Horsing Around

All thanks to the Students Union, ‘mini me’ and I had one of the best days out ever last weekend...
We were lucky enough to get some free tickets to the world cup pentathlon in Greenwich Park ! We arrived at two o’clock, not knowing what to expect, although we had ridden horses on odd occasions before we had not ever watched any competitive horse riding.

Prior to our arrival, the competitors had already completed two events at another location (fencing and swimming) and were all set to begin the riding phase of the competition. We had an excellent view, and the action was very dramatic. At one point ‘mini me’ confessed that she enjoyed it more than cricket, which was almost sacrilege, but I was prepared to forgive her as it was so exciting ! There was one clear round from the Chinese pentathlete, though she was a hard act to follow as almost every other rider had a few incidents and accidents. The worst was definitely the Canadian, whose horse refused a jump... The poor lady did a mid-air somersault over the horse’s head and landed head first on the bars – ouch ! Luckily she and the horse were fine though, and she bravely got up to carry on her round...

The two of us were so inspired by her performance that, during the running and shooting phase of the pentathlon, we were the only ones shouting ‘Go ! Go ! Canada !’ at the tops of our voices, and were rewarded with a few odd looks from the rather more restrained spectators around us ! ‘Mini me’ was particularly thrilled to see herself on the big stadium screen at one point...

J’s record of the week :

‘Summertime’

by

DJ Jazzy Jeff and
the Fresh Prince.

‘Summertime ! Wow, What an evocative song...’ I said to myself as I downloaded it this week, remembering the first time I had heard it aged 17. It reminds me of teenage beach parties, fake gold necklaces with $ signs and my first pair of Nike Air trainers ! As we listened to it for the fourth or fifth time, ‘mini me’ remarked ‘Why do we keep having to listen to THIS song Mum ?’ I replied with this analogy... Imagine you are 17, and you have never heard slightly-old-skool-yet-new music like ‘Feel it’ by the Black Eyed Peas before ! That’s how it was !!! Actually, she still didn’t ‘get it,’ but never the less, she let me listen to it one more time before flicking back to Eliza Doolittle ! Jerushah X

The Water Blog

A water bill with added OUCH !

This week I received my water bill for the entire duration of time that we’ve been in our house (since mid-February), and it came to a whopping £147.02 !!  I’m sure I have my birthday paddling pool party to thank for most of that... It was with a grim, resigned sort of face that I went to the bank to pay my bill earlier this week, and there and then I made a resolution that... THINGS HAD TO CHANGE ! I’ve come up with a few water saving solutions to share with my lovely blog readers, so I’ll see if it has any impact on our bill next time :

      Using a kitchen timer for shower time. Since moving to the new house (which came with an abandoned cooker, incorporating a timer), my wind up kitchen timer has been a bit redundant. I’ve recently put it to good use in the bathroom allowing 3 minutes per shower (my daughter loves this and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet !

      Yucky warning... read on if you dare ! I took the top off the cistern and carefully lowered in a full glass bottle of water, which (as it takes up volume in the cistern) happily saves 1.5 litres per flush.

      Recycling bath water 1. If my daughter chooses to have a bath, I often hop in afterwards so that the water gets used twice.

      Recycling bath water 2. I always take the watering can up to the bathroom after bath time and use the old bath water to water my containerised plants and our minuscule lawn.

      New rinsing technique... Rather than putting the dishes under a running tap, I fill up a plastic bowl next to the sink for rinsing.

Let’s see if any of it makes a difference !

Rain gauge action :

I now have the completed rain gauge data for June... You may be interested that the longest run of dry days, June 1^st – 5^th was followed by the wettest day. This was June 6th on which we had 29.5mm ! The three wettest days were June 29^th (20.5mm), June 18^th (12mm) and June 6^th 29.5mm). Our monthly rainfall total was 99.65mm !

J’s record of the week :

Everybody loves the
sunshine

by

Roy Ayers

I thought this song would be appropriate for a month in which we’ve had a total of eleven dry days ! This record was released in 1976 on an album of the same name. I saw Roy Ayers in concert on New Year’s Eve 2009, at the Jazz Cafe in Camden. He performed this song beautifully, the only problem was that when we came out of the concert, thick and fluffy snowflakes were falling !  The snow earlier this year seems a distant memory now... Let’s hope there are many more sunny days to come. Jerushah  X

A wedding in Cambridge :

On Saturday, my fabulously glamorous Aunt ‘H’ got married in Cambridge... It was a wonderful day, with not only the wedding, but catching up with all those far flung family members that you don’t usually see. People had come from as far afield as Northern Ireland, Stafford, Somerset and Cornwall. Some of us even drove up from deepest darkest Medway ! Highlights included the cute little flower girl ‘T,’ who did her very best; hanging out with my cousins ‘M’ and ‘C,’ who share my sense of humour (and good looks); my eighty-nine year old grandmother dancing with a ‘lovely young man’ (her words, not mine) of sixty-five; the sweet poem written my aunt’s new husband ‘S’ entitled ‘Our little house’ as part of his speech and meeting new cousin by marriage ‘S’ who tells me she is hoping to attend Greenwich in 2012 !

 

Food for free :

This week has also been an excellent week for... Cherries ! Fellow blogger Dan is always saying ‘Jerushah, we live in the garden of England.’ He is right too ! At the beginning of the week daughter ‘S’ and me were out picking wild cherries in the rain ! They are smaller and darker than commercial varieties, but have a lovely intense flavour - My freezer is now full of them and my hands are all juice stained after the de-stoning...I am really looking forward to the rest of the summer when there are all sorts of wild foods to be found in rapid succession : woodland strawberries, cherry plums, damsons, blackberries and cob nuts to name but a few Kentish examples ! At the university this week, I mentioned the whole ‘foraging thing’ to a friend who shall remain nameless. I offered to lend him my copy of ‘Food for free’ by Richard Mabey, to which he replied ‘...is that a book about shop lifting ?’ 

 

‘Fly me to the moon’ was written in 1954 by Bart Howard, and performed by Frank Sinatra. I am dedicating my record of the week to Aunt ‘H’ and ‘S’ who tied the knot this week, and are such big jazz fans that they had a Frank Sinatra impersonator to provide the musical backdrop to their wedding... I wish them every happiness  ! Jerushah X

Life in the home lab :

I’m sure if you have a family it cannot have escaped your notice that it is half term this week ? I had a slight logistical difficulty, in that although I can take ‘mini me’ along to the library or cafe on campus, the labs are strictly off limits... and with good reason too, we work with some very ‘narrrrrsty’ chemicals and the occasional biohazard.
I was discussing this difficulty with lovely ‘Dr F L,’ one of the academics who has given me an awful lot of support with my lab work.
She came up with the ingenious solution that if Jerushah cannot go to the lab, the lab (only the safe bits of course) could come to Jerushah ! Dr F L very kindly lent me a binocular microscope, picking equipment and identification books to take home...
Last Friday, I spent most of the evening setting up my ‘home lab’ under the stairs, also incorporating an old garden table, a rickety Victorian chair and my daughter’s purple ‘groovy chick’ lamp for extra illumination. When I had finished the task, I proudly emailed the picture around to a few friends to which friend ‘L’ replied : ‘Jerushah, that is truly the lair of a mad scientist !’ such a way with words, but I took it as a compliment !

...and what was I picking and identifying under my microscope ? Beautiful and intricate, six million year old microfossils gathered during my trip to Spain (it has taken this long to process them), called foraminifera.
They are very small, these particular specimens are 125 microns in size, and just about visible to the naked eye. Good thing too, as I have to pick them up with the dampened end of a one stranded paint brush and glue them to a slide, and at 300 individuals per sample, it is very intensive work !
Here are a couple of pictures I took during the course of my picking this week :

J’s record of the week :

‘Hold me tighter in the rain’

by

Billy Griffin

In 1982, Billy Griffin (the former lead singer of the Miracles), released this song, which was a UK top twenty chart hit in the following year. I first heard it featured in the ‘quiet storm’ on the BBC radio one soul train show, while tucked up in bed with a secret radio under my pillow. This time last week, remember that Bryony’s provision of record of the week resulted in a huge downpour ? Actually the rain gauge total for last week was 6.5mm, 5mm of which fell on Thursday night alone ! So this week, with plenty of rain forecast for the south east on Sunday, I thought I should choose something more appropriate and dedicate it to meteorologists everywhere ! Jerushah X   

Family history :

Do you remember way back in February when I moved house ? I’m sure I told you that I had grand plans for the garden... My lovely dad has been staying with us this week, creating a wonderful deck  for us using reclaimed timber. I intend to give you a full update on that, with lots of before and after pictures later on in the week, but before that I tell you about something else we’ve been up to...

My aunt in Canada recently scanned some of our old family photo’s and put them on a cd. Dad and I have had a few late nights looking through them and recounting the stories attached.
The pictures span the period from the early 1900’s up to the 1960’s.

This is the earliest of the photo’s,  and shows my great-grandparents Annie and Aaron (in about 1910), with their two eldest children.  If you look carefully at Aaron, you will see that he is missing his right arm.  He was the unfortunate victim of an industrial accident in a sawmill when he was only twelve. Luckily for him, the family had a little bit of money set aside and were able to send him to university, as he was no longer able to work in the sawmill. He spent the remainder of his career as a teacher.

The second picture in the series shows my grandmother Marie, at her graduation in 1925.
She had a distinguished career, firstly as a district nurse in the extreme north of Canada (undertaking her rounds by a combination of dog-sled, horse and bush plane).  With the onset of the second world war, she worked in England, caring for the injured in London’s hospitals.

The pictures below (taken later on in her career) shows her in an interesting combination of clothes, wearing her district nurses uniform (including shoes, cape and wide brimmed hat), with leather riding chaps over the top.

J’s record of the week :

‘Everything stops
for tea.’

Written by

Al Hoffman

After deciding to feature my old family pictures in the blog this week, I just had to choose a retro song for my record of the week. My grandmother, Marie would have been 107 this year. One of my favourite memories of her, is reminiscing about her war time experiences, when I was about ten. The upshot of which was in her teaching me the words to this song – one of her favourites  ! It was written by Al Hoffman in 1935 for the film ‘Come out of the pantry.’  Thanks Marie ! Jerushah X

Going Underground

Non-flattened fauna :

Well... While most of the country were poised in front of the television waiting for Will and Kate to tie the knot, what was Jerushah doing ? Making the most of the extra day off and driving to Cornwall of course !
The journey down was for the most part uneventful, but with two notable exceptions... At approximately 11.20pm a very skilful badger managed to dash out in front of me on the A303, pick the exact spot in between my front wheels, stay there for a split second then dash out from between the wheels on the passenger side of the car – I saw his little white tail disappearing in my rear view mirror.
At approximately 2.15am, when I was approaching our first stop in Calstock, I saw two glowing eyes in the distance on the road. I realised it was quite a large animal as the glowing eyes were about three feet off the ground... ‘Is it the beast of Bodmin ?’ I asked myself, to which I replied ‘No silly - you’re on Dartmoor, not Bodmin Moor!’ As I came closer, I could see antlers and realised it was a deer – wandering very lazily across the road. Perhaps he was returning from a night out on the tiles ?

On the way home it was a bit sad to see that there were many, many animal casualties on the roads as a result of the extra bank holiday traffic. Obviously as an environmental scientist, I am all for recycling, but being a vegetarian of many years standing, I can’t really encourage any ‘recycling’ of animal road casualties. However, I recently read a newspaper article featuring a man who likes nothing better than badger sandwiches :http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article96189.ec

All I can say is I am really glad our badger lived to tell the tale !

Going underground :

In addition to our mandatory amount of sun, swim and sand, we did something equally Cornish and spent a large proportion of Sunday poking around in a tin mine. Knowing it was likely to be rough going, ‘S’ and me wore our best wellies and waterproofs. It was good thing too, as it was raining on the surface and there were waterfalls from the roofs of the tunnels – there was so much water that some sections of the floor had to be pumped out before we entered them, as the water was too deep to walk through.  It was a shame that no one had told the lady in front of us though, she was wearing a very swanky leather jacket and expensive looking leather boots !

J’s record of the week :

‘Going underground’

by

The Jam

As you know, I’m usually more of a soul, R&B and reggae aficionado, and apologies in advance for the rather dodgy link, but this week I’ve chosen ‘Going underground’ by The Jam. I don’t quite know why, but I found myself subconsciously humming it as we crawled through the dark dampness of the mine ! I remember this song getting to number one when I was only five, and playing along to it with an upturned biscuit tin and two wooden spoons ! Enjoy ! Jerushah x