Pain, Peceptions and What Not (by sarah)

As those who follow me on facebook, twitter, text message or in the flesh will have detected I am in pain at the moment - I am having a flare up not just with my back and shoulder but also with my hands. Not surprising really as it is pregnancy hormone that kept these pains at bay for the last few years - instead giving me the pelvic issues. My hands are not working brilliantly but they have also been a lot worse in the past.

They are not completely useless lumps of rubber like they were at the end of my degree.

But they are weak, I can not open the baby's beaker so we need three of them so I don't have to refill whilst Al is at work. I can't open cans nor chop veg or lock/unlock the door. We have ways around most of this and those we don't we are working on.

But it is always depressing but I am being kept in ok spirits by Alaric and friends.

I am also awaiting the stuck coil to be removed and the pains associated with that which is stressing me out - I just don't like the idea of it being there at all now plus it is now spiking me. I'm trying not to be negative about things but I am being overly persermistic about stuff. Pain killers make me thick, pain makes me thick, I feel thick and dull and fat and boring to be quiet honest.

But again I have ways around this so it isn't really that bad - I just need to moan about it. Hopefully I can stop boring everyone with it all now!

Also I had injections in the top of my spin in 2003 to help with inflammation and pain and stuff - it feels like these have worn off? Is that possible? I was hoping to get longer out of them as I was told I could only ever have the injections three times in my life.

Day 1 of making the ladder (by alaric)

This weekend, I am attempting to make a fixed ladder, mounted to the wall of my workshop so I can fix the roof more easily.

First, I had to tidy up in the workshop to make room. I bought a set of four folding chairs for guests which are rather in the way (the chairs, not necessarily the guests), So I screwed a few bits of scrap wood up between the beams to store them:

See all that damp on the ceiling, by the way? That is the enemy! Eradicating that is the long-term goal of this whole mission.

With the chairs out of the way, I could get on with the task at hand. Here's the bit of wall where the ladder will go:

And here's the pile of steel I ordered from Hindleys to make it from:

The ladder is being made mostly from 1" square steel tubing, which needs to be cut into bits of various lengths with my trusty angle grinder. Here's the rungs (longer parts) and the spacers that will join it to the wall:

However, for extra strength and extra not-having-a-sharp-corner-ness, at the bottom it will be joined to the wall by an angled spacer on each side. The spacer will be at forty-five degrees to the vertical (and to the horizontal, thanks to the magic of maths), so I need to cut twenty two and a half degree angles onto the bottoms of the ladder uprights, like so:

Also, I needed to cut out two spacers with twenty two and a half degree angles at one end (to mate with the uprights) and forty five degree angles at the ends which will mount onto the wall, bringing my pile of various lengths of steel tube up to this:

Where the tubes need to attach to the wall, I'm going to weld them to flat steel plates, which will be drilled for the bolts that join them to the wall. All of the tube ends I've cut will be welded, so the fact that they're rough angle-grinder cuts doesn't matter, but these edges will be exposed, so the fact that they are nasty and burred offends me:

But a quick run along the bench grinder each has given them nice clean edges:

Sarah turned up and took a picture of me, just as I was finishing. Check out my lovely protective clothing - I take my safety seriously when dealing with forces that can make metal flow like honey:

Finally, I measure out the layout of the angled spacer, to check I'd done my maths correctly to make it the right length to produce a 30cm spacing, to match the straight spacers, and that the angles were right:

Tomorrow, I will go out shopping to buy some anchor bolts to mount it to the wall (I can't drill the holes in the plates until I know the diameter required), welding magnets so I can make sure the angles are exact as I weld it together (I don't want a wonky ladder), and some metal paint so it won't rust when it's installed - then it's time to start welding. I plan to start by making the sides with the angled and straight spacers so I can check they align perfectly by placing them one on top of the other, before welding the rungs in between them.

Continue to day 2...

Snow Garden (by sarah)

More snow fell after I took the pics and I regret not having gone out with the birthday money sooner and gotten my camera as it ment I was restricted to the half an hour of Al getting ready for work and his smart phone! However I did discover that the broken camera still records film ok so I did take some vids of the girls which I will attempt to process later on!

I made Al stop to take a pic of him as he left for work but alsa the camera went with him!

But here is what I got! None of the kids paying sadly 🙁 Though it turned out Mary hated the snow where as Jean spent hours out in the garden making snow angels and just walking around in it, sticking it too the walls etc... I made soup out of frozen veg in the freezer, and then Mary went down for her nap so I ended up building a snow man with Jean and having a snow fight where we both got covered!

Old Snow Pics from The Bakery (by sarah)

With the snow falling and having a broken camera I decided it was about time I dug into the archive and aired some of the snow pics that have been lurking around for the last few years. As I said yesterday I am both sad and happy not to be there anymore where snow is concerned. It was fantastic for sledding and pretty pictures but our water used to freeze and we couldn't look out the windows of the house for having to put bubble wrap on them to try and keep warm.

The new house is very different with double glazing and central heating and so snow is not the issue it used to be. A heavy frost could have us stranded in the valley so snow was a complete grind everything to a stand still.

Enjoy the pics - I'm sure there will be more!

Volunteering (by alaric)

I've always wanted to change the world for the better. I'm not sure where this impulse comes from, but it's probably something to do with reading a lot of science fiction and adventure stories as a child. It's always seemed natural to me that the world is a place full of problems, and that they can be solved with a mixture of ingenuity and dtermined hard work.

You can do a lot of world-saving on your own; indeed, that's often the most satisfying kind, as you can see the direct results of your actions in isolation. But it's hard to find opportunities to do so. Problems that have a chink in them a single person can exploit and solve them are rare. Most problems are large and don't have an easy fix (even a cunning one), and a single person's effort against them would be like trying to divert the wind by waving your arms.

So the most immediately rewarding means of improving the world is to join up with others who have a similar idea on what to do, and volunteer to work together with others as a group. This might mean forming a loosely-coupled team, like the contributors of an open-source project; or it might mean joining a more formal organisation.

As it happens, I do both.

On the loosely-coupled team side, I'm involved in the Scheme programming language community, and the Chicken Scheme sect within it; and I have a bunch of open-source projects I publish on my site, Kitten Technologies. Ugarit might help to save the world by helping it to keep better backups and manage its files better, Tangle might help the world not get confused with its cabling, Simple Graphics might make a tiny contribution towards teaching future generations to do awesome things, and if I ever have the time and money to really put some effort into it, ARGON might provide the world with a vastly more awesome platform to build software systems upon.

And on the formal organisation side, I'm the Cub Scout leader for the Cub pack in the village I used to live in. During school term time, every Wednesday I spend an hour in the village hall with two dozen kids aged eight to ten inclusive, trying to broaden their minds and teach them useful life skills. They are a lucky lot, in that that's all I do for them; some Scout groups give children an escape from abuse at home or other terrible situations like that, but my lot come from relatively secure backgrounds, and are well loved, well fed and well educated. Once a year or so I organise a camping weekend, too, where they can learn a bit more self-sufficiency, and have an exciting adventure with their friends.

All of the voluntary stuff I do is very rewarding. When I think about the sorts of things I'd do if I was rich and didn't have to work, a large fraction of it is voluntary work. When I had more money in the past, I actually hired somebody to write open-source software for me, and I'd do it again if I could. I suppose my interest in wearable computers is driven more by my own interest and desire to sharpen my skills than in any benefit to the rest of the world, but I'll still be publishing my designs for others to take inspiration from or to just build their own copy! Volunteering is also a great way to gain new skills, gain confidence, and meet new people. It's my default suggestion for people who feel lonely, bored, or stuck in a rut.

I'm under no illusion that I'm some saintly figure laying down my own interests in order to help others, either. I just happen to enjoy making other people happy, and also enjoy tinkering with certain kinds of technology that happen to be very easy to share, thanks to the Internet. My contributions to the world have generally been insignificant compare to many others, and I often feel sad about that - I feel I am spending too much of my time just keeping my family safe and fed (which is my first priority), and that the kinds of things I'm good at are unfortunately only useful in narrow niches (distributed data storage technology isn't going to solve world hunger on its own). But such is life! This year I am setting aside two weekend days every month for my own projects - for January, this is going to be spent on my infrastructure rather than anything directly useful, as I need to repair the roof of my workshop as part of the ongoing process of making it into a more usable work area, but if I have any time left after that I'm going to work on Ugarit some more (on the sofa in the house - getting an Internet connection down to the workshop is a project for next month).

Volunteering can become unhealthy, however.

I'm struggling with running the Cub pack right now; I am the pack's only leader, and it's more normal for a pack to have two or three leaders. I have helpers who come along on the Wednesdays, which is invaluable as I couldn't safely run the meetings alone, but I still need to organise something every week, and then be there to run it. If I need to take a week off for some reason, I still need to either organise somebody to take over and prepare the required information for them, or contact all of the families to tell them I'm having to cancel an evening (which I really, really, don't like doing). I skirt the edge of a vicious circle - doing something because I feel I have to, and fearing the consequences if I don't, takes the fun out of it; and after executing all my other responsibilities of the day, I often lack the energy to do things I'm not fueled by enthusiasm over, so put them off. That in turn increases the unpleasant stress and pressure the next day until I end up rushing it all at the last minute!

Volunteering where you sit down and do something you feel like doing is safe. Taking on a responsibility is a little more dangerous. I am under no real obligation to keep running the Cub pack - there's no contract - but without a backup leader, if I leave, the pack will collapse, and I don't want that to happen to the lovely kids. Not to mention that I'd miss the little blighters! So I press on, providing a rather less exciting programme than I'd like. I think that it's not a good idea to take on an ongoing voluntary responsibility alone; it should be done as a group, so that the workload can be shared more easily, and when a group member is overloaded with other pressures, they can temporarily or permanently reduce their contribution without major disruption - and otherwise tedious planning and preparation can be fun when it's done as a group. However, sometimes you start doing something as a group and end up doing it alone, or (as in this case) start something with the expectation that others will join you once it picks up some momentum, but they always want to join as helpers rather than taking over from you to some extent - or, alternatively, that you're bad at delegating because you're scared of putting too much pressure on them and losing them.

Speaking of which, I need to go and prepare something for the Cub meeting tomorrow...

...actually, I can do it in my lunch break tomorrow, and go to sleep now instead, as it's forty minutes past my bedtime already. A MUCH better idea. Surely.