{blog_title}

It’s that time of year again when I have to pack my bags to go to Brazil for three weeks to teach a course. As usual, I haven’t got nearly as much organised before my departure as I’d hoped. I had planned to write a few articles to forward post here, but — well — that didn’t happen. Frankly, I’m amazed that I seem to have got things organised for the trip, but I’m paranoid that I’ve forgotten something vital. It all seems a bit too easy…

One thing that I set up before the trip last year, which has been immensely useful this year, is a kind of master packing list. I wrote a detailed list in OmniOutliner of everything I took (separated into checked baggage and hand baggage). Since I know that I travelled comfortably with those items last year, I can be fairly confident that if I pack those things again, all will be well. As with GTD, getting things out of your mind and into a ‘trusted system’ is a huge help. It basically stops you sitting bolt upright in bed at 3am and yelling “Torch!”, startling your partner in the process.

I leave on Sunday, and while Brazil will be — I am sure — as beautiful and wildlife-packed as usual, it’s going to be a tough three weeks. I’m also going to miss Mr. Bsag (and Cleo) like blazes - I’m hoping they’ll look after one another while I’m gone, but I’ll have to make do with a picture of both of them on my phone. It’s our seventh¹ wedding anniversary while I’m away, so we’re having a substitute celebration on Saturday. Roll on mid-September!

In the meantime, if something goes awry with the site in my absence, or gets swamped by spammers, I’m afraid that I won’t even know about it, still less do anything about it.

¹ Seven years! Shouldn’t we be itching, or something? ↑

A few days ago, I noticed a bit of buzz about a new CSS framework called Blueprint. The main idea behind the framework is to make it easy to construct purely CSS grid layouts, and also to set up good-looking typography, and to make the whole thing as similar as possible in all browsers. Even Internet Explorer. That’s no small task.

I’m certainly not a CSS expert, but while I’m not too shabby at making things with pretty colours and attractive padding, I usually seem to come unstuck when it comes to positioning blocks of text on the page. Getting neat columns of text has always seemed a bit of a trial by ordeal to me, and line spacing has always been a matter of complete guesswork.

I’ve been putting off producing a few pages for a web site for work¹ for ages, so I decided that this would be a good opportunity to try Blueprint out. The site is very simple (just a few pages, mainly text with a few images), but I wanted it to look professional, clean, minimalist, but also attractive.

{Read more...}

We have a rather impressive wasps’ nest in our loft space. It seems that the wasps (Vespa vulgaris) got into the loft via the ventilation holes in our wooden soffits¹, and built the nest on the inner surface of the roof, near the junction with the wall. The nest is just above the window of our office/spare room, so as I type this, I can see dozens of busy wasps hanging around the entrance or going in or out.

When we first discovered the nest a few months ago, we had a bit of a dilemma: should we call in a pest controller and get them to destroy it (or try to do it ourselves), or should we just leave it alone? As far as I can determine from reading about them, wasps don’t overwinter in their nests (unlike bees), so in theory, if we leave the nest until winter, all the workers will die, leaving only the queen to hibernate in the nest. It also seems that the queen leaves in the spring to found a new nest in a new location, so there isn’t much danger of her founding a new nest in the same place.

Wasps don’t have the good press of bees, but they are still beneficial for the ecosystem as a whole (and help to kill garden invertebrate pests like catepillars). I also dislike sloshing insecticide around unecessarily. So we decided to leave the nest alone, and clear it out once the colony has died. Apart from occasionally straying into the office when the window is open, they don’t bother us much.

However, we still have a problem with the loft. We don’t need to go up there much, but if we have to go and fetch something we’ve stored, it’s a bit scary. When you open the hatch and turn the light on, they start swarming around the light and moving towards you in a rather threatening way. I’ve got to go and get a suitcase down now for my upcoming trip to Brazil at the end of the month, so if you hear the sound of a small, British blogger falling down a loft ladder, closely followed by an empty suitcase and swarm of angry wasps, please summon help.

¹ ‘Soffit’ is one of my favourite words at the moment, for some reason. ↑

I watched a couple of things yesterday (one a TV documentary and the other a film) which were both — in their different ways — about silence, isolation, and internal mental strength. The coincidence of watching them both in the same night wasn’t planned, but they made a very interesting pair of companion pieces.

The first was a documentary called “Real Men Under Pressure” about saturation divers working on North Sea oil installations on the sea bed. The other was Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille), a film about Carthusian monks in the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. Two more dissimilar subjects, you would think, would be hard to find, but there were a lot of parallels.

{Read more...}

Mr. Bsag and I went to Walsall yesterday — my first visit to the town. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting (it’s very easy to have negative pre-conceptions about a lot of Midlands towns because they have been the butt of jokes for years), but I was pleasantly surprised. It is never going to be a tourist destination, but it has a very nice feel about it.

For a start, it seems to have managed to hold on to one or two independent shops alongside the usual high street suspects that spread like fungus over most British towns. I might be a vegetarian, but I still like to see proper, family-run butchers shops that appear to be doing a brisk trade. It was a lovely day, which always helps, but people were wandering around the pedestrianised streets looking happy and relaxed, rather than having that “MUST BUY CONSUMER GOODS” zombie-like expression that you often see around shopping centres.

Walsall also has a very nice art gallery, which proudly (and prominently) displays “Free Admission” under the name on the outside, so as not to deter shy and/or poor potential art lovers. I enjoyed a good wander around it, and took some pictures (one, two and three). They have an exhibition of Andrew Tift’s portraits of Kitty Garman on at the moment, and they are really captivating. Kitty¹ seems to be quite a woman, and the portraits show the intelligence and wit and life in her eyes beautifully.

There also seemed to be a lot of activities on for children in the streets (no doubt organised to coincide with the school holidays). There were several puppet shows, Punch and Judy booths (complete with a gaggle of kids sitting rapt on a blanket in front of the booth doing the full ‘He’s behind you!’ thing), puppet making workshops, a giant monk puppet accompanied by two Medieval bagpipers, and a cheerful man riding inside a huge, papier maché crocodile. I have no idea what the latter two were about, but they were certainly entertaining, and the whole thing gave the town quite a lively creative air — again, not what I was expecting from Walsall.

¹ Daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and first wife of Lucien Freud. I hate describing women solely in terms of their relationship to men, but that — unfortunately — is how she is known. Judging by the look in her eyes, there’s an awful lot more to her than just being a daughter and a wife. ↑

Birmingham can be a constantly surprising place. Just when you think you’ve explored all that it has to offer, you find something that’s new to you, tucked away somewhere.

My brother came to visit this weekend, and Mr. Bsag suggested that we go to St. Paul’s Gallery, tucked away in the Jewellery Quarter. Despite the fact that I’ve visited the RBSA gallery many times, which is just around the corner, I’d never been to St. Paul’s Gallery before. It’s a fantastic place, specialising in fine art prints of album cover art, and features the work of Storm Thorgerson, who produced many of Pink Floyd’s album covers, along with some great covers for other bands.

The brother and I are both big Floyd fans, so seeing huge, beautiful prints of the original cover of Dark Side of the Moon and the Atom Heart Mother cow, signed by Thorgerson, made us go squeee! with geeky excitement. Thorgerson’s covers are incredibly visually arresting (if slightly disturbing), and seeing them so much larger than even the size of a vinyl album cover is a treat. I’ve always loved the look of his cover from Pulse, and that was particularly good at a large scale. The colours are wonderfully vibrant, and you get the full effect of the repeated circle motifs, and the morphing imagery around the edge.

It isn’t all Storm, though. They have a number of other great pieces, like a fantastic portrait of BB King by Robert Crumb, which is signed by both. Since Mr. Bsag loves the work of both of them, that would make a brilliant anniversary present, but I’d have to do a lot of saving up for it.

Another piece we both loved was a special print from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, and depicts the HMS Thunder Child battling against a Martian fighting machine. My brother and I both grew up with War of the Worlds — we both know the first part of Richard Burton’s terrific (in the proper sense of the word) narration by heart, and will quote it to bored listeners on the slightest pretext. In fact, we had just been drooling over an original vinyl copy of War of the Worlds in Swordfish, so it was quite a coincidence — enough of a coincidence to set the “oo ee, oo ee, oo ee” musical motif running in my head for the rest of the day, with the odd, “ULLA!” thrown in for good measure. Readers how have not heard War of the Worlds won’t know what the heck I’m on about, but that’s OK.

Anyway, if you’re in Birmingham at a loose end, particularly if you are a Pink Floyd fan, St. Paul’s Gallery is a great place to visit.

One endearing characteristic of Somali cats (well, one of their many endearing characteristics) is their chirrup. Where other cats miaow or yowl, Somalis chirrup. Imagine someone pronouncing a rolling ‘r’ (as in Spanish¹) with a rising, musical inflection, which sometimes ends in a miaow-like sound. I’ve never heard a cat make a sound like that before, and it makes me smile every time.

The other night, during a protracted chirruping bout before her dinner, I realised that the sound reminded me of something else: Chewbacca on helium. All she needs is a little bandolier and a cat-sized space ship, and she’s all set.

¹ Which I have just discovered, courtesy of Wikipedia, is called an alveolar trill. ↑