NotSheep

It is my belief that there is a design-flaw in women. I think that each time we have a baby, we should grow an extra arm. Because we need it. I’d have eight arms by now - the two that I was born with, and another six - and I might just be able to keep up.

But I don’t have eight arms; I have two. And they are both engaged, a great deal of the time, in holding, nursing, changing, carrying a baby. And when they’re not, they’re usually rushing about the house (attached to the rest of me, of course) trying to do all the needing-to-be-done things that have occurred to me while my arms were busy with the baby and the other children.

Hence, very little blogging recently. I can’t blog with one hand; I just can’t. It’s not that I can’t actually physically do it - my typing-speed with one hand is actually not bad, considering it’s one hand - but it doesn’t come anywhere close to my speed with two hands, and that’s just too frustrating.

(Also my trackball mouse has been slowly dying; I’m awaiting the arrival of a replacement. I did try a Fish Mouse, and I love the concept - a trackball that needs no surface on which to rest it - but it just wasn’t responsive enough, even set to the highest speed. And I cannot be doing with these stupid touchpad things that you get on laptops; I hit it accidentally way too often even when I’m not using it.)

Back to your regularly scheduled etc.

Another reason for the lack of posts here is that there hasn’t been much to say. It has rained. And rained and rained. Fortunately we weren’t affected by the flooding, but that doesn’t make me any less fed up with all this rain. According to a friend, because the country is getting warmer and wetter, we can expect summers like this for the next few decades. In that case, i need to move. I don’t need the Bahamas; I just need somewhere that has at least a couple of months of reliable sunshine and warmth each year.

Since we’ve been stuck indoors, the boys have done a bit of studying, and Toby has joined in: he has been bringing me the Superphonics book and demanding that I tell him what the sound is on the page it’s open to. He’s also been drawing a lot - particularly spiders, most of which even have eight legs, and some of which also have eight eyes. It’s a pity he wasn’t around when they were designing women - he might have given them some useful ideas.

I’ve read The Diary of Anne Frank aloud to the older boys. They were beginning to complain that it was boring - and then I read the words “Anne’s diary ends here”. They looked at me in shock and confusion - they’d been expecting a happy ending, or at least a resolution of the tale. As I read through the rest of the book - what happened to Anne and the other residents of the Annexe, the discovery of Anne’s diary and the results of its publication - they were all blinking back tears. Then each of them in turn chose to read the book again.

It was a good time for them to encounter it, I think. George and Freddy have been reading a lot about the Second World War, but it’s hard to comprehend the suffering of huge numbers of people, and I think Anne’s diary made it more imaginable for them. We can think about those who lost their lives, but I think the diary helps us feel it. I visited Bergen-Belsen in my late teens, and have never forgotten the impact. I would very much like to take the boys there sometime.

But back to the present. I need to work through all the stuff - mainly books - in my dining-room; I did try to attack it last week but only managed about ten minutes before Louie demanded my presence and attention again. I also need to do some orgo-planning (it’s a home-ed thing), and I need to do some programme-planning for Beavers; I’ll show up and be a countable adult leader for the next few months, but I doubt I’ll be much use in terms of actually physically running games and activities over the next few months. Programming, however, seems to have become my responsibility. I don’t really mind that; I’ve almost two years of Beavers programmes worked out already (because I’ve been clever enough to keep records of what we’ve done! ) and since the longest anyone stays in Beavers before moving up to Cubs is about two-and-a-half years, once I’ve another year of programmes sorted, I can just recycle them all. But for now, I have to get that year of programmes done. I hope to have at least up to Christmas sorted by the time we start back in September.

My attempts to get organised have not been helped by Twitter’s decision not to send any more text-messages to its users outside North America. I’ve been using I Want Sandy a lot, largely due to its ability to send reminders and details to my mobile phone via Twitter direct messages. Now that Twitter isn’t sending me any messages, it’s 95% less useful, so I’ve been looking at alternatives. Brightkite is still invitation-only, so isn’t very busy, but I am very impressed by both the service and the responsiveness of those running it. And it sends text-messages. It doesn’t work with Sandy yet, unfortunately, but nothing else does in the UK. Bah.

One thing I have managed to do is establish what my holiday cacti actually are - this was do-able with one hand because it involved reading lots of plant websites. The plant that I thought was a Christmas Cactus turns out to be a Thanksgiving Cactus, and the one that flowered briefly in June turns out to be an Easter Cactus, and the third, which hasn’t bloomed yet (at least, as long as I’ve had it) turns out to be a Christmas Cactus. Confused yet? I took some cuttings from the Thanksgiving Cactus a few months ago, and despite my opposite-of-green thumbs, they seem to be thriving. They’re not big enough that you could actually say they were plants yet, but perhaps they could be called plantlets. So I got all confident and took some cuttings from the other two as well, and have planted them with high hopes.

And that’s your lot, because writing this has taken absolutely ages, and I’ve a to-do list as long as several of the extra arms I’d have if this whole reproduction thing had been done properly.