Jaw Ache, Flu and Impetigo (by sarah)

I had been meaning to book an appointment with the dr for ages as I feared I had brought the bed bugs from london back with me - itchy red lumps were still appearing on my legs and now on my stomache.

I had unfortunatly scratch the bedbug bites I and some had gotten infected. Then on Saturday I woke up and found I couldn't open my jaw very far and couldn't really shut it either - I lost my ability to bite. Side ways movement was painfull and cuased clicking and crunching - from one or two old bites I was covered in red spots - but not in a way I would associate with a rash - was I being bitten? I haven't found any bed bugs here and have been making Al hoover the bed and stuff just in case.

Smaller incidences of the jaw restriction had been happening for a while but nothing like this - I couldn't eat and drinking was hard.

Sunday my jaw was a little better and I could eat soft things but my hearing had gone west and by night time I was starting to show cold symptoms.

Monday Al phoned the dr as the glands in my neck had swollen to look like small chicken eggs on the outside - my joints are all stiff and achey - I felt/feel pathetic - obviously I have man flu - ie I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill.

So the Dr looks at me and checks my tonsils and is concerned I can't open my mouth and then the question - when did I last go to the dentist - erm.... I don't remember - in fact thinking about it I don't think I've been to see a dentist since I was about 11 :/ might have to remidy that shortly.

Podded and pocked and questions asked - everything is inflamed and may or may not be the flu, and the red spots aren't insect bits but maybe infetigo. So not knowing what that is I look it up when I get home and it doesn't look anything like the stuff of the wikipedia page but thats cos there are different types - its a bacterial infection cuase by the strep stuff that cuases sore throats etc... It's common in toddlers and sports people and take advantage of cuts or insect bit that have been scratched.

Mmmmm... so if this is what it is I think that were I was bitten by bed bugs in London was ultamatly the cuase of this - of course I shouldn't have scratched but I do it in my sleep. Symptoms include swollen lymph glands and flu like symptoms :/

I have Fucidin cream which is an antibiotic and steroid mix. They are hoping that this will clear it up - I have to put it on each spot indivdually.

I have another appointment for a weeks time and if my glands haven't gone down by then it'll be blood test time.

It took a little bit of time for me to work out that infetigo was impetigo. I am now being very cheesed off about bed bugs. I am now going to have a bath - get Al to change all the bed sheets, apply the creme and sleep.

Oh and I'm going to have hairy legs as I'm not allowed to shave or wax them - they reckon that they should have it cleared up in time for me to not have a hairy leg summer - lets hope so.

Mum’s Cancer Stuff – Good News (by sarah)

Mum went back for another ultra sound today just to make sure there really weren't anymore lumps as the drs had been arguing on this point.

The scan was clear which is fantastic! So now I have my fingers crossed for Thursday for two reasons:

First off dad has to go back for another lot of eye laser stuff and secondly there is a meeting about the enquiry into my uncles death - so we will have to wait and see.

analysing the moon rock (by sarah)

Friday saw me once again wending my weary way to London.

This time I was going in to carbon coat my lunar meteorite thin section and put it in the machine to make X-ray maps of specific elements. I felt very nervous as I hadnt done anywhere near the amount of reading I had ment to do for it what with boundary disbutes and work stuff etc...

And I had been highly confusing myself by trying to learn lunar mineralogy from scratch - complete with minerals I have never heared off! I had started making a list of elements mentioned in association with lunar minerallogy and then side tracked myself - turns out if I had completed this it would have been a very good start - oh well.

I was a bit sad when I arrived that the sample was already in being carbon coated - I assume the machine works by some sort of spluttering of carbon. You coat the sample to help get a clearer image by stopping alot of the interference(I think). This means I only got a pic of it carbon coated thin section and my hands were shaking so its not a very good picture anyway but this is a piece of the moon that fell to Earth in a meteorite that Landed in Africa.

The Carbon coating machine:

My piece of carbon coated moon rock!

This means I also have to be weary of terrestrial contamination when analysing it.

I took photos of the machine and bits around it!

What I have done for the mini project is just selected one breccia clast/grain out of this thin section from a few cubic cm's of lunar meteorite to ananlyse. This really is looking at the fine detail - I always have to remember that it is part of a system, part of a big over all picture, the small makes up the big and the big affects the small.

We chose which elements to map for, then defined the mapping area which was just slightly bigger than the clast. An important fact is that no matter how good the polish on the surfacce of the section it is not completely flat so to get golod results you have to sort of take the four corners and average them into a focus plan. At least this is what I understood to be happening.

Anyway I selected with some help the elements that I wanted maps for and the grand total time was 56 hours running time for the machine - wowowow. Of course this is why I was in there on a Friday afternoon so that I could have the machine run over the weekend - I clicked the button to start it and away it went.

I then proceeded to make a fool out of my self by saying - its obviously regolith isnt it - erm... we dont know came the reply. I am also very intreged by the clast I have chosen to analyse - it looks like two main minerals interlocked in some sort of intergrowth way - each with its own specific selection of other mineral inclusions.

I am a bit worried that I just dont remember enough mineralogy to do this project justice :/

Still I think I may have some idea of whats going on but suffered that thing of not wanting to say anything incase I was wrong and they thought I was stupid and wasting their time and effort. I now need to go and work out the correct scientific termonolgy instead of inventing my own - again.

Still I got to take pics of the sample being mounted in the machine including the adding of the highly conductive copper sticky tap that also keeps it in place!

There was one interesting point - the machine appears to do a continues scan but it doesnt it stops every .... and 'dwells' for.... this leads me onto something else I have been pondering recently - how different are analogue and didigital - you came make one appear as another depending on resolution etc... but this needs a me to do a bit more thinking and maybe write a few books on the nature of existance I feel!

Once I have worked out the mineral phases in the sample - which I will do from these elemental maps I will be putting it in the microprob for furthure analysis.

I think that for my oral presingtation and poster I will therefore need to focus on what we know of the moon from meteorites rather than just what we know about the moon.

I am getting very excited about all this - its the thought of being able to tie in the mineralogy of crystals grains within a clast with a brecciated meteorite to lunar and even solar and possible even universe formation processes!

Happyness is once again rock shaped. Though I am hoping the element doesn't blow over the week end - it was a new one this week so hopefully it will last!

The Moleing Man (by sarah)

The Mill has spring water which is piped down from the farmers field behind the Bakery. There have been multiple issues with this water supply some of which we have documented and some of which I haven't got round to mentioning yet.

Such as the ecoli issue and the blocked tank and the cracked earthenware pipe and the blocked pipes etc...

The most recent one was that the one of the pipes that carries the spring water into the house under the lawn seems to have perished (at least I think this is what the pipe is for the system was put in by Al's granddad and seems to be a bit complex and meandering). This ment that water was seeping out in the path around the pound making it a bit of a quagmire 🙁

This also means that the water isn't gettting into the Mill (I assume there just isn't enough head) so Barbara's house is a jumble of pipes giving her a tempory water supply - unfortunatly not only is this a trip hazard but it is also a flood harzard if Barbara forgets to turn it off once all the tanks are filled etc... which has also happened a few time.

Now we weren't really sure where the pipes went, or how collapse/persihed they might be and it looked like we'd have to dig the whole lot up - making a right mess of the whole lawn. Barbara is really militant about the grass as well as anyone who has accident driven on the verges down the drive will know.

So it was decided with the plumber - (who doesn't do digging) that we would get the Mole man in. Now I wasn't privvy to this conversation so when Barbara knocked one morning to say the mole man was here to look around and so was the plumber - I thought that she was being mean and erradicating our little hill building buddies, who are admittedly making a mess of the lawn :/

Anyway I missed this visit as they were gone before I got outside and after a little bit of talking at cross perposes my error became apparent. Mole men are men who have a compressed air device which bascially sledge hammers its way through the soil/stone under the ground - making a tunnel for pipes and cabiling and what have as it goes. And all with out making a mess by digging a trench that runs the length of the pipe/cable.

Then, Thursday morning when I came back from Cheltenham there was a guy digging a whole in the lawn by the back window of the Mill. I assumed it would be the mole man or maybe the guys who are going to clean the gully out - but Barbara hadn't actually said anyone was coming so I thought I'd best check it out.

And I got to look at the fun things - and watch the metal cylinder that is the mole being fed into the ground and watch the guy line things up with a strick stuck in the whole at the other end by the Mill and a viewer with cross hairs in it (this reminded me of survaying).

All he did was basically dig two wholes - one each end and then fed the mole in - it thumbed its way across the lawn with him standing above it to check its progression (I assume he was feeling the vibrations of the thumps). They then threaded the blue water pipe through, cut it and added the connectors at each end.

When the boss arrived I asked him about the technique and he showed me other thumpers which can make wholes of different sizes - including largish ones 5 inches (around 12 cm) which are good for laying cables.

He is mainly employed by the one of the local councils to relay water pipes - this is genius as basically you don't have to dig up the road to fix a burst pipe which is wastefull from a tarmac point of veiw. Also due to how this works he replaces the whole pipe so instead of fixing a perishing pipe in one place and just shifting the leak further down the system he is fixing the system!

They seem happy with this and he is starting to get work from other councils around here.

He even goes to the effort of putting the turfs he has dug up onto boards so that they don't put mud all over the lawn etc... He prides himself on how it looks at the end - if we had dug a trench it would take ages to get rid of the little furrowed dip you get when the soil has all compacted down.

Here is what we were left with! Plus all of this took like half a day which is a fraction of the time it would have taken to dig a trench.

I was very impressed and think that if we ever get to laying the cables we want along the drive we will be employing him!

For anyone who's interested there P.C. Moleing Services Ltd. specialists in Underground pipe and cable installation.

Contact:

Phil Clutterbuck Hillview Cottage, Over Old Road, Hartpury, Glos

Tel: 01452 700523

Red Nose Day – Or Jean as A Clown Day (by sarah)

Today was Red Nose day and as always I made sure I had a nose - I have been collecting the different ones since I was 4 years old and have fond memories associated with each:

The first one I got in hospital, they came round with a tray and I didnt have any money but some else bought me one. It got droped and rolled behind the wendy house in the day room - the nurses and a doctor move the house so that I could get it back.

I dont remeber what order they appeared in but there have been tomato ones, hair do ones, poking tongue out ones, fluffy ones, ones with embossed faces and heat change ones which got y brother into trouble as he announced in that pink mean pregnant.

Jean wasn't really old enough to participate in the last Comic Relief but she was this time.

And though it was a bit too close to the World Book Day dress up her Pre-school were having a clown day.

I found out about this a few days after I found out about the World book day event and I basically work on both costums at the same time.

I made the hat with a bit of help from Jean - the buttons were all of her work which is cool 🙂 as I think they look fantastic. As always the hat had to be pink - I let her choose! We also decorated one of her large white t-shirts with glitter fabric paint that I got for her snpw cloud costum. She had a great time swerling the paint on the t-shirt and I did manage to get a magizine stuck inside the t-shirt - it was there to stop the front of the t-shirt sticking to the back!

Barbara had a pair of childrens clogs - proper wooden ones that are just right for Jean and she loves them and I thought they would make good clown shoes!

Dad however did have to sand the jagged sharp glue away from the inside of the shoe - one of the clogs had been repaired at some time in the past but very very badly.

I then picked up the strippy trousers from a charity shop for 50p - these can double as pirate trousers or count draculars trousers! That and the £1 for the nose are all that I laid out for the costum everything else was 'in stock' as it were which was cool.

The hat is far too heavy - it is also just about the sturdiest hat ever and in the process I discovered that fabric glue is good for sticking more than fabric!

Jean was really excited about this outfit though she kept insisting she was Aladdin!

She made me wear my red nose to take her to pre-school in and I even went inside wearing it. They were doing show and tell and Jean had to go straight to the front to show her hat off!

We sent her in with her trainers as the clogs are not very practicle for running etc...

She had a great time and we bought lots of little smiley brown cakes with red glace cherry noses to eat from the nursery - I then wizzed off to London to look at a piece of the moon 🙂

I was a bit sad not to see more red noses but as mine was secreted in my bag at this point I woundered how many other people had them but just werent wearing them! I did however give some money to a man in red tights at Paddington station - he had a red curly wig, face and nose 🙂

I have unfortunatly left this years red nose with glasses on, on the ear of @ndy's nabaztag in the office in Highgate :/

Hopefully the 'how to' on the hat and t-shirt will appear on Salaric Craft soon.