I Had, of Course,

....never heard of Ingrid Michaelson, until I clicked on a link on Metafilter. 

Metafilter is a source of hours of diversion for me, and allows me to pretend to myself that I'm learning new stuff, so it's not really procrastinating. I feel guilty about it, but otherwise how would I learn stuff like "A genome-wide association study has linked a dislike of cilantro with a variant of a single nucleotide in a cluster of olfactory receptor genes. The palatability of cilantro has previously been a divisive subject on the blue."?

And how, otherwise, might I have heard this? Well, I'll bet there is a whole heap of other procrastinators who justify their vice by imagining that blogging is not really just a pernicious propensity toward temporal profligacy. Dammit, that's a nice sentence, "Pompously bombastic claptrap!", shouts my greatest critic,  throwing sharp-edged peanuts at me. 

 Oh look.....  there's a link to a study on whether spiders abhor conkers..... wait a while, I'll be back, I promise, but I've just got to head over there and read it.

Listen to Ingrid Michaelson singing R.E.M.'s 'Nightswimming', with an a-capella choir of her own voice multilayered on looping tapes. I love it. There's someone in the live show audience I want to bash over the head with a frying pan though. Why do audience members think the song will be greatly improved by their random squeals and whoops?

Oh. Still there, are you? Well the Royal Society of Chemistry's foray into the world of arachnids versus the fruits of the horse-chestnut tree remain inconclusive.  Conker season is almost here, so I might try an experiment or two myself.

At my friend's house, a few days ago, something huge with eight legs scuttled up the wall. Before the humans could trap it, with a view to release outside where it might eat pigeons, or some other flying nuisances, there was a snap, the dog swallowed with a gulp, and lolloped back to her bed. 

Here, have a quick toccata and fugue. What? No, it's free. no charge, no, I'm not trying to make you do something nasty.

Good night.

Biff! Pow! Whack!

An update, don't-cha know.

 

Scaffolding arrived. 

(Bloke is a random passing stranger, this blog does NOT pay extras)

Got to miss all the phone lines. Why doesn't someone invent a wire-less telephone?

Isn't this the future? Don't we all have flying cars and pocket communicators now?

Beam me up, Spotty.

I bet they've seen a lot of bottoms in their day.

Bash thump.

 

And, new timber purlin, steel brace, bolts, and glue. 

Yes, glue.

Single-skin brick, I bet it was cold in there in winter. You wouldn't loiter, oh no, straight back to those nice warm machines!

Can has bukkit?

 So far, no unscheduled plummeting, neither of bricks nor of humans.

The mortar on the roof's from the ridge tiles, another job on the never-diminishing list of things to get around to, someday.

Oh. and I spent some time tracking pipes, for another job. 

 The pipes are colour-coded. But sometimes the painter makes it up as he goes along.

Yellow denotes gas. 

And there's a specific code for the EXACT shade of yellow.... Or you can just use whatever you've got in the van, can't you?

And I was crawling in a dim space where water's coming out of the wall. It's a spring, it comes and goes with the weather. Have to invent a cure for it. 

Or plug it. Or dig a drain. Or install a sump-pump. Or dark-adapted penguins. Whatever.

Have You Ever Seen the Rain?

When people ask me what music I like, well, I'm at a loss. Who's my favourite musician/ Depends what day or hour you ask me, the answer is not constant. Country and western is not my thang. decidedly not...

But there are exceptions to every rule, so Epimenides said.  Willie Nelson's my exception. Way back, in 1971, I bought Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Pendulum', which had "Have you ever seen the rain' on it. 

Willie, I first heard in 1979, or 80.

This video unites the two.

Next Project...

 

The gable wall has been moving outwards.

The disused toilet block is pulling it outwards.

The floor is dropping away from the wall.

In both of them.

The wall's been damp, and the timber purlin is rotten, just where it should be strong, tying the wall and the roof together.

The steel's pulled out by an inch.

See that iron bar, holding the bricks?

And this is what's pulling the wall outwards.
Scaffolding coming tomorrow,
We'll probably go with Plan B.

A Message From Above?

Lunchtime today.

But isn't that....?

I hear you.

Roffle. And loll. I'm good at lolling. Especially after I've had my lunch... Char-siu fried rice today. No time for lolling though. Things to bash, steel to chop.

Recent Work Activities.

Repurposing space in an 1860's weaving mill. The brackets on the ceiling were installed in, I think, the 1960s, to strengthen and stiffen the great timber beams which support each floor, when new, heavier machinery was being installed.

Each iron pillar, in the centre of the room, supports two beams, which span to the outer walls. In the squared tops of the pillars, there are slots, which, long ago, held brackets which supported rotating shafts the full length of the mill (about three times the length of this room). The shafts, in turn, supported numerous pulleys, which turned long leather belts, to pulleys which powered the looms.

 

New walls, new windows, new heating, new kitchen area, water supply, electrical distribution boards, lights, power sockets....

Busy busy busy, hurry scurry...

Windows are in, walls up, it's coming along.

I try to be neat and tidy, even though these pipes will be hidden.

The big red pipe's there to stay, it's part of the automatic fire sprinkler system, shifting it would be a major job in itself.

Completion by the end of the month? What? A week earlier?

They're moving in.

Transformed, and tranquil.

Remote Area Medical

Of course, the British model of universal healthcare, treating all who come, isn't going to suit everybody.
Some areas of the world don't accept the idea that we should all be entitled to universal healthcare, paid for by taxing all those who earn, but of benefit to all, no matter their status.
We believe that access to healthcare should be a right, not a privilege.

 "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", is all very well if you can afford it, but if you can't pay the fees, well, you'll struggle to meet those ideals. You'll be unhappy, and die significantly younger than your more affluent countrymen.



 "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
 "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

RAM's expeditions this year: A=Airborne, D=Dental, M=Medical, Vet=Veterinary, Vis=Vision, W=Women's Health
feb 4-5 Knox County, Knoxville, TN - Jacob Building D, Vis, M, W

March 3-4 Rockbridge Co., Buena Vista, VA - Southern Virginia University D, Vis, M
March 10-11 Rhea Co., Evensville, TN - Rhea County High School D, Vis
March 22-25* Oakland, CA - Oakland Coliseum, East Concourse D, Vis, M
March 30-April 2* Sacramento, CA - Cal Expo, Buildings C & D D, Vis, M

April 13-15 Sullivan County, Bristol, TN - Bristol Motor Speedway D, Vis, M, W

May 19-20 Franklin County, Sewanee, TN - University of the South D, Vis, M, W

June 2-3 Claiborne County, Harrogate, TN - Lincoln Memorial University D, Vis, M, W, Vet June 9-10** Pikeville, KY D, Vis, M July 7-9 Rosebud, South Dakota D, Vis, M

July 12-15 Pine Ridge, South Dakota - For info & to volunteer: e-mail RAM D. Vis, M, July 20-22 Wise County, VA, at the Wise County Fairground D, Vis, M, W
July 23-27 Operation Lonestar - Brownsville, TX For info & to volunteer: e-mail RAM D, Vis, M, W

August 4-5 Jefferson County, Dandridge, TN D, Vis, M, W
August 25-26*** Oklahoma City, OK D, Vis, M

Sept 8-9** Pulaski County, Somerset, KY - Southwestern High School D, Vis, M
Sept. 16-30 Guyana, South America - For info & to volunteer: e-mail RAM D, Vis, M September 22-23 Hamilton County, East Ridge, TN - Camp Jordan D, Vis, M, W

October 6-7 Buchanan County, Grundy, VA D, Vis, M
October 13-21 Siguatepeque, Honduras - For info & to volunteer: e-mail RAM D, Vis, M

Nov 3-4 Pickett County, Byrdstown, TN - Pickett County K-8 D, Vis, M, W
Nov 10 Knoxville Veterans Stand Down D, Vis

So, About the Hospital, Again

Back a few posts, I was talking about The Vic, a pub, and about strolling along in front of the Infirmary. I was, in fact, on the way to another hospital.

The reason for this was that I had an appointment to see a surgeon, (I went to the Vic on the way back), about a tooth. Yes, a tooth. 

About thirty years ago, I had a filling in the said tooth. Then I was hit in the face by a twelve-ton truck. Well, at the moment of impact I had 2/3 the width of a van between me and the truck. But he was doing fifty miles per hour and was quite determined to get to me, so after the loudness, which I vaguely recall, there was a pause, silence, echoing dripping noises.

Silence again. 

Next time my eyes opened, there were diamonds in red sauce across the back of my hand. I thought: "that's strange", and drifted back into dripping, echoey silence.
There's about a thousand words of ensuing drama  that I'll spare you. It was funny in places though. Ouch.

If, however, we fast forward, I ended up back then, needing to see a dentist, after all the doctors and nurses had done their thing (and the police officer had threatened to kill his prisoner on the late-night observation ward, if he didn't stop moaning and let the rest of us sleep), because the door pillar, that should have been a yard from my head, had imprinted itself on my face, and the filled second upper left molar had become explosively unfilled. 

I blame that incident. It got a gold cap on it, but that came out some years later. Bit by bit, over the intervening years, pieces of my tooth got broken off, or drilled off, and a few weeks ago I had an infection in the root. My dentist told me it was best if the tooth came out, but that she would prefer I had a surgical extraction in a hospital. 

I'm no expert, I trust her to be one, so she referred me to a specialist. And last week I had a consultation with him, and set a date, today, for surgery. Originally, they said it would be under a general anaesthetic, but, I'm asthmatic, so general anaesthesia is to be avoided wherever possible. We agreed on local anaesthesia. 

So this morning, at seven, I was booked in to a private hospital, for a procedure funded completely by britain's national health service, and I can report that all went well. Right now, there's a bit of a throb, but I'm trying to ration the painkillers, I'll take another soon, before bed. 

However, I know some of my U.S. readers are great opponents of "socialized medicine", and fear our ramshackle commie system may be imposed upon them, with 'politicians deciding who lives or dies' (as opposed to the current U.S. system, where insurance companies decide who lives or dies).

Here's some views of the commie hospital's death-row cell, with my fees paid by the NHS.

Primitive, huh? I've certainly stayed in worse hotels. So this tooth-out business. It's the first time ever for me that a visit to the dentist require me to strip naked, then don disposable underwear, and one of those nasty tie-at the back gowns.

It's also the first time that I've ever been conscious whilst being attached immovably to an operating table, under those huge lights that could fry a whole planet. 

After a lot of crunching noises, drills, cutters, chainsaws and so on, (I think there was even a hedgetrimmer at one point), it was over. The surgeon practiced his best sewing techniques, cracked a few jokes, and I made inaudible noises of gratitude, as I was wheeled out to the recovery room, where a very nice nurse hooked me up to the machine that goes beep, and undertook a one sided conversation with me for? I have no idea how long, then wheeled me back down to my room, where I read the same page in my book over and over again, until the fog in my head started to clear. Another nurse came to check on me, hooked me up to another beepbox, talked through the medications she'd brought, and asked me to confirm my name date of birth and address, which was about the zillionth time today I'd given it. I also had a wristband with all that plus a QR code, for which I was very grateful, I had visions of getting mis-identified and coming out with the wrong number of kidneys, or maybe a boob job.

I'm not to drive for 24 hours, or operate machinery. I'll bet a computer counts as machinery, phoo, I might post naked images of myself  that I'd regret after they went viral.

No. I care too much for you people, so I'll post naked pictures of someone else instead.