the corner office

Here's an interesting fact: lots of people have switched to plastic chopping boards, believing them to be more hygienic, but it turns out that wooden chopping boards actually hoard less bacteria than plastic chopping boards, quite possibly because wood has natural antibiotic properties.

The M-P household's plastic boards are apparently OK (on account of spending a lot of quality time at high temperatures in the dishwasher), and our wooden boards spend a lot of time on the side of the kitchen sink waiting to be washed. So there.

Leo and I playing Playstation together, and whenever you get nudged by someone and go spinning into a barrier, the irritating commentator/DJ chirps up "you spin me round like a record. Baby."

"Do you know where that comes from?" says I, "... when I was a boy there was a song where a funny-looking man sang 'you spin me right round like record, baby, right round'" (etc etc)

*pause*

"But you probably don't know what a record is, do you?"

"Yes I do! It's when you race really fast"

The tooth mouse had cause to visit the household - on my birthday of all days (more on that in another post). We had a minor dilemma - what's the going rate for a tooth these days? I can barely remember what it was when we were kids, but I suspect 20c or the like was about right. Maybe I'm doing the same thing our parents did when talking about what they got. It was always a tickey (half a cent) and that was enough for them to catch a bus into town, pay for movies AND popcorn AND still have enough money to buy a pie WITH chips on the way home AND put down a deposit on a 2nd hand car.

We finally settled on a amount we thought was reasonable. We'll call it X. Our child decided that the tooth mouse is a cheapskate. We should have seen the warning signs, when the following fragments of conversation happened:

"If there's a tooth mouse and a tooth fairy will I get money twice for the same tooth?"

and

"How much will I get for my tooth?"
"X"
"How many teeth do I have?"

We get woken up early by Leo coming through 'mooooom! My tooth is wobbly!' A new milestone.

A little later in the morning Ronwen's chatting to Leo and she says 'later, Daddy will tell you all about the tooth mouse!'

'Tooth mouse?' I ask when we get the chance (when we were growing up was it a mouse or a fairy? I can't remember). Regardless, Ronwen reckons we'll have more luck flogging the idea of a tooth mouse than a tooth fairy - we've had a hard enough job explaining that lots of these mythical critters don't exist so please just go back to bed and don't worry about them it's 3 in the morning you're safe and sound just pleeeeease go to sleeep.

Anyway. This afternoon I sit down and give Leo the shpiel: 'so when the wobbly tooth falls out (no it won't hurt) you put it under your pillow and then when you're asleep along will come the tooth mouse, and how it works is... &c &c'

Leo listens patiently and excitedly and then says to me 'you know, there's also a Tooth Fairy!'

On the election theme... this is from a couple of years back (this year's elections seem rather polite) but it's still a hoot.

PS. Hoe cakes look quite yummy.

I was just going to mail this link (via) on to Ronwen, but then I read this, at which point I could not resist:

The rise of civilization coincided with a strange twist in our evolutionary history. We became, in the coinage of one paleoanthropologist, "mampires" who feed on the fluids of other animals. Western civilization, which is twinned with agriculture, seems to have required milk to begin functioning. No one can say why.

The 'it ain't natural to drink milk' argument isn't new, but I didn't realise that two out of three modern adults are lactose intolerant. Interesting as well is that the rapid spread of lactose tolerance amongst homo sapiens was so sudden and widespread that it can only be explained in evolutionary terms as being critical for human survival. At some point in our recent history human beings who couldn't handle milk were dying out.

I'm glad I'm not lactose intolerant. From cheesecake (thanks again love!) to the glass of milk I just drank with dinner, I am extremely happy being a mampire.

This blog's been kicking around for over 9 years. The default 'blue' theme you'd previously see when loading the page had been around since the beginning. The world has moved on a little since then. My tech blog settled for a 'plain' theme, which I liked 7 years ago (and partially still do) but which was also looking a little long in the tooth.

So it was time for a bit of a change to the look of the place. And I sat down one night this week and fired up the fancy web dev tools that now come out the box in Firefox and Chromium, and started fiddling, and tweaking, and before I knew it, I had something that looks a little more contemporary.

I ain't saying it's cutting edge, mind, nor that it's the best-looking theme in the whole world, but it's simple and clean and although I might fiddle and faff a little longer, I think it'll do. Hope you don't find it too ugly.

I like for my chickens to be in the bag before counting them (or something), or in this case, getting the piece of paper in the post. The piece of paper in question being the degree, which arrived in the post last weekend. So now I can go off and update LinkedIn and my about page etc etc.

When I started out I just wanted something which would open a few doors career-wise and allow me to speak the language, so to speak. Looking back I had a pretty naive and misguided idea of what I was in for, but somewhere along the way, I've had my mind opened up not only to new languages, but entire new worlds.

Getting this degree ended up being a lot more pain and work than I'd anticipated, and it came at a pretty steep cost for my family. So at the risk of introducing some acceptance speech cheese, I owe a big thank you to Ronwen and Leo, for putting up with me (and so often the lack of me) and helping me get it done. Thank you to you both, I couldn't have done it without you.

Only one post during September? That's shocking.

So, the Killing is over. Very good, although you can't help but think they could've squeezed the entire thing into about half the length. Then again, maybe not. I enjoyed the ending while being disappointed at the same time. Now for LoveFilm to hurry up with Series Two.

The most exciting part of September was the on-going 40th birthday season, notably a week on a canal boat on the Kennet and Avon Canal. I got to skipper the thing which I loved. Nothing quite like steering 65' and 20-odd tons of steel down bendy canals, through centuries-old locks and under quaint old bridges that are so picturesque that by the end of a week you're committing the cardinal sin of becoming blase about them. Oh, and across aqueducts. Taking a boat across a water bridge with a beautiful valley beneath you, is something else.

We made our way down to Bath, which is beautiful. Sadly wife and child couldn't stick around long enough to see it on account of the child's edumacation being important or something, but we'll be back soon.

I got off the boat with a gentle sway to my step. It's been a week and sadly the sway has gone, to be replaced by impending-winter trudge. Not that I'm complaining - but at this time of year it is obligatory to indulge in the usual oh-gawd-what-a-shite-summer-and-now-winter-wtf-is-this-country-coming-to? with a healthy dose of persecutory self-pity.

Not up to much at the moment, which is to say, we're making our way through The Killing. A Danish subtitled TV series about cops trying to catch a serial killer, with a side dose of politics and family drama.

The series is gripping and as far as adventures with subtitles go, quite fun. The fun part is that speaking a second European(ish) language, you recognise more words and phrases than if you spoke English only, and after enough time, you very occasionally get the drift, even if you've missed the text.

Having said that, it's not the kind of thing you can watch while doing the ironing, say, as I learned very soon.

We're about halfway through the series. The plot has taken so many twists and turns already that I'm not quite sure how another 8 or 9 episodes are going to go. Our child remains fed and regularly washed, as are the dishes, but sleep is starting to suffer.