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The reeds and rushes in the water meadows are now almost as tall as I am. In the breeze, they ripple like a green sea, a froth of creamy meadowsweet flowers capping the waves. If I close my eyes, I can imagine myself on a quiet shore. As I walk the path through the meadow, I smile, feeling like Moses parting the waves.

Everything is lush.

As one might expect, I spend quite a bit of time watching animals, trying to work out what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and—in the case of mugger ducks—how I can get them to stop doing it. Much of this happens at work, but I also watch animals in a non-professional setting, as I have for most of my life. Sometimes I can work out what is going on—at other times, I can only wrinkle my forehead in perplexity and think, “What the flippin’ Nora is going on there, then?” This is about one of those occasions.

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There’s a huge amount of building work going on at work, so the toilets have been swapped around so that no-one has to dash up or down three flights of stairs when nature calls. The upshot of all this is that my nearest toilet is a former gent’s toilet. Walking in there is a bit of an odd experience, even once you’ve got over the “Oh, wrong toilets!” feeling. I noticed some interesting differences:

• There’s a lot more graffitti in the men’s toilets. In fact I learned a few interesting things from the wall of the cubicle…
• All of the coat hooks on the back of the doors in the cubicles have come off, and are now fixed on the rear wall. What do the guys do with the hooks—do they have excessively heavy coats? Do they pull 20 chin-ups on them?
• Before they switched the toilets over, someone screened off the urinals. Seemingly, the powers that be think that we women might have our delicate sensibilites offended, or might freak out if we caught a glimpse of the forbidden porcelain. How little they know us.

My guess is that the men are probably marvelling at the virgin walls and the hooks on the back of the doors.

After my last post, there seemed to be some interest in an expansion of my ‘I once got mugged by a duck’ comment. So here it is.

One lovely summer’s day, I decided that I would get out of the office at lunchtime, and eat my sandwiches in the University Parks. As I sat myself down in a pretty spot by the river and started to unpack my lunch, the ducks started to gather. One duck in particular—or drake to be absolutely biologically-accurate—caught my attention. He was extremely tame, and came right up to me quite boldly. I noticed that he had one deformed foot. It looked like a congenital condition, so I thought that he had probably developed this excessively friendly attitude in order to survive. Sucker that I am, I started to toss bits of my sandwich his way. Gradually, the other ducks started to get bored and leave, as this tame duck was menacing the others and getting all the food. In retrospect, I should have found this slightly disturbing.

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I’m sorry if you had problems loading this site yesterday. The whole of my host’s domain was out for hours. It turns out that they had a small fire in their server room, and had to evacuate the place and then get everything back up again. There doesn’t seem to have been any harm done anyway. I think everything is still here, but if you emailed me yesterday, it may have got lost in the system.

Everyone’s gone button mad! You can make your own or steal them from gtmcknight.com—which is what I did! I had a few buttons before, but I thought that I’d take the opportunity to update them and replace a few with prettier ones. I know that that everyone and his dog uses them, but they are a nice compact way to display information.

While I was on the H2G2 site, I found this definition of Ansty (a place I’ve mentioned here before), according to the Meaning of Liff:

Ansty (adj.) Descriptive of a computer mouse icon pointer that refuses to move no matter how much you gyrate the mouse.

Fantastic! I’ve got the Meaning of Liff, but I’d forgotten that Ansty was included.

I’ve put some more photos from our Florida trip up on Wings Open Wide. This time, all the pictures were taken with my Lomo.

I was listening to the Today programme this morning—half asleep as usual—when my brain filtered the following phrase out of the warm fuzz of words:

“…lives blighted by otters”

Take a moment to read that again. The questions ‘what?’ ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ immediately springs to mind. The piece was following on from another yesterday, which noted the welcome recovery in the otter population due to the banning of pesticides like DDT and dieldrin. Not everyone is happy to see the cute little furry critters back: the ‘Specialist Anglers Alliance’ (carp fishermen) are claiming that the otters are eating all their fish.

The phrase “lives blighted” is usually used when old people are terrorized by groups of delinquent youths, so it brought to mind a fantastic image of gangs of swearing otters, drinking alcopops on river banks and spraying graffiti on trees. “Tarka” would make quite a good graffiti tag, actually…

As a kind of bribery/attempt to reinforce a positive association between XHTML-wrangling and pleasure, I treated myself to watching the DVD of Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) on Monday night. I saw it ages ago, but it was fun to watch again. It’s not a vintage Allen film by any means (the sketches are a bit variable in quality—some are hilarious while others are a bit so-so), but one line made me sit up and take notice. Gene Wilder plays a doctor treating an Armenian patient who is in love with a sheep. The doctor meets the ovine fatale in question and falls head over heels for her, sneaking off to a hotel and ordering caviar for himself and lawn clippings for the lady. Anyway, my point is that when the doctor introduces himself, he says his name is “Ross—Doug Ross”. What? Surely the writers of ER didn’t chose the name of the charming Dr. Ross at random? I’ll never be able to watch old episodes of ER and see Doug Ross in the same way again.

I got a text message from a stranger on my mobile this morning. Apparently, Liz was given my number by Louise, and she was wondering if I wanted to go out for a drink. I see three possibilities:

• I have a secret female admirer. Interesting, but very unlikely.
• It’s spam. I’ve never got SMS spam before, but there’s always a first time.
• Someone keyed in a wrong number.

If it was a wrong number, Liz is probably—at this very moment—agonising over why the object of her affections didn’t text her back. Did he/she get it? Did he/she not want to go out with her? I would text her back and put her out of her misery, but for the second possibility.

p. An interesting fact I learned today, in the course of totally legitimate work-related research on laterality (or ‘handedness’*): true hermaphrodites always have a functional ovary on the left and a functional testis on the right. Also, in most men, the left testicle hangs lower than the right, despite being lighter. I don’t have a large enough sample size to personally confirm either of these facts, but I will be paying much closer attention in future.

p. These were the only interesting gleanings in a very long and dense paper, but it was almost worth it for them. This kind of information ought to be gold dust in pub quizzes.

p. *This is a somewhat misleading term. You can get handedness, beakedness, pawedness, eyedness and even whales tend to list slightly one side.

p. I found it unexpectedly hard to blog while I was in the US. I had thought that it might be difficult to write about my experiences after the fact, as weblogs (well, mine anyway) are meant to be spontaneous things. So I made sure that I actually wrote my posts on the day that they occurred to me. What I hadn’t anticipated was that it would matter if I didn’t publish the entry immediately — that was completely unexpected.

p. I’m still not sure why it matters. I think that it’s something to do with the fact that — in the usual course of weblogging — your thoughts and opinions surface, you write them down, and then you publish them. From that point on, they are more or less out of your control: for better or worse, they are released into the world and you must accept what follows. If you don’t publish immediately, creeping editorial doubts (the enemy of creative writing) surface. You start to tinker and fiddle, and before you know it, you’ve killed anything fresh and lively that they might have contained. For me, the weblogging mechanism seems to be an integral part of the writing process.

p. Mr. Bsag went to the bank to change our sole remaining $10 note (why we even bothered, I don’t know — it’s not as if we were going to get much for it). He realised, as the cashier was counting out scores of £10 notes, that she had mistaken it for a $100 note. There were a few moments when he wrestled mightily with his conscience, then he pointed out her mistake. You see what an upright, honest citizen I married? And why we will never be rich…

p. [Sunday 23rd March]

p. Phew. Airboats are fast. And noisy. And probably really bad for the environment. Buy boy are they fun! We thought that we really had to have a go on one while we were in Florida. Actually, we saw quite a bit of wildlife on the trip — lots of birds, some lovely dragonflies and an alligator some way off in the distance.

p. The first time you ride on an airboat and the driver heads straight for a patch of reeds, you can’t help thinking “Aaarggg! We’re going to crash!”. This wears off after a bit, and then it gets quite fun — though wearing the ear defenders is a really good idea, or you end up shouting at everyone for hours afterwards.