Actually of course it isn’t a bookcase at all, it’s a bookshelf. However I am inordinately pleased with it. For over a year it was entirely Mythical while no-one else thought it could, would or ever should exist. Since it is now manifest, it seems only right that it should be promoted to Legendary.
It began its life as a twinkle in my mind’s eye early last summer when my neighbour threw out some pine floorboards and the council started digging up the by-pass.
Hmmm. Now that I write it, that sequence of cause and effect does look rather odd, even to me. I am sure you can see the relevance of floorboards to a set of free-standing bookshelves. The by-pass never actually came into the thing, but it was my Muse. When the workmen ripped out the old armco barriers they piled high stacks of wooden posts which whispered to me “take us home and use us to support the floorboards and make a bookcase”. Shelf. Bookshelf. They were rough and interesting and distressed and chunky bits of wood. They’d have looked fab. Now I am a socially confident woman, but stopping at the building site and asking if I could have the posts from the armco barriers was a complicated conversation I just didn’t feel up to having, so I kept on putting it off. Then one day they were gone and I thought I’d lost my chance.
I was telling a friend of mine about this and she said “oh, my neighbour’s got some flooring blocks she’s giving away” which was how I came by six bin-bags of flooring blocks, 3″ x 3″ x 6″, with pegs and holes to hold them together and bitumen on one side to glue them to the floor. These were blocks that had lived; some were burned, some were splashed with paint, some were heavily scored and had pieces of metal bedded in them, and almost all were covered in coal-dust. Who keeps coal in a room with a parquet floor? The bin bags also contained earth and some small creatures such as woodlice. I piled them in the car, took them home, invested in a couple of scrubbing brushes and a box of Lux flakes and started cleaning them. I’d worked my way through five of the bags when the autumn set in and it got too cold to sit outside covering myself with soapy water and mud splatters.
My neighbours took a gentle interest in the proceedings and one of them pointed out that cheap pine tongue and groove floorboards would not hold up to the weight of books. He was right of course. He got me some bits of Southend Pier, but not enough for bookshelves. So once I’d finally cleaned the last of the blocks about six weeks ago and rearranged the living room to clear a space by the wall, I took myself online to look for floorboards. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find floorboards that are 8″ wide and 1″ deep? Don’t bother; it’s damn near impossible. I eventually tracked down a reclaimed timber yard about an hour from where I live. After much scepticism on their part and some delays on mine I went over there a couple of weekends ago. They didn’t have any suitable floorboards, but they did have pew seats. They were about 14″ deep, made of pitch-pine and very, very solid with bull noses, flat on one side and gently curved for pious bottoms on the other. They cut them into 5′ lengths for me, tactfully not telling me they thought I was mad all the while they did it.
And lo! After some considerable time knocking the flooring blocks together with their little pegs and almost as much time cleaning the dirt off the pews and fannying around with a tape measure and a spirit level, we have My Legendary Bookcase. Shelf. Bookshelf. A particularly pleasing part of the whole pleasing exercise is that I had exactly the right number of wooden blocks, which is all the more remarkable because I selected them at random from a pile of the things in the middle of last summer.
I really am pleased with it.
Apologies for the quality of the photographs, I took them as the light was fading yesterday evening, and the camera on the Ericsson 850 is noticably less sharp and crisp than it was when I bought it. I should probably clean the lens.
The users of the internet seem to fall into two categories: the literate and the illiterate. I had hoped that the fact that most communication is by the written word would encourage literacy but it doesn’t seem to. Hopefully the increase in visible illiteracy is because the demographic is expanding to include people who can neither spell nor touch type, and not because we are in fact dumbing down.
I’ve been freecycling a lot of stuff recently, and I have to remind myself that just because someone replies to me thusly …
sorry its late but can pick up tomorrow or sunday evening many thanks shirley [phone number] if you ring me i will ring back to arrange pick up and address
… is no reason not to let them have my stuff.
I’ve been playing Travian for a couple of weeks, and browsing the forums. Travian starts off looking like a rural version of Sim City and ends up being an mmorpg war game. I’m not particularly interested in war games and will probably wander back here whimpering when my villages are destroyed by hormone-enraged 13 year olds who cannot spell.
I can’t work out whether the posters here intend to be as rude and arrogant as they seem:
I’m really confused!
I’m new to Travian so I need answers about this server restart business. I’m in server 4 so I don’t know if it affects me but when they restart the servers is everyone going to lose their cities and have to start all over again? Please help me!
wow, i’m in an answer stupid questions mood tonight….If server 5 restarts, it has nothing to do with server 4. server 4 just restarted like 3 or 4 months ago… if i’m not mistaken, the last game on server 5 probably already ended if its restarting at the end of the month
Today is stupid question night, but I guess we really shouldnt’ say anything about this guy because he is new… And it’s not in the manual or anything………
what about server 3?
wait.. nvm.. i see now.. server 3 won’t be affected ither..
Wow don’t get mad at me when you didn’t even answer my question… “when they restart the servers is everyone going to lose their cities and have to start all over again?”
I answered your question You asked: I’m in server 4 so I don’t know if it affects me but when they restart the servers is everyone going to lose their cities and have to start all over again? Please help me!Ok. The server restart ONLY AFFECTS the restarted server. It doesn’t affect the other servers the tiniest bit! If the server is restarted, you lose everything on that server. But if your village is not on that server, then you don’t lose anything!
Alright thanks for your time.
wow, hot to not become mad when after a stupid question (that was answered few days ago and u can find it on the forum) you don’t mind even a little to read SirensMoon’s first post:Quote: Today is stupid question night, but I guess we really shouldnt’ say anything about this guy because he is new… And it’s not in the manual or anything………Nothing will affect you. |
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that’s an answer
What A Noob Question
There are pages and pages of that sort of exchange. I cannot tell if the posters are:
badly served by their own illiteracy
writing abruptly because they are writing in a foreign language, (Travian was developed in Germany and is “set” in the Gallic / Teutonic boarder at the “time” of the Roman empire), or
13 and hormones and peer-pressure are undermining their ability to socialise or think
It worries me that illiteracy is a fashion and that the posters could in fact type perfectly sensibly if they chose to.
Then it worries me that this is the highest level of their written communication skills, and they are going to be unleashed into an economy where the blue-collar jobs are all done in China.
I don’t which worries me more. Maybe it’s just a noob question.
I’m not entirely sure why I’ve not been blogging recently. It’s been a so-so week, and I am singularly lacking in insight or inspiration.
I dunted the wheel of my car on Sunday night and am lucky that instead of blowing on my way to work on either Monday or Tuesday, the tyre decided to wait until it could deflate gracefully and safely while parked overnight so that I had a flat tyre on Wednesday morning. The Internet found me a replacement wheel and tyre for thirty quid. No-one round here seems to pay VAT. It would have been twenty-five if I’d got the cash on me.
I got dicked for overstaying my parking ticket on Friday. It was a fair cop, I was 20 minutes late coming down to buy the replacement, but the only reason my parking expired at lunchtime was their bloody machine wouldn’t take my pound coin. The chap checked that the machine really wouldn’t take my coin and recommended I went to the Parking Office to appeal. He also said he’d noted down that I’d been nice about it in his report. Thankfully I’d bought a pain-au-chocolate as a Friday Treat so I paid for that and my morning tea with a tenner, and still had the pound to demonstrate.
One highlight was finding Paddy K’s blog while I was doing a search for goofy road signs to illustrate a presentation with. I couldn’t post and say “Hi” because blogs are blocked at work.
We are playing musical jobs again. When someone asked me what I was going to be doing next, I realised that I have absolutely no idea. It really is a case of buzzword bingo. Operational improvement process excellence cross-functional service divisional programme scope phase. Take your pick. I’m sure I’ll find it’s worthwhile once I’m doing it. Of course I will.
It occurred to me today that the exciting stuff with the Internet is now behavioural rather than technical. The e-shopping apps are in, the e-banking apps are in, we use google to satisfy our informational whims, all sorts of transactions are now almost friction-free. Developing apps is not where it’s at.
What’s interesting now is how the Internet is changing how we interact, and the most interesting space of all at the moment is Facebook. The premise of Facebook is that it is your name, with your address, the details of your school, college or work, and your real, live, real-life friends.
This is new in various ways:
Firstly, we’ve got used to using screen-names, and incidents such as the Oxford students and the Police show that many Facebook users have not yet thought through their lack of pseudonymity.
Secondly, apps like Facebook in particular mean that we will never loose sight of friends or enemies ever again. They can run, but they can’t hide. And vice versa.
I’m still thinking through the implications of this one. At the moment one can easily and happily drop out of one place and into another by changing jobs, changing hobbies, moving house, leaving a relationship. One can grow up and move on, leaving embarrassments, mistakes, consequences, and really really boring people, behind. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, it’s just a thing. But Facebook, even more than Google, takes that away from us.
And do you know what? It’s so useful and such fun that none of us mind.
I made the mistake of listening to a Radio 4 programme the other day about “Normal” levels of fitness. We’ve already established that when I say “no, really, I don’t enjoy exercise” it’s because no, really, I don’t enjoy exercise, so we won’t flog that particular dead horse again just now.
However, in a fit of existential angst following the programme, I bought myself a pedometer. Oh the dangers of combining online shopping with listen again on the same Internet. The angst was existential because they kept discussing whether or not people were “fit for life” which has rather nasty implications, really. The pedometer is not one of those notoriously inaccurate ones. Ho no. This one has been Tested. So it must be good. It is a clever little thing: it stores your alleged number of footsteps for the last 7 days. So here goes:
I decided not to make any major changes to my habits for a week to see what a normal day looked like. Mind you, if you can’t manage what you don’t measure, there’s an inevitable tendency to manage what you do measure, so I’ve already stopped using the lift as much at work. Unfortunately, I can’t yet do five flights of stairs without embarrassing wheezing so I walk three floors and then take the lift. The blip on Friday was because I realised that I can walk up and down the office like a demented tiger while I’m on conference calls; fortunately there are at least two other people who do the same thing, so I am not alone in my eccentricity.
While looking for the obvious video to illustrate this post, I found this one. A better illustration of the indignities produced by alcohol would be hard to find, and the sight of Janette Krankie bopping drunkenly on a chair is one that will give me disturbing flashbacks for minutes to come. You have been warned.
I was raised by women who were adult during WWII (and during WWI, one of them) and that has coloured my attitude to waste and recycling ever since. Their proverbial admonitions still ring in my ears: “Think of the Poor Poles” “Think of the Starving Russians” “Waste not, want not”. These phrases were contextless two or three decades after Stalingrad and the Warsaw Ghetto, and were never updated to “Think of the poor Biafrans” or “the Starving Sudanese”. But it is drilled deep in my bones that wasting food is ill-mannered at best, and wickedly profligate at worst.
So I want you to appreciate the trauma of spending the last two hours clearing out my kitchen cupboard. Why is it so hard to accept that I never will eat the fruit preserved in Brandy given to me for Christmas five years ago? I know and you know that the best and kindest thing to do is get rid of it. And the five packets of flavoured teas which are not only too disgusting to drink, but too stale to give away. And the packet of rice noodles I bought two years ago and never finished. (I lived off rice noodles for most of the summer of 2005, but suddenly one day I’d eaten enough of them and the remaining half-packet has been perking up hopefully every time I open my kitchen cupboard and then sagging back, disappointed and scorned, when I shut the door on it again. Well no more.) Oh god the guilt. I am throwing perfectly good food away.
The problem is not only that I under-utilise; I also over-stock. I have two packets of half opened and half used muscovado sugar. Now in what possible circumstances am I going to use a couple of pounds of muscovado sugar? It doesn’t make good crumble. I suppose I could mix it with the two packets of white sugar and a the pound or so in a jar with a vanilla pod, and turn the lot into rum. The last lot of sugar I kept with a vanilla pod was in there for half a dozen years at least. I do not need any more sugar.
Couscous? When will I remember, standing in Tescos, that I don’t actually like couscous that much? Or that one packet of Quinoa goes a very very long way. Sesame seeds. Why did I buy so many sesame seeds? And as for lentils: I have red split lentils, two kinds of yellow lentils, two kinds of brown lentils and two packets of Moth Beans which are “like lentils”. Oh, and three tins of the things in case I don’t want to do all that unpleasant boiling.
Note to self: “Lentils: enough, already”.
Probably best not to get downwind of me for a while, then.
I’ve been selling some of my books as an Amazon Reseller. I’d list them here and sell them to you, gentle readers, but that would breach the non-commercial terms of my account with WordPress.
It’s a slightly odd feeling, sending a book I don’t want to someone who does. The one I chat about these things with said I should print out a copy of my post distancing myself from all things flaky and include it with the copy of Light up your Life - discover your true purpose and potential, but that seemed churlish given that I was happy to take their £4.75.
It’s a satisfying process, printing off three copies of the packing slip, finding a suitable jiffy bag, sealotaping the packing slip to the bag, taking the package to the post office, buying the stamps and keeping the receipt for the postage. Saying such a formal farewell to unwanted or inappropriate gifts provides closure, and it’s a ritualised and profitable way to discard the ghosts of previous relationships.
But it’s also odd.
I find myself wondering who on earth would want to spend a fiver on a copy of Roger’s Profanisaurus?
Which fool thinks that if they Eat Right 4 Their Type it’ll make a blind bit of difference to their health? I did think of writing “this is complete shite” on the packing slip for that one, actually. The woman who recommended it to me swore by the approach but she always seemed to have little niggly things wrong with her, and then it turned out she’d been eating for the wrong blood-type all along. Which only goes to SHOW. Though what exactly it shows I wouldn’t like to say. I don’t in fact know my own blood-type and so I toyed with the idea of “eating right” for each type for a month to see if it made any noticeable difference at all, but really I could not be arsed, and now I don’t have the book so I’ve lost the chance.
Selling some of these books is also an admission that I am never going to read them. Does the person buying a Poetry Handbook want it to improve their own poetry or because a lecturer or teacher has Set it as a Text? If they buy it and read it, does that make them a Better and More Serious Person than I am, who merely rented it from Amazon for a while without reading more than two or three pages and gulping nervously?
So it’s an interesting thing, selling on Amazon, but I probably wouldn’t bother if there wasn’t a Post Office in the building where I work. They pay the money into my bank account, but I wish they’d block it up into fivers and give it to me as gift certificates. Then I’d sell lots and LOTS of books, just to feed my habit.
I enjoy the pepper’s ghost effect of images reflected in glass. This is partly because the brain is not entirely sure what to focus on - is it a girl or is it an old lady? Is it an homage to Mondrian in red and brown and white, or is it a photo of the back of a girl on a ferry? There is also the fact that composition is even more important when dealing with reflected images, there is just more that can be out of alignment and wrong.
Anyway, because I am all worded out right now, here are some photos of more or less reflective surfaces.
not 
It began its life as a twinkle in my mind’s eye early last summer when my neighbour threw out some pine floorboards and the council started digging up the by-pass.
My neighbours took a gentle interest in the proceedings and one of them pointed out that cheap pine tongue and groove floorboards would not hold up to the weight of books. He was right of course. He got me some bits of Southend Pier, but not enough for bookshelves. So once I’d finally cleaned the last of the blocks about six weeks ago and rearranged the living room to clear a space by the wall, I took myself online to look for floorboards. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find floorboards that are 8″ wide and 1″ deep? Don’t bother; it’s damn near impossible. I eventually tracked down a reclaimed timber yard about an hour from where I live. After much scepticism on their part and some delays on mine I went over there a couple of weekends ago. They didn’t have any suitable floorboards, but they did have pew seats. They were about 14″ deep, made of pitch-pine and very, very solid with bull noses, flat on one side and gently curved for pious bottoms on the other. They cut them into 5′ lengths for me, tactfully not telling me they thought I was mad all the while they did it.
The users of the internet seem to fall into two categories: the literate and the illiterate. I had hoped that the fact that most communication is by the written word would encourage literacy but it doesn’t seem to. Hopefully the increase in visible illiteracy is because the demographic is expanding to include people who can neither spell nor touch type, and not because we are in fact dumbing down.
It occurred to me today that the exciting stuff with the Internet is now behavioural rather than technical. The e-shopping apps are in, the e-banking apps are in, we use google to satisfy our informational whims, all sorts of transactions are now almost friction-free. Developing apps is not where it’s at.
I was raised by women who were adult during WWII (and during WWI, one of them) and that has coloured my attitude to waste and recycling ever since. Their proverbial admonitions still ring in my ears: “Think of the Poor Poles” “Think of the Starving Russians” “Waste not, want not”. These phrases were contextless two or three decades after Stalingrad and the Warsaw Ghetto, and were never updated to “Think of the poor Biafrans” or “the Starving Sudanese”. But it is drilled deep in my bones that wasting food is ill-mannered at best, and wickedly profligate at worst.
I’ve been selling some of my books as an Amazon Reseller. I’d list them here and sell them to you, gentle readers, but that would breach the non-commercial terms of my account with WordPress.
