Glad to be home.

I am so glad to be here in our flat. We've had quite a day, apart from the tornado.

I love my husband.

M talking to Noo

M talking to Noo
Originally uploaded by Marvin Marblesons.

Lovely bridesmaids on car 3

Lovely bridesmaids on car 3
Originally uploaded by Marvin Marblesons.

Mischief managed

I am such a wit.
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Things I do not like to eat

1 Prawns
2 Parsley
3 Tea
4 Coffee
5 Coffee walnut cake/ any other coffee-flavoured pudding including tirimasu (don't know how you spell this) and coffee creams
6 Walnuts
7 Fizzy water
8 beef jerky
9 korma

Appeal for content

Friends of Jerome, please post your party tales at www.jackonjack.blogspot.com

Pictures also welcome.

Unusual primate with thin middle finger

Here's a link to a picture of an aye aye. Highly endangered and weird.
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837110_18A_007
Originally uploaded by Marvin Marblesons.

Do you really find this interesting?

Yesterday, in a rare moment of optimism, I said, It makes perfect sense. You set up your main Committee and write minutes for that in one book. Then you set up other several other, less important committees, and you buy a new book to write those minutes.

I was wrong. It still doesn't make sense. The Burial Board, established in 1861, appears occasionally in the minute books of the General Committee, but its separate minutes don't start until the 1880s-ish.

It's quite easy to give a blow by blow account of archive work because everything takes so long.

Light dawns on Mount Marv

I have been reading the minutes of the collection I'm cataloguing, trying to work out when they established their current committee structure. The early minutes have been microfilmed: very good for preservation, very bad for me because I am utterly hamfisted and impractical and watching me load microfilm into a microfilm reader is a piteous sight. So I tried to load the microfilm and it was back to front and upside down. The only way I could read the sodding thing was to turn it the wrong way up so it didn't feed through the reader properly and half the top of the page was obscured. I persevered and made some notes and thought in that vague way I so often think of so many things, "Why are the numbers of the resolutions and the dates going backwards?" After spending half an hour loading the film and an hour reading I gave up and stomped off to our office.

I decided that the microfilm must be wound the wrong way on the spindle. It wasn't my fault; it was the microfilm.

Today I tried it again on the other, much better, microfilm reader. I loaded it in 30 seconds. It was the wrong way round. I turned it upside down and I could read it. And suddenly after half an hour of reading I realised that the dates were going backwards for a reason. It's a Jewish volume so it reads from right to left. But they'd microfilmed it from left to right.

Sometimes archives make you feel really stupid.

The organization had a lot of different committees. I am tryign to work out when these were established. They have separate minute books, but the minutes don't seem to begin at the date when the committee was set up. Perhaps the minutes of the committees were written in the same book as the minutes of the governing Council. I have been plodding thorugh the governing Council minutes looking for the minutes of the other committees. Apart from the odd report, I haven't found anything. Today I went back through my notes and discovered that the minutes of the other committees were all written in a separate book. I had noted this and then forgotten it. It makes perfect sense. You set up your main Committee and write minutes for that in one book. Then you set up other several other, less important committees, and you buy a new book to write those minutes. It takes so much effort to discover these simple things. And when you discover them you feel really stupid for not noticing before.

I am going to have a very nice day tomorrow though. I am going to go through the book and write down all the committees, with page numbers. Then I will see if the volumes of minutes that belong to only one committee follow on from the ones in the volume whose minutes are all together. And for a few hours I will know what I'm doing and it won't be confusing. That's my hope. Or delusion.

Harry Potter

The people at Brogue Towers say 'yes'.

It took me a couple of hours to recover from the ending.

along with the sunshine, there has to be a little rain sometime.

Tomorrow is Harry Potter release day. Exciting. Not as exciting as the last release day because it might be like book 5.

What a funny meeting we had today. We were rebelling against our head of archives who wasn't going to let us have a sub-fonds level. That's the level of description between a series and a collection, for your information, if you care and I hope you don't. He wasn't going to let us have it, but faced with mass rebellion from all the cataloguing archivists (cardigans flying at all angles) he decided he would let us have it but call it something else more comprehensible to the users. So we have our functional subdivision. Hurray!

No title, ha ha

I wouldn't be able to live with someone with anal retentive tendencies. They'd murder me.

So dull, so very dull

On reflection, I don't think I've got the rituals thing quite right.

I always put my purse and keys in the same place in my bag.

I always put my underwear in the top drawer of the bedside table.

I always put my socks in the drawer below.

I also leave heaps of clothes lying around for days because I can't be bothered to pick them up. This probably negates the putting things in drawers.

Sacred rituals

Here's an interesting question from Pete's blog. So, the question is, what are your idiotic rituals that you dare not speak about? Things that bug you even though you know they shouldn't.

Things that bug me and I know they shouldn't:

I truly believe that if you have something interesting to say, making grammatical mistakes that a good sub-editor can mend, like misusing the aphostrophe, is not the end of the world. And I make loads of style errors on this blog and I have no right to be holier than thou, but:

I pick holes in other people's writing in what would be an incredibly irritating way if I ever said anything about it. But I don't.

I hate clumsy use of metaphor. I used to work with someone who would say, "Let's take that tact." I can't tell you how much that gets on my nerves. "Tack! Tack! You're in a sailing boat and you've decided to go in a different direction." If you don't know you're being figurative, stick to the literal. Otherwise you might as well be painting a canvas with an electric road drill. Business plans are among the worst offenders.

I hate it when people, particularly cold callers and shop assistants, ask me how I am. I always make a point of asking them how they are back.

I don't like it when people don't put CDs back in their cases, particularly when it's the Lord of the Rings DVD.

I don't like people to fold paper documents that they intend to keep. (but this is reasonable)

I don't like people talking loudly and critically while bands are playing during music festivals.

Rituals:

James has hundreds. He's always making them up because they are such a useful way to achieve (nearly split the infinitive there, chaps)his artistic and practical goals, which are always very clearly defined. He doesn't like having routines imposed upon him though, which is just as well.

I am a gremlin, and avoid or subvert any kind of routine because i have had too many idiotic routines imposed upon me in the past. (For example, in Home Economics at school, our form would sit on stools while the register was called, then stack the stools in the corner, then the next class would unstack them and sit on them again and then put them away and the next class would unstack them, even though that class would come in immediately. The routine helped the teacher maintain control, and children need routine. I didn't. I wanted to be treated like a reasonable human being.) Ahem. Forgive that dull interlude.

When I dry myself after my bath/shower, I always do it in the same order, starting with my face and hair. That's all. I can't htink of any others. There must be others. I will give it some thought.

Don't hate me, all my friends who read this blog.

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scary

scary
Originally uploaded by Jonathan D Hall.

He's Great

IMG_0022
Originally uploaded by Jonathan D Hall.

Things I would have liked to say #2

To the man who laughed when I got on the top deck of the bus because he thought I was ugly and not worth chatting up.

It's not very original and it rhymes with duck goo.

Things I would like to say but don't #1

A message to the woman who lives downstairs from us.

Turn your bloody music down before my husband kills you and I become a prison widow.

Marv's blog plumbs new depths of tedium.

I want to pay a bill and the bank web site is so SlOW!!

Tolkien and Birmingham heritage

From the introduction to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings:An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence which is inadequate and ambiguous...it has been supposed by some that 'The Scouring of the Shire' reflects the situaiton in England at the time when I was finishing my tale. It does not...It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender, for the economic situation was entirely different , and much further back. The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten...Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important. I never liked the looks of the Young Miller, but his father, the Old Miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.

There's a plan to put a large metal statue of an Ent in the middle of Moseley because this is the place that inspired Tolkien. I prefer to put it like this: Tolkien was inspired by the destruction of the landscape that used to be here.

Is it good that we won the Olympics?

I'm only asking!

Gibber

I have a picture of a little guinea pig. He has feet like stars and a quiff like a punk. When we get a house, maybe i will buy two guinea pigs and call them Lion and Tiger. It's great fun to call your pets inappropriate names. You can do the same with your family too. I am living proof.

We listened to the BBC Radio Lord of the Rings in the car a few weekends ago. It was so exciting. The Battle of Pelennor Fields. "Rohan had come at last!" Hurray! And then the pirates turn up on the black ships. But it's not the pirates! They bear the banner of the Kings of Gondor! Hurray!

In less than a fortnight I will have the new Harry Potter in my hot little hands. Time to reread the entire series in preparation, I feel. Although that means reading book 5 again...

My friend Lucy was deeply distressed that JK killed off her favourite character. I thought that it cheered up the climactic scene, which was otherwise quite dull, like the rest of the book really. When she had recovered from her shock at this heresy, she asked me who my favourite character is.

I don't know. What an interesting question. I am very fond of Ron Weasley. I like feisty teenage Ginny Weasley, one of the few good things about Book 5. I am quite keen on Cassandra Trelawney.

"We don't send people to Azkaban for blowing up their aunts!"

Cupboard love

Quoth James to Marv, "You won't leave me, will you?"
Quoth Marv to James, "No, you cook the dinner."

Village Fete

We went to the Village Fete this weekend. It was a remarkably good year for our family.

My mother won the duck race (floating numbered plastic ducks down the mill stream)

I reached the playoffs of the hit the golf ball into the cardboard boxes game, a game so ridiculously difficult it should be banned.

My father guessed the height of the bottle of whisky. It was about an inch and a half shorter than he is.

I bought the board game Cranium for £1 and Dad bought me a sheepskin coat for £3. We bought a plastic bag tidy made out of a map of Wales.

My mother won 2nd prize in the raffle.

I won a bottle of bubbly on the spin the numbers game.

I managed not to drink too much.

It was all in aid of the church. All the prizes are bottles of wine and most of the stalls involve gambling. Truly good comes out of evil.

Que?

Spotted on my parents' bookshelf: The Practical Mushroom Encyclopedia

A work of reference for skilful fungi?

The Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see,
My foe outstretchd beneath the tree.

Good site for anyone who's been bullied at work

This is a great source of information on bullying at work. It helped me enormously when I was suffering at the hands of a bully.

I think the issue is getting more attention - both school bullying and bullying at work.
three cheers for Tim Field