My life as a bell ringer . . .
IS NOT OVER. You will be glad to hear. Well. You are probably blinking slightly, having not realised there might be a question that it was over. Let me repeat: last Wednesday’s practise was really, really, really bad. Bad bad. Bad to the bone. B-b-b-b-bad. I’d been planning to go to the pub after and . . . I told you I ran out of there. I ran out of there because I couldn’t face the rest of them. Granted I’m a trifle thin skinned about things. Still. It was bad. And I really did come home and wail and moan and wring my hands and consider spending more time on origami.* Gemma was a little late to handbells on Friday, so I had time to do a Sarah Siddons** at poor Niall, who was feeling a bit low himself for having been (according to him, although I’m not sure I believe him) instrumental in losing a (tower) quarter (peal) the previous Sunday. We had got to the point where we were about to swear off tower bells forever and cleave exclusively to handbells, and in another few minutes we’d probably have nicked our fingers and made a blood pact, but fortunately Gemma showed up. She was quite startled at my Lady Macbeth imitation.*** She must be a fabulous family doctor†: she does that calm, patient, rational-as-if-you’re-rational-too-and-just-had-a-bad-minute-there thing superbly. She very nearly cheered me up. And she did at least convince me that my ignominy Wednesday evening had not been complete.
As previously (often) mentioned, I sometimes think my single virtue is frelling obstinacy.†† Sheer mindless persistence I can do. So there was never any real doubt that I would show up at the abbey for Sunday afternoon service ring . . . but I can’t say I was looking forward to it. The not looking forward was getting pretty disagreeable by last night and by the time I got out of bed this morning I wanted to change my name††† and run away. It’s a beautiful gardening day.‡ I could stay home and garden.
What if I turn up and they stare at me in disbelief and say, For pity’s sake go away? —Even if Gemma keeps insisting this isn’t going to happen.
In the first place there were only, and exactly, eight of us. Including me. Which meant that with me they could ring triples. Without me they could ring doubles or minor with the seventh sitting out. Triples is much better. So yaay. I’m useful. (Which has been one of Gemma’s strongest arguments right along: they need Sunday afternoon ringers. You get lots of brownie points if you ring Sunday afternoon service. As well as more time on a rope.) So we rang Grandsire Triples—with me (relatively) safely on the treble.
But the best thing was that I had a chat with Albert. I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t be there for practise next Wednesday‡‡ but that after last Wednesday I thought I should probably revert to doubles and minor till I had adjusted a little more to the (frelling) abbey’s (frelling) bells. And he looked surprised and said oh no, you don’t have to do that, everyone has trouble getting used to these bells, they’re not the easiest bells anyway, the ringing chamber is huge, and the sound is muddy and erratic.
Well . . . yes.
And, he added, last Wednesday was a bad practise. People who have been ringing Grandsire Triples for thirty years were going wrong. It wasn’t your fault.
Oh. Um. I had actually thought there was a little variability elsewhere, but . . .
But the thing he said that really sent me away with a song in my heart if not precisely on my lips, was that when he’d first been ringing here he’d had trouble focussing on each bell rope because, the blasted room being so big, the ropes were so far apart.
Focus. Yes. That’s exactly the right word, and it hadn’t occurred to me (so not a word person as I am), because it’s counter-intuitive. Ropesight is the ability to see which bell you should follow next by PRECISELY where the person ringing it is in their stroke (since everyone ringing will be in a slightly different place than everyone else). Part of the problem at the abbey is that since it has ninety-seven bells, if you’re only ringing six or eight or ten or twelve, you’re in more of a queue than a circle, and you have got used, in smaller towers with fewer bells, to ringing in a circle,‡‡ and your ropesight has probably developed from looking around a smallish, more or less circular, group of bellropes. You would think that having them more spread out would mean each comes into much sharper individual focus but in practise, as I have dreadfully discovered, it seems to have the opposite effect: they all blur together.
So Albert and I have something in common besides being bipedal air breathers with opposed thumbs. Yaaay. And then he said, let’s ring a couple of plain courses of Grandsire Triples, and you ring inside, and you can practise looking. So we did that.
I may still have a future as an abbey ringer. . . .
* * *
* I was just writing to a friend that I’d bought a couple of books on basic origami to remind myself what folding feels like, for SHADOWS, since Maggie is a folder, and a couple of books of extreme origami to see what the . . . er . . . extremists can get up to, and that I could feel the attraction of another obsessive-friendly activity but that I didn’t have time for any more all-consuming pursuits and would probably stick to cranes, which are hard enough, frankly, if you are over-equipped with thumbs. The mere fact of possessing twelve thumbs wouldn’t stop me, you understand, since I don’t hold out for things I have some talent for. See: bell ringing.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Siddons
*** Out, damned bell rope! Out, I say! One; two: why, then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky, just like my ropesight!
† Which is what she is
†† Not just plain obstinacy. The frelling kind. Which is much gnarlier.
††† Possibly to K MacFarquhar. Hee hee hee hee hee hee.
‡ Old Blush is out. Barely the middle of May is early even for her. It’ll be another fortnight or so before she’s in peak hurrah, but she’s got three roses full out now. And I have two robins again, so there must be a second nest in prospect. Robin #1 was rushing around yesterday dispensing mealworms but robin #2 sat in the apple tree and stared at me as I galumphed haphazardly, potting things on and swearing. Robin #2 is gigantic. I am not seeing anything about size differential between the sexes in robins—having just hit three robin-info sites^—but if it’s true that dad sticks around to feed the fledglings, the gigantic one is mama. And she’s probably deciding if she wants to risk me. I don’t know if robins re-use their nests? I won’t clear this one away till the end of the year so it’s available at a very reasonable rate, not to mention all the mod cons, like trays of mealworms on the balcony.
^ One does mention that robins are so crazy about mealworms they will take them from human hands. That does, however, mean that the human hand has to be holding the mealworms. I will pick mealworms up when I drop them+ but the idea of standing there . . . um. Peanut butter for the chickadees back in Maine was less lacerating to one’s delicate sensibilities.++
+ And did you know they CLIMB? You want to be certain of your containment vessel.
++ When I first moved over here one of the things I missed the worst was all the wild critters I was used to. Chickadees were very high on that list. It’s hard not to love something that little and cheeky. British robins are out of the same box: little and cheeky. And the funny thing is that I feel that I’ve always lived with British robins.# I know my love of skylarks and brown hares and beech trees is only twenty years old. British robins . . . I can’t imagine life without them.
# American robins are fine. But British robins are the real deal.
‡‡ Fiona and I are going to get into trouble. Unfortunately there were only tickets available for trouble on Wednesday evening.
‡‡‡ Mind you there are some fairly strange layouts in small towers too. But the small part does limit the grievous possibilities.
ME Awareness Week. And some bad bells.
Hey. People. I read the forum. But you don’t seriously believe I’m going to post the second part of Corellia’s saga right away, do you? Blow off two guest posts in a ROW? If I had two nights in a row off I’d have established a habit of lying on the sofa covered with hellhounds during blog-writing time, eating bonbons and reading trashy novels. Marabou-trimmed satin lingerie optional. No, no, no. Besides, torturing blog readers is one of my few pleasures.
. . . ‘Pleasures’ certainly not including bell ringing. Oh gods. Practise tonight at the abbey was unbelievably awful. Awful. As I said to Albert as I raced out the door* to escape as soon as possible, this habit of taking one step forward and two steps back is getting discouraging.** Profound and utter humiliation is disagreeable at best but in this case I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve only ever learnt . . . well, pretty much anything, but particularly bell ringing . . . by grind. Relentless grind. You don’t get to grind at the abbey—there are too many ringers at too many different levels (especially upper) to have time for grinding any of them.*** I’d been hoping that I was far enough down the ringing road generally that I wouldn’t need to grind the way I used to . . . wrong. But the big spiky unmediatable situation here is that it’s specifically the abbey that’s the problem: those bells, that frelling ringing chamber, the fact that it’s the abbey. I can ring Grandsire Frelling Triples at other towers—not gloriously well, but I can ring it. Or I could. I think I’m forgetting, because what I’m chiefly doing lately is failing to ring it at the abbey. I cannot begin to tell you how WILDLY FRUSTRATING it is to listen, or to stand behind and watch someone else ringing, something that in any other tower I’d give my eyeteeth† to have a go at—I should be consolidating my Grandsire Triples and practising bob triples and major, Stedman triples, Cambridge minor, treble bobbing to surprise major. But I can’t ring at the abbey.
I wasn’t even expecting the worst tonight. Usually I’m horribly good at expecting the worst. Tonight when I pulled off the bell felt familiar—it is not, in fact, the bells, it’s the ballroom-sized ringing chamber and the abbeyness of it. And I thought, pulling on this familiar bell, oh good. I’m getting there. I’m making progress. This is, or at any rate is going to be, my new home tower.
Does anyone have a bridge handy that I could throw myself off?
* * *
Meanwhile . . . @cambridgeminor/CathyR tweeted me this today:
I know there have been ME awareness weeks—possibly every year at this time, one of the symptoms is really bad memory—but I’d missed we were having one now. And ME, like way too many other badly understood and/or scary don’t-want-to-think-about-it-because-it-might-happen-to-me afflictions and ailments, can use all the good press it can get. Yes, it’s a real disease.†† No, we’re not all malingerers.††† Hurrah for journalists who write articles‡ saying that ME is a nasty kick in the head from fate and to take it seriously. And I’m very glad to see someone making a noise about the appalling so-called ‘treatment’ of enforced exercise, which I’ve railed about here before. If you have ME the last thing you should do is force yourself to do stuff. That only makes it worse. As I’ve also said—but to me, being someone with ME, this is all worth saying again—there may be a few ME-diagnosed people out there for whom enforced exercise worked . . . but I’d personally doubt that in that case what they did have is ME. It’s a fairly slippery disease/syndrome and there’s a lot of overlap with other fateful kicks in the head.
But I want to add (again) that my experience of it is also that what energy, physical and mental, you do have you MUST USE, because if you don’t it will not only go away again—but you’ll feel worse, just like if you forced yourself to do too much. The Lack of Slack Syndrome. One of the things this article also mentions, and good for her, although I’d put quite a few underlines around it too, is the good days and bad days thing—you may also have good half days and bad half days, good hours and bad hours . . . good minutes and bad minutes. She mentions people who have to put their lives on hold because they can’t do anything consistently. Yes. This is one of the big ratbags about managing it—and leads to why I seem to get away with so much. I’ve told you (often) before there are a lot of smoke and mirrors on the blog—well, if I have to lie down for an hour or a day, I just do it. I don’t have to tell you or my boss about it—and the hellhounds adore it, of course. But one of my bottom lines is that I have no stamina, despite all that hurtling. I gave up horses (several times) because I can’t ride regularly enough. I don’t ring quarter peals because I never know when I’m going to have a bad day or a bad hour, and you’re letting down five or seven other people if you fold up unexpectedly. I don’t travel for a variety of reasons, but head of the list is the ME. Managing it on the road is . . . well. I’d rather have bell practise nights like tonight, when throwing myself off bridges seems like a rational reaction, than cope with a bad ME day away from home.
This is one of the things I’d like to see more recognition of—that most people with ME are still capable of doing something—and most of us want to: who wants to be helpless, hopeless, dependent and bored?—but we need SLACK from the healthy, functioning world. We need FLEXIBILITY. The business/working/income-oriented world is still lousy about people who don’t fit their pattern. It’s like the colossal waste of energy and talent of parents who want to, you know, raise their kids themselves. The corporate world still seems to think that kids are something you do in your spare time, and that making widgets and earning money is the real centre of the universe. What is wrong with this picture.
Everybody would be happier if they could work and live to a model that suited them better, you know? You don’t have to have ME or little kids. Elasti-world! Now all we need is a logo and catchy tag line.
* * *
* Not a good idea from this tower. GERONIMOOOOOOOOOO!
** I’ve also started wondering again how long before they tell me not to come back.
*** Except in terms of ‘into little pieces’. I came home in a basket.
† As if anyone would want these eyeteeth. I did, however, get my crown glued back in today.
Dentist from R’lyeh was on holiday, so I saw An Extremely Chirpy female dentist. Extremely Chirpy. Except that I guess you aren’t allowed to make jokes about doctors on drugs I’d say she’s on drugs. Nobody is that chirpy without chemical assistance. I commented, as I produced the small offending object, that it was remarkably clean, as was the post-stub it used to be stuck to. This is, in fact, a crown put in by Dentist from R’lyeh himself, so they could look it up in their records and the chirpy dentist went off into peals of tinkling laughter when the assistant declared that he’d glued it in originally with Glurpbggg™ ^ which is a temporary cement. Oh, that’s why the crown was so clean! sang Ms Nitrous Oxide. Temporary cement always dissolves over time!
Erm, I said, spitting out the crown, which she had spronged back in place to check rapport and congruity with the surrounding teeth, and then couldn’t dislodge again, why?
Oh, because it’s such a good fit! she trilled.
Um. From where I’m sitting . . . the temporary cement was always going to dissolve? Therefore I was always due to be back here in this chair having spent x number of days chewing on one side of my mouth and worrying there was something actually wrong, and then spending an afternoon I might have spent getting on with novel-in-progress schlepping into Mauncester to have it put back in?
Um. Why?
^ I can hardly wait to see what WordPress does to the TM symbol. I wonder if I need popcorn.
†† Although I personally think it’s a syndrome. As I keep saying. If I were going to guess more, I’d guess that it’s caused by a variety of sensitivities to the extremely not-what-we-evolved-for life we lead now. A kind of uber-allergy.
††† Note that of course there are malingerers among us. It’s like some accountants embezzle. That doesn’t mean the definition of an accountant includes ‘embezzler’.
‡ Although please the frelling gods couldn’t they have hired a PROOFREADER? Text as bad as this undermines both the message and the professionalism of the journalist or the paper or both . . . or maybe that’s just that I’m a professional writer with ME.
A whangblamming thunderstorm and dazzling blue sky kind of day
. . . in more ways than one. In the first place yes, the weather is completely crazed. Because of other issues* the hellhounds got a series of short hurtles today rather than one long and one medium-length one, and trying to fit these in between cloudbursts was all part of the jolly fun. So I’d just had the latest bit of bad news about the weekend’s Adventure** and I was blitzing around the cottage in a dangerous, bruising torpor because the archangels were due ANY MINUTE*** . . . and I finally thought to check my email and the archangels were going to be an hour later than scheduled.
I could have had a little more sleep.
I could have given the hellhounds a little more hurtle.
I could have hung from the rafters screaming about the reality of Sunday travel a little longer.
I did make myself a second cup of tea, left it on the Aga to stew, and took hellhounds for their second sprint of the day. And got back to the latest parcel of little live green things, longing to be potted up and too tender to leave outdoors. I’m hauling in trays of the little ratbags every night—and back out in the morning. I’m running out of trays. And the sweet peas, which arrived weeks ago, are starting to need repotting. ARRRRRRGH.
The archangels arrived†, were here for two hours . . . AND COULDN’T DO ANYTHING I WANTED THEM TO DO. With the exception of a few bits and pieces, and getting the kanji-support Japanese download installed.†† But I need both Pooka and Astarte, both i-gizmos, frelling updated . . . and they couldn’t do it because my broadband is TOO SLOW. Meanwhile, my so-called provider has changed hands, changed its name and logo, raised its prices and lost my Direct Debit details. And claimed never to have received the archangels’ email, attachment and fax from a month ago about upgrading . . . they plainly raised their prices to pay the designer for the new logo which is undoubtedly larger, flashier, and in full colour, and which will cost more money to produce every month at the top of your invoice.
So the archangels sent it all again, and then went back to wrestling with various gremlins, ogres and unidentified snarly things.††† Raphael checked in with my nonproviders in about fifteen minutes. No, they hadn’t received the resend. Half an hour. No, they hadn’t received it. An hour. No, they hadn’t received it, hahahahahahahaha, isn’t this comical? Meanwhile Gabriel had taken the lid off my phone housing, or whatever you call it, where the wires come in from outside, and did a hissing-between-his-teeth equivalent. You will remember when this came up a week or something ago, that there’s nothing I can do about Brit Telecom’s utter indifference to the connectivity trials and tribulations of a small cul de sac in New Arcadia, and BT owns all the wiring. Gabriel stared thoughtfully out the window at the telephone pole that various hysterically-laughing linemen have nearly fallen off. Your Problem Is Obvious. However between them they think that Raphael can bedevil my provider into providing something, and Gabriel can do something about the connection between Outside and Inside.
But meanwhile . . .
I took hellhounds for another sprint and fulminated. Work did not go at all well in what remained of the afternoon. Also meanwhile . . . I had to go to Forza tonight. I’d missed last week’s practise due to family arrivals and Morse-code electricity, the week before was some rangleblagging scheduled cancellation or other, and I’m going to miss next week because they’re having one of their forty-six-and-a-half bell practises.‡ I didn’t want to go tonight. I didn’t want to go a lot. I’m completely demoralised on the subject of tower ringing and I’ve pretty much turned the fact that I can’t deal with the abbey into a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom, and I’m short of sleep, dreading the pogo-stick journey on Sunday, and totally furious with my technology. I’m clapped out on adrenaline and I’m exhausted.
I had to go.
I went.
Oh, and did I mention it was TIPPING it down? On the way over in Wolfgang we were creeping along in third gear because I couldn’t see out of the frelling windscreen.
And when I got there there were people crawling around with cameras. What? Leaving now. And the Scary Man was in charge. Whimper. Why was I ever born?‡‡
The Scary Man swooped down on me and said, Come ring some Grandsire Triples. —Wait! No! I was going to run away!
. . . I actually haven’t dwelled on how bad it’s been, the last few times at the abbey. I had what I thought was that little breakthrough ringing on six bells rather than eight a while back . . . and then it went away, and I couldn’t ring on six either. I am not joking about the demoralisation. If it weren’t that it felt like either go on facing the abbey or give up ringing, I’d be staying home with a good book.
Anyway. Yeah. Clearly I’m setting you up to say . . . it was okay. It was okay. I didn’t ring frelling Grandsire frelling Triples flawlessly, but I was ringing it. I wasn’t just blindly pulling on a rope and doing what my minder was shouting in my ear, which is mostly what it’s been so far. I am going to do this. I am going to learn to cope with the abbey. Which is to say I may even have a bell tower again. I’m sorry it’s a frelling abbey . . . but it remains the nearest tower that rings methods if I’m not going back to New Arcadia and, hint, I’m not, and therefore my best option is an abbey. . . . where things like BAFTA-winning documentary makers come round and frelling film you. Apparently we’re going to be part of a son-et-lumiere deal for some Hampshire festival. We had exactly thirty-seven ringers for our thirty-seven bells and the Scary Man told us all to catch hold which therefore . . . included me. We just rang rounds . . . but I’ve told you about this before: when you’re ringing rounds on four hundred and twelve or even only thirty-seven you pull off and then hold up for frelling EVER while you’re waiting for the other thirty-six bells before it’s your turn again. This doesn’t happen on six. It’s very disconcerting to someone who is used to ringing on six and finds eight a stretch. Oh, and if you see the film . . . I’m wearing a bright turquoise cardigan which would not have been my choice if I’d known I was going to be immortalised. I’d have gone more for dark brown and a bag over my head.
I also have to say a big fat shiny word for Gemma here. She’s an abbey ringer, and she knows what a struggle I’ve been having. She’s the one who’s kept saying, no, no, they will not tell you to go away and furthermore you will catch on. She’s also the one who suggested that I try a different bell for triples because she found it easier to see from . . . and she’s right. I think that’s one of the things that helped tonight. She does keep smiling at me in this Rather Amused Fashion, but I have this effect on some people for some reason. And I was so giddy tonight that I let her convince me to come to the pub after. . . .
I may have a bell tower again. My life is not over.
And the OTHER THING? I HAVE A NEST FULL OF ADORABLE FLUFFY BABY ROBINS IN THE GREENHOUSE. They’re so cute you could die. I rushed out and bought mealworms.
* * *
* Including sleeping really badly because I’m starting (early) to stress out about an Adventure I’m slated for this weekend that I am dreading extremely. So . . . of course. I turned the alarm off and went back to sleep in one fluid movement. The sleep I’d spent the last x hours not getting.
** You cannot go ANYWHERE on a Sunday in this country. They close the roads^, they close the railway lines, they lock all the barn doors before and after the horses have fled, they glue the wheels of all locally-flying airplanes to the runways, and the Sunday dog sled teams are booked years in advance. Maybe if I started walking now. . . .
^ Including bicycle paths and rickshaws.
*** And I’d overslept. See above.
† Gabriel reported that they had been given a very suspicious look by one of my neighbours. Hey, two young men in hoodies. And Gabriel has a two-day beard.
†† Do I even have to tell you that this did not go the way it was supposed to and I would have gotten totally screwed up and berserk if I’d tried to do it myself? Whatever. They pulled out one of their Magic Discs and made the software(s) talk to each other. And now my Learn Japanese site isn’t mostly little empty rectangles.
††† I sat on the floor and knitted. With some help from hellhounds.
‡ The half is the tower captain’s gerbil.
‡‡ Don’t answer that.
Handbells, and further bulletins on comparative ickiness
Niall and I went haring across the landscape this evening*, looking for Curlyewe. Our new lot of handbell ringers are from Curlyewe and last time they came to New Arcadia Niall suggested, despite my frantic gestures,** we come to them next time. ARRRRGH. I do not commute. Commuting is something other people do.***
Niall picked me up tonight, so all I had to do was hold onto my seat.† But Curlyewe is in the same section of enchanted landscape that Tir nan Og†† is, which is to say that you can’t get there from here, and even if you could, you’d miss it in the fairy mist. Maps lie, and signposts move around. Possibly Niall had in mind outrunning the magic.
I guess it worked, since we got there. Eventually. I had been even less enthusiastic about our expedition when I found out they were expecting us to ring at the church. Doesn’t someone have a sitting-room we could use? A nice warm sitting-room with mod cons like an electric kettle and a loo? Whimper. So I was wearing six extra layers and fingerless gloves††† and a good thing too. Although there was both a loo and a kitchen with an electric kettle . . . there was even an electric fire, which Enoch put up on a shelf and angled down at us as we sat in our little circle . . . and I was still freezing to death.
But handbells were rung. Farrell is back at university, but Oliver is beginning to ring little touches of bob minor; Enoch is beginning to get through plain courses of bob minor; and Olga . . . needs more self-confidence, and an iPhone with Mobel on it. She is bringing back horrible memories of Niall and Esme trying to teach me. . . .
But the main thing is, the three of them really aren’t ready to cope alone, and neither Niall nor I have a regular free evening left. I don’t know what we do now. Pity we can’t use a little of that fairy magic and call up a handbell-ringing golem. . . .
* * *
* At an extreme rate of speed. Frell it, honeybun, I want to live to my sixtieth birthday.
** You could see him thinking, poor thing, she has cramp.
*** Yes, I’m a cow.^ But it’s a little like judging a book by its cover. There are too many books. If I really, really hate the cover well, great, there’s one I don’t have to buy. DISCARD. YAAAY. There are too many interesting things to do and see and get involved in. If they take more than twenty minutes to get to, great, there are closer ones. DISCARD. YAAAY.
I admit there’s a sliding scale about this. If Nadia were a bell tower, I’d be looking for something closer.^^ And the Japanese conversation lessons I’m still promising myself after I finish SHADOWS, which is a little perverse, but there’s no way I have brain or energy to start now, will be farther away than Nadia. However, they have helpfully said that a good deal can be done via Skype.^ While they also, equally helpfully, send me occasional links to interesting events at the Japan Society in London.
Anyway. Niall is a nicer human being than I am. If it were up to me, if a bunch of beginners want to learn to ring handbells, they can come to us. A bit like I go to Nadia—or to the language school.#
. . . Oh, and yes, both my Japanese cookbooks arrived. Someone on Twitter (?) asked a few days ago. I think that’s one of the things that got buried in the post-flu avalanche of Missed Stuff. It’s not that the flu was all that severe—it was a ratbag but it wasn’t serious—it’s just that I’m always not quite coping as a way of life, so any spanner in the works really does me in, like a mild wind will knock over a cardboard house. I was going to blog about my new cookbooks—they’re lovely. Maybe I still will. I can pull them off the shelf## and add them to the pile of things to be dealt with NOW. RIGHT NOW. I MEAN NOW.
^ I’m also a cow with ME, and driving is a genuine bugbear.
^^ On a heavy Monday, let’s say when I’ve done a particularly intense stint of work before my voice lesson, and Niall isn’t going to Colin’s that night so if I want to go I have to drive myself, when I get home again I may be just beginning to see the little smoke wisps in my peripheral vision that mean STOP NOW.
^^^ Supposing Skype is in the mood. A language I know—which is to say English—is usually pretty challenging and video? Are you kidding?
# Which may indeed turn out to be too far. In which case I will have to find a Skype pixie/hobgoblin/troll and bribe the frell out of it.
## Yes. They’re on a SHELF. I hope you’re impressed.
† YAAAAAAAAAH. It’s amazing what a 15-year-old Peugeot can do.
†† Er—Tir nan Og, Hampshire. I have rung there occasionally. When I can find it.
††† NO NOT THOSE FINGERLESS GLOVES. They’re still in a bucket in the greenhouse.
Diane in MN
I’ve never had a plastic bag break, but oh how I appreciate the ewww grossness of your situation. I have taken to using plastic gloves–the disposable exam-glove kind–when doing public pick-up duty with my critters, and keeping an extra one in my pocket just in case of some unexpected disaster. So far so good.
I have a large-economy-size box of those disposable gloves because I seem . . . to get myself in icky situations, one way or another, somewhat regularly.^ But as a town dog owner, I go through one to four plastic pick-up bags a day. Even if we get out to the country for the long morning hurtle, the afternoon hurtle is pretty much invariably in town. That’s a lot of plastic. The local pet store, after listening to me whine about it for several years, finally found a source of biodegradable dog crap bags that seem to be genuinely biodegradable even after you’ve read the fine print . . . but it’s still a lot of plastic. I certainly use the gloves . . . but I’m under the impression the bags leave a smaller, you know, footprint.
Re Williams
As someone who milks cows on a dairy farm two days a week, I can tell you that it does wash off.
Well personally I draw AN ENORMOUS THICK LINE, LIKE MAYBE ABOUT A MEDIUM-SIZED ASTEROID WIDE, between herbivore crap and carnivore crap. I’ve spent years of my life mucking out stalls, but I think I’d have trouble working at a kennels, and I’m even a dog person. Herbivore crap is just not that big a deal.^^ I’ve come into direct personal contact with . . . well, an awful lot of horse, including scouring foal, which is pretty unpleasant, cow, which is always sloppy, goat, including scouring goatling, sheep and rabbit. There are probably others. But it never occurred to me in my barn days that washing my hands and putting my jeans and flannel shirts through the washing machine wouldn’t be enough.
PamAdams
I would argue that rolling over in one’s sleep, only to discover one’s face in a pool of kitty vomit, is worse.
Oh gods. Oh gods. I’m not laughing. I’m really not . . . RRRMBGGLK. NOT. LAUGHING.
b_twin_1
| I would argue that rolling over in one’s sleep, only to discover one’s face in a pool of kitty vomit, is worse. |
. . . given the number of people on the forum who have access to animals with copious excrement of all types I humbly suggest we don’t carry on with “mine’s bigger than yours”
::notgigglingeither:: ::NOT:: I don’t think that’s what was happening here, but you’re probably right we want to ensure that it doesn’t. But I’d differentiate between indoor pets and you farmers. I’ve worked on farms, and it’s also a different mindset. So PamAdams’ interesting experience and my exploding dog bag are in the same category, as are you and Re Williams in the same other category.
^ This includes in the garden. I scatter pelleted chicken manure by hand, because it’s quick, easy and efficient that way. The bags all say STERILIZED but I am much happier in gloves somehow. And I once had a carton of mealworms break all over the kitchen floor, and having very promptly shut up hellhounds, scrabbled (most of) the escapees out from under the corner overhang of cupboards and so on by hand. Speaking of mealworms I haven’t checked on the robin’s nest in a couple of days. . . .
^^ Which, since there’s so much more of it, is a very good thing.+
+ I don’t think I’d do too well mucking out the big cat cages at the zoo either.
Unnnngh, continued indefinitely
Diane in MN
Your condition reminds me of the last time I had real, honest-to-goodness influenza, a couple of decades ago. I made it worse by attempting to go to work on the days I felt marginally better–that was the first week; the second week I just stayed home. My husband had been out of town the first week, but since he caught it as soon as he got home, we were both knocked out the second week, barely able to stagger downstairs to heat up soup. I hope you do NOT have honest-to-goodness flu and see the end of your current affliction very soon.
Yes, along about the third day you have trouble getting out of bed you start thinking about the Spanish flu that killed 50 million (or so) people in 1918, right? A little learning is a dangerous thing, especially when you’re ill and less emotionally stable than your usual calm, sane self.*
I finally heard from Hannah today (we having missed connections mainly due to germ ramifications this last week) that she got home and went down with bronchitis. Joy. I can’t wait to find out that’s next on my agenda. At the moment it’s mostly a really alarming head cold with this bloody cough, and some fantastically exciting gastric complications. And I didn’t fever-spike last night which I want to believe is a good sign. I’m getting the hellhounds hurtled. Where is my medal. But I do miss breathing. And tasting my food. And my eyes not starting to go fuzzy after about two hours of reading or staring at a computer screen. Yet another mark for the excellence of knitting: you can knit when your eyes are too fluy to focus on print.
EMoon
I agree–don’t know how I survived waiting and boring events before knitting.
Boring events including having flu. Here I thought it was just about badly organised handbell evenings and very long stoplights on your way to your voice lesson.
jmeadows
|
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I am not merely working on the second leg warmer, but that I cast on and immediately started ribbing—not only without having to redo the first few rows about forty-seven times, but without even thinking about it. I cast on and started knitting. Yaaay. Progress. |
YAY!!! *so proud*
Well at least you’re continuing to accept responsibility for your part in my yarny downfall.
Isn’t that an awesome feeling? Just . . . casting on and knitting?
Um. . . . Okay. Yes.
I won’t lie and say you’ll never have to fiddle and retry ever again
If at the point where I can do the exact same ribbing I just did for 1,000,000,000 rows for the first world’s longest leg warmer without thinking about it for the second, there were no challenges left ahead of me . . . knitting would clearly be unworthy of us. So what a good thing I HAVE MANY HOURS OF BEING DRIVEN OUT OF MY TINY FREAKED-OUT MIND to look forward to.
– because it happens to EVERY knitter no matter how long she’s been knitting –
Especially if she keeps being drawn farther and farther into the dark side. A friend is sending me the pattern for a rose intarsia pullover—or I think it’s intarsia; I don’t actually need to know at this stage—that I have about as much chance of making successfully as I do making the world safe, happy, peaceful and environmentally sound by pointing out that the majority of our heads of state are morons. And blondviolinist tweeted me this today: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0307586715/ref=sib_dp_pt/181-5660244-9068349#reader-link which I instantly found over here and ordered, despite the fact that I’m pretty sure even the flowers the author has labelled ‘starting out’ will be beyond me—and besides, I want to knit the rose, which is probably in the ‘resolute’ category.
but that’s a great step.
Yes, actually, it is, isn’t it? Hee. Also, I really need to FINISH something.
Mockorange
But may I just say that it amuses me that yesterday’s blog, preoccupied as it was with not only handbells but the miseries of illness, roused comments about what on the forum? Knitting
Well, naturally. Some of us are knitting again for the first time in years entirely due to your proselytising on this blog. Let’s see if we can derail to knitting again. KNITTING! KNITTING! KNITTING! KNITTING!
All right, you woodwork-lurking knitters: go for it. And I’m delighted to be able to provide the evil role model of degradation and despair for a few of you that jmeadows and blondviolinist so generously offered to me.
Birdreader
I hope you feel better soon. Of course you had your knitting. It can be an ice breaker, with some curious person coming over to be interested in what you are making. (We shy people are absolutely not hiding behind handiwork – of course not!)
Well—are you certain it is shyness? Shyness has the implication that you can’t talk, that your mind goes blank or you’re overwhelmed or something. Maybe you just don’t want to talk, maybe you don’t want to be in this situation, whatever it is, and knitting is a way of preventing you from doing something you might regret later, like throwing a chair through the window and running away.** Most social occasions make me uncomfortable and I’m mostly bad at them, but it’s more about being introverted and cranky with it.
Diane in MN
You were absolutely primed to be a knitter by ringing handbells. You HAVE TO COUNT if you’re a knitter, too. (You also have to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Knitters get plenty of arithmetical practice.)
I am not hyperventilating. I am not hyperventilating. I no longer fear and dread maths. I don’t. No.
. . . But I’ve told you, haven’t I, that the tower captain at my old tower—East Persnickety, a million years and a century ago—used to say that his wife picked up change ringing instantly because she was a lifelong committed*** knitter?
PamAdams
Then I went back to bed (which was popular with hellhounds†)
I find that cats are equally helpful in an emergency such as this. During my own bout with the Martian Death Bug earlier this year, I was constantly surrounded by and/or covered in cats.
Oh, the Martian Death Bug? Maybe that’s what I have? NOBODY SHOULD FEEL THIS CRUMMY. ESPECIALLY NOT DAY AFTER DAY. Oh, and let’s have a little sideswipe at ‘the wisdom of the body’, okay? I love homeopathy, and I do think it keeps me on the road—and, for example, is the reason why hellhounds are still being hurtled right now and I’m not in an oxygen tent at the local hospital—but there are times when the la-la-la aspects do get to me a little, and now is one of them. So, in the depths of my illness, what does the wisdom of my particular body declare? Chiefly that it craves strong black tea and champagne†, and it doesn’t want ANY FOOD AT ALL.†† And if I attempt to remonstrate with it, it turns nasty. Oh, and ‘if you feed a cold you will have to starve a fever’? Bulltiddly. Or maybe this depends on what stage of life and/or immune system you are. But I have to eat. Aside from being dragged out behind a brace of hellhounds twice a day.
† Oh reckless dog owner beware of precedent.
On the other hand, they do make adequate substitutes for the electric blanket……
It’s the self-motivating factor I find problematic. This includes the bizarre hierarchical struggles to do with Contact with the Hellgoddess. The last generation got this sorted pretty well immediately. These guys are still at it after (almost) six years.
. . . . Is it late enough? Can I go back to bed yet?
Ajlr
|
I am an obsessive listener to Radio 3 |
I’m more of a Radio 4 addict – sleep comes peacefully after listening to the Shipping Forecast.
That’s it! I need an endless loop of the Shipping Forecast!
* * *
* Who? What?
** Not an option the other night. In the first place we were in the undercroft, and in the second place, Niall was my ride home. I wasn’t going to make seven leagues on foot, thank you very much, especially not this week.
*** No remarks please
† Cider, prosecco, whatever. Alcohol with bubbles. But it needs to be alcohol. Fizzy water is inadequate. And my wise body wants more than its two units.
†† Not even chocolate. I am truly not myself.