The Spelling Maffia (by sarah)

Grrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!

I subscrib to a Writers Newspaper and a Writers Magazine to my horror I keep coming across articles saying things like 'if they can't even spell basic words correctly then they can't have done any research' or other such comments some worse some better - all implying that the person who has mispelt something is thick or lazy or both!

Now whilst I advocate intensive spell checking and proof reading I should think the odd thing will still sneak in especially when like me you start with ~every third word mispelt! It is absurd however to suggest that someone has not researched a topic becuase one typo or spelling mistake has sneaked in and some of these people weight the person on the spellings in the emails! Al thought I was paranoid about the spelling issue until recently now he frowns, looks sad and seems to repeatedly be saying 'why is there so much discrimination over spelling?'.

Recently someone said to me on a forum that I should not have my degree due to my spelling and that it was a disgrace of our education system that I had achieved my 2:1 - I have a BSc!!! for goodness sake - if it was a lit degree then maybe but for science? Thats what drafts and supervisors are for with papers - they are checked by you, by peers, supervisor and then the editing team and the journal (or maybe this is just me as my spelling is sooooo bad). Why should people with valid points and the brains to do the research be swept aside becuase of a few transpotions of letters which like so often in DNA actually has no effect on the meaning of the peice written?

People look upon spelling as fixed these days too - this my friends is a relatively recent occurence hence half the problems with the natural 'vandilisation' of our language - its could evolution - each set teenagers/the young and happenings has its own codes, its own special words - a cool black and white film about some guys working to update the dictionary sums this up bueatifully - its a comedy mind, wish I could remember what its called :(.

People tell me I cant be a good writter with my spelling - of course I realise it will just mean more proof reading than most but what has that got to do with the content? I realise that stories need to flow - so I work on the language specifics afterwards - no one has said Will Shakespeare is a bad writter and he couldn't even decide on how to spell his name! People have got PhDs out of going through his work trying to make the spelling uniform - otherwise it looks alot like Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg have been doing the writting!

The other thing is it seems to me that editors have gotten lazy - I know they probably have a hundred and one jobs todo - all of which are probably needless paper work that has nothing to do with actual editing or sorting out proof readers for large amounts of text - this now seems reserved only for large techniqual books that institutes are likely to buy on mass and therefore carry a high risk of suing. An old lady who had written books in her youth was horrified that fiction writters had to do all the proof reading and such them selves - even those with commissions - 'thats the editors job' was her definate answer - unfortunatly they seem more interested in cutting out the dros by using pre selection techniques! This is like throwing out a UCAS form of a student wanting to study science cos they have mentioned Terry Pratchett on the form 🙁 (this happens scary I know).

Anyway this is a rambling post now - mainly I am peed off that people - a large amount of people still seem to think that the ability to spell perfectly is some how realated to intelligence/hard work - it is not!

Peoples brains work differently - alot of the most itelligent people I know cant spell - to an extent that I notice!!! We have pooters with spell checkers now - its like people thinking someones no good at maths cos they struggle a bit with mental arithmatic - now as alot of maths peeps have told me - doing sums in your head like that has very little to do with maths and how it works and many of the people with maths degress... well lets just say its a nightmare if you go out for a meal with more than one of them (unless they want to be accountants!).

Erm, so yeah - Dyslexics rule!!!! KO!

p.s. I do not spell check my blog enteries as I consider them informal

The Stupidity of Recycling (by sarah)

I have decided that recycling is bad - yes you heared me bad!

Its so waistefull it really is - lets see we have put resourcess and money and power into making a container say a glass jar - it gets used once and then mashed into little pieces - using more energy and resources, melted - more energy and moulded back into - oh a glass jar - what a pointless effort.

Glass is autoclavable you can steam/boil sterolize it, it can be made squeeky clean - so surely it should be highly reusable? Well milkmen have been doing this for a long time now with no ill affects. When I was in Kenya you where charged for the glass bottle your coke-a-cola etc... was bought in and got refunded that money on its safe return to a shop - any shop. People here have said they remember being paid for empties - it would make so much sense really it would.

Re-use instead of recycle!

This is why I loath anything but broken glass having to go to the bottle bank but there is only so much jam and wine one bod can make! Still I suppose more will be used when we have bees 🙂

If anyone knows of somewhere that does reuse this sort of stuff could they let me know?

Ok so recycling isnt bad - it is in fact good but it would be even better if it was only used on things that are no longer usable in this reincarnation - no I know the economical costs are probably the driving factor here but surely that cant keep up? Is it really easier and cheaper to melt everything down than to steralise it and reuse - I know they'd be different sizes and the such like so there would be some sorting - but for home jam making and preserves that would be fine (as just one idea of the top of my head) - I see the shops selling empty jars and bottles for this - and I bet they are 'new' jars as well - its so wasteful - so ludicrus (sorry spelling out of the window today).

On the plus side - the Green shop we go to allows you to bring your own containers for refilling 🙂 does anyone know if the body shop still does this? I heared that they stopped when they were sold.

I wonder how many bars, resturants and clubs recycle? You'd have thought that they would considering the amount of bottles and cans they get through but I know that all the ones I've asked have said no!

Ok so I've been ranting about re-using stuff - here is how I practice some of what I preach : 1) I make jams, chutneys, pickels and (hopefully if it works first batch on my own) wine which uses quiet alot of my jars and things - I also tend to try and make my own suaces reducing the number of jars I have in the first place but that isnt practicle for everyone (most people).

2) I keep the punettes fruit comes in from the supeermarket and then when out costing the hedgrows etc... use them for that or when we go to pick your own.

3) I use the fabric softner bottles to keep the worm juice in (hoping that we will shortly be migrating this sort of thing over to eco stuff).

4) Refill herb jars rather than just buying new herb jars.

5)Use old Milo tins for storing my tea bags and old baby milk tins for other kitchen sundries/seeds/lego/beads the list is endless.

6) Ice cream tubs and calwslar containers I use as tupper ware and freeze suops and the such like in.

7) Yogurt pots make great little plant pots my nan did this for most of her life - though as I now make most of our yogurt we dont have many of these.

8) Use reusable bags for sopping - this is great at the moment cos we get club card points and stuff too and the councel here gave us some free coconut husk bags as well 🙂

9) I used terry nappies until Jean was 8 months when her size and wrigglyness made them inpracticle - however in despair at our over spilling bins every monday I have found a lady who tracks down baby stuff for you and she has specially ordered some reusable nappies that work like the desposables - ie velcro! Me and Al are quiet excited about these as we have been looking for them since before JEan was born and this lady said she was suprised that non of the mother cares in the area or any of the other big chains round here sold them - this unfortunatly means they are a bit pricey but if they last to be used four times each they will have paid for them selves!

I know that not everyone can do alot of this stuff for practical reasons ie time but the councils could be making more of an effort with the recycling - what seems to be happening at the moment is that there is a lot of apparent recycling without alot of thought behind it but thats just my opinion - here is pretty good aand getting better but still alot of room for improovement like the stupidness over plastics - they say only plastic bottles with no reguards to the plastic types so lots of things that are recyclable get ignore 🙁 and therefore thrown away (we have unfortunatly already recieved a letter from the recycling people due to confussion on our part on how it worked here which is completely different from Essex - these letters would probably scare little old ladies away from recycling all together 🙁 )

Bound feet and high heels (by sarah)

Today I went to a museum and read about the old Chinese custom of binding womens feet, the foot was curved in so that the weight ended up being taken on the heel and big tow when the woman walked or scuttled - now it occured to me that this must have been similar to high heels in wweight distrabution. Mainly this was done to the feet for fashion and cos it was seen as highly erotic - same as high heels - I wonder why? Why is something that is detramental to movement so erotic and sort after? Saying that what has happened to the world whilst I've been bizzy creating and looking after Jean? Everyone is so dressed up! And what is it with the hideous pointy toed shoes - witchy toes - lalalala - witchy toes tralalalala. And if they arent wearing that then they all look like they are from the 50's, 60's or 80's or that they are a cross between minni mouse and supermans girly (I cant spell her name ok).

Ok so now I have slated of a huge chunck of the population should I start on the wellies? Hmmm...

I'm not saying these cloths are bad (appart from pointy toed shoes especially if they have kitten heels) but why so dressed up all the time? Where are all the students in just jeans and T-shirts? They seemed to be absent 😕 Gosh things have really changed and I was only out of it for 2 yrs!

Photos from the Party and Christening (by alaric)

There's been rather a lot, so here are some of my favourites from the ones I've seen:

And here are some links to online photo sets various people have put up:

My cousin's photos Charlee's photos on flickr

Eyes (by alaric)

As I've mentioned before, I have a lazy eye.

To recap, this is because I have really bad vision in my left eye - I'm astigmatic - and have been that way since I was born, so my brain didn't properly develop to use the blurry vision that eye gave; it just focussed on my right eye. Having very different vision in each eye is called Anisometropia; when this causes a lazy eye, it's known as refractive amblyopia.

Anyway, we are of course concerned that my eye badness might be a genetic trait, so we want Jean checked for it so that if she is also anisometropic she can be treated and not develop amblyopia.

So we raised this concern with the health visitor, and she arranged an appointment with the orthoptic screening clinic. A letter duly arrived telling us to attend the "orthoptic service filter screening clinic" at Stroud general hospital this morning.

Sarah and Jean (with Sarah's father driving) set off this morning, only to find that Stroud General Hospital has an orthoptic filter screening clinic every third Friday of the month - last Friday - but their database knows nothing of Jean anyway.

Bah.

This makes me inordinately sad. I'm a bit prone to rolling in self-pity about my eye - I know it's only a minor thing, I can see and drive and stuff, but for whatever reason I'm easily upset about it. And I'd hate hate hate to think that I might pass it on to Jean.

However, while researching it for Jean, I come across:

To quote Dr. Leonard J. Press, FAAO, FCOVD: "It's been proven that a motivated adult with strabismus and/or amblyopia who works diligently at vision therapy can obtain meaningful improvement in visual function. As my patients are fond of saying: "I'm not looking for perfection; I'm looking for you to help me make it better". It's important that eye doctors don't make sweeping value judgments for patients. Rather than saying "nothing can be done", the proper advice would be: "You won't have as much improvement as you would have had at a younger age; but I'll refer you to a vision specialist who can help you if you're motivated."

Every amblyopic patient deserves an attempt at treatment.

Treatment of Amblyopia

And:

Anisometropic amblyopia: is the patient ever too old to treat?

I've spent years having opticians take one look in my left eye, shake their head sadly, and tell me nothing can be done. 🙁

Anyway... enough wallowing. We need to find out how to get Jean tested, that attempt having failed! Prevention is better than cure.