Friday the thirteenth...

So the saying goes that 'things' come in threes.  And the 'things' that come in threes are usually 'bad things'....   It is also usually accepted that 'bad things' may happen on the 13th, and on Friday the 13th in particular....  Now, I wouldn't say that I am usually or unusually suspicious, but read on and let's see if what I relate is just coincidence.

Our lodger, bless her, has been known to be a little accident prone (in as much as she maybe has a tendency to break things.  Like the time she drove off with the coffee cup on the roof of her car. Needless to say it didn't stay on the roof of the car...).

On Thursday she apologised for breaking the catch on the door of the microwave oven in the kitchen, so for the moment the microwave doesn't work.  Not entirely a surprise, as the door had been feeling stiffer than usual for a while.  I tried to glue it back together to see if it helped.  It didn't.  The catching blob shape on the catch detached itself to the internal workings of the slot it engaged with, and is now lost.  The engineer will be here on Saturday.

On Friday (the 13th) I broke the kettle.  More of a nuisance, but not really a problem as I'd got a 3 year warranty from Argos, so a replacement was easy to come by.  What was irritating was the fact that I'd already replaced the same kettle (with the same model) after the same fault in January.  At about 6 months of use of this kettle the quick-boil 1-cup facility goes 'pop' if you drain it entirely after boiling and then fill with cold water.  I don't know about you, but this seems a design fault to me.  Replaced it with a different brand the following day, no quibble from Argos.

And the third thing?  On the evening of Friday (the 13th), our lodger put her head round the door, looked dejected and like she was about to cry, and said that she'd clipped my car (with hers).  What can you do?  It'll be fixable, and in daylight shows a scuff of exchanged paints and a pimple and hairline crack on my back bumper...  but it's a hassle.  C'est la vie?

On a lighter note, at work in the Library on Saturday I was delighted to try to find a book for a 10-yr old boy I'd not met before.  He was in with his mother and (as it turned out) younger half-sister.  His demeanour impressed me as he was polite, calm, confident and thoughtful.  Not adjectives I'd normally associate with 10-yr old boys, and thus far my experience working in the library has shown me that a classful is usually a handful, and class visits need to be carefully planned, but I'm ever hopeful of meeting a nice one, and 'O' was a nice as you could wish for.

He was looking for a 'Percy Jackson', ah, that's Rick Riordan, I'll check the shelves for you. No sorry, our copies are out, did you want to reserve one?  No thanks, I'll try and find something.  Have you seen this one?  (Inkheart, Cornelia Funke).  No.  Looks good.  Thanks.  I quite like football books, there's one with (I can't remember the character name, but I looked it up on keyword search, and found the author, Dan Sheldon?, but we didn't have copies).  Umm.  Have you read Harry Potter?  Yes, read them all when I was 8. (wow!)  I like the look of this 'Zom-B' Darren Shan. That may not be a good choice for you at the moment.  That title's 'older teen' as it's got a sticker 'teen+'. It's a good idea to try just 'teen' stickered ones as they're crossover from junior and will be more suitable.  Have a look at this one - Holes, Louis Sachar - I read it recently and really enjoyed it, and I've a 12-yr old daughter who read it as well. It's a modern classic, well written, a good story with a couple of good twists....

Eventually, in between serving other customers/borrowers, and keeping my eye on him, it ended up with him borrowing 'Bootleg' by Alex Shearer.  the blurb goes like this:

The Good for You Party is improving the health of the nation. Fruit and vegetables are compulsory and chocolates are banned. When best friends Smudger and Huntly discover an overlooked stock of cocoa and sugar, their secret chocolate-making business takes off fast. Can they stay ahead of the law?

I await his verdict with anticipation.

perched on my car ariel..  difficult zoom, best I could manage!

Night night y'all.  Kat  :)

Ode to Autumn

I remember this from school, must be 30 years ago now...

...'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom friend of the maturing sun who conspires with him how to load, and bless with fruit, the vine which round the thatch-eaves run' ... John Keats.

Our dog walks now are excuses to go blackberrying, or brambling, as someone round here called it the other morning.  The blackberries are very good this year, large, ripe and plentiful, and it's easy picking if you're not worried about a few stings (nettle) or scratches...  I've the stained black fingers/nails to prove it.

I'll have to make jam this weekend.  My freezer is already full - ready for the comforting crumbles of winter - but when there's this much abundance it's a shame not to make the most of it.

We've a glut of apples as well.

I'm not entirely sure what the variety is, but I'm guessing it's Cox's Orange Pippin because there's a definite orange flavour - I'd never actually understood it until I ate apples from this tree, but it's there and it works.  Wierd, but in a good way.

The wasps love it.  The air around the tree is thick with a sweet perfume, and a buzzing reminds you to be careful.  There are husks of apples on the ground - barely core and skin, where the wasps have sucked the life out of it and moved onto the next one.  The apples actually move under the skin, there are that many wasps there - I counted 6 that I could see in a hole the size of a 10p coin, and there must have been more inside...

So although there's a glut, and I've a fruit bowl full inside and more on the window ledge of the kitchen, there's an awful lot of windfall on the ground being worked over by the wasps.  You have to be careful walking past the tree, and if you do want to pick an apple, you should employ extreme caution - I learnt to my cost last year that hastiness equals sting.

There's only one thing worse than a wasp sting, and that's two wasp stings.....

On a lighter note, the children have returned to school, and me to my beloved routine.  I made headway on the ironing this morning listening to Radio 4, and I could feel the tension of the holidays dropping from my shoulders.

It's not that I feel I have to entertain the children the whole time, but there's only so much TV/screen time you can allow them, and only so much backchat I can take, so we did have a few excursions on my Wednesdays off when the Library is closed...  and my pile of ironing grew and grew....

Peacock butterfly on the buddleia bush overgrowing the derelict building awaiting demolition next to my back/kitchen door...  and that's another matter!

Barley field (this year) on the Letcombe footpath

It's been as nice a summer as I can remember - in fact nicer than I can remember actually. There was the hot summer of 1976, of course, and I seem to think 2003 had some heat to it as well, but there's no reliability to the weather in this country, and of course that's what makes us talk about it so much.

I'll have to download some more photos as I'm sure I had a few of the apple tree, but can't find them just now.

Back in the groove now the children are back at school.  Watch this space!

Keep it sweet,  Kat  :)

Spaced out

I love where we live.  We are fortunate in this part of Oxfordshire to have the amenities of a market-town on hand (shops, library, schools, pubs, takeaways, restaurants, museum, football team, churches, health centre, leisure centre, children's groups, social groups etc) or town/city facilities close enough by (hospital, cinema, arts centre, train stations). Yet within 5 minutes walk we're on footpaths that meander through farmers' fields, and in 5 minutes drive we can be on the lovely ancient Ridgeway (http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/ridgeway/).  To my mind it's the best of both worlds.

Yesterday we visited the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories for their Space Open Day to learn about other worlds! (http://www.stfc.ac.uk/RALSpace/Default.aspx).  This is only 15 minutes drive away, and was a free event - woohoo, something to fill another day in the school holidays (which by now are dragging on, for both chidren and parents...).

We arrived late, having picked up a teenage friend of my daughter's who took an age to collect her things to be ready to go.  I don't remember being that bad at that age, but memory plays tricks on you, I'm sure.  So we got badged up, had the health and safety talk, and joined our allocated group in the 'Mars Robotics' building.

I'm not good with science.  I've not been able to get my head around it since Mrs (battleaxe) Carruthers (maths teacher at the Convent school I attended in the late 1970s).  If you weren't good at maths you didn't do physics - that's how it was back then - and I wasn't good at maths...  'Mrs Carruthers, I don't understand' 'You don't need to understand it, JUST DO IT' she barked.  Full stop.

So although the things they told us during the visit made sense (in context) as soon as I left the various buildings the normal soundtrack to my life returned and wiped clean the interesting information I'd just been told about electrons, positrons or whatever-trons.  The same thing happened a couple of years ago when we visited the Diamond Light Synchatron (another tron!).  (http://www.diamond.ac.uk/).  But that's another story.

Within the Mars Robotics building is a central quadrangle, which, un/surprisingly, has been filled with rocks and earth to resemble the surface of Mars and enable realistic testing of the robots to be done in the development process.  Unfortunately they didn't demonstrate any of the robots in action, but the roving photographer took a photograph of our group 'on Mars' with the robot vehicle.

The soil and rocks had come from Tubney Wood Quarry ( http://www.hills-group.co.uk/consult/tubney-wood.html), a local site, so it seems that Mars is closer to home than you would think.  They also test the robots in a desert in Chile.  So I learned something then.

The next session was light science - as in the science of light (doh) - lasers, and also much more talk of electrons and charged particles.  They've a lot of interns and students and they were all very enthusiastic to communicate either what they were doing or what the equipment on display did.  A nice young man (!) started to explain something to me, but I had to stop him part way through with 'I'm sorry, you lost me at electron'.

The children had a lovely time here, Phoebe, under careful instructions, became positively charged using the Vandergraph Generator (I thought that was a psychodelic band from the 60s!), and her hair stood on end - to the general amusement/satisfaction of the gathered group.  She was also very taken with the lasers and defraction lenses.  Tom had fun trying to move a laser beam through a maze, discharging the electrons from a plasma ball (?), and racing a hydrogen powered toy car.

I was interested to see the old technology - they had an IBM 360 computer - the size of my car, which was the state of the art when installed in 1969, and had the equivalent computing power of the RAM of a modern day printer.

The final session was space based.  Phoebe and her friend spent time learning about geology with rock samples, and we all had fun with the UV camera and ice-cubes!  This was to demonstrate how the scientists look into deep space to find things hidden to other telescopes.  The solar flare man had 3D glasses for us to try and we missed out on making bracelets with special UV detector beads that change colour in the sun and indicate when it's necessary to put sun screen on.  (These are available on the internet we were informed later, so we may have to have a hunt for those).

The final 'wrap up' session had us in the lecture theater with all 10 groups gathered together to give feedback (by way of handsets you pressed a button for to answer the questions on screen).  The lady in charge had her assistant pouring liquid nitrogen onto a small disc - thereby making a smaller magnet levitate.  You could have a closer look at the end of the session, as it was very small to see in a lecture theater, but it was magic the way the magnet hovered, the polarity reversed, the dry ice swirling around it mysteriously....

She said this was the most exciting thing about working at RAL.  They'd discovered this effect of this super-conductor in the 1980s, and it had initially been discovered in 1919, but, she enthused, THEY DON'T KNOW HOW IT DOES IT.  I love to see someone so animated, so enthusiastic and passionate about what they do.  Life affirming, and still more to explore - out there, and closer to home.  The future, it seems, is science.

See ya!  Kat