Hello World!

My second (test) blog post using jekyll-now repo. This may work! Simply deleting the original file and expecting the blog to catch up did not.

Floods

Not much to say today apart from to mention the local flooding (thankfully not hyperlocal, i.e. not right here.)

The power was off for 1-1/2 hours this morning, the centre of Rochdale flooded as the River Roch burst its banks, and at the sewage works. Bury had a gas explosion, and a pub collapsed not far north…

My wife, working tonight, left her phone here. She had a couple of diversions en-route, so I'm hopeful it's an easy drive home in the morning.

It's still bloody raining!

Charitable

How do you explain to someone, without actually explaining, that you will not buy their raffle tickets (all proceeds to local charities, prizes donated by local businesses) because you already gave more than your allocation for the month?

Not an easy few words.

So I kept my few words to an absolute minimum, and yet still experienced a sense of guilt. It probably doesn't matter that I already gave to one of the beneficiary charities a few weeks ago…

Are we programmed to donate socially, judged unfairly when we don't?

Probably. And probably.

I always have picked 'my' charities to suit my history, circumstances and mood. And occasionally because my friends or acquaintances believe passionately-enough to mention them. Or in response to media-led frenzies. It's a perfect storm when all three influences coincide.

Yeah, because I'm only human.

Paris

Life is complicated. Living it is easy. Put one foot in front of another, breathe in, breathe out, drink, blink, eat, pee, poo, sleep, work, play, laugh, cry. And then it's over.

There is more, of course. Aspiration. The latest smartphone, TV, games console, car, a house, family, friends, safety.

And then there's freedom.

Those of us who have it are incredibly lucky. Yet still we moan about the overreaching of the states we live in. Surveillance everywhere, taxes for female sanitary items, too many traffic wardens…

Imagine being invaded by a foreign power, your independence taken away, large men with brutal attitudes and frightening weapons always in your face for reasons you cannot understand. Imagine your school, your playground, hospital, workplace, all rendered unusable by decades of conflict. Imagine your home bulldozed one day just because someone wants the plot of land it sits on. Imagine a peaceful day broken by a knock on the roof, followed only minutes later by the destruction of your home, your neighbourhood.

Imagine all of this for every day of your life, no hiding place, no security, no hope of ever influencing the people who so callously disregard you. No hope of ever getting them to change their attitudes, so in thrall are they to the bigots who elect them and pay for their advanced weapons systems.

I cannot.

I cannot begin to imagine my life being shaped by the influences that cause someone to become a terrorist. But what I can do is attempt to at least understand why.

I'm not about to start down that road right now, not in a blog post. Mine isn't a knee-jerk reaction shaped by the latest news, the cause forgotten about in a desire to have someone else do something about it. Something quick. Retribution.

Even in my comfortable existence I've not forgotten one fact, apparently beyond the wit of a sizeable proportion of the people commenting on the Paris killings of Friday 13th November 2015… And all the other atrocities carried out in the past in the name of our freedoms to give us our comfortable lives.

It's a statement that covers a multitude of 'sins.'

Religions don't kill people, people kill people.

Bucket (2015-10-17)

We're supposed to prepare a bucket list* – stuff we'd like to do, accomplish, experience before meeting the Grim Reaper, kicking the proverbial bucket. Death, it's something to be prepared for, not by winding one's life down but by living it.

Right, here's my first public list, starting with the things I've done already:

Visit the USA. (Five times.)
Visit Canada, see Niagara Falls. (Once.)
Visit Egypt. (Twice.)
Visit Amsterdam, see the red-light district. (Half-done, probably the only man alive to fail at this simple task.)
Visit Bruges, see Hieronymous Bosch's triptych. (Twice and once.)
Propose marriage somewhere extraordinarily romantic in the most romantic way imaginable. (Not in a port on a ferry! Maybe prior to a renewal of vows?)
Get married, have 2.4 children, get comfortable. (2 girls, currently 3 pets, comfortable is years away.)
Visit somewhere hot, chill out for 2 weeks. (We got married, honeymooned in Antigua, I nearly relaxed.)
See live NFL American Football. (Cleveland Browns.)
See live US College Football. (Bowling Green.)
See live Friday night high school Football. (Wauseon OH.)
Stand in front of a piece of art that won't let me go, (Cleveland, a typical Mark Rothko piece, 3 horizontal bands, perfect.)
Visit London, England. (I'd seen Washington DC, Ottawa, Cairo, Edinburgh, Cardiff – but not my native country's very own capital city, at least not until literally 2 weeks prior to this post!)
Try the cats' food to see if it's 'good enough.) (Don't try this at home children!)

Unfulfilled ambitions:

Read my copy of 'things to do now you're 50' and do some of those things now I am,
Get a UK Premier League football season ticket and redevelop a familiarity with the sport. (I used to have a Championship-level one with Burnley FC),
Learn to swim. (To join my family in the pool),
Ride a camel, (Egypt would be favourite, when 'things' settle),
Triage my science fiction collection, broaden my horizons,
Clear out the garage, even though a car will not fit,
Regain the patience to read again. (I used to have a voracious appetite for books, it's passed on to my oldest daughter),
Visit at least 2 more European countries. (Italy for my wife [she wants to see Florence, I want to visit Pompeii] and France [e.g. Euro Disney]),
Save up for a cruise (mini cruises across to Europe do not count),
Reduce my reliance on technology,
Live a little…

Now-impossible:

Become a pilot, spaceman, cowboy.
Turn back the clock to study for and get a university mechanical engineering degree, for a somewhat different career. (Or leave home to work for the UK Ordnance Survey as a cartographer.)
See Talking Heads play live. Anywhere.

Not complete, for this is a first draft at a point half-way through my life.**

Do you know something, I've been bloody lucky.

* Thanks to @bsag on App.net for providing the inspiration for this post. Just a few words, but so well-timed.

** Ha! I should be so lucky.

Lendl

All I can think of right now is Ivan Lendl's sex face.

I'm sorry to bring this up.

I should go and cook hotdogs for the girls, perhaps that'll take my mind off it?

Stony

A variation on a theme; a joke told to my daughters a few minutes ago:

"What did the Italian man say when asked why he was leading Bambi, who was wearing 2 eye patches?

'I've-a no i-dea!'"

I'm imagining your response, dear reader, is the same my girls gave me.

My wife didn't tut. Progress.

Baz’s Law

The probability that footnotes could be added to a social media post* whilst retaining meaningful content in at least 2 component parts is proportional to the number of available characters per new post but tends towards zero below 256.

Barrie Turner. (@bazbt3)

Version 1.0, 2015-03-09.

*The separation between email, social media posts and instant messages is not as rigid as in the Internet's infancy. The word 'post' is used here both for brevity's sake and to limit this document's terms of reference.

Flasher

I can only now bring myself to talk about it – such is the impact on my family.

On Sunday evening, wearing my trusty grey dressing gown, I flashed Mollie, our female cat.

Swinging dangly bits, hip sways, whatever real flashers do, I did, my wife looking on aghast. Mollie's normally inscrutable gaze faltered a little before she rolled onto her back, hands clasped cutely at her chest, legs 'akimbo.' Cute.

To me it felt liberating.

Giving an added sense of perspective, Mollie is coming up to her 4th birthday – all-but 7 months spent in our home (assuming the dates we were given are appropriate.)

And then it happened.

"You do know you just flashed your daughter," my wife said.

Ah.

Catharty-ism

My children's discipline is a constant source of frustration to me. I've spent the last few years being consistent in my approach to it, even with the obvious discord it engenders. I've honestly thought I've being doing the right thing. Apparently not.

Today though, something remarkable happened…

For a long time I've been threatening (yes!) to throw toys away. My wife hates the idea and, even when I've implemented the threat in the past it's ultimately failed for a number of reasons – not limited to rescuing whatever's in the bin or forcing (yes!) me to do it. I've apparently been unreasonable.

Perspective may be a worthwhile thing to introduce at this point?

We're overrun with toys of all shapes and sizes, spent paper & card, paint pots & brushes, pens & pencils. Every room in the house apart from the 'master' bedroom, toilets and bathroom has mess wherever the girls (nearly 7 & 4) finish what they're doing. Bedrooms are occasionally, in a very real sense, impassable – bedclothes, dressing-up clothes, toys strewn across the floor, beads and sharp pointy things underfoot to cause maximum discomfort to unwary adults.

One of the very worst things to deal with is the horrendous number of stickers that appear on every surface in the house. They stick to furniture, floors, are run through the washing machine, clog the vacuum cleaner, stick to work clothes, to bare feet and cats…

It's been going on, as I mentioned above, for a few years now and despite my best efforts the lessons I've been trying to teach simply haven't sunk in. It would be fair to say that my wife and I don't exactly see eye-to-eye on matters of child discipline. You could say I've gone way past the point of being reasonable about it, but without any visible improvement using other methods (naughty step included) I thought it would eventually pay off.

Today though I'd just had enough. I'd asked the girls to get all of their art stuff together and make a pile of it, and put everything else in another pile. We'd then figure out between us what to keep and what to throw out. It worked until I figured out I'd got in the way – at which point I'd made the mistake of believing both girls' suggestions they'd have it done soon.

An hour later, and 2-1/2 hours in to the exercise, and after frequent reminders I gave up. No, I hadn't expected concentration for that amount of time, there'd been breakfast, juice, a bit of telly as a temporary reward…

So, all of the stuff not already sorted into the 'art stuff' pile went in bin bags, ditto all of the other toys. All this while the girls watched and asked awkward questions.

Then, the remarkable thing: my wife didn't stop me, nor did she suggest the toys shouldn't be binned. You could have slapped me down with a small wet fish! Amazing!

To spare my oldest daughter the pain of seeing her toys going into bags my wife decided to take her shopping – there's a rather important milestone-y family birthday party next weekend, and we'd also nearly run out of ketchup! My youngest daughter can still be bribed with TV, so that's what happened whilst I 'tidied up' in the back of the kitchen.

The back of our kitchen has in the past been called 'The Morning Room' (previous owners) and by us 'The Breakfast Room' (though we've never really used it as such), and now it's 'The Area' (christened thus by the girls) for art and general messing around. It's been allowed to fill up with colouring books, sticker rolls, beads, aprons, discarded paint pots, brushes, and especially completed works of art…

So all the paper and card and felt and plastic went in bin bags, and with it anything I deemed unusable. Anyone more sentimental than I would have baulked at destroying their children's precious memories, but not man-of-steel here, no. I thought about the implications, of course.

My wife and oldest daughter returned home from the shop some time after I'd finished. I helped with the unpacking, feeling good about something for the first time in a week-and-a-half.

We had another brief chat about what I'd done, she suggested sorting through the toys later – a not unreasonable thing to do given the circumstances – and I put the last bits of shopping away.

You could say that the morning had occasioned a cathartic response in me, the result of which is the 4 (yes four) bin bags (items taken only from the front & dining rooms and 'The Area') waiting next to the outer door in the utility room for my wife to sort out later. And, more-importantly for my sense of well-being, a sense of a job well-done and a feeling of an achieved consensus.

Success!

The very last item out of the very last shopping bag – another pack of stickers.

@bazbt3 🏡

…powered by empathy and Schadenfreude

Author: @bazbt3