Today’s otter is from ekilby on Flickr.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
Just watched the latest Doctor Who. ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ written by Richard Curtis. I’m slowly warming to the new Dr and this episode was the best yet. I hope he keeps writing for the show.
I’m also “studying” for my US citizen test next month. There are 100 possible questions, they can ask any 10 and you have to get 6 correct. Not sure what happens if you fail. Pit trap to Gitmo maybe?
Dual citizenship here i come…
I’ve finished and submitted my final essay for the semester, and I’ve taken next week off work. I’m now revelling in doing absolutely nothing.
It’s a nice feeling, isn’t it Rebekka?
Coz, I’m looking forward to the Richard Curtis episode. I know he can occasionally be a bit mawkish, but he’s also sharp as a whip.
Gooooooooal!
I too handed in my final assignment for this semester, and am now trying to work out how to make a flash website. So far I have started with “sleep in, make blueberry muffins”, which seems to be going well.
Have been noticing – and liking! – your new layout. Nice! Love the scrolling of latest stories.
Thanks! – I’m playing with it to stretch what it can do at the moment.
There’s an option to choose just one post category to go in that slideshow section – I’m tempted to just make it the Life section but I quite like it being the latest stories too.
There’s another option for a plainer blog layout – I’m going to add that into the top nav bar for those who don’t really like the more magaziney style – hopefully that will give folks the best of both worlds.
Took the old cat to the vet this morning, thinking that we’d have to get her put down. The vet said that the cat didn’t need the needle just yet, that she just needed help pooping and keeping her coat clean, and to get rid of the flea problem in her sleeping area. Melma (the cat) has a host of underlying health issues and she’s not long for the earth, but I thought I’d have to bury her today.
So now I’m going to relax and watch Doctor Who. *deep sigh*
I’m relieved for you, NN. Nobody’s ever ready to let a beloved companion animal go, so I’m glad for both of you that there’s a reprieve.
Wondering vaguely why Answers in Genesis is in the blogroll. Sure, it’s under an appropriate heading, but if you want to categorise all the nutjob sites on the internet it could take millennia.
Occasionally I amuse myself by wandering over there to see what they are misrepresenting at the moment. *shrug* The Flaming Nongs part of the blogroll is a bit of a historical curiosity really, since I haven’t added to it for a while.
And I have just added an alternative anti-spam beastie, and I can still comment! *is chuffed*
Speaking of the blogroll, your link to Tiger Beatdown needs to be updated.
Thanks for the heads-up – done.
I have just enjoyed classic homemade coq au vin for the second time this month. As usual for the second time one follows a recipe, this time it wasn’t as good. Next time I have to try and reproduce the mistakes I made the first time.
That sounds worrying: we made ricotta hotcakes yesterday and they were rather rubbish. I hope the second time isn’t even worse!
I’m getting rather horrid pain in my right arm, from my elbow to my wrist, which alas, I think is associated with typing / mouse use. So I’ve swapped to a left handed mouse, and been diligent about micro-breaks, but I’ve still got about 40 assignments to get through (we have to mark on-screen, which I loathe), plus our NZ tax returns, which involves me doing sets of accounts for the house we still own there (don’t want to own it, but that’s the way things panned out as we moved over here), plus several essays to write… I think I’m going to be doing a lot of left-handed typing for a while. Plus re-arranging the desk and chair configuration.
*puts on lapsed physio hat*
I’m sure you’re right on the root cause (too many clicks will do that – it gets me every few weeks on something or other) – and you’re doing the right things. Something many people overlook, especially at this time of year, with neck/arm aches and pains, is keeping the neck warm enough. A cold neck can have the muscles surrounding the cervical spine spasm up affecting blood supply to the nerves underlying them and doing no favours to the muscles themselves. So: it’s turtleneck time, scarf time, shawl time, microfleece neckwarmer etc time for you!
I have an old neck injury from a car crash 20 years ago, and I spend all winter wearing either turtlenecks or these little cotton-lycra hiking tubes of cloth that just sit lightly on my neck – they’re fine for indoors, and when I go out I just throw a scarf over the top.
The cat just came by making her “I want to go out” noises. I opened the door and not quite an arctic blast but definitely a solid block of wintry chill confronted us. She looked at the garden to see if this cold was something she could smash. She looked at me. I queried whether she had had a change of heart. One more disgusted look into the garden, then she turned tail and headed back in the direction of the heater.
Does anybody have a better response to asking your noisy kids “what are you two up to?” and receiving the reply “we’re being weird” than my lackadaisical “oh, carry on then” ?
Dead silence is hardly incompatible with weirdness!
Mary, that is very true, but on this particular occasion they were being noisy.
tigtog: right, I was suggesting that you could tell them they could be just as weird or possibly even weirder whilst simultaneously being quiet. Perhaps you could sell it as “spooky”.
Heh – that’s definitely worth a try for next time, although that line is quite possibly one that they’re only going to use once.
That ‘wear a scarf’ advice has been excellent, thank you, tigtog. I have a soft hand knitted merino one draped around my neck right now, and it’s lovely. Also, the pain is much reduced, to be point of being gone unless I spend a whole day at the computer.
Deborah, very glad to hear it! That was something said by one of my uni lecturers about chronic neck pain and the Aussie penchant for eschewing scarves. She encouraged us all to nag nag nag neck-pain sufferers about them 🙂