The Sickness Is Spreading

Monday, I felt dodgy. Tuesday/Wednesday I was off work sick. Thursday/Friday I was back in, but operating at about 50% efficiency.

Julie came down with the cold on Wednesday, went downhill on Thursday/Friday, but made it to my brother's place that evening to see my mother, who is up until Wednesday.

Saturday she got hit worse, and has spent the two days since then with horribly aching joints.

I, on the other hand, am steadily recovering, and today I feel fairly fine, except for a chesty cough, which I woke up with this morning. And weak arms from helping Erin move flat yesterday.

I'm spending the next couple of days with my mother, and have this week and next off work so as to use up some holiday time. Normal posting service will probably resume on Thursday, when life calms down somewhat.

Interesting Links for 11-02-2013

• "Game Of Thrones" Valentines
  (tags: valentines_day GameOfThones )
• Up to 85% of snowflakes form around bacteria.
  (tags: bacteria snow )
• American Citizens Split On DOJ Memo Authorizing Government To Kill Them
  (tags: news assassination usa satire )
• The is the one thing I dread about the new Star Wars movies.
  (tags: starwars )
• What it's like to leave the Westboro Baptist Church
  (tags: religion usa )
• Robots are being developed that destroy weeds using lasers.
  (tags: robots lasers farming )
• You can have your own space program for only $300million
  (tags: spaceflight space )
• Cross-party support for bid to set decarbonisation target
  (tags: politics uk globalwarming electricity )
• Men married to women with higher incomes more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication
  (tags: medication sex money relationships )
• The Elsevier boycott one year on
  (tags: academia viafanf publishing )
• BBC to start releasing more TV on iPlayer before it hits broadcast.
  (tags: tv bbc )
• Why Don Rosa quit creating comics (see #6 for the way Disney, and others, treated him)
  (tags: money rights copyright disney comics )
• An awesome 404 page with plummeting lemmings. How many can you save?
  (tags: web lemmings )
• 6 Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes
  (tags: history viaDraxar funny )

Not an image I expected to bump into

(Julie and I have just got to Season Five of Buffy. But as a photo from an alternate future, I love this. Particularly the look on the baby's face.)

Source: Mrs Denisof

EDINBURGH ON FIRE!!!!!

So, I was getting ready to leave the flat this evening to go see my mother for dinner, and Julie mentioned that a few people were talking about the local church being on fire. So, as I'd already said I'd pick her up a few things at the corner shop before going out I said I'd see what the fuss was all about too.

The answer to which was this:

So I took the photos/video home and showed them to Julie (along with bread/chocolate), and then headed to my brother's for dinner.

And was then joined, forty* minutes later, by Nick, who lives rather closer to the blaze than I do, and had been told that going home was not an option. So came over and ate Meredith's delicious Japanese Quorn Stew Thing. And then hung out and chatted until eight o'clock, before we walked back together, to discover that things were largely under control, and the chances of him burning to death in his bed was acceptably low.

Incidentally, all of the news sites are saying that the building that burned down was a church. Which would seem reasonable when it looked like this:


But less likely when you see it from the other end and it looks like this:


I'm now not sure whether it was or not...

(Incidentally, isn't it awesome that I can take video on a phone, including zooming in on the interesting bits one-handed? I know I'm late to the party on that front, but still!)

*I just had to check whether it was "forty" or "fourty". Both of them now look wrong to me.