Off and On

not a good place to break down

not a good place to break down (view larger image in Flickr).

Oh dear - I fear the driver of this bus stuck in the centre of Southall is not the most popular man here right now! Can't really ask for help to push it out of the way, either!

Invitation to Moscow

Very quiet at work today as you might imagine, but one email did turn up. It was an invitation to give a presentation at a business conference about intranets. Not particularly unusual given the work I do - I do quite a lot of talks and presentations at conferences. What is unusual about this invitation is that this particular conference will be taking place in Moscow, Russia! They have offered to pay all my travel and accommodation expenses. Even if the decision at work is that there is no real reason for me to do this from an RNIB point of view, I rather think I will be quite happy to take a few days annual leave and do this one in my own time, if it means I get a couple of days to visit Moscow! And if we can find cheap enough flights, it might even be possible for Chris to come with me. That would be a lovely, and unexpected, spring break for us both.

Technorati: Moscow

Henny achieves her fundraising target, and the money's still coming in

Fantastic news! Just checked Henny's fundraising page, and discovered that the total raised is now £3,080.51 - which means that in just 15 days, Henny has achieved her fundraising target! And what's even better is that people are still pledging money, so goodness knows what the total will be by the time she sets off to the Arctic at the end of January.

Absolutely brilliant, Henny - well done!

Technorati: Sponsorship | Fundraising

Bus drivers ARE important

I heard a snippet on BBC Breakfast this morning where they were asking people to write in if they work on Christmas Day, and one guy wrote in saying that "while his job wasn't important" he'd be working a shift on Christmas Day. He's a bus driver.

Well I'd just like to say to him and all the other public transport workers who work on public holidays that there are millions of people who, like me, don't have a car, and who therefore rely on public transport to go anywhere. And if you guys on the buses did the same as the train companies and shut down altogether on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, there are an awful lot of people out here who would be stuck and completely unable to get anywhere they couldn't walk to.

So please don't think your job isn't important. It might not be "high powered", but for an awful lot of people, it's very, very important indeed. You have our heartfelt thanks for being willing to keep the buses running on public holidays - we may not always say it, but we really do appreciate it.

NORAD tracks Santa!

www.noradsanta.org

How did I miss this all these years?! It seems that, since 1955, NORAD has been tracking Santa's progress around the world at Christmas. Wonderful!

Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | Don't forget the flat-nosed

Don't forget the flat-nosed

Excellent article about the inconsistencies in interpreting bits of the bible demonstrated by those bigots who were parading in Belfast the other day.

Amount pledged fast approaching Henny's fundraising target

The total pledged towards the Bristol Royal Children's Hospital is now very close to Henny's £3,000 target - it now stands at £2,725, which is amazing!

If you haven't already donated, please do consider doing so and help her break through that £3,000 target before Christmas. For more information, see Henny's fundraising page on Just Giving.

Technorati: Sponsorship | Fundraising

Manor House Grounds, Southall

Manor House Grounds, Southall - View 1 (view larger image in Flickr).

Thanks to the Southall-Norwood Trust making a complete pig's ear of my appointment (they had it in the system as being at 11am, but the letter I received said 11.30am - as a result, it has been rescheduled to January, a full TWO YEARS after I was first referred to the trust), I found myself at 11.40 this morning a) absolutely furious and flaming mad, and b) with some time to go for a walk to try to calm down.

So I decided to take a wander round the Manor House Grounds, just a hundred yards away from the Trust offices.

It's quite a small park, but it was a gorgeously clear, sunny day, and the park was deserted. I wandered round, taking photographs, and gradually calming down.

Had an interesting chat with a couple of the park staff - they were intrigued to see someone taking photographs, and we got on to talking about the history of the manor itself, and exchanging bits of information about it that we'd picked up.

That ordinary little chat helped me a lot too - it reminded me that not everyone is as incompetent and uncaring as the Southall-Norwood Trust staff seem to be, and brought me back to everyday normality.

And now I think about it, if the Trust hadn't messed up my appointment, I wouldn't have felt I had the time to wander round the park and take lots of beautiful photographs, so even that wasn't all bad.

Still feel angry about it though.

Shoes, shoes, shoes...

Shoes, shoes, shoes... (view larger image in Flickr).

Rather pleased with this picture. This is for all the shoe-lovers out there, of which there are many! :)

I rather fear that Poppy is deaf

Oh dear. After suspecting for some time, I am now almost certain that our cat, Poppy, pictured here, has gone deaf.

She is now about 14 years old, and so it might simply be age related.

She certainly wasn't always deaf. I'm not sure when it started - a good while ago I suspect. But over the past few months, I've started to notice that, more than she used to, she'll turn round to check if I'm there when she's trying to lead me down the hallway to the kitchen (i.e. to feed her!), rather than simply relying on being able to hear if I'm there or not. But she has always done that to some extent, so it's not been something that was immediately obvious.

And then in the past few weeks, I now realise that she has stopped responding to sounds. I mentioned this to Chris yesterday while I was holding her, and he clapped his hands behind her head. Her ears didn't even twitch, which seems pretty conclusive.

The strange thing, though, is that over the past year, she's become much more vocal than she's ever been. Which hasn't been much - for the first few years of her life, she hardly ever made any sounds at all. There's probably a straightforward reason for it, but right now I can't figure out quite why she would start miaowing just when she started going deaf!