Remembrance of things past

Can I still do it? Write a blog post? I wasn’t sure before today and I had got to the stage where I didn’t feel able to. I had meandered past Too-Busy, cantered over Too-Tired and ended up at Too-Difficult which, as some of you may know, is on the borders of Deep Despair.

It can feel a long way back from there, but I dragged myself to this point Here, now, this page. It has taken me several days to finish it, and frankly I don’t know it was worth it as I read it back. I merely hope to unjam a blocked channel of communication, rather than win a Nobel Prize for being brilliant.

Nothing, as in no one thing, has been wrong. I just didn’t want to write anything, and that’s OK. Until the day I did want to write something and found myself in a very strange country indeed. Still, that was then and it seems this is now, and my fingers make increasingly confident contact with the keyboard, from stuttering to staccato in only 96 hours or so..

It has been a strange experience. I have always found that writing was soothing to my soul and yet lately, it has seemed a chore. Words have been coming less easily as I experiment with new activities that involve hands and eyes but not so much speech and reading (not in English anyway!). I feel different and it’s quite disorienting.

Hopefully EBL 2.0 will turn out to be reasonably interesting anyway. I don’t want to spend my time being bored by some old biddy who knits and cackles to herself. I was hoping that might wait another decade or three, if I’m honest. I’m all for cackling and knitting in their right time and place, and getting some practice in has been welcome. I just don’t want to do only that.

I’m assuming this is Grief having a bit of a giggle at my expense. Go on, then. I don’t mind. Everyone needs a laugh, and certainly I am no stranger to providing it for friends and colleagues. I don’t work in IT for nothing you know. Almost 30 years the laughing-stock, woman and girl. There are jokes, you know, and probably a web-site. We’re an easy target because IT is ridiculous and we become so by association. That and the speaking Martian thing.

Changes have certainly been afoot in EBL Towers, thanks for asking. Building work. Decorating. Garden improvements. Turf and fireplace removals. New fireplace, new flowers, new paint and an almost new chimney. It turned out the cracks in the plaster were due to the fact the chimney was being held up by a 200 year old piece of wood wedged in where some stone had been removed. The Ancestors were Bodgers too, it seems.

And I have been having some fun as well. Courses. Events. Translations. Dressing up. Eating, drinking and being quite merry. Knitting. Embroidering. Meditation. Quakerly volunteering. Making soup. Calligraphy. And work, of course, always work, for which I am both grateful and resentful.

Now here I am again, with no expectation about keeping a regular blogging habit like I used to. We shall see, my dears, we shall see.

Anyway, more importantly, how are you all? You have been in my mind if not my blogspace. Let me know before you go.

And as they are alleged to say in Ireland:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face.

May the rain fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God hold you in the hollow of her hand.

Namaste.

Coming soon

Regular readers will have been gnawing their nails to the quick with frustration at a lack of their favourite Bag Lady’s musings. To reassure you all, in case you had noticed my absence, I am alive and well, and hope to resume service some time before Christmas.

It’s been busy. I might tell you about it, or some of it, or I might just allude darkly. Let’s see what happens.

Namaste.

The Waiting Game

My dears, many of you will know Rara from her marvellous blog, and also know her terrible situation.
This news came through recently and I would ask you if you can to offer support, through hearts, minds, or wallets, whatever is possible.
Thanks you

Important: Please Help Save MORE Than a House

Merbear is a lovely lovely blogger who should not be losing her home because she is unwell. Please read more and see if you are able to help her – either by sharing more widely or contributing to the fund (or both)

a funny thing

A while ago I commented that it always seems to happen that people ask me for directions.

This 

evening Sigoth and I arrived in Copenhagen and found our way from the airport arrivals hall to the train platform. 

 

A young man came up to us immediately and asked me where to go to buy tickets.

 

I have lliterally been here less than half an hour. 

 

Go figure! 

 

Namaste.

More Live

and yes, we have another successful release – the interim to follow the recent go live. Finally I get a bit of a breather. Next release is November! Oh the joys of version 1.0.

Tomorrow it’s a creative writing workshop on making a spiritual journal (I’m intrigued and nervous in equal measure), then on Sunday we will be popping over to Stamford Bridge to celebrate thrashing some Vikings in 1066. ahead of Harold’s unfortunate exploits at Hastings.

If only he had waited for his reinforcements,,,

C’est la vie!

Namaste

Live

It’s live.

I’m not saying it’s perfect.

But it’s live.

What am I talking about? Well, I have just finished the first phase of a project for a new IT system, and made the deadline. There were casualties along the way – mainly functional requirements. Most of those will follow over the next few weeks and months. By March it will be a lovely little system.

Today we are happy with good enough.

The final checks were followed by coffee and chocolates, then a long country walk to clear the cobwebs and ease the aching back. I may soon be back to blogging a little more often but first – a break.

Namaste.

 

Who am I?

A while back I wrote about workaholism and taking on a Death March Project. If you really want to, you can read about it here.

Well, it’s been just as draining as I thought but I am cautiously optimistic that we will complete phase 1 this weekend. Thanks to a brilliant team, a following wind and a fantastic supplier, we might actually go live on the scheduled date. I am doing final test Saturday morning, then curling up in the foetal position and weeping – with relief or despair is yet to be known. I’m so tired I hardly know who I am any more.

Time is pressing. There’s an interim release planned for the end of the month too, and a further patch release later in the year. Then it’s phase 2 in March. All of these changes will see improvements.

I hate 1.0 releases. They are never as perfect as you want. You start off with a shiny dream of a beautiful system and as you go on, you compromise. But that’s life. This week I am all about good-enough systems.

Good-enough saw me through my early parenting; so long as I could be good enough the children would grow up to be reasonably sane and healthy, Now it applies to my new babies, databases and websites and so on. I suppose I’m not cut out to  be an idealist.

That’s EBL for you: pragmatist by day, but by night she becomes a tree-hugging, hippy peacenik.

Take that, Clark Kent!

So help me out, give me a diversion. Introduce me to your alter ego, Go on, you know you want to. It’s time you let them out for an airing.

Namaste.

 

To Valhalla!

Well, my dears, the festivity laden weekend has drawn to a close with a mighty flourish. Our In our closing hours of chocolyptic celebration the family has enacted a Viking ceremony to affirm the death of the Contact Lenses formerly resident on my very eyes.

Regular readers will recall as a matter of priority that I was subject to eye surgery both last year and more recently in early March to replace my biological, but inept, lenses with artificial, but effective, plastic versions in order to allow me to perceive the World of Light. This miracle having transpired, I have been settling down to what you humans call “vision” and gradually accommodating myself to waking up and being able to look at things such as the ceiling, the alarm clock and the sleepy face of Sigoth. Blessings abound.

In any case, these are the things I no longer require as part of my daily routine.

It seemed only appropriate to gather as many of the family as possible to recognise the importance of this moment, and to usher in the new world of visual competence awaiting me. A holiday weekend provided the opportunity and the weather relented on Monday afternoon to enable us to hold the ceremony in a traditionally biting easterly wind, blowing directly from the Viking homeland across the North Sea to the Yorkshire coast and then roaring inland towards EBL Towers.

Sigoth constructed a Dragon Ship to carry the lenses to the Halls of Valhalla, for they have striven mightily in the battle to reveal the world in its true colours over the years. Their achievements equalled those of the greatest warriors in piercing the gloom of myopia and the mists of shortsightedness, and we shall remember them with honour.

Here is the proud vessel in all its glory.

I’m not sure why it has oars, but never mind.

We loaded it with fuel and took it to the water’s edge.

 

The Offspringses beg to inform you that they rolled their eyes but I am also pleased to say they played along, indulging their poor old mum and standing in the Arctic blast to watch the ship burn and start to sink in the icy wastes of the pond in the back garden.

 

It is the firm belief, and certain testimony, of the management that no lives were harmed during this funereal occasion, including any pond life; we removed the ship before it could cause any negative environmental consequences, and took it indoors to finish burning in the fireplace (once it has dried off enough from becoming waterlogged)..

And so we sent the plastic heroes to the Mead Hall to drink with the mighty Fallen, and we went back inside, shivering from cold, and ate a feast worthy of Odin: chocolate muffins and Yorkshire tea.

I hope your holidays were as mighty in their own way.

Namaste.

Counterintuitive can be Counterproductive

Fiction is a mirror of the collective soul, and so the narratives we choose to tell and to read present an agreed version of reality we decide to share. Our shared version of reality becomes actuality, and we find it uncomfortable and inconvenient when other versions intrude. Sometimes those versions, underpinned by science, become submerged in the groundswell of opinion holding to our selected consensus.

In this week’s Prompt for the Promptless, Rarasaur suggests writing about counterintuition.

Counterintutition is a seemingly simple concept– it represents a truth that is contrary to common sense or the expectations of intuition.

Some examples of counterintuitive situations: You burn calories when you’re sleeping, flailing around is exactly the wrong thing to do when drowning, and beautifully speckled dart frogs can be poisonous to the touch.

On the same day, I read a guest post by Elizabeth Bear on Charlie Stross’s blog about how we think we know certain things, but it turns out we don’t. It was a prime example of how we have rewritten reality and made it counterintuitive as a result.

You probably think you know what a nuclear explosion sounds like.

You’re probably wrong.

The first footage released of hydrogen bomb tests was silent. A foley was dubbed in, using a standard explosion or cannon sound effect repeated to form the familiar continuous, ominous rumble. (If you think about this, it’s pretty obvious that the footage most of us are used to is dubbed, because audio and visual are simultaneous–and these films are shot from miles away from the blast site.)

Collectively we have made the world of known scientific learning one of mystery and furious, opinionated debate. It irritates my Inner Pedant that space battles on TV are chock-full of explosions. They claim in space no one can hear you scream, and they are right. They just don’t demonstrate it so everyone carries on thinking space and vacuums transmit noise just like air.

Equally it’s a guilty pleasure to watch a space battle where not all the ships are oriented the same way up.

More importantly though, if we make scientific discovery a matter of opinion instead of an accepted best description of reality (until we get a better theory – because that is how science works), then we end up with creationism and climate change deniers and all kinds of crazy.

Fiction is a fantastic escape. It’s a means of exploring other possibilities, of examining the human condition and sharing emotional connections. It is not a text book for how the world works. Demarcation, people!

So while certain truths may be counterintuitive, that may be nothing more than a failure of current understanding, When it is caused by conscious manipulation of known facts about the  ‘verse then I call it out as fabrication and mythologizing, and demand quality of imagination.

The universe is amazing enough, and has mystery enough, without us compounding our ignorance on purpose.

<Steps down from soap box and shuffles aside>

It’s a beautiful Reality. Enjoy it as it is, without the face paint.

Namaste.