My first anniversary with the Enquiry Unit :
I can’t believe  it’s been a year since I first started work at the Enquiry Unit... An awful lot has happened.  My job here allows me the security to support my home, Mini Me and Twilight. It also gives me the confidence to continue with my studies , surrounded by likeminded and inspiring people. Truly I didn’t realise what a big impact filling out that job application a little over a year ago would have...  In the past year, the three of us; Mini Me, Twilight Kitten and I have experienced times of uncertainty, many ups and downs and lived in three different houses... but above all we are extremely happy !

So, ‘Happy first anniversary to me and you Enquiry Unit !’ 

Environmentally friendly things !
You know me, being a geographer/climate scientist I’m always banging on about saving the planet... This week a few of us have actually managed to turn saving the planet to our own financial advantage... ‘How ?’ I hear you ask. Last week a few of us at the Enquiry unit have formed a carshare group for travel from Greenwich to Medway each day. By a rough guess-timation, I think we’ve each saved about 75% of our travel costs... Need I say more ??
Although we organised ours informally, you can join
an organised carshare via the university through the ‘5hare’
scheme... Feel free to check it out at :

http://www2.gre.ac.uk/about/travel/travel-tips/5hare 

J’s record of the week :

‘Drive my car!’
by
The Beatles

Sorry everyone, such a cliche I know ! The journey to and from work has been such a big (and not necessarily bad) part of the day, with singing along to the iPod, cool chat and lots of laughs,  that I just had to have this song ! It was written by Paul McCartney in 1965 – The old ones are certainly the best, and remember folks if you are driving a car... it’s more fun to share ! Jerushah X

A Scilly time !

When ‘Mini me’ and I decide to go on holiday, we like to live ‘off the grid’ and our summer holiday each year usually finds us in a tent on a remote island 25 miles off the coast of Cornwall. Not many people have heard of the Isles of Scilly, which are an archipelago of beautiful , remote, sub-tropical islands.

We’ve been going there for our annual trip for six years now, and there is a strange tale attached to this family tradition... Six years ago I had finished my PGCE and was just coming to the end of my first year in teaching. Initially, I confess I found working as a teacher so stressful that I would have difficulty sleeping, wake up in the middle of the night in a panic or experience strange dreams.
One night I dreamt that a shadowy figure (I suspect who he was, but this is too personal to share) took me by the hand and we flew together over the islands and I had a wonderful sense of calm, happiness and fulfilment. While we were flying he told me that I would find what I was really looking for if I visited the Isles of Scilly. The next day, I woke up and decided to do just that. Within a few hours I had arranged flight tickets and booked a camping space.  We were both captivated by our first visit and have been going back ever since !

The weather can be a little bit dodgy so I packed lots of cards, travel games and books, but actually there was no need as we had fantastic weather this time (I even came back peeling in places). We spent most our time rock pooling or watching the amazing wildlife.

Not far from where we were staying were puffin and seal colonies.  I’ve been used to seeing postcards featuring puffins, where they are perching on rocky ledges, but these were entirely different. There were large groups of them fishing in the water and flying  by our boat – if penguins could fly I’m sure it would be just like that as they had such short wings ! The seal colony was amazing, and neither of us had seen seal pups before. They were beautiful, with creamy, white fur and cute eyes ! We also saw the Bishop’s Rock lighthouse (see picture),  which is an awe inspiring stone structure built the 1850’s. It is perched on a tiny rock in the middle of a treacherous area called the ‘Western Rocks.’

We also visited the ‘Abbey Gardens’ on Tresco Island. They were established in the early 1800’s by the governor of the islands and contain a huge number of tropical plants which he brought back from his travels overseas.

J’s record of the week :

Big apologies blog readers, but as our little campsite didn’t have any electricity, we didn’t take any iPods with us on holiday. Consequently, I don’t have a record of the week....
But I do have a radio station of the week ! The Isles of Scilly has its own radio station, which is excellent – where else would you have something like ‘Scilly Automatic,’ a show named after a weather station !?

You can listen online at :J !

http://www.radioscilly.com/

I hope you enjoy it as much as we did

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