yonmei

12:21 am: Huh.
I told a joke.
My brother laughed.

You'd have to know our relationship since I was ten to know why that's weird.

Tags: family stuff

03:58 pm: Broccoli and pea soup, with strife
Soak about a cupful of dried split peas in boiling water.

Chop and fry three onions: when they're soft, add a chopped head of broccoli.

Add salt, dried basil and marjoram.

Listen to brother snarling at parents in background. Stir onions and broccoli over a strong heat till they're just beginning to brown.

Drain and add the soaked peas, then about 2 litres of water and a couple of veggie stock cubes, and a dash of Worcester sauce. Reflect that it isn't veggie and decide not to mention that, because of the lack of other spices available.

Simmer for about 10-20 minutes while brother attempts to pick fights with everyone at table.

Swirl the stick blender about in the soup till smooth, and serve with good bread and cheese. Calm ensues.



Tags: broccoli, family stuff, onions, recipe, soup

12:17 pm: Sleepy polar bear
I am going to St Boswells to spend about 30 hours uninterrupted time with my family.

So this morning I went to the zoo to see Mercedes in the tiny little polar bear enclosure where she has lived for 25 years, which has driven at least one polar bear insane (that I know of).

Next week Mercedes leaves for the Highlands, where the Army has built her a much larger enclosure where she can roam around like a proper polar bear would. Probably no seals, though. At least, not for long.

Mostly, Mercedes was asleep. I don't think that's surprising: none of the coffee shops in the zoo open till half past ten. (I had to leave about 10:25, and went back via the market, where I had my usual skinny double-shot latte and considered buying provisions for the weekend and decided that, however apprehensive I am, if I want to spend time with my new nephew/get to know his mother, it would probably be necessary to leave my room some of the time. (Unless I can persuade them to hole up with me and leave my brother to fight with our parents on his own.)



Tags: bears, coffee, family stuff, zoo

07:10 am: I woke up at 5am
This was not a good plan.

Admittedly I have now made soup (well, chopped veg and such) which is in the slow cooker, and I shall have that for my tea when I come home.

I was supposed to be meeting my brother and his girlfriend for supper tonight, but they didn't ring yesterday, and goodness knows if they will today. I'm feeling a bit stressed out about it all actually.

Hm. This could be why I woke up at 5am. I suppose I might now go into work early. And leave early.




Tags: family stuff, insomnia, soup

11:59 pm: Today wasn't a good day
Tomorrow probably isn't going to be a good day either.

My sister's up for the weekend, did I mention? Not liking her very much right now...



Tags: family stuff

12:11 pm: UK to US: The Truth About the NHS!
Signed the petition, added a comment:

My grandfather lived long enough for me to remember him because an NHS surgeon performed a quadruple bypass on his heart when I was two. My dad is still alive and well (and able to see and to bake his own bread) at the age of 82 because NHS surgeons performed operations on his wrist, his eyes, and his heart, in the past five years. I've had regular visits to my GP and to consultants over the past two or three years to establish why I felt like I had a perpetual cold in the head: turned out to be a dust allergy, for which I get regular medication and pay £104 a year for all my prescriptions. I would have been functionally blind since I was 7 if not for NHS eye-tests and free NHS specs till I was 16: I pay for my lenses now I'm working full-time, but when I was a student or looking for work I could get free lenses when I needed a replacement prescription. The NHS keeps me healthy, keeps me sighted, keeps me free: the US corporate control of healthcare is not only evil, it's inefficient and stupid.

Update: Wow. I think the petition went up this morning and there were over 10,000 signatures by the time I signed it: at 17:11 today there are
29,740 30,369 signatures.



Tags: evil american politics, evil americans advertising against nhs, family stuff, my health, nose of a nose

11:09 pm: Giving things away and keeping things
My mum had located two boxes of stuff in their house - and a bag with my old sub aqua gear, fins / mask / snorkel - which were mine. I collected them on Sunday, opened them up, and discovered that my plan - to put contents directly into bag for Bernardos to collect today - was more complicated:

This was my old collection of boxes, wrapped for packing sometime years ago. Goodness knows how long ago: most probably when my parents moved from St Catherines's Place, where I lived till 1986, and they lived till 1988. (By which time my sister had also left home, and my parents had a too-big house which was really too expensive for them to run.) That wasn't itself a problem: these was stuff I'd not seen in over 20 years, and I figured if I hadn't missed them in two decades, they could go to charity and be bought by someone else.

The problem: Some of the boxes had things in them. Some of this wasn't intrinsically a problem - a collection of sweeties, hard sugar from quarter of a century ago, some old old chestnuts, a box of tea - all of which could go, and did: but, what I kept, eventually, was:
- a box of buttons (my sister collects them); three wooden elephants of varying sizes (afrai might like them); the straw hen that hatched stray foreign coins and banknotes (on the basis that it's slightly foolish to throw out money without looking at it); a small chest with hares painted on it that I had used to store shiny jewellery (Ajay's having a party on Sunday: this would make a good pirate's or princess's treasure chest if she wants one); - all of these with the plan to get rid of them shortly, either to the named recipients, or just to a charity shop.

But what I kept, and mean to keep:
- my first chess set (pure sentimentality: I don't even play chess much any more);
- a box with halfpennies and one half penny (because it still strikes me as amusing);
- a memento mori box, which I had - beginning, I think, when I was about 12 - put things into that meant something to me. For about four years. Some of the items I still remember what they meant to me: some I have no idea. But it's an odd collection, odder even than the fourth box, which was:
- a small box with smaller items in it: four discs of metal mesh, that I think once looked golden; a flat portrait in china of a red-cap mushroom; a minature beaded scarf in two shades of green; a tiny brown china jug; two small dominoes from two different sets, one black and one green, both with pips adding up to seven, though different patterns; a wooden knight and a pawn from a travel chess set that long since disintegrated; a bead made out of an irregular shape of wood like a ring of bark; the head of a glass penguin; two tiny plastic wineglasses; a pin with a black glass head; a tiny fork, two knives, and two spoons, from a dollhouse set of cutlery the rest of which is long since lost; a rooster and three wise monkeys, both made of yellow plastic, out of a Christmas cracker; four counters for a game, two red, one green, one yellow (tiddlywinks, I think); and the jawbone of a stoat, that was old and dry when I found it, about three decades ago.

But everything else, along with two bags of other stuff I'd been piling up for a while, got put out in front of my garden, with a sign on it for Bernardo's, and they came by some time during the day and collected them and now they're gone. For good.

There's a free shop at the Forest this Sunday and next Sunday, and more stuff is going then. Yay.

Tags: elephants, family stuff, memories

02:04 pm: The subject line has nothing to do with the post.


I can't say I would ever be this bad, but it's mostly because I would never get married wearing a tux unless my beloved were also wearing a tux. [Update: Hm. My visual imagination seems to have invented the tux: the pastor stick figure is wearing pastor-robes, the bride stick figure is wearing foofy white dress, but the other stick figure is just a stick figure not wearing anything. Perhaps it's the kind of nightmare where you suddenly realise you're standing in a public space doing something very important with everyone looking at you... but you're NAKED. ...or maybe it's just typical cartoon sexism, as when XKCD indicates a stick figure is female by drawing long hair?] And I truly cannot imagine ever wanting to get married to someone who wanted to wear a foofy white dress to the ceremony. Whatever her name was.

Anyway. This isn't today's XKCD, but today's XKCD is kind of disturbing. So.

It's my mother's birthday today. She's 74. We're meeting this evening for a pizza and a film. Either something from the 1960s with Dirk Bogarde, whom my mother has bizarrely never seen in the cinema, or something from the 21st century about two women smuggling illegal immigrants into Canada, which my mother thinks she will like because she's Canadian. The pizza will be delectable. I expect I'll enjoy either of the films she opts for.

My birthday present to her this year is afternoon tea at the Howard Hotel on Sunday. I did momentarily think of offering her afternoon tea at the cafe next door, but actually I'd quite like to keep that a secure harbour. Besides, she will like the afternoon tea at the Howard Hotel: it's basically an enormous leisurely meal. This means running away from a picnic that HoF are organising, but I can live with that.

I still haven't told them I'm going to Canada in August. I just got the e-mail from the volunteers coordinator inquiring if we want to do pre-con work, and e-mailed back to say, yes, Wednesday morning and Thursday.

I want pink and summer dragons! Give clicky!


Tags: family stuff, worldcon, xkcd

12:28 pm: Looking at pictures of my newborn nephew...
My brother set up a password-locked account on a photosite which he's invited all his family to join, and he's uploaded 14 photos - of my wee nephew fast asleep, being fed, being bathed, having his nappy changed (by my brother - who looks happier than I've seen him in a long time) and of his mother, looking very tired but very happy. (Well, there's one of her looking at my brother with an expression that just says "Put that camera down NOW" but I'm sure he did. ;-)

I have two totally adorable nephews, I just think you should all know that and envy me.





Tags: family stuff

06:28 pm: New nephew
Two weeks or so early, but none the worse for that: born 2am Friday. My brother went home and seems to have slept for 24 hours before phoning my parents: my mum called me Saturday just as I was walking down the Royal Mile clutching a banner and trying not to slip on wet cobbles, and I called her back just before I went into the play yesterday.

Which was great, by the way.

But not as good as having a 26th June 2009 nephew. Whee.



Tags: family stuff

11:45 pm: A Yonmei solution
We were in the family car. My mum was driving, my dad was in the passenger seat, the three of us were in the back with my sister in the middle because she was the smallest. We were, as usual on long car trips, bored out of our tiny minds. (This didn't take long. We were three active, intelligent, inquiring children who were used to being able to make our own fun and wreck things very scientifically and have lots of books to hand. We could get bored in twenty minutes.)

My mum, who had read a handbook of family games to play with children in the car with the desperation of a slightly-awkward driver who cannot afford distractions from the back seat, proposed a game:

"We will bet on traffic lights!" she said. "If you guess correctly, you get five points. If you guess incorrectly, you lose a point. The winner will be the one with the most points at the end of the trip!"

"What if it's amber?" asked my sister, who was picky.

"A thousand points if you guess amber and are right," my dad said. "But you lose a thousand points if you guess amber and it's wrong," my mum said. "It counts only if it's the colour as our car either passes or stops at the lights."

My sister and brother thought this would be great fun. Or possibly they were better actors than me. For three sets of traffic lights, I boredly guessed "Green" or "Red" and was wrong or right, while my brother loudly totted up everyone's points and my mum said happily that this was fun, wasn't it?

We passed the third set, and my mum said "Quick, everyone, pick your next set of lights!" because the colours obviously had to be picked before the traffic lights came in sight. My brother said Red. My sister said Green. Or maybe the other way round. I said "Amber" and we turned the corner and the traffic lights were in sight and it was a pedestrian crossing, so my mum had to come to a halt and there was no doubt in the world: the lights had been at amber when my mum stopped.

I won a thousand points and the game ended, because it was abruptly obvious that no one else could win. The thing was, I'd expected to lose a thousand points: I'd just figured that once I was down a thousand points, the game would be over for me: I could go back to staring idly out of the window being bored in the car, as opposed to being bored by the stupid game.

( a poll )

Tags: family stuff, polls

09:32 am: Sisters, volcanos, and work
Had a longish conversation with my sister last night: this BBC article seems rather ironic as a result.

On the other hand, I can't imagine having a conversation like that with any other member of my family, so, well.

In other news, I meant to do some work last night, but Volcano was on, and... I watched it.

It is peculiar how a simply awful movie can become actually watchable because of one actor. (One and a half: Anne Heche wasn't bad either, though her character didn't have much focus beyond being The Scientist Who Is Right But No One Pays Attention.) Tommy Lee Jones made the character he was playing - a divorced dad, his teenage daughter visiting for a week, who is also the disaster manager for Los Angeles (whatever - I didn't quite get it, but then I wasn't paying that much attention to stoopid plot details), and then a volcano erupts. In Los Angeles.

One reason why I did not pay too much attention is because the director really enjoyed doing lots of scenes in which someone hapless falls (or in one instance jumps) into molten lava and burns to death. In fact if you are that close to molten lava you are probably fairly dead already, because the gases are poisonous and the heat is extreme. But scientific realism had evidently had one date with this movie and then moved elsewhere, never to meet again.

But: Tommy Lee Jones did manage to make his own reactions realistic. Which is half the battle. The moment I actually walked out, though (I mean, through to the kitchen to make another cup of tea) was a moment about twenty minutes from the end where I understood that it was inevitable that Tommy Lee Jones's character (and his daughter, and a small boy wearing a metaphorical red shirt) were all going to die. Except, it wasn't the kind of movie where those characters would die, so I understood that after harrowing me nicely over an hour or two, the director had decided to whomp it up by having a Dad Saves His Daughter And Nameless Kid You Don't Care About Really From Certain Death Scene. And I don't like being whomped like that.

In other news, I think my period, which never really got started, has kind of stopped. Franlkly this is just annoying me.

Tags: bloody bloody bloody, bloody job, family stuff, films

10:58 pm: Yesterday, and today
I get depressed, over nothing very important, and it becomes difficult to write about stuff.

It was my dad's 82nd birthday yesterday. I gave him cake, and a jar of "pumpkin marmalade", which is quite tasty, and a book; Jane Austen's England, which I knew he would like, and he did.

Also, I heard the spectacularly good news that his book is to be published: the magnum opus he spent 10 years writing and then discovered no publishing house wanted to do a book by an unknown writer (unknown except to academic fans of Robert Southey) about an unknown hero (unknown except to Quakers who recall pre-WWII). But, my dad's wealthiest former PhD student had one of her books made into a movie, and - clearly being a person of taste, discerment, and good judgement - is offering the university press a private subvention to produce the book. So, yay.

My brother rang to wish him a happy birthday and to tell us he was having his wisdom teeth out tomorrow.

I left just before 10pm and just missed the 11 bus, so walked downhill for 40 minutes and caught the next 11 bus on Princes Street. My ankle hurt. I probably overdid it.

Today I slept in. And it snowed. I have awesome amounts of cake leftover from Saturday night, but I shall consider it a trial run for cake-making for Redemption.

It didn't snow much where I live or where I work (I got caught in a couple of flurries, but it never lay down on the pavement and looked pretty). And according to Weather Pixie, right now it's 3 degrees above freezing and raining lightly. I took some cake to work: I think my favourite is the banana-walnut cakes.

My mum gave me a tray for 12 mini-muffins (even smaller than most fairy cakes) and a big six-muffin tray. Also a muffin recipe book.





The Mess From All Hell still seems to be merrily going on on livejournal, but I really don't want to know about it any more...

Tags: baking, dragons, family stuff, weather

10:05 am: Competitiveness
I have 14 comments on my yuletide story.

This is just about half what the main yuletide story written for me got in the way of comments, though more than either of the stocking-stuffers.

Yesterday, my brother was describing a round game played when he and Flow were visiting my sister and Sti, "First Lines".

(First, collect together a lot of books. Then, divide into teams. Each member of a team has to invent a first line for one of the books: then the invented first lines and the real first line are read out, and members of the other team vote on which is the real first line. Individuals get points if their invented line is picked by a member of the other team as the real first line: the teams win if they pick the right first line.)

It's fun, my brother said: there is a lot of satisfaction in writing a first line that gets picked as the real one. Obviously none of the books can be books people playing the game know.

My brother came first and my sister second, my brother said, and the reason was... (and he tailed off, leaving the sentence open for praise)

"Our well-known competitiveness," I said. At which, Flow grinned.

It wasn't a totally wasted day. I also bought a Royal Doulton teapot for 8 pounds, a copy of Jane Austen's England by Maggie Smith, and met Ajay for a glass of wine, over which we had a grand lesbian conversation about her recent engagement.

Tags: family stuff

09:34 am: Okay, stuff...
My sister rang me. She is on her way to a Landmark Forum Saturday and wanted to check in about Christmas/December.

We settled on the weekend of the 12th, which is best for me, best for nephew, and fine for her, and my parents are likely to be good for it (they had hoped for the 19th, but recognised this was not that likely because you're into Christmas travel time then).

We talked about the US elections and I explained about the awfulness of Proposition 8. I do not think she would have quite understood had I just been wonky about it, but I clarified it for her by pointing out that I knew people who had got married in California in the last six months, and she made sympathetic noises.

Then she invited me to Landmark Forum once again, and I said that I had looked stuff about it up on the Internet and did not believe it was my kind of thing. She was impressed that I had, and said no, it wasn't, but it would still be good for me. I swear, the next time she says this I want to say "Yes, I know that's what you are supposed to tell me because I looked it up." Still, she has not yet ended a phone call to me with "I love you" which is a mandated Landmark Forum thing... so not quite lost to decency or common sense, yes?"

Anyway. I must sign up to Yuletide this weekend. (I started this week and realised that I didn't have a chance of thinking sensibly about it.)

Also, I am nanoing, and have written 11192 words, which is 1308 words less than my target but I'm still feeling pretty good about it.

However. This morning, I am determined to go to the gym, and to a Close Guantanamo Bay demo at 1pm which is being organised by kids from my old school. Yay.

Tags: bloody bloody bloody, family stuff, landmark forum, yuletide

03:13 pm: Painkillers are lovely, I eat them with chocolate
I am bleeding.

I had lunch with my parents. My dad is MUCH BETTER, which is yay. (A persistent breathlessness turned out to be the result of fluid in the bottom of his lungs which was caused by low pulse after his fall and which has been fixed by a diuretic, which he can stop taking soon...)

Painkillers are lovely.

Tags: bloody bloody bloody, family stuff

10:49 pm: End of Friday
melancharisbron plans to return her Friday as defective, which sounds like a great idea. Let's.

I was looking forward to leaving work, going home, collapsing with a drink and having some kind of Dead Simple It's Friday food.

Then my mum texted me, to let me know she and my dad were home from Sheffield and could not carry their luggage up the stairs, so they would expect me shortly to do it for them.

Really, it was about as blunt as that.

So I rang, and told my mum I was working and wanted to finish what I was working on before I left, and that it would take at least an hour. It took more like two, mostly because T#1 and I kept talking - it was a relief to talk, of course, but I did want to get the thing done.

I'd just missed a bus - mostly because I forgot, and had to go back for, the C. J. Cherryh I was re-reading (I have gone back to the very beginning of the Foreigner sequence and am now on Invader - I have a horrible, horrible feeling that Cherryh may think she has more than nine novels in her for this sequence and I very badly want her to move on and write something else, given there was barely enough plot in the last three for one novel), and then my camera, and finally my Zen stone, since I did not think I could tolerate the bus ride to my parents and back without Johnny Cash in my ears a lot of the time. As it happened I got Janis Ian and Willie Nelson too, but that was fine.

( In which I rant about my parents )

I got home at about half past eight and discovered that thanks to my leaving my windows open to what had seemed this morning to be a bright dry gusty day, the towels and such I'd hung on the pulley in the kitchen had never properly dried out, so there was actually nothing for it but to hang the bedding I'd left on the line this morning up on the pulley on top of the not-quite dry towels, close all the windows, and hope for a drier day tomorrow.

I watched QI hoping Stephen Fry would cheer me up, but he didn't. I brushed my teeth, which means I really cannot be tempted to pour myself a glass of wine, and am going to sleep. Tomorrow had bloody well better be a better day.

Tags: family stuff, just my life really

12:02 pm: The difference between me and my brother
My brother paid for my nephew to get a bike rack and to have it fitted on to his bike in Sheffield: and told him that if he had any "material need" he should contact his uncle and ask. (That's a quote. My brother rang me last night.)

I sent him a list of his rights now he's 16, and an ostrich egg.

Tags: family stuff

09:04 pm: Four phone calls
( None of them terribly much fun: well, one out of four isn't bad )

Tags: family stuff, just my life really

11:09 am: My dad fell down five stone steps
I talked to my mum last night: the fall that caused the nosebleed was down five stone steps outside Old College, where my parents had been attending a celebratory dinner (he was the thesis supervisor of the Alumnus of the Year, and she had many lovely things to say about him, all, I don't doubt, well-deserved).

The servitor offered to carry my mum's walker (it doubles as a chair and is quite awkward) down the long flight of steps, but my dad said he could manage and then fell the last five steps and broke his nose. (Typical of my dad, he did not complain that it hurt, and they just went home: it was the persistent nose bleed that got them to call an ambulance at 2am.)

That was Wednesday night/Thursday morning. My mum said she hoped the hospital would keep him in one more night, to Saturday morning, since he still looked very tired and feeble - well, he will have lost quite a bit of blood, and these days they don't give a transfusion unless you're going to die without one. Given what their home is like, I kind of hope they don't send him home till Monday, except I gather he has a problem eating - nothing but soft food, nothing hot, and the NHS is always hopeless about special diets, especially if you're vegetarian. I may bring a couple of Innocent smoothies tonight if he's still in - I would bring a dozen, but they need refrigeration.

I said I would go out and visit him tonight if he's still there - which means (because the hospital is of course out at Livingston) a 2 hour bus trip (half an hour from here to Princes Street, 90 minutes from there to the hospital) so I'll need to leave *work* at 4:30 in order to get there for visiting hours at 7pm. According to my mum at least, and although she walks much more slowly than me, she is usually fairly reliable about bus times. The only buses that go out there are First group buses, too, not LRT. God, I hate what the Tories did to public transport and to our hospitals - ten years ago my dad would have been in the Royal Infirmary in the centre of town, which got sold off some time ago as lovely expensive mid-city land for building expensive homes. Actually I can't even blame the Tories for this one, except that they starved the NHS till it seemed like a good plan to raise money by selling the land that central, convenient-access hospitals were standing on to give money to private contractors to build massively-expensive modern hospitals shoddily so that they revert to public ownership in 20 years just as they're falling to pieces. Well, I can blame the Tories, but bloody Labour for thinking that rescuing the NHS was less of a priority than, I dunno, what was their priority? Bah.

I hope my dad's okay, political rants aside: the staff nurse I spoke to yesterday said he was going to be fine and he was "a wee character", which sounds like - despite the broken nose - he was on form.

Tags: family stuff