from last year and I have to Just Get On With It. Fortunately, or unfortunately it will stop in three weeks, or is it two. I must do another Action Plan. And read more Calvin and Hobbes, which now counts as homework. I'll stop now or it will get too long and turn into a strange list, which it would be far more appropriate if I wrote down for myself, even if scary. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 11th, 2008
3:34 pm	I managed to get myself to a walk on a beach, yesterday. I've been threatening to do this for some time, and saying I needed it. Putting my needs on top priority -- well, I do this quite a lot when its the course of least resistance, but going to the sea is an epic, from here. Nowhere in England is more than 72 miles from the sea, apparently, but it depends what you mean by sea. An estuary would be OK if it wasn't filled with industry and people, and what I had in mind wasn't somewhere wild and peaceful. Ellesmere Port is probably our closest coast, it is also the closest I have ever seen to the factory from hell, lit up at night like a christmas tree, or, indeed, a chemical factory. Refinery. Whatever it is. I do keep hoping there might be some quiet peaceful place hidden amongst the low-lying industrial landscape, but haven't found it yet. So I drove for two hours with YS, who wanted to see the sea too, and hadn't quite worked out the level of commitment required. We got there, North Wales, and it was nice, and I did feel healed and restored, and I walked on the sand while the tide retreated. YS built some strange structures, discovering that the water level was not far below the surface, and his castles automatically acquired a moat, but tended to be undermined by the action of the water filling the moat. So he concentrated on digging sort of large square pools. I didn't much want to leave. And maybe it would be better if I did this on my own in future (YS got bored way before I did). But it did help. I feel better. I'm not completely imprisoned. I must do this again. Yesterday was hot, today even hotter, its just as hard to deal with as the cold, I'm waiting for evening to go in the garden. Current Mood: tired (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 25th, 2008
11:11 am	Pressure I have been run off my feet, it feels like. Projects. Assessments. Shopping. Elections. I now kind of know/remember what it is like being a student. Except this experience is different, and non-mature students don't have to remember to organise meals and quite a lot of other stuff for three other people. I kind of remember how irritating it is that one's teachers are not perfect, but sometimes seem to be planning on the hoof, repeating themselves, or contradicting other teachers. What I don't remember, because it didn't happen in those days, is being continually assessed, and that this creates extra anxiety, as one is told that if you do just this and this you can go up a grade. But don't just chase grades. I've noticed this in my children's work, that they are told exactly how to get more points, in their work and in exams. We didn't do this when I was young. We would have thought it un-British. Un-sporting. No, I am half-joking. But we would have been surprised. We probably thought that the mystique of teaching was that no-one quite knew how to get the high marks in essays and exams. The bright ones did, and the less bright did not. I did not. I was erratic. Still am, it seems. Reliably erratic. And - there is a French quote - plus ca change - it is not that different. We get our interim assessments with their little hints about how one could go up a grade, or two (two?), and we put our heads together to try and find out exactly how the clever ones got their great grades, and why others did not. Its not just the ticks on the boxes. Not quite. There is something about quality in there too. So anyway, this is all an excuse for not communicating with people (like here) more. All the pressure. And I am beginning to remember (because I do know it) that resting and socialising have benefits that running around like a wet hen definitely does not. Like one works better and remembers more. Still its kind of hard to get the hang of how to stop, apart from dead stop, which is easy, and playing computer games, also easy. Current Mood: drained (Comment on this)
Friday, February 15th, 2008
9:46 am	In Sickness And In Health, And Inbetween I woke up this morning feeling grotty, which, actually, is normal. People on the art course I am doing are very nice and often ask me how I am. 'Never better' is not going to be the answer, and I am rather aware that the whinge, as a life position, seems to be moi, and that I don't like myself for this. Denial is not a way forward. One has to go through. So maybe it needs a dialectic, if that is a valid description. I was also thinking about getting the children (they fill the house with their energetic bodies, all strength and carelessness and not little children, any more) to eat more healthy food. I have been working on this for about twelve years and not getting anywhere. Another constant whinge. But I have to eat healthily now. More healthily, if even if I can't achieve the high standards set by my nutritionist and my herbalist (the alternative therapists of choice these years). Make no mistake, I would live on chocolates, chips, and mature cheddar cheese sandwiches, if I wasn't afraid of the consequences. Maybe I would eat the occasional apple, with salad as a rare appetiser. I don't seem to be able to persuade the large boys to eat healthily, or even to live healthily. I feel some kind of failure. I wanted to educate them at home, but worried and couldn't trust Theo to find his way through dyslexia on his own. Plus it gave me no time to myself and required a lot of driving and talking to mothers mostly only as mad as myself, and some considerably madder. Oh, I don't need to argue this out with myself. I gave up on the home education when I was tired and worried and lonely, and when I heard a woman who had been through various kinds of alternative education say that she didn't think she would do the same for her children because it was so hard on her mum. And I am still tired and worried and lonely! This week we heard that one of the boys' cousins had dropped out of his degree course due to depression, and reading about the drug culture among university students, there are a whole load of new worries. But my health is rather better, having my gall-bladder removed really helped, and I have come to terms with eating much more salad and trying hard to avoid any sugar. Some sort of terms. Only the boys go at their own pace. OS does try new food these days, and looks forward keenly to chicken korma, which is quite a big step. He is sensitive to strange ingredients at one part per three million, as far as I can work out. And YS has announced that he is now a vegetarian. We have flirted with vegetarian-ness for ages. Meat does not happen every day. But the boys don't like vegetables much. Sweetheart cabbage has been a success recently. Thank you Tesco and the Spanish farmers. I don't often feel really well. I wake up feeling varying degrees of vile. It goes off when I get up, or at least enough for me to get on reluctantly with things, and if I get absorbed, which I do at college, then its OK. When I am at home I want to lie down a lot. And have to drive myself out of bed. Then when I get to the computer, games like patience and tetris have this fatal attraction. And make me feel worse. So I am thinking today about getting the boys to eat salad. Proper salad. Not just raw carrots, though that is a start. I don't want them to get ill, or get depressed, or abuse their bodies with drugs (there was a recent article in the Times about the amount of drug-taking seen as normal -euurgh). And here am I, can't even drink coffee and tea, or milk, because my body reacts like its poison. I don't know how to live, thats the problem. We don't. As a society. Current Mood: mellow (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
5:32 am	Insomnia again It is very early. 4 am - can't sleep. Very annoying. My SO can't sleep either, and we have both decided to get stuff done, which is the only sensible way to spend the time insomnia gives you. I have various stupid ways of spending the time. I lie awake and get angry or depressed. Very amusing, and only rarely productive, though a really good cry can be uplifting, long-term. No good if I take himself apart on the way. Other stuff I do is logic games, 16 box sudoku, or codewords, or hanji (rebuild pictures from numbers). Can be relaxing but terrible timewasters and I suspect I am numbing myself. I also suspect that it is better to face the bad feelings I am escaping from. I have got so good at half-escaping and mostly messing up that it is really hard to round myself up and feel the feelings. I do miss the snow. Its really warm for January in this north/mid/west part of England. The nights are so warm. I haven't needed extra blankets, hot water bottle, anything. Well, its 12 deg C. The birds are singing a lot outside - not now, in the daytime I mean, they obviously think its spring. They may get a surprise, we might have a mild sort of cold snap. Or maybe they are going to get a really really long year of nestbuilding. Yesterday evening OS (not SO, this code stuff is a bit confusing) decided to make American Pancakes. We had not known they were different. But they are. Bicarbonate of soda, sugar, and more flour, essentially. A more solid pancake. So he can make pancakes in the next Sea Scout session where they are doing International Cuisine, a regular feature he enjoys. We had to find maple syrup too. He reported that neither the pancakes not the maple syrup were as sweet as he expected. In case anyone wonders, we make very thin pancakes which are usually smothered/sprinkled with lemon juice and sugar. This happens on Shrove Tuesday which is quite soon. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
2:46 am	A Quiet Day (After Too Many Busy Ones) I stayed away from college today, yesterday I mean, feeling like I was coming down with something. Slept late, didn't do anything taxing (I've got a wearing complaint thing I am pushing myself ahead with slowly, needed a day off from worrying about it), and slept in the afternoon as well. Of course, I can't sleep now its night-time! I am feeling physically better, but staying up all night will not be a good move. Time to catch up with friends here, though. I always feel like I have got too much to do. Part of this is because I do have too much to do. It helps if I write things down, and it helps if I get some stuff done. But there is always more. How do people keep their heads above water? How do you? I keep finding that new problems come up and demand my attention before I have finished sorting out the previous one. My SO is good at doing one thing at a time and finishing things. He achieves this partly by forgetting things I've asked him to do, and by not doing anything that requires making a telephone call. I claim this adds to my confusion. Especially making the telephone calls that require me to relay his ideas to an artisan. Some things never make it to the top of my list. Many things. Obviously I need to spend more time with my list, but it just feels never-ending. Current Mood: pensive (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 4th, 2008
5:24 pm	Free Of The Orthodontist, Part I I have been taking OS to see the orthodontist at six monthly intervals, waiting for him to get all his adult teeth, except the wisdom teeth. He has now completed this, is looming over me, is fifteen, and handsome. He takes after me in having a small jaw; his upper canines, like mine, came in very high giving an odd feral look. However, they have descended slowly and are now just wonky. Today we went to the orthodontist and officially decided NOT to have them sorted out. The treatment is free anyway, but it was too much work for too little a problem. His mates have been sharing their brace experiences, and when she said he would need to have two teeth out, that was it. I don't blame him, I had four out, ghastly. So he is going to have a slightly out of line grin, it feels like sort of allowing in a little freedom, a little wildness. Free the jaw! Will YS get away from the orthodontist, too? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007
10:38 pm	Flying (no, driving) south Happy Christmas everyone. We're going down t'south for the holidays. (2 Comments |Comment on this)