15/52 2018

Week 15
9 - 15 April

Following on from our visit to Fortress Recycling, this week we visited their neighbours on the industrial estate - Dennis Eagle, the factory where they make bin lorries.

Poor Jamie got a little bit panicked as we drove past several bin lorries on the way to the reception office car park, shouting "please! Stop! Look! Bin lorries!" but thankfully he trusted us that we were going to see even more.

He's probably the youngest visitor they've had, but they do give tours for school groups, so they had safety specs that were almost small enough. Jamie wasn't too sure about wearing them, but eventually understood it as the price of getting to go and look at bin lorries.



Steve carried him, partly for safety and partly so that he could see. The factory is laid out in stages with a vehicle on each "footprint" at any given time, so we literally got to see the whole build process from chassis to hydraulic lines to engine to paintwork.

The employee who showed us round was called Charlie, and he did an excellent job. He's more used to the school groups or representatives from councils/companies looking to buy bin lorries, so a serious-faced two year old with his parents was outside the norm. One good thing about me being so behind on my updates is that I confirm, five months on, as Jamie gains more language and ability to express himself in ways adults can understand, that he really did grasp a surprising amount of what he was taught that day and still enjoys telling us about it every time he sees one of "Charlie's bin lorries".

The best moment for me was probably when we got back to reception. Jamie went straight to the receptionist and started excitedly squeaking at her about how she had to come and see all these amazing bin lorries that she'd missed out on. It was extremely cute, and I think it confirmed to everyone that the Serious Face was concentration rather than boredom and he was in fact very impressed.

05/52 2018

Week 5
29 January - 04 February



Having demonstrated both love for and technical aptitude with train sets at nursery and on play dates, we took the plunge and got a Brio starter set, plus an extra bridge, a couple of wagons, and a packet of various sizes of piece for adjustments.

Admittedly adults are still required to create closed-loop tracks. Perhaps we should get some buffers instead.

51/52 2017

Week 51
18 - 24 December



Jamie is always interested in what other people are doing and is almost always interested in tech. Steve doesn't want to have to shut himself away every time he's using his laptop, so as a rather neat solution, Jamie now has one of Steve's old wireless keyboards enabling them to both happily clatter away typing together.

37/52 2017

Week 37
11 - 17 September



Jamie inherited a significant Duplo collection from his now-teenage cousins, and this has been added to with new sets of his own. He loves building with it, and Steve enjoys helping... which results in creations like this enormous truck.

Bonus video footage:

Ice cubes

We have the most *amazing* ice cube tray - cute and accessible.

Here's the manufacturer's website for the black + blum brrrrr ice cube tray, but I thought I'd take a picture that was a bit less stylish and a bit easier to link to, as well:



So basically it's a wide-necked bottle that has ten blobs along one side. It's up to the beholder whether this makes it a ten-legged polar bear. The bear's black nose, aka the lid, just pops off, nice and easy, no gripping or twiddling required. There is a hole in the part of the bottle that makes the bear's "back". You hold the bottle upright (the shape makes it easy to hold) and pour in water (hurrah for the wide neck) until it starts to come out of this hole. That means you have the right amount of water. You pop the lid on again. Then you stand the bear, on its legs (or whatever), in the freezer, where the gravity does a much better job of distributing the water than I have ever managed with a dribbling tap or shaking jug.

Another thing which makes it much better than a traditional ice cube tray for me is that I don't have to try and balance it over to the freezer. As long as the bear's nose and back are facing more or less up, then water can't come out. It's very anti-spill.

Getting the ice cubes out is even better. No wet hands, freezing fingers, cracking the tray, fumbling to lever out one or two, failing and sending the whole trayful across the floor. You just hold the bear by the head and bang it against something until you hear the rattle of some pieces of ice coming loose. Then you pop off the nose again and pour them out. Yay icy bear vomit!

Coombe Country Park

This weekend Steve and I had a friend come to visit, and the three of us went to Coombe Country Park. It's very pretty and a really nice place to spend a sunny day. Entry is free, parking is the really quite reasonable sum of £1.90, and access is pretty good as these things go. It's "natural" paths rather than tarmac, so not the smoothest of rides, but in the dry weather the easy access route is very do-able and the medium access was what I would describe as bumpy, but possible with assistance.

I needed assistance three times.

The first time was to go over a bridge. The gradient of the slope up was just a little more than I could comfortably manage... I probably could have done it but there's no prizes for hurting yourself when you're with people who are entirely happy to give you a boost.

The second time was to go down a slope where the path had a deep rut all the way along the centre, presumably caused by a combination of feet, bikes, and from the look of it I suspect water when it rains. It was just a bit too wide for my chair to go astride it, and there wasn't quite enough space for me to go down one side of it - especially once nettles, tree roots, patches of loose pebbles, patches of loose sandy soil, etc got factored in. So Steve took my chair down and our friend took me, and we all made it safe and sound to the more solid path at the bottom of the hill.

The third time... the third time was the most terrifying, but was nothing to do with the park itself. It happened, of course, at about the furthest point of the two-mile medium access loop around the forest and conservation area. My left front wheel started making a funny noise. The funniness of noises is a bit subjective when you're talking about hauling a four-year-old cross-folding wheelchair along a forest track, but this was a really funny noise with more than a hint of ominousness. I looked down, and noticed that one of the two bolts holding the left front wheel unit on was sticking out by just over an inch. I put my brakes on, reached down, and caught the bolt as it came out completely and the whole wheel unit flopped.

Things got worse as I examined the bolt and saw it required an allen key. Although I had two pocket multitools with me, furnishing an assortment of screwdriver heads, cutting blades, bottle openers, tweezers, pliers, etc... the nearest allen key we knew of was in the car. Which was at least a mile away over terrain which in one direction was completely unknown and in the other direction would include going up the slope that I'd already needed help to get down.

I got out of the chair again and we all took a closer look to see how much of a field job could be done with the tools we had available. We hadn't lost any bits, and it seemed to have simply untwiddled itself rather than having sheared away or anything, so that was good. Unfortunately, Steve realised that lining up the bolt that had come out would mean undoing the second bolt as well to take the whole wheel unit right off, in order to align the whole thing properly for both bolts to go in together.

Being out and about, especially in nature-type places, always gives me a sort of thrill that people who've never been housebound don't quite get. Look at me, how daring I'm being, not only out of the house, but a mile or more away from the nearest car. Which is great until the point you're sitting on a dirt path, knowing that yes, that's right, you're an actual mile or more away from the nearest vehicle, and trying to stay calm while someone fully detaches a wheel from the object you depend on not just to get back to a place of safety but to move around independently once you're there.

Of course it could have been worse. There were three of us. It was a sunny, dry day with about eight hours until sunset. We were on an "official" path, we had phone signal, a picnic blanket, and plenty of water. I was hardly at risk of life or limb. I trust Steve, and I know that he has more mechanical ability than I do, and I know that he's read the manual, and I know he won't put me at unnecessary risk. I was happy to let him lead the repair effort, and he kept me informed and waited for my permission at each stage. Even so I was only one notch off a panic attack at the point the wheel was entirely removed.

Thankfully my faith was not misplaced. Within a few minutes Steve had got the wheel back on and we were able to move again, albeit somewhat cautiously and with all three of us continually peering at the chair every few minutes. The rest of the path was much kinder, and bit by bit we reached the visitor centre, got some lunch, and then I installed myself on the picnic blanket within not just sight but wobbling distance of the car.

On our return home, Steve tightened up every bolt he could find on the chair, using the Official Toolkit. Apparently most of them were pretty tight and the ones on the right front wheel were basically immovable, so we don't know why the left one managed to work loose.

The bad news is, now the car has started making a funny noise.

This is a technical document

Well, of course, it isn't, but I could put words like Cisco and network and voice over internet protocol all over it, and then it would look a bit like a technical document. It wouldn't make any sense, but I can't imagine who'd notice.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, there have been complaints. A particular reader is being a Bad Example To The Younger Generation by reading my blog at work, and apparently I must post more often. It's okay, English is unlikely to be the first language of anyone peeking over his shoulder. Yes, hello you. :)

There now follows a diagram. This proves the technical nature of this document which is entirely work related.



Look, I'm sorry. I mean to write more. I also mean to not just write about disability. I want to write more about my life and what I'm doing, but things divide into two groups:

• Things which are too boring and inconsequential to write about.
• Things which are quite interesting and I want to write about, but after doing the things, I'm too tired to write about the things until later.

Perhaps I should try doing shorter posts?

Today, I did some grocery shopping online. The best bit of doing online shopping when your brain doesn't work the way it's supposed to, is that when the shopping arrives, you've forgotten what you ordered. It's as if some kind of benevolent pixie sent you £70 of delicious food, and there isn't a single item you don't like!

I also had my laundry done. Yes, that's right - don't tell any of the women in my family, but I use a laundry service for my towels and bedlinen. I am a slattern who does not do her own housework. Or possibly a person who prefers not to injure herself wrestling large, wet, heavy pieces of cloth. Either way, in the morning the nice man picks up a sports bag of smelly linen from my house and in the evening he brings it back, fresh, clean, dry, and neatly folded.

I'm struggling with the paperwork for my assistants at the moment - making sure they get paid, and the monitoring that Social Services conduct to be sure I am using the money properly. I set up my systems really well, and my more lucid self has written out clear instructions for how to do each stage so that when I am not very well, I can still get things done. The problem at the moment is I quite literally don't know what day it is. I have "today" and "yesterday". All other days are confused together in a big tangle. So the timesheets and invoices got in a muddle and weren't submitted at the proper times... I think I've unpicked it, though.

Steve and I have been married for nearly a year and we are wondering what we should do for our anniversary. He's been able to book a little bit of time off work and we're looking at options. We have all these ideas - we'd love to go back to the Eden Project, or alternatively there are a few places in London we'd like to visit, for instance the Science Museum - but Steve is so tired out from work, I think he could sleep for a fortnight. We could just stay home and try to put together our wedding photo album. Right now we have thousands of photographs backed up to multiple storage devices, but unless you count shoving a USB stick into a digital photo frame, no album. There are also several guests who we have no pictures of, which is a bit sad.

The book I'm reading at the moment is Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. I have read it many times - I first picked it up in high school. It's a bit of escapism, I suppose. I have the DVD as well, but I think the DVD won't make much sense to people who haven't read the book because it misses out an awful lot of backstory and historical detail. Some of the "historical" detail is inaccurate but then it is a fiction novel.

I don't know. What else? What do you want to know?

Following technical complaint about the diagram above: (written by evilstevie)
This diagram clearly only holds true for a relatively small number of passwords - above a certain point you are either some kind of memory-whizz or use a password-manager program to ensure the right password goes in the right box. This has to be the case as most applications of passwords also have something in place to prevent brute-force guessing of passwords, either a counter or timer (or in some cool applications, both) to make it difficult or impossible for you to try more than a few passwords. At a certain point on the graph you simply get a flat-line as you can't enter any more wrong passwords and you stop making new ones or come up with a new way of dealing with passwords. Also, I'd like to add that Batsgirl's clearly been around me too much when she considers VOIP usable in everyday conversation or blogging...

Still preferable to Eurovision

Steve gave me a scare yesterday evening.

It started off gently, as these things do. Late in the afternoon, he got a headache, and decided that the sensible thing to do would be to scoff half a packet of biscuits and a paracetamol tablet. He hates taking any kind of medication and only does it when there's no alternative, but it seemed to help a bit, and after a while we started thinking about dinner. We decided that fishfingers held about the right level of challenge for the evening and turned on the oven to preheat.

Steve started on the washing-up, but then he started feeling worse again and went for a lie-down. No problem, I do that all the time. So I took over the washing up, a little bit at a time like I do. About half an hour later I had finished. The oven having preheated, I decided I was feeling well enough to manage to heat up some fishfingers without close supervision, so I called up the stairs to see how many he wanted.

No response.

So I clambered up a few stairs and shouted again. And again. No response. That's quite unusual. Certainly unusual enough for me to think it worthwhile crawling the rest of the way up the stairs to investigate. I found Steve in bed, sound asleep. Aww, bless. I sat on the bed next to him and tried to wake him up.

"Steeeeeeviiiieeee....."

No response.

"Steve, wake up, it's dinnertime."

No response.

"Steve?" gentle shaking "I just want to know how many fishfingers you want."

No response.

Rather more enthusiastic shaking "Steve, wake up, stop pissing about, this isn't funny."

No response.

So I tried a few more things. The only things that got any kind of physical or audible reaction were very loud noises, vigorous shaking, and pinching him - and even then, it wasn't words, his eyes flickered but didn't open, he didn't try to pull away, he just flinched and grunted. I could not wake him up.

Now don't get me wrong, Steve is the sort of man who has deep affection for his duvet. It's practically impossible to get him out of bed and up and dressed unless there's something concrete that he has to do, like go to work or catch a train. But it's fairly easy to wake him up and he goes from asleep to responsive and brain-functioning really quickly.

Knowing how much he detests doctors and hospitals, I tried another tactic. I shook his shoulder until I got another grunt out of him and then told him loud and clear "If you don't wake up, I'm going to call 999."

No response.

Crap. This really wasn't just a love of the duvet. Something was wrong, and to do nothing and assume he'd wake up in a little while would be tantamount to negligence. But, on the other hand, he was breathing quite normally and wasn't turning funny colours, no blood, no limbs missing, no trauma, and he wasn't totally out-cold-unconscious, so was 999 appropriate?

My first thought was to call the GP, but quite apart from the fact that it was Saturday evening, Steve doesn't have a GP. Heigh-ho, NHS Direct it would have to be.

After 15 minutes on the phone to NHS Direct, giving all relevant details, and prodding and shaking and shouting at Steve as instructed (and still getting no response), the nurse put it to me that this was not normal and that she would like to put me through to a 999 operator in order to send an ambulance so that Steve could be checked over.

I come out with some stupid comments sometimes. But, "I'm sure he'll come round in a minute," after trying to rouse him for close on half an hour, has to be in the top twenty at least. She put me through.

Ambulance Control already had a certain amount of information from NHS Direct, so I just had to confirm my address and stuff. At that point, apropos of nothing, Steve moved. I told the 999 guy this, but he said that even if Steve properly woke up, he needed to be checked out anyway, and that in the meantime, I should stay with Steve, make sure he kept breathing, help him if he vomited and so on.

"No problem," said Mary.

"OK," said 999 guy. "The ambulance is on the way (I'd heard they weren't allowed to say that). Shut away any pets, open the front door of the house, and wave down the ambulance when it gets to you."

"No problem," said Mary. "Thank you. Goodbye."

As I hung up, I realised that it was in fact physically impossible to stay with Steve, in the bedroom upstairs, and also open the front door, which (and I realise this is rather unoriginal) is downstairs. Added to which, it takes me over a minute to get myself up or down a flight of stairs at the best of times. And I hadn't thought to mention this to anyone.

Just to make things even better, at this point Steve stirred again, sat upright, went horribly pale, and fell back down onto the bed again. Well, mostly onto.

Swearing may have occurred. I got him settled, although still not awake, then slid down the stairs to unlock and prop open the door. Then I sat four steps up the stairs, so that I would be able to hear any movement from Steve upstairs or an ambulance outside.

The ambulance arrived a couple of minutes later. I lurched forwards to greet it... as Mr Dazed and Confused staggered out of the bedroom to find out what was going on (well, that's what he says he meant, this being the first part of the proceedings that he has any recollection of. At the time it came out as more "wstfgl?"). He reached the bottom of the stairs at about the same time as the ambulance people. Half an hour of no responses to anything I said or did and then seconds before help arrives, he's up and about. I though only toddlers were supposed to do that?

Poor Steve then got his finger stabbed and a light shone in his eyes and cold things stuck to his chest while he was still barely awake and wondering why there were loud people in green outfits in his house. I think he'd have preferred a cup of coffee. Still, he was steadily waking up more and more, so I was happy about that. I think given a choice between feeling like a wally, and rushing to A&E with an unconscious boyfriend, I'll opt for 'wally' every time.

Eventually, the ambulance people decided that he didn't need to go to hospital but that he should see his GP (ahem) and probably see about getting painkillers that aren't paracetamol-based. I don't believe Steve has any intention of doing anything so sensible, but it was a relief to be able to re-set the evening from 'hospital?' back to the original plan of 'fishfingers'.

He's fine, though. There are two ways of telling.

Firstly, he won't stop teasing me, big meanie that he is. :(

Secondly, the ambulance people left behind the finger-stabbity-clicky thing. It's meant to be single-use. It's not any more. Engineers...

An Engineer's Guide To Cats

While I don't usually regurgitate the b3ta newsletter onto my blog, this was one of those things. Those special things. Those things that just, somehow, wriggle into your consciousness rather than being a two-minute giggle that is forgotten with the next shiny object that rolls past.

The Engineer's Guide To Cats, by Paul Klusman with TJ Wingard, is nominally about cats. Indeed, Paul opens the video with "The purpose of this presentation is to educate engineers, and the general public, about cats."

Nice idea, but really, I think this is the ideal film to educate the general public (and possibly, cats) about engineers. An oft-misunderstood species, I have believed for many years that engineers make superior boyfriend material (although Dilbert may be interested to know that NASA have not hidden me on the moon yet) but I have been unable to explain WHY. What is it about a man with a scientific calculator, a leatherman, and a roll of duct tape, that is attractive?

I still can't explain it properly in actual words. Could it be the intelligence? The single-minded devotion? The attention to detail? The defeat of self-consciousness? I don't know. But I defy any woman to watch these two play with their cats and not melt a little bit inside. That's what it is about engineers.