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A sandy end to the month

This afternoon, I went with my friends Ally and B, and their two kids, to Dunster beach, where we ate ice cream and chips, drank tea (as you do) and I got to see how fast the e-numbers in ice cream send small children hyper.

Scary stuff.

Dunster beach - 31 August 2010

Dunster beach - 31 August 2010

Snipe didn’t need any encouragement to go hyper, though I was relieved to discover that in the insanity stakes, dog calmed down before small boy. Phew.

Snipe - 31 August 2010

Snipe - 31 August 2010

All in all, a lovely way to round up the month.

No foot, no hoss

Well, no Jo and no Snipe, to be more accurate.

I’ve got a recurrent ankle “thing”. My heel bone aches for no reason and walking becomes extremely painful. It’s been a few years since it last did it, so t’was a bit of a shock when it went yesterday afternoon. Especially as I was an hour’s walk from home at the time.

And now, Snipe has managed to cut her foot and has bled all over the carpet. I’ve cleaned it up (foot and carpet) and wrestled her to the ground long enough to put a bandage on it. She’s now lying in her bed, shaking, but she’s such a wuss that it’s hard to tell if she’s in any genuine pain or if that’s her natural cowardly reaction.

How’s your bank holiday weekend going?

It was not me, it was my food

Dear Man on Cycle,

If I had known that you were behind me on the road this evening, I would have maintained better control over my digestive system and would have refrained from letting rip with the most monstrously glorious fart to have ever caused structural damage in Somerset.

It was with much admiration that I watched you simultaneously pretend nothing had happened whilst struggling to maintain control of your bicycle.

Sadly, despite witnessing your valiant attempts to get your two-wheeled beast back under your command, I fear I have a confession to make. The admiration I felt for your skill was tempered with regret, for I feel that Caused Man To Fall Off His Bike would have guaranteed me a place in the Flatulence Hall of Fame.

Alas, since this will not be the case, let me just offer my best wishes for the speedy recovery of your hearing, and I trust that the crossing of our paths has not shattered your belief in cycling as a gentle, leisurely and peaceful pursuit.

Yours faithfully,

Etcetera, etcetera.

To ubuntu or not to ubuntu

Over the weekend I ugraded from Vista to Windows 7. And what an improvement W7 is on its fat and bloated cousin.

Except…

I didn’t like it. There were lots of great features, but without there really being anything that I can put my finger on, it’s just… I don’t know.

And so I bit the bullet and installed the open source operating system, Ubuntu, alongside Windows, just to see how it works.

Fast? Unbelievable. The laptop is up and running before I’ve made a cup of coffee … that being the benchmark for me. My elderly laptop used to let me make a cup of coffee, go outside, smoke a slow and leisurely cigarette and go to the loo (back indoors, obviously) before it was ready. I even turned off the password so it had less to do :roll:

Anyway, Windows 7 is fast. There’s no denying it. But it’s a bit like upgrading from a Shetland Pony (vista) to a teenager’s Pony Club mount to a sleek and expensive racehorse.

Ubuntu has its own annoyances and I can see me having many arguments with it over various things.

The current one is about playing DVDs. For some legal reason, that I don’t understand, although Ubuntu comes with a media player, it doesn’t have any specific software to play “protected” media, such as DVDs. So you have to download a free plugin (this stops the illegal mass distribution, though it’s legal to source it as an individual. Or something.).

But they don’t tell you WHAT you need.

Or at least, they do, but you have to go looking for it, and in the early hours of the morning, looking at the online troubleshooting manual was far too logical.

So I installed various plugins and none of them worked. Then I did something and it simultaneously worked – altered the display options for my internet browser. My attempts to fix the internet display failed, but it did stop the DVD player working again – and convinced the laptop that I had no sound card.

More fiddling, and I restored both sound and the ability to play DVDs.

I still cannot, however, get the net to render properly. Currently, the fonts on Facebook are stretched really wide, whereas on this blog, it seems really squished together. And I can’t actually read the front page of the BBC website, everything is so small.

Note to self: next time, read the pissing manual. And don’t fiddle with the computer as a reaction to insomnia.

You say tomato...

A friend’s baby grandson has been rushed into hospital. I have everything crossed that he makes a swift and full recovery, though I am more than a little impressed that it took four grown adults to hold him down in order to draw some blood.

And, in other news, someone on a web forum I frequent has been fussing because an egg has been smashed in a clutch under her broody hen.

I try to avoid outright bitchiness.

I try to avoid making comparisons between people’s lives.

But in this case, I can’t help but feel that context is everything.

Empathising with Scrat

There’s a scene in Ice Age 2 where Scrat, the sabre-toothed squirrel, pulls his prized acorn from the side of a glacier, thereby cracking the ice and causing the entire thing to give way.

He desperately tries to plug all the holes, and being an animated movie, it’s all rather comical and jolly.

Poor old Scrat

Poor old Scrat

But some days, that’s how it goes. Something starts leaking, so you plug it, but the pressure builds elsewhere, and you plug that, and before you know it, the whole thing is helplessly out of control and all you want to do is stop plugging the damn thing and let it drown you.

And you thought kids’ films had no bearing on real life?

Farewell to feathers

The Pekins have gone. Sold. My landlord is an arse.

Note to other landlords. If you don’t want your tenant to keep chickens, don’t say yes when they ask for permission.

What a wet and grey August day...

I cut short my walk in Quantocks today, thanks to the intermittent rain that kept spoiling my fun. Actually, it wasn’t too bad: none of the rain soaked through in an attempt to speed up next week’s laundry, which is the point at which I start caring. And I was smart enough to knock about five miles off my walk and come home early, which meant that instead of trudging through the deluge that threatened to drown half the county, I was instead curled up on the sofa, chatting to a friend on Facebook, marvelling at my lucky escape.

Quantock Hills - 13 August 2010

Quantock Hills - 13 August 2010

Quantock Hills - 13 August 2010

Quantock Hills - 13 August 2010

Snipe - 13 August 2010

Snipe - 13 August 2010

Blackberries - 13 August 2010

Blackberries - 13 August 2010

My real gripe is that, once again, I was at the highest point in the hills and unable to take a decent photo. Pah.

Footsteps echo in empty rooms

The other day, a friend asked me what it feels like when I “wobble”, a term that seems to have entered common usage to describe me at my low points. It’s quite a generous description, evocative of towering jelly, when it reality it is often something rather more akin to crossing the Grand Canyon on a tightrope.

Anyway, in reply, I set off with a metaphor about the Veil in the Department of Mysteries in Harry Potter, and how you are part of the world, but looking in somehow, but that’s utterly inaccurate and I cannot work out where my inspiration for that came from. Other ones come to mind, from cycling uphill in the wrong gear to trying to do ballet in steel toe-capped leather boots, and while they perfectly sum up the transition from good to bad, they don’t really come to close to what it’s like when I’m there.

Yesterday, I went for a long walk in the woods and hills and it dawned on me that there *is* a way of helping my friends understand what it’s like, and it’s so obvious, I can’t believe that I’ve been wrestling with it for so long.

Physically, it’s simple. The first “stage”, if you will, is that my skin starts to itch and crawl, and my muscles twitch and if I don’t get up and move, I could scratch the skin right off my body. Luckily, moving around and doing things is a great help, even just going to make a mug of coffee or tea.

Otherwise, think of the usual physical signs of anxiety and panic. Tight chest, closed throat, sweating. It happens so often, I can’t actually think what they all are.

As indications that I am becoming unwell, I can cope with them, deal with them, mostly manage them. That’s what I think of as wobbling – might fall, haven’t yet.

But when it all happens too fast, or I didn’t succeed in staying on top of things… That’s when it all goes to pot, when I really do plummet into the darkened depths below.

And then… communication becomes an issue. When I first became ill, I would make a little panic room in my mind and lock myself in there, protected from the outside world by locks and bolts and drawbridges, etc etc etc. Now (and this is a sign, I tell myself, that I am getting better) I try not to do that and let people in.

But.

Communication.

I can’t.

If it’s anything more complicated than a yes/no question, I can’t answer. And this what I have been unable to get across. It’s not when I was locked up in my little room, whose walls ensured that words and questions couldn’t penetrate. Now, I hear everything that is said, loud and clear, but the words for me to answer just aren’t there. I want to respond, but it’s like a deserted, empty house. You know where its residents, the furniture, ornaments should be… but there’s nothing there. Bare walls and vacant windows. And so I run from room to room, but the tools to construct an answer are absent, and the longer it takes, the more the question is repeated and the house grows and the rooms get bigger and emptier and the corridors longer and still I don’t have any means to respond.

++++++++++

I feel like I should be putting together a pithy concluding paragraph, but in a wonderful example of true irony, words fail me.

Um.

Quite.

Six legs becomes fourteen!

A few weeks ago, I went to a small poultry auction, more for the fun of it than to seriously look, though I had been mumbling about getting some Pekin bantam hens for the garden.

Anyway, to cut a long but predictable story short, I left the auction as a proud (if slightly bemused in a what-just-happened? sort of way) owner of four young pullets.

Of course, it being a impulse buy, I had nowhere for them to live, so they have been boarding with my friend Ally’s flock while I have been sorting Pekinopolis out for them.

It’s not finished yet (a friend is going to put up a roof for me), but yesterday was The Day and we now number eight wings, fourteen legs and an obscene number of toes.

Pekins like plums - 3 August 2010

Pekins like plums - 3 August 2010

It’s good to have chickens again :D

These boots were made for walking

Well, not boots, not this time of year. Sandals, actually.

But walking? Oh yes. Miles and miles.

Fourteen, yesterday.

Snipe - 26 July 2010

Snipe - 26 July 2010

Quantock Hills - 26 July 2010

Quantock Hills - 26 July 2010

Typically, the sun was blazing down as I slogged my way along the road and up the (steep, very steep) hill, but as soon as I got to the top, it hid behind the clouds until I went into the forest, at which point it was all blue skies…. until I emerged from the green depths.

As a consequence, my photos don’t even come close to reproducing the spectacular views – and they certainly don’t hint at quite how steep the hills round here are. And I’m from Wales!!

Sir Drefaldwyn

T’other week, I went up on the train to stay with a friend who lives near Welshpool. We ate lots of cake, talked, laughed, gossiped, ate more cake, knitted and made butter (shaking double cream in a jam jar).

Oh, and we also went to Montgomery Castle:

The view from Montgomery Castle - 14 July 2010

The view from Montgomery Castle - 14 July 2010

The photo utterly fails to capture the magic of the location and the ruins themselves.

All in all, it was wonderful to see the lovely Rosie again, though I can’t help but wonder if her ducks will ever recover from meeting the manner-less Snipe :shock: :oops:

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