h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Cher-ching...back again. O I love broadband so much! That was why I was absent for the last two weeks or so...the last few days have been spent abusing it

If you have some spare time would you like to peruse A3235781? Just finished a few odds and ends and submitted it for Peer Review. Marv found it already, the cheeky boy!

\m/

Hypatia, my thoughts are with you. Consider yourself ed plenty, okay?

I'm feeling fabulously refreshed, and quite unwilling to get off my butt and figure out what I am going to teach today. It seems so, well, unimportant. I mean, I know it's not, but...

Ah well. My vacation is over. I need to do it again very soon.

Good to see you back, TIM.

*bounces up and down*

Ben

I think everyone else has given you excellent advice, Hypatia, but I wanted to mention one more option: hospice care. I'm not sure if it is available in your area, but a local hospice organization might be able to help you and F manage your lives and provide some much needed care and assistance. Here is a helpful link:

http://www.hospicefoundation.org/

If you're not sure if there is a hospice in your area or simply need someone to talk to, here's the page for you:

http://www.hospicefoundation.org/hospiceInfo/locate.asp

Having gone through a similar situation with my father, I truly wish you and F love and a from the bottom of my heart.

*waves* Yo, Mike! Welcome to broadband!

Am feeling virtuous. Had a good time with U, (she is good at sorting out mind-kinks as well as prescribing sugarpills), and we had a major gossip over lunch. Then I spent the afternoon applying for jobs, including one in Glasgow. I'd love to workt there again, even in winter.

Off to cook and then do some OU stuff later on this evening.

B

I arrived at work at 2345 last night, and turned around and went home. It was 3C up there, no way we could make snow. I am trying a sleep experiment. I slept for a few hours once I got home, I will do some stuff around the house today and then sleep for a few more hours later before I go back in to work. Perhaps this will allow me more rest than I have been getting of late.

Warning - very dull rant and whinge about exercise coming up. Please feel free to skip.

I have an exercise machine. It has a calorie counter on it. I pedalled away on it for 25 minutes, I covered 2.5 km, I apparantly burnt off 60 cal. Hmph, I thought, especially as I was rather out of breath and sweaty, and went off to look online. According to the BBC activity into calorie converter I would have burnt off more by going for a 25 minute moderately brisk walk. Now hang on a cotton-picking second, I go for a 25 minute moderately brisk walk quite often and I can assure you that I do not get into a sweating panting mess doing it. So how in heckitty heck am I burning off LESS calories by going scarlet in the face and puffing like a grampus? It makes NO sense! Is the calorie-counter on the machine up the spout? And how come I am only covering 2.5 km? I can walk to Clapham Junction in 25 minutes and I'm sure that's 3km with a humongous hill in it. How can I be getting this breathless poundy-heart doing apparantly LESS exercise than walking to Clappers?

My x-trainer does exactly the same thing Ag, I don't think it counts properly! Also, I can't put my weight in to mine so it is probably counting the calories for someone with less to carry. If I do the same workout on one of the machines in the gym (with approx the same amount of sweaty red-facedness) I burn approx 150 cals per 10 minutes, so I ignore the readout and assume that is the rate I am working at.

Does anyone here in the atelier know Stealth Kamanchi (U206500) IRL? He is very down, has posted some worrying things and I am very concerned for his safety.

[GDZ]

Hypatia

I cannot add any advice to the ideas already given - but I want to underline that it *is* important that you remember yourself, or someone else remembers you, so you don't get worn down physically and emotionally. In retrospect I see that my mother took too much upon herself during my father's last years. She is one of those strong and competent women who doesn't let hardship show and hardly ever asks for help.

I'm often reminded that we have a good public social system including health care. Here you would be entitled to take leave of your job and get paid to care for F. - and have the right to return to your job.
I fervently hope that the current government don't manage to ruin our wellfare system - they are trying hard .

I forgot.

If you choose to work, F. would have the right to have nurses and caretakers come and do the caring at your home - there are also palliative teams that visits private homes, and F. would be appointed x hours with a personal helper who's job is to help F. do things he cannot do by himself - read the newspaper, go for a walk - anything social and cultural. Everything is paid for via taxes.

I've just had a meeting about the conference at the weekend, and it's hit me. On Saturday I've got to give a twenty minute talk on safe gay sex, and two fourty minute workshops.

I'm a bit scared actually.

Still fortuantely A is back with his laptop that has a copy of my previous talk and hand out.

I just finished everything on today's to-do list! This never happens. And of course, it's time to make a new list.

for Hyp, tartaronne and anyone else in the general direction.

Kerr - thanks for filling me in on the Touching the Void location stuff. So, we have two very fit (if a little older than they were) climbers, and a film crew who are probably used to nothing more strenuous than streets of London huffing and puffing with all their gear. I bet that made for a fun shooting schedule!

Z - I'm surprised that you haven't worked out that the popular jobs are in the places with the good canteens. Some years back I worked in a hospital in Lincoln (ie the back of beyond) and we had no trouble filling junior medical posts specifically because we had a 24hr canteen. Not only that, it was good quality food and cheap. The decision to fund the staff catering service to a much higher level than the norm was made by the Board as an explicit recruitment & retention thing; and it worked famously. I ate three great meals a day there

B - jobhunting? Ugh. A most frightful undertaking! Good luck!

Just spent a pleasant couple of hours thinking and writing about "What is poetry?" and "The purpose of poetry". My brain hasn't had to work this hard for ages!

B

B this link posted on get writeing
http://www.virtualwriter.net/poetry/poetryexercises.php?action=3&id=12
I liked it, mightbe interesting comparing you view to this

Tartaronne and Hypatia and anybody else feeling like having one.
I was out of town today. Couple meetings in another town, one with people from http://www.hospitalityclub.org That was really cool. Unfortunately the back was awful and now my head is about to explode. I hope I can cure that with a pillow.

Thanks for the good wishes, TIM.

Thanks for the link, ltp. Useful and thought provoking. The section which I found stirred me in a different context is:

"I believe that we must always struggle, day by day and hour by hour, against these blindnesses that reduce us, little by little and without noticing, to the level of desensitised beings, zombies, automatons destined only to obey orders without having any longer those essential and interrelated abilities known to every child: the ability to wonder, and the ability to question."

The different context is our current situation, where we are being polarised into fundamentalism. Did anyone else see the documentary about Martin Bormann last night? The Dutch reaction to the brutal terrorist murder of Theo van Gogh means that I find myself wondering if we are not all Pastor Niemöller, that they are coming for the Muslims, but we are not speaking out because we are not Muslims?

Cheerful stuff.

Sorry.

Ben