baratron: (Warning: Sick!)
Haven't found time to update for a few days.

We're now staying in Montréal until Saturday 16th February, and flying home that night. I'd been hoping to get to Toronto to see my alt.poly friends there, but Richard now has to work until Friday. The combination of snow and a heavy electric wheelchair makes it too impractical for me to travel alone, and it's far more hassle than it's worth to lug all our stuff to another city for only one day. I'm sad about that because there are a number of people in Toronto who I really like and don't see often enough, but at least [livejournal.com profile] epi_lj and [livejournal.com profile] clawfoot should be passing through London in May on their way to Paris.

We saw [livejournal.com profile] papersky on Saturday, which was lovely - the first time we've met up in over a decade. Put it this way, when we last met in person, her son was 9, and he's now 23. She provided a place to stay for Richard & I on our very first holiday together. We had virtually no money, and got some sort of young person bus/rail pass which allowed us to travel around South Wales for a week. We stayed with Jo in Swansea, and with some other alt.poly people in Cardiff, and in a dodgy B&B in Merthyr Tydfil in between the two. It was one of the most educational trips in my life, and I could expand upon it at length, though it would make me cry - since I am a person who cries with most strong emotions. I should do so sometime, when I have spare time for writing.

Today I am Ill. It's nothing serious, only period pain. It will pass with time and hormone levels. But right now, I can't get out of bed. It's partly my fault - yesterday, I lost my stash of painkillers and opted to continue with our plans rather than run around looking for a pharmacy. After shopping for tools and a printer and TV for Richard's work, we went to the Jardin Botanique and looked at many strange and wonderful plants in greenhouses. Then I completely lost my temper because of pain and had to be placated with Maple Toffee Popcorn (like normal toffee popcorn only made with maple syrup, and amazingly without animal content), and ended up spending an hour sitting in a Second Cup watching curling on the TV because I was too ill to move, waiting for my painkillers to kick in. I still do not understand why the yellow team was throwing the red stones and vice-versa, nor why Alberta was playing "Canada". If it was Team Canada from the Winter Olympics, why aren't they in Sochi? Very confused about that.

I wrote all of the stuff above before Richard's laptop decided it was out of battery, hours ago, and now I hurt too much to carry on. More tomorrow, when I will hopefully hurt less.
baratron: (test tube)
NASA finds Cookie Monster on surface of Mercury. Awesome :)

Parody of anti-gay pamphlets offers detailed, behind-the-scenes view of how liars misuse real citations. Very interesting, and Relevant To Our Interests.

Sexist bastardJames Watson on The Double Helix and his changing view of Rosalind Franklin. I still want to spit at him, but I suppose he comes across as slightly less objectionable when all the evidence is considered. Bah.

More than you maybe needed to know about the echidna. Warning: Contains echidna penis. Once seen, can never be un-seen!

Protein art. This is also Relevant to My Interests.

OMG, baby octopodes! *hyperventilates with Teh Cute!*
baratron: (sleepy)

1) I have 17 insect bites on my legs. Some of them are several cm in diameter. I know that I tend to be delicious to mosquitoes, but this is ridiculous.

2) Richard has a head full of wool. It's all very well going out & telling me to phone him when I'm up, but that doesn't work if he has his UK SIM in, & his phone switched to airplane mode! I've tried phoning & texting one of the other boys in the house, but he's not answering either. Humph!

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

baratron: (london)
Lately I've been spending a lot of time in Richmond Park. On Sunday I went cycling with Richard, going from Kingston Gate to Broomfield Hill, then came back via the Isabella Plantation. We saw a Sequoia sempervirens and a Liriodendron tulipifera, recognising them both as "non-native trees". Actually, I even recognised the sequoia as a sequoia, but didn't believe it could be one so far away from home. We stared at the tulip tree for a long time because of its weird leaves. Most trees grow according to the Fibonacci sequence, and I'm used to seeing leaves with 3, 5, 8 or 13 lobes on them. Four is... strange.

Yesterday, [livejournal.com profile] artremis came over and we took the 65 bus round to Petersham Gate to see the bunnies and the fallen-over-but-still-alive trees. We walked through the Park to Ham Gate, then a few roads over to get the 371 back home. The bus takes far longer than cycling for some reason.

Today I went cycling, got a bit lost and ended up doing around 9 miles (according to Richard, anyway). If you look at the PDF map of the park, I went from Kingston Gate up Queens Road, then turned right at Ham Gate onto the yellow/red-dotted cycle path until the car park just under the P in the middle. On the way I found the proper cycle entrance to the Isabella Plantation where there are racks (rather than the back entrance we found on Sunday). Then I meant to go on the blue dotted path through Pen Ponds to Pembroke Lodge, but instead carried on the red dotted path past White Lodge until Sheen Cross, then up Sawyer's Hill. I was slightly surprised to end up at Richmond Gate, but it only took 20 minutes from there back to Kingston Gate down the road (instead of the cycle path - it's safe enough, as it was after 9 pm so the car gates were closed). The whole thing took 1 hour & 20 minutes, which I didn't think was bad considering the hills.

I wish more of my local friends were into cycling, because the Park is beautiful and there are lots of car-free paths. Some of them are even properly tarmaced over, so are easy to ride on. Today, they were full of "serious" cyclists who ride all hunched over for streamlining and speed - I suppose it's good for them to have car-free roads to practice on, but it seems sad that they never get to look at the scenery. I was riding deliberately slower than usual because there were too many interesting trees and animals.
baratron: (wolfy)
Richard & I have been busy planting trees today...

You were supposed to be seeing a "badge" that tells you about my trees, but livejournal apparently hates iframes.
baratron: (science genius girl)
In other news, today I saved an endangered moth from drowning.

As the UK is apparently experiencing a severe water shortage, we have been recycling water as much as possible. Every time one of us showers, we collect the bathwater for use on the garden plants by showering over a bucket. This morning, I got into the shower to find a moth floating on the top of the water in the bucket, on its back with its legs in the air. It seemed pretty damn dead, which made me sad - but I didn't want a dead moth in the bathwater even if its body would provide extra nitrates for the soil, so I tipped it out to dry. A few hours later, I went back into the bathroom to find the same moth had miraculously come back to life, crawling up the sides of the bath, and getting stuck due to the steepness of the gradient. So I used the bucket's lid to help it out, and released it from the window. It happily flew away.

So that was very exciting already, with the coming back to life and all; but in tonight's Evening Standard there is an article about endangered species in London, and a photograph of several species of moth. It seems that the moth in question is called a Double Line Moth and is very rare in the southeast; and found mostly in Richmond Park. Well, Richmond Park is just up the road (10 minutes on foot), and gives its name to our constituency - and that, plus the fact I examined the moth for a good five minutes to make sure it really was okay before letting it go, makes me quite certain of its identification.

Isn't that cool?

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