dear diary.

[Teiana]

<on, 'now', screws up nose like that woman off 'Bewitched', and blinks, waiting for normality to appear. >

[Teiana]

i've been so ill for days and days and it's just not fair. I only had one thing to do all week and i screwed it up.

[Teiana]

think things can't get any worse? We took 3 people out for lunch yesterday and one of them ended up in A&E.

I need a rock to go and hide under and wait to evolve into a functioning life form.

[Teiana]

i just want one clear day where i have got everything up to date and nothing untoward happens.. trouble is i can't seem to even get close to that situation.
stuff that needs dealing with just keeps stacking up like planes waiting to land, and in the meantime, new issues present themselves..

please let tomorrow be simple, and fun, and productive, and get me to a place i can get organised from.

[Teiana]

i'm thinking about communication and language.
These days i think the telephone and internet are reducing people's ability to 'read' and send body language signals.

Mostly everyone assumes that before proper language/words/speech was invented, that people didn't actually communicate much, and that the invention of speech/words/language was an improvement. Progress.
What if there's a giant parallel going on.. you could argue that before the internet we didn't communicate much, until now..

What if, before they invented a proper language with words and speech, we were all completely psychic/telepathic, whatever... and we lost that once we started talking? Now we're losing body language too..

imagine something like 'the big brother house' ( i don't like big brother, but it's an example of a contained environment) where nobody was allowed to use words at all. You could draw pictures if necessary, or other than that had to mime or act out information. After a month or so, do you think the inmates would have got better at reading subtle clues?

[Teiana]

well in case you were wondering what happened about the screwed up TMA, i passed it - *yay* - so that's a relief. one down, seven to go. plus an exam and a compulsory residential bit..

nice to get it back quite quick, considering it's all been sent by mail and not sent via the interweb.
now if i can just get my head around getting some actual work done and not spend the afternoon 'resting' after the 'effort' of reading my returned TMA.

[Neill]

just want one clear day where i have got everything up to date and nothing untoward happens..

I'm with you all the way on that one.
Over a week ago, I had just finished Q1 of the TMA due tomorrow, had my trip to South Africa planned for next week and every moving along great.
Then I got a back ache. A real back ache.
5 days of tests and getting nothing done narrowed it down to an inflamed gallen.
Wednesday night they tok it out just before midnight and now I am in hospital nearly back to normal.
The TMA is still not finished (but I got an extension
and South Africa is postponed.

So maybe tomorrow I get out and can start a bit of catching up including the forum posts.
Escaped today to do a geocache (neill.blogger.de)

[Teiana]

that sounds terrible neill are you ok?

gallen? gall bladder? or something else?

hope you get good marks on your tma still.

[Neill]

Sorry. I meant gall bladder.

Nearly a week later, it is no longer so terrible but still not something that I would wish on any one.
I'll get down to the TMA when I get home tomorrow. I have this week off work so need to have it done before I return to work.
My boss rang last night to see how I was and said that they were doing fine without me. But I bet there are a few little tasks left.

Anyway, it is all better now.
Neill

[Teiana]

dear diary

so, student-like, i decide to waste a couple of hours today in a stationery shop.. wandering about, on the basis of 'urgently needing' to get all my course books wire-bound.
So on the way out of the shop there's a table of sale items, including one box containing a plastic ice-cube tray. The tray is designed so the ice 'cubes' will look like the continents.. although they've done britain as well i think.. so you can make little ice blocks shaped like africa etc, and watch them melt. The whole things packaged under slogans about global warming and how you can watch it melt.. meant to be some kind of joke i think.. but slightly disturbing. I can partly imagine that the kind of people who would buy stuff like that would be the kind of people who are actually worried about global warming, and, buy BUYING the plastic (probably made of something non-environmentally friendly) tray and then using power to freeze the water (to get 'cold' drinks, not a necessity for survival) they're actually causing more co2 emissions/potential warming, etc.. i'm sort of tired of this kind of irony.

and for the record i am not an environmentally friendly person and i'm not anti-shopping (although i did put back a nice leather covered notepad today because i felt rather that it didn't Need to be leather, really: though i could just as easily have bought it, i still might..or similar.) it's just there's all these people jumping on the 'selling eco products' bandwagon, because it's a market share, they say 'well someone would be selling these things, so we might as well make 'better' ones and then people can buy ours instead of 'bad' ones - but actually they're just creating demand for more products, and people are then buying more and more because they feel better about the ones they are buying. but you can't save the planet by shopping for eco-products any more than you can 'save' money by spending it in 'X' supermarket... buying stuff is just consumption, and spending money isn't saving.

but i will still end up in the same supermarkets buying 'green' notebooks and stuff because the alternative seems to be staying home locked in an endless cycle of computer gaming.