I’m an old IT pro. Co-mum to Tig and Freddie, rescued Border Collies x Welsh Sheepdogs. They are the latest of our greatly loved and now hugely missed dogs.
Chemistry is like physics where the particles have personalities - and chemists love talking about the really nasty ones. It makes for fun reading, like Derek Lowe's column "Things I Won't Work With". For example, bromine compounds:
"Most any working chemist will immediately recognize bromine because we don't commonly encounter too many opaque red liquids with a fog of corrosive orange fumes above them in the container. Which is good."
And that's just plain bromine. Then we get compounds like bromine fluorine dioxide.
"You have now prepared the colorless solid bromine fluorine dioxide. What to do with it? Well, what you don't do is let it warm up too far past +10C, because it's almost certainly going to explode. Keep that phrase in mind, it's going to come in handy in this sort of work. Prof. Seppelt, as the first person with a reliable supply of the pure stuff, set forth to react it with a whole list of things and has produced a whole string of weird compounds with brow-furrowing crystal structures. I don't even know what to call these beasts."
The Gambling Industry Is Wrecking Our Mental Health
Online betting apps are making it easier than ever to lose money and develop gambling disorders. Any serious attempt to improve mental health means taking on the predatory companies profiting from addiction
The HoC Public Accounts Comm. has concluded the civil service lack both skills & capacity to property oversee infrastructure projects contributing both to the evident delays & budgeting problems.
Civil servants have become too reliant on outsourced expertise (consultants & the contractors) for evaluation, with the state no longer able to act as an 'intelligent client'.
The Tory attrition and politicisation of the civil service has (and is having) sigficant detrimental impact.
Much longer than that...I was a PwC senior IT management consultant from 1989-1994 and I did a lot of puclic sector work at a fee of >£1,000 + expenses per day.
I met my wife, Caroline, in 1990 on a job at London Borough of Tower Hamlets implementing the Local Government Act 1988 (which extended CCT to blue-collar services, such as refuse collection and ground maintenance, and white-collar services such as public libraries and arts centre management).
I was adopted in the UK in 1956 when I was 6 weeks old.
I must an oddball, but I’ve never thought very much about all this 🤷
My view has always been that my birth mother chose to let me go, possibly because of her family’s pressure. From that time my interest in her, my birth father, and their families died.
I’ve gained a good education, had interesting work, and made a good life with my wife. For me, that’s what matters. I can’t influence anything else 🤷
Beat the queues: secure a table in The Vulcan Hotel with a pre-booked beer flight, showcasing 1/3 of a pint tasters of the three Vulcan beers produced for us by Glamorgan Brewing Co, or enjoy a Hartsease Farm Sparkling Traditional Lemonade.
Diary of an ASD Squirrel. Day 188 , Saturday 04/05/2024
Up at around 07:30 to a day that promised to be filled with more difficulty than I anticipated it might yesterday morning.
To set the scene:
Last night my MiL , who is very elderly & quite frail but still lives at home with the help of carers , had a fall.
We were contacted by her carers when they found her on the floor as they arrived to make her comfortable for the night.
We live about an hour away by car & both Mrs S. & I had had a few drinks so we had to depend on the carers to sort out getting an ambulance for my MiL who they suspected had broken her leg.
We’ll skip lightly over the fight we had , over the phone , with her to get her to go - she fears the NHS staff might bump her off 🙄🤦♂️ .
So we went to bed with all this hanging over our heads.
Thusly we arrive at Saturday morning:
The hospital has called , apparently while in a lot of pain my MiL has just got a sprained ankle. This is good !
They are sending her home later , but Mrs S. has a somewhat fraught relationship with her mum so while we are on standby in case anything untoward happens she is letting the hospital sort out returning her Mum home.
This sits uncomfortably with me, I feel that herself should make some effort here.
Don’t get me wrong she gets her mums shopping once a week , & see’s to her administrative well being, but when a loved one (even a semi estranged one) is in distress I think that one should step up.
Once I would have pushed the point, but I no longer have the spoons to deal with the resulting fallout, so I will keep my thoughts to myself & let the situation play out as it will.
We spent an uneasy afternoon watching TV, waiting for the phone to go, finally got a a call late this afternoon, turns out that they are keeping my MiL in hospital, sounds like they suspect a possible broken hip & have scheduled a CT scan for tomorrow .
Watching the last of the Terminator franchise (Dark Fate) while eating Chinese takeaway.
Final Thoughts.
Sometimes plans change in a heartbeat due to reasons way out of our control, once again I will spend an uneasy night wondering if my MiL is ok.
I wish that Mrs S. & her mum had a better relationship , it disturbs me at a fairly fundamental level that herself is yet to check in with her mum either in person or on the phone.
Thank you to all those who are helping me on this journey, in a myriad different ways. I am thankful to each & every one of you! 🫂 🫶🐿️🖖
