I’m tickled to learn of the existence of tofu interconnects, especially as they work in 6 dimensions. Soya products transmitting information in hyperspace?

Some time after 11pm yesterday, my dad called to tell me that ambulance staff were attending my mum after an apparent stroke. I threw some clothes into a bag and looked at train and flight possibilities while Elly looked into taxis.

About an hour later, my dad texted to give an all-clear: ‘stoke symptoms now abated. Speech & movement now normal. No need for hospitalisation. Cause was a TIA – a transient episode. See GPO tomorrow.’ So the mad dash for Worcester was put on hold.

Some time after 11pm yesterday, my dad called to tell me that ambulance staff were attending my mum after an apparent stroke. I threw some clothes into a bag and looked at train and flight possibilities while Elly looked into taxis.

About an hour later, my dad texted to give an all-clear: ‘stoke symptoms now abated. Speech & movement now normal. No need for hospitalisation. Cause was a TIA – a transient episode. See GPO tomorrow.’ So the mad dash for Worcester was put on hold.

He emailed today to say ‘Mum has to visit the vampire at the surgery tomorrow for blood samples to be taken & have an ECG. As from tomorrow, she is to take aspirin to thin her blood. This is for a month to check on the effect on blood pressure. This is not madly high but needs to be kept in check.’

I suspect, admittedly on zero knowledge of her medication regime, that the pain-killers taken in connection with having broken her femur neck in March and other medication stemming from diabetes complications may be responsible – but I will look into that when I make a planned visit to Worcester on Thursday. During this trip I get to meet my brother’s new girlfriend – oo-er!

I phoned home this morning – dad sounded OK but mum sounded rather tired – hardly surprising after a scary episode. My mum is nearly 81 and my dad is 83 so I guess I’m lucky to have them both – and that mentally both are fully functional as far as I can tell.

On a slightly better note, my offer of a place at Napier was made unconditional today (they were waiting on a reference to confirm that I really am suitable for the course) so I’m a step closer to trying to get my head around Java and OSI models – and to buying a new mac with a student discount. Yeehah!

I’ve finally finished sorting Vilior but it’s been too wet to do the alpha-shakedown so I’ve finally got around to uploading photos from February, March and April. Can you feel the tediousness of my prose yet?

Update 1
May’s pix are here.

Update 24

June’s pix are here.

Update 3
July’s pix are here
August’s pix so far are here.

This pleases me wildly.

As of 5pm this evening, I ceased working for NewsCorp. Tomorrow will be my last NewsCorp payday. I’ve been a Murdoch minion since early 2010, when Leckie & Leckie was bought by HarperCollins.

I’ve left mostly because I’m sick of commuting and hence often not getting home until 8pm – I will miss being involved in educational publishing and, had Leckie remained in Edinburgh, I imagine I’d still be there.

So what next? A month of sorting things at Servants’ Quarters and on Arran, then this. So I will end up with an actual qualification in IT rather than just being a dilettante.

Comments

ggreig
Good luck with it! My conversion course was a good thing for me.

silverwhistle
Well done! And well done for escaping the declining Evil Empire!

Thoughts on drinking my first tin of Irn Bru just after midnight last night – I was inexorably reminded of an old advertising jingle:

Plink-plink! Fizz-fizz!
Oh what a relief it is!

Only an hour to go before the restricted diet ends – and what have we learnt?

In no particular order

• It’s much to write blog entries using a real client (Xjournal) rather than the basic web interface.
• The Clash’s London Calling is brilliant accompaniment for kneading chapatti dough and then rolling out chapattis – in fact, to me, it’s brilliant full stop. The Fall’s Dragnet isn’t.
• We’ve had plenty to eat, most of which has been ok. I can’t say I’m fond of porridge made with water – and my hostess doesn’t like porridge anyway – but the various lentil concoctions (caramelised onions and garlic, red lentils and stock) with rice and chapattis have been very enjoyable and filling.
• My hostess has most missed tea and coffee. I’ve missed tea and the 20 or so tins of Irn Bru or Dr Pepper I’d drink in a normal week. (We both thought that hot water was better than black tea. I usually loathe coffee – the mere thought of it can make me feel sick.)
• Our final food bill was
  

  Item	Amount	Cost	proportion used
  Tesco Scottish porridge oats	1 kg	£0·99	about half
  Tesco Value long grain rice	1 kg	£0·49	all
  Tesco Value penne	1 * 500 g	£0·09	only 1 of the 2 bags we bought
  Tesco value veg stock cubes	2 packs of 10 cubes	£0·20	only 2 of the 5 packs we bought
  Tesco market value brown onions	2 kg	£1·18	19 of the 22 onions in the bag
  Indus red split lentils	2 kg	£2·69	around 1·75 kg
  Tesco plain white flour	1·5 kg	£0·52	around 0·9 kg
  Tesco swede	600 g	£0·70	all
  Tesco market value carrots	600 g	£0·76	500 g
  Tesco pure vegetable oil	225 ml (remnant of a 1 litre bottle)	£0·32 (22·5% of £1·44)	about 50 ml
  apples, oranges, garlic	varying amounts	£1·39	all
  salt	a few pinches	£0·10	all but a few grains thrown over our left shoulders
  Total		£9·43

• It takes ages to knead chapatti and aeons to roll them all out. Fortunately, the kneading can be done while onions are caramelising – they only need stirring occasionally. (In general cooking from scratch takes longer than I’d normally have in an evening. How did our parents do it while working full-time too? I begin to understand why convenient foods cost so much, even though they’re churned out by mostly production lines.)
• There’s lot’s more washing up too!
• I don’t have the knack of rolling chapattis out round. How is it done?
• I wish I’d lived like this as a student – my overdrafts would have been much smaller (or maybe I’d have spend the same amount on other enjoyments!)
• We’ve not suffered physically apart from me having some headaches which could easily be due to early mornings and commuting – and not wearing the right glasses on Tuesday. In fact today we’ve done an amount of heavy lifting – humping a new-ish dishwasher AARRGGHH!! and freezer into the flat.
• My hostess likes driving white vans!

13 minutes to go – I can hear the Irn Bru in the larder calling.

Just in case you missed the bold type here, please do not mention my medical conditions in anything my parents might read, such as comments as in a non-restricted blog post. They don’t need to know, they’re both old and quite frail and they will only worry needlessly if they learn that I have diabetes.

If you see no indication that a blog entry is friends-locked, you should assume it isn’t.

Thank you for your co-operation.

Reposted…

My rice cooker’s non-stick coating lived up to its name – it didn’t stick around. So rice tends to stick to the bottom of the pan. Cleaning it is a pain – you need to soak the pan for quite a while to soften the rice enough to remove it.

This evening I was making soup for tomorrow’s lunch when I had a mini-brainwave Normally we thicken soup by adding a lot of grated carrot and maybe a few red lentils. This evening I made the stock in the rice-cooker pan, allowing the hot water to soften the coated rice. So when I added the stock to the vegetables, it was enhanced with extra thickener in the form of rice-starch – and the rice-cooker pan was ready to be washed without any effort.

We’re at the end of day 2 of living below the line. My hostess is missing her caffeine but surprisingly I’m not. I am missing fruit but I think we might swap the teabags we’ve bought but not used for some apples. I had a foul headache yesterday afternoon and evening but I think that was due to not being able to find my current glasses, wearing an old pair and staring at a screen all afternoon.

Currently I’m reliving my lost alternative youth with a CD of a 1976 Sex Pistols gig – wonderful stuff!