Proud sisters

I was going to blog about the time I lent Jimmy Carter my hammer. Or, as dad points out, his hammer.

“Gee Lucy,”  I believe he said, “can I borrow your hammer?”

I was doing a Habitat for Humanity ‘blitz build’ in Hungary in 1996. It was wonderfully surreal. I only got on the team after memorising a phone number and saving some money from working in London for a year. I use the story when I want to illustrate how unlikely events in life can be. Of the ten houses we built in five days, I was on the same house as Jimmy and Rosalind. What are the chances?

However, hoping for a neat segue into my sister’s very recent HFH building efforts in Kenya proved unbloggable while she was away because I didn’t know how it was all going. Nor is it fair to make comparisons since she has returned. Why? Because now I find I am inordinately proud both of her and of our cousin, the team organiser and person who sacrificed her biythday (sic) while building houses with no straw in the African heat. I saw some photos on facebook of it all. Comfort zones were well and truly abandoned, and valuable lessons in building to Kenyan design and standards were learnt. I also noted there was no cement mixer. Result: a far more convincing and sacrificial effort than my American just-add-water approach in Vac. I see my sister is now offering to build houses in the UK. I’m sure this will wear off, but if it doesn’t, maybe I should hold her to it.

Talking of siblings, my daughter is now at the age I was when I became a sibling, as illustrated by figure (i), a rare glimpse of me on this blog, along with my little brother, taken in 1979.

Figure (i)

Now my daughter and I do share a silly sense of humour, so after going through my baby book with her yesterday and explaining that her uncle was not her cousin, we did a photo shoot. The result is in figure (ii). Note the lack of sibling. That would be explained by the fact that the sibling should not be arriving for another 19 weeks or so (see figure (iii)). Said sibling remains anonymous in all respects, and appears to be healthy and progressing well so we trust we will be thankful for what we get and find a name that suits in due course.

Figure (ii)

Figure (iii)

Self-control in a wired world

Having stolen an idea from a friend for the previous post, I now ought to post a link my friend has just sent me to a thought-provoking talk about time-wasting.

Apologies if you do not come from the same background as me, but it is not too difficult to watch and has some ideas to prod us whatever our faith or spirituality. Apologies also if you noticed that Maslow’s hierarchy works the other way round when it comes to triangles. I knew there was something odd about it.

So distracted

but that is little excuse for lack of blog-material. Maybe I should steal some. I was hoping for another 25 hour day, but the chances are we will lose most of our sleep to the ravings of the little one who is recovering from high temperatures and snotty noses (feels like more than one), so maybe a simpler, 24 hour option is ok really. Like sentences, days should be short enough and to the point.

Please take a look at this triangle (click on it, if you must save your eyesight),

which details some of the digital distractions of modern living. It does look kind of tasty if you are the kind of person who appreciates hierarchical taxonomies (unlike one of my readers.) However, I will be nice to him. He is coming up to three years since the heart attack and I’m not sure what one is supposed to do on such occasions. I was thinking of stopping the blog. However, it may be easier not to. Depending on how distracted I, um…

Triangle food is happy food

This is my new theory, stumbled across at lunchtime a month ago.

Since then I have been in a stupor (for stupor, read first trimester blues) and generally angry and unhappy, against all the odds. I have been making myself a lot of triangular food to cheer myself up, and my conclusion is that the hypothesis is correct. Let me explain, by way of images:

You may have noticed a correlation between food with an acute angle and food which is not advisable after a heart attack. This is largely true, and can be attributed to the way that nature rarely provides these shapes in ready-to-eat snack-packs. Not so clever for fruit to grow in this way (bunches of grapes don’t count, as they don’t have the critical angle on closer inspection). Most of these foods are man-made and deliberately triangle-shaped.

So, what would happen if you wanted to market something in the shape of an apple, say?

If you want it to be a happy feel-good thing, it would probably turn out like this:

Proper Architecture

Since February I have been tentatively learning the saxophone, although I fear I ought to be practising a little more. I was sent a link the other day, which sums up how I feel some of the time when listening to music, but puts it far more eloquently. I don’t know if I can copy the video link in directly, but I would strongly recommend listening to Michal Levy’s animated short films Giant Steps and One, via this link: http://michalevy.com/giant-steps.

Apologies, incidentally, if you have been checking this blog and getting frustrated when I haven’t been updating it as much recently. I have good reason, as my energy levels are particularly low while they work on supporting an extra little person, who we hope to welcome into the world around Easter time.

Which reminds me, I am starving.

Next week’s winning lottery numbers

I am the sort of person who does not like being  lied to. I do not appreciate double glazing companies repeatedly calling me and telling me they I’m wrong when I gently remind them of this. I don’t like people knocking at my door and telling me we share the same faith when we don’t. I don’t like people claiming to be able to predict the lottery numbers, and encouraging others to believe them.

Before we go any further, let me predict the winning lottery numbers for the next draw. With absolute certainty, barring the end of the world or the national lottery, I think you will find them in this list:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

A certain Mr Brown believed he could convince people that he could predict the winning lottery numbers live on television last week. If he had come up with a serious explanation, he might have saved his reputation. However, the explanation he gave was mathematical nonsense and just made people all the more sure that he had used clever trickery (read: magic) to confuse and excite his viewers.

I will tell you why he didn’t really predict the lottery numbers.

1. He did not win the lottery himself, and has not done to this date to my knowledge.

2. He has not given a convincing explanation for his ‘winning’ numbers. Otherwise you might find that the experiment is wholly repeatable (i.e. scientific) and this week we would have 9 out of 10 lottery players winning, and sharing a vast sum between the lot of them. Say, £3.65 each or something. The other 1 out of 10 would stick with the numbers they play every week, because ‘you never know’. Quite.

3. A certain Mr Daniels has been quoted as saying that there are ‘99 ways’ of doing this trick. Great. And if he never got round to doing it, it was because there are certain stunts the public just doesn’t fall for.

Admittedly, if one person had the secret power to get the numbers right and did so every week (until they were caught), they could use the money for all sorts of good. But the chances are they might abuse the system. Hmm.

Now although I do not like lies, I am amused by trickery and clever sleight of hand. I just like to know that there is a reasonable explanation, even if I do not know it myself.

I get angry when suggestible people are told that there are ways to predict the lottery numbers when there are not. I have done the maths.

Courgette Etiquette

Somewhere in America there must exist a television channel devoted to Etiquette. In the UK, we have Debrett’s. I’m not sure what the rest of the world does, and would not like to comment without taking the right advice.

Recently I was in need of etiquettal advice. Having mislaid the butler, I had no one to ask. I even looked online, but all I found was a page of vegetables in season. This solved another long-standing question of mine, but was temporarily filed in my brain. You see, I was searching what to do in the event that an acquaintance has the misfortune to plant courgettes and discovers, too late, that they are productive little things and can even become productive large things if ignored enough.

This phenomena is something we can no longer ignore.

I cannot think of a good way of refusing another courgette and chocolate muffin. I do not want extra courgettes to go with my courgettes. I love the things usually. I enjoy frying them, steaming them, preparing asian stir-fries, and all manner of savoury meals. However, I do object to being foisted upon. It affects my planning and it upsets the apple-cart (for apple-cart, read ‘veg box delivery‘ who deliver fine - if muddy - examples of all sorts of exciting vegetables in season and start you thinking what a sensible thing to do with chard might be).

There is a certain type of person who grows too many courgettes, and there is another certain type of person that they try giving them to. This may explain why Harvest Festival was invented. It is rude to appear ungrateful or arrogant in refusing fresh vegetables, which means that usually one obliges. Courgette ice-cream – why not? Courgette jelly? Great for kids. Courgette en croute? Deep fried courgette?

I have a better plan. Somewhere, and probably not in America, there must be a way of developing courgette energy into fuel for vehicles. (And I don’t just mean the self-propelled kind). This would use solar energy and the natural climate of countries like ours for a positive ecological purpose. And, perhaps more importantly, it saves us from the scourge of courgette chocolate cake.

Oops: overslept

Apparently, I was informed by the radio this morning, residents of Ipswich were woken today by the sound of medieval bells. I wasn’t. We put special double-glazed units into our sash windows recently and were woken by the radio instead. I wish they’d get their facts right.

Happy and Loved

You made me
Happy

Loved
From top to toe

 

Is this the real beginning of our
Big Brother
adventure?
Little Sister
so small, so far to go

Inventing Sports

In this country we are good at inventing sports for other people to beat us at.

Maybe the Olympic organisers ought to be asking local villages in the UK what they would include in the 2012 bonus features. Cheese-rolling (Men’s 200m) or Bog-snorkelling (coxless)? Even darts was under serious consideration I believe. Don’t they understand darts are bad for your health? And also dart-related injuries, such as drinking, smoking and sitting around with greasy food. In my opinion, all sport is bad for health, as proved by Sporting Injuries.

On a completely unrelated topic, I believe America (United States of) are good at inventing sports no one else wants to be beaten at. If you want to be a real empire, you gotta mark out a few pitches and start a few leagues. However, they are Real Sportsmenandwomen, and take beating other people a lot more seriously than we do. So we can be sure that London 2012 will not be dominated by British talent in the same way that China dominated 2008 or the US dominated almost every other Olympic games this side of Ancient Greece.

Why doesn’t China invent a few sports?

Maybe they should invent more technology. I feel that is the way it may go. However, in the West we have an insatiable dual appetite for entertainment and ridiculing our politicians, which may be our downfall. Take a look at this, for example. If you are not already aware of the phenomenon that is Autotune the News you may be a little confused. Hopefully you will find some humour in it. In any case, let’s not recommend this sort of thing to any passing Olympic Committee. It isn’t quite the thing.