Bank Holiday weekend continued

We went walking in the Peak District this weekend. We stayed near Buxton, where apparently British mineral water comes from.


I bought walking boots and a raincoat and was ready to go. We walked three or four miles the first day, and I was whining about being tired and thirsty by the end of it. But the scenery was beautiful:


This being Britain, though, it rained a lot and we were soaked. I stopped at Mr Darcy's house to see if he was home and could give me a cup of tea (and maybe we could dive in a pond with our clothes on later like he did on TV) but he didn't appear to be at home.

Slaughtered at badminton

In a rush today, Bank Holiday Monday. I haven't unpacked yet from our weekend of walking in the Peak District. It was so much fun, here's a pic:


I got up this morning and played badminton with my husband. He was ruthless and destroyed me, three games to nothing. I don't know what was wrong with me this morning, but I accepted my defeat gracefully (unusual for me).

Then I went to town and found a cheap pair of Edwardian-looking shoes for my anniversary party in December. They look like brogues but with heels and are lace-up, sort of like those Edwardian boot shoes they would wear. I'd spotted them in a Sunday style magazine so raced to beat everyone else from buying them today. I got the last pair in my size.

I came home and cooked a lovely Chinese meal for everyone -- chicken, cashew nuts and vegetables. The secret is a marinade of soy sauce and sherry for the chicken.

Now I'm going to get my hair cut and dyed. It's a mess. While I'm there I'm going to keep reading a bio of Emily Post. I found a hardback new one in the US when I was there for only $7. I guess no one cares about reading about the Gilded Age but me.

PS
I have a new source of future stress coming up. I am signing a contract to write a book, and I told the publishers I could have it done by Christmas. It's not anything fascinating -- it's a book about Agile methodologies for running software projects. But still, I am thrilled. But can I write it? I dunno; I'm going to do my best.

Bank Holiday Weekend

This weekend is the last three-day weekend of the summer in England. Everyone tries to go somewhere else for one last time because then school starts and you don't have another nice long break until the Christmas holidays.

My niece Georgia and her friend Zoe came to Reading for the Bank Holiday for the big Reading Festival -- zillions of people gather in a field to listen to rock music. One year Muse played -- I would have liked to have heard them.

But I would not like to spend a long weekend using Porta-potties and not having a shower and tromping around in mud.

That's the key thing about British bank holiday weekends. It always rains.

Here are the girls moments after they arrived at my house (in a downpour, of course). I just loved the way they came in and started furiously texting -- I don't think anyone uses a landline phone these days.

Sunday morning worship

Well, not really. Instead of going to church on Sunday mornings, my husband and I head out to the badminton courts near our house.

There, we worship the feeling of getting exercise and moving around, and we come out refreshed and revitalized.

It is so much fun, playing badminton, even if I'm not so good at it and my daughter and son can slaughter me within minutes. My husband and I are going to keep playing every Sunday morning until wheelchairs beckon us in old age.

Julia Roberts converts to scary religion

Julia Roberts made a movie in India. And as movie stars and the Beatles are wont to do, she fell for the seduction of an Eastern religion -- Hinduism.

I was reading an American magazine this week where they regaled their readers of the scary aspects of this strange religion.

"Although Julia's parents have nothing against Hinduism," the article states, "they're upset Julia is raising their grandchildren in a religion that is so different from theirs and whose followers practice animal sacrifices and fire rituals."

I laughed when I read the paper's interpretation of Hinduism. I work with lots of Indians at Nokia and most of them are vegetarians who don't drink. (They think you can't be close to God if you are polluting your body with meat and alcohol.) The idea of them spending their free time sacrificing animals is hilarious.

I mentioned it to one of the Indians in my office, and he had a good question -- what do they think eating meat -- as most Americans do -- means? It's the slaughtering of animals.

Still fighting World War II

It's common knowledge among Southern Americans that the Civil War is still being fought -- it never dies as a subject of conversation -- and of course, a group of people still fights it routinely -- the Civil War re-enacters.

But in England, it's different. They are still fighting the second World War. Honestly, they go on and on about it in papers -- there are always new documentaries on TV. You'd think it was over just recently.

I heard something on the radio on the way to work about a battle, and the announcer was talking about it like it only happened the other day.

In one paper on Saturday, there is routinely a big story about some new aspect of a World War II battle.

Enough already! We've had plenty of wars since then. Can't we move on a little?

Things that Occupied Me on Tuesday

What a day today was:

Exam Results
Waiting for my son's exam results. He's been working towards them for two years and everything rides on these results. We were nervous wrecks waiting for these today. I drove to the office thinking I should change my name from Mrs. Thomas to Miss Anxiety. Luckily he did fine and doesn't have to become a janitor just yet (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Katie's Travel Advice
My daughter travelled to New Zealand with her house mate. She chose the flights herself so she ended up with a 10-hour layover in Abu Dhabi (trying to get food at the airport during Ramadan was tricky) and had another flight to Australia then back to NZ -- what a mess. She's a total wreck now and sent me this advice by text:

Don't ever fly with Aerolinea Argentinas!

Need to Know Things that Can Never be Known
I'm having female problems now, and I really need to talk with my mother to ask her what she thinks, what I should expect, what her experiences were, but she's gone, and I can't. Very frustrating. Why didn't I ask her to tell me everything I'd need to know for my lifetime -- things I needed to know but didn't know I did yet?

Surprise Package of Pop Tarts
One great thing -- I got a surprise package of Brown Sugar Cinammon Pop Tarts from LA. My college pal sent them to me. I took one up to my son with a small cup of black coffee, his fave morning drink, to cheer him as he waited for his exam results.

Another evening with the girls

I went to dinner with my girl friends last night. It's nice to be able to sit around and talk about things that are on our minds.

Here's Karen and Elise. Elise just flew in from the US that morning and still managed to bring a Pirate's rum cake from North Carolina. I almost demolished it single-handedly.


Sometimes socializing can be tricky though. Here's Karen trying to figure out how to use a motorized salt shaker:


Guess what we talked about for a lot of the night? Menopause. Good thing there weren't any men present.

Menopause can be dangerous for men. One night my sister-in-law's estrogen patch came off of her body and attached itself to her husband Louis, and he woke up the next morning wearing it.

Woman putting cat in trash

Look at this woman walking down the sidewalk, seeing a nice cat, giving it a little pet, then picking it up and throwing it in the trash!

Animal-loving Britain is in a uproar, and the police are having to give her protection because she's getting death threats.

Things to do by the end of summer

I read an amusing list of things to do before the summer goes. Many of them ('go to the beach with your kids') aren't applicable to England where it's too chilly and rainy this August to loll on a beach.

Other items were cute. Here are my faves:

Wear White: It's not just a silly scene out of Serial Mom: wearing white after Labor Day is a serious sartorial offense. You don't need to give people another reason to make fun of you! Plan your outfits accordingly so you can get all your white pants, shoes, bags, and other accessories one last wear before they are relegated to the back of the closet. While you're at it, give all your linen, seersucker, and sandals another go 'round too. If you dare take them out before Easter, it's at your peril.

Watch Things Explode: The only thing that says summer more than heat, humidity, and nothing to do at the office is big, expensive, effects-laden action movies. There's something special about spending a calm day in the fabricated chill of the multiplex watching a bunch of macho heroes turn cars, buildings, tanks, airplanes, and just about any other large structure into fiery rubble. It hasn't been the best summer for blockbusters, but between Inception, Salt, and The Expendables, there is bound to be something worth your $12. Now if only we could blow up Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love.

Call in Sick: You pretend like you're so busy at work, but face it, there isn't shit to do right now. Half of the country is on vacation, so even if you wanted to do your job, the people who enable you to do it are sitting on a chaise lounge somewhere with a fruity cocktail right now. Do yourself a favor and join them. It's not like you're going to miss anything. Go to the beach, spend some time with the kids before school starts, enjoy a day watching Judge Judy reruns. Anything is better than trying to pretend like you are actually doing something. Your boss isn't even around to care and we all know it's not until September that anything worthwhile gets accomplished anyway. Oh, guys, I'm gonna be "sick" next Thursday. Just letting you know now.

Read Something Stupid: There is nothing happening. All the media has been collectively obsessed with lately is flight attendant Steven Slater's flamboyant flame out, Chelsea Clinton's wedding, and Lindsay Lohan's jail sentence. Don't bitch about our tabloid culture, just enjoy it. Pretty soon the legislatures will be back in session, there will be some elections, or another disaster, terrorist plot, or major court decision will come along. Then you can feel all intelligent reading your smarty-pants news. Right now, there's something about Justin Bieber's hair that needs your attention.

Are you Being Served?

My son goes back to school in a couple of weeks so we had to go buy his uniform this morning. He has to wear a black suit every day - we had to fork out $300 for the ensemble. The only good part of this outing was going to the old-fashioned department store in Reading that is just like the department store in the Are You Being Served? sitcom.

Here's Mel waiting for Mikey to try on his uniform in the wooden closet.


The first difference you notice is that the store has enough workers to help each customer individually. The sales person stays wth you, tries to find what you need and basically doesn't leave you until you're satisfied and ready to buy. It's amazing service. But it's so hokey too -- the sales people don't handle money. They take the money and put it in a bottle sort of thing and send it to another department by some tube traveling system. Someone in the finance department figures out the changes and sends it back to the clerk through the tube.

I think the store was really upset by the advent of credit cards and didn't accept them for years. Then when they had to bite the bullet, they set up a dedicated desk in the store where you had to take your receipt to pay by card.

The man who helped us today - well, look at him below. He had on a three-piece suit with a fob and chain. It was like being served from a person from another era. Here he taking Mikey's measurements then seeing how much it needed to be taken up, and of course, the store will do the hemming.

Bulging brides

I watched a show about brides who weigh about 10 pounds too much to get into their wedding gowns. They all look fine to me. At the beginning of the show, they seem cheerful and bright, but by the time the trainer and nutritionist have humilated and shamed them (the brides' friend are encouraged to call and rat on her if they see her taking a bite of pizza), the gleam is gone from their eyes, and they are convinced they are fat and hopeless.

I wish one of them would talk back to the experts sometime and say, "I think I look fine. Stop trying to make me feel bad."

Here's one of the 'bulging brides' being made to feel inadequate by the show's cast. She looks great, don't you think?


Bulging Brides is a Canadian television series produced by Slice, and shown on Slice and Discovery Health Channel in Canada and the WE: Women's Entertainment network in the US.

Here comes the bride, all dressed and…wide? After months of stressful planning and bank-breaking expenses, the real test of a bride’s nerves is the stroll down the aisle in her wedding dress. She knows that all eyes are trained on her, examining every inch of her body in that revealing, ultra-fem gown. No woman wants to be a bulging bride!(except those women who are confident in themselves, and believe the marriage ceremony is not about looking like a pretty princess, but instead about two people joining their lives together) Bulging Brides is a fast-paced, action-packed television series that exposes a bride’s desperate struggle to drop unwanted inches so that she can look picture perfect on her wedding day. The series is co-hosted by The Last 10 Pounds Boot camp’s “Dream Team”: personal trainer Tommy Europe and nutrition specialist Nadeen Boman. Each half-hour episode features the story of one bride-to-be in the high-anxiety period less than two months before the Big Day. The bride has her wedding dress, but it doesn’t fit. Racked by tension from the bridal arrangements and petrified by the thought of not feeling her best on her big day, the bride-to-be has turned to the Dream Team as a last resort to lose her excess weight and look breathtaking in her gown.

The recession hits me in the stomach

The company where I work is not having the best of years. Cutbacks are happening, budgets are tightening and we all walk around with a little anxiety cloud over our heads.

Luckily, near the receptionist's desk was a little bowl with chocolate squares. When life and its worries got too much to bear, I would head over and pick up a square to pick me up.

This morning I was walking past the desk and thought I'd pocket a chocolate. I looked around -- they must have moved the dish.

"Where is the chocolate?" I asked.

The woman at the desk shook her head sadly. "We can't have them anymore," she said. "Cutbacks."

I turned away sadly thinking, "CUTBACKS! How I hate that word."

That facelift I was planning is definitely ON HOLD now

I watched a documentary on plastic surgery gone wrong last night, and was repulsed by the procedures. I think that old-age facelift I was planning for my future is definitely on hold now.

Here's the pic of one of the women on the show. Her self-esteem was low, so she and her husband remortgaged their house to pay for a facelift which then left the nerves on one face permanently damaged:

And it's so expensive. I was thinking someday I could go to India for good surgery cheap and have stay at a five-star resort to recuperate but....this news came today:

Hospitals in Britain are on alert after a new drug-resistant "superbug" was found in around 50 patients, many of whom recently had cosmetic surgery in Pakistan and India. Experts warn it coud produce infections that a...re "almost impossible to treat

I told my husband he was just going to have to live with me as an old bag.

End faith-based education?

I thought this article was very interesting, but maybe that's just me. What do you think?

"Richard Dawkins, the UK’s most prominent atheist, will today call on Ofsted to force faith schools to bring religious education into the national curriculum. Professor Dawkins said that the move would be the first step in ending what he calls the “wicked” practice of inculcating children with religious belief, as he steps up his campaign against religious education with a film that calls for the abolition of faith schools.

But in an interview with The Times, he made a striking admission — far from condemning parents who fake belief in order to get their children into a good school, he even could imagine doing so himself. In Faith School Menace?, the evolutionary biologist argues that faith schools are socially divisive and educationally damaging. Citing the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where almost all schools are sectarian, he says: “If it wasn’t for religion, and especially religious education going on down the generations, you wouldn’t have a label by which to know who to oppress.”

He told The Times that his visit to Madani High School, an Islamic school in Leicester, revealed the educational dangers of faith schooling. “When I talked to a handful of girls and to their science teacher I was really shocked to discover that every single one of them rejected evolution because when in doubt they would always put the Koran ahead of science.”

Professor Dawkins said that the end of faith-based education would mean “religion would be taught in a comparative way according to a national curriculum, not indoctrination”. The solution, he said, was straightforward: “Faith schools should not be allowed to opt to out of religious education. Yet they are given this free pass to do religious education in their own way, which is not inspected by Ofsted.”

He added: “Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results but they’re not foolish enough to believe that it’s because of faith that they get good exam results.” Anecdotes of parents suddenly discovering God shortly before school admissions season are certainly common, and Professor Dawkins is sympathetic. “I don’t want to cast any blame on them. It’s hypocrisy that is imposed on them by a ridiculous and unjust system. It’s something that taxpayers shouldn’t be tolerating.” In fact, if he were in the same situation, he might be tempted to do the same thing. “Since I have absolutely no belief at all, I wouldn’t be betraying anything,” he said."

Women's shapes become like men's

We went up to meet some in-laws for a pub lunch in London. It was a sunny afternoon -- one of the last we'll have in August in England, I read -- and it was nice not to have to cook lunch. Here we are:


We went there because my niece Georgia has a summer job there as a waitress. I walked up to her and said, WAITRESS! and then made some demand. I'm sure she saw the amusing side of it. (?)

Isn't she a pretty thang? (below) She got some beautiful Italian looks from my bro-in-law's side of the family:


At the pub, then men started talking about sports and cars, as they do. We women, on the other hand, had some menopausal issues to discuss. I related how I had consulted my doctor about the menopause, and he had some horrible things to say. The worst was that women get flab around the middle because they lose hormones and their shapes become like men!

Unthinkable! Why should we start to get shapes like men after all we've gone through giving birth and raising children?

Writing a letter -- as obsolete as developing film?

I am writing a letter to my mother's best friend, Miss Betty McGehee in Natchez. She's become my 'new mom' since my mother died.

I was thinking as I wrote -- this will probably be one of the last few letters I write in my lifetime. The only reason I am putting pen to paper is because Miss Betty isn't online -- but most other people I corrrespond with are so me writing her a letter will probably become one of those memories that I touch on in old age.

"Let's see," I will say to my great-grandchildren, scratching my head in a vacant old-person way. "I think it was back in 2010 that I last wrote a letter to someone."

"Letter writing? What's that grandma?"

Then I'll explain about the old days when stores sold things called stationery and pens and you used a pen to write. Why it'll sound like chiseling on a stone to them by then.

Ageism in workplace: 'He was born in 1960'

I heard a supervisor criticize an employee today by saying this:

He was born in 1960.

As if that criticism sums everything up! The person he said this to laughed and proceeded to give examples of why a person born that long ago could have no understanding of our mobile phone industry today.

I couldn't believe it when I heard it. If only he'd written this criticism down in an email then maybe I could do something about it.

Weekend stuff

Snowflake comes to stay

I got a new rescue cat last night to foster. She's cute little Snowflake. She's 18 years old, only a few years younger than my own daughter. Her bed has a heating pad in it that turns on automatically when she sits on it. Sounds like heaven to me. She also comes with pain medication for her arthritis. I have to put a few drops of pain stuff in her food -- I had a headache this morning when I fed her, and I did think about having some myself.


Facebook Annoyances
My husband keeps using me for Over-the-Shoulder Facebooking -- it's annoying so my daughter is creating an account for him. He should have his own account and stop living through mine vicariously.


Rain for all the rest of August
It's been raining today, and I read it was going to rain for the rest of August. Argh, no more summer.

Here's Hyde Park yesterday:

Good luck messages that do nothing

A friend of mine sent me a good luck angel that was guaranteed to bring me a miraculous event on 11:06 the next morning. The next day a friend sent me a message picturing the Eye of God taken by the Hubble that would bring me good luck too.

I braced myself for an avalanche of good fortune.

Later I realized I'd been buying fruit at 11:06 and nothing good happened. And the rest of the weekend passed uneventfully. So none of the messages changed my luck at all....

But then I looked around the table at lunch. There was my husband and two wonderful kids. My kids are doing well in school and college. My husband is fine at his bank; I haven't been laid off from my job. We all laugh at the same jokes.

So maybe the good luck messages worked after all? Or maybe I didn't even need them

Top 10 Items You're Too Old to Wear | Lifescript.com

Check this out. Do you make any of these mistakes now that you are in your geriatric years? (Over 40 :))

I can't make them now because I've put on too much weight to wear anything trendy.
Top 10 Items You're Too Old to Wear | Lifescript.com

My new diet plans gone awry

I was going to go another diet. I'd gained 10 pounds since I started working at Nokia, and this time, it was coming off!

I stopped eating crisps and cut down on sugar, but nothing came off. I was perplexed.

Still thinking about it as I reached for some nuts in my cabinet at work where I keep snacks.

Turned the package over to check the calories -- it was only a small bag.

I dropped the bag in alarm! One small bag contains 4,000 calories!

FOUR THOUSAND. Can you even comprehend that amount?

I meant to only eat a handful during the day but I'd been consuming half a bag.

So that was giving me an additional 2,000 calories a day. What a great diet plan I'd devised.

The slow, whiny death of British Christianity

Excerpt from an interesting article I read today by Johann Hari:

"And now congregation, put your hands together and give thanks, for I come bearing Good News. Britain is now the most irreligious country on earth. This island has shed superstition faster and more completely than anywhere else. Some 63 percent of us are non-believers, according to an ICM study, while 82 percent say religion is a cause of harmful division. Now, let us stand and sing our new national hymn: Jerusalem was dismantled here/ in England's green and pleasant land.

How did it happen? For centuries, religion was insulated from criticism in Britain. First its opponents were burned, then jailed, then shunned. But once there was a free marketplace of ideas, once people could finally hear both the religious arguments and the rationalist criticisms of them, the religious lost the British people. Their case was too weak, their opposition to divorce and abortion and gay people too cruel, their evidence for their claims non-existent. Once they had to rely on persuasion rather than intimidation, the story of British Christianity came to an end.

Now that only six percent of British people regularly attend a religious service, it's only natural that we should dismantle the massive amounts of tax money and state power that are automatically given to the religious to wield over the rest of us. It's a necessary process of building a secular state, where all citizens are free to make up their own minds. Yet the opposition to this sensible shift is becoming increasingly unhinged. The Church of England, bewildered by the British people choosing to leave their pews, has only one explanation: Christians are being "persecuted" and "bullied" by a movement motivated by "Christophobia." George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, says Christians are now "second class citizens" and it is only "a small step" to "a religious bar on any employment by Christians".

Really? Let's list some of the ways in which Christians, and other religious groups, are given special privileges every day. Start with the educational system. Every school in Britain is required by law to make its pupils engage every day in "an act of collective worship of a wholly or mainly Christian nature". Yes: Britain is still a nation with enforced prayer. The religious are then handed total control of 36 percent of our state-funded schools, in which to indoctrinate children into their faith alone."

I kept wondering what Mr Hurstwood was doing

I just finished Theodore Dreiser's novel from 1900 called Sister Carrie. It's about a man named Hurstwood who falls in love with a young woman and destroys his life trying to have her.

I wade through so many crap modern novels -- they get good reviews, and I think I must be an idiot because I can't see what's good about them. But then I read something like this, written in 1900, and it's magnificent, and I feel restored.

This book was so engrossing that I spent time during the work day wondering what was going on with Mr. Hurstwood and Carrie and couldn't wait to get home to continue my travels with them.

Here's one nice passage from the book. Hurstwood is soon to lose all this, though he doesn't know it at the time:

A lovely home atmosphere is one of the flowers of the world...there is nothing more tender, nothing more delicate, nothing more calculated to make strong and just the natures cradled and nurtured in it. Those who have never experienced such a beneficient influence will not understand...the mystic chords which bind and thrill the heart of the nation, they will never know.

Reading great books like this gives me so much pleasure. How come there aren't more of them written these days? Why do I have to read a book from 1900 to discover good fiction?

Here's a pic of Laurence Olivier in the film version. Such a wonderful performance; I rented the movie last week and was amazed at how good it was.

Christians do not follow their own moral precepts

I'm reading an interesting book my friend Jane in Natchez gave me about an African prince who was mistakenly sold into slavery (Prince Among Slaves by Terry Alford)

Ibrahima has been a slave for a while, and they try to talk him into to converting to Christianity (he is a devout Muslim).

Here's the part that interested me:

"Prince speaks of the Christian religion with strong evidence of mature reflection," Griffin wrote about 1827. "I have conversed with him much upon the subject, and find him friendly disposed" toward Christianity. "[He] admires its [moral] precepts. His principal objections are that Christians do not follow them...He points out very forcibly the incongruities in the conduct of those who profess to be disciples of the immaculate Son of God."

"I tell you," Ibrahima said to him, "the [New] Testament very good law, you [Christians] no follow it; you no pray often enough, you greedy after money."

Eliz again: Ha! The Prince certainly nailed it.

The decline of the middle class

A friend and I were talking about the possibility of the middle class disappearing the other night.

Today the Financial Times has something along these lines:

“The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years.

That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.

The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility.”

Do near-death experiences mean we have immortal life?

I thought this article I found online was so interesting. I have a friend who reads books about near-death experiences and thinks people know things they shouldn't know and can see people who are dead.

Why Near-Death Experiences Are a Flimsy Justification for the Idea That We Have Immortal Souls

The evidence supporting the 'independent soul' explanation is flimsy at best. It is unsubstantiated. It comes largely from personal anecdotes. It is internally inconsistent.

Most arguments for spiritual belief that I encounter are so bad, they don't even count as arguments. But some believers in religion or spirituality do try to make real arguments for their beliefs, and try to defend them with evidence and logic. This evidence and logic are never very good... but they are sincere attempts to engage with reality instead of ignoring it. So I want to do these arguments the honor of taking them seriously... and pointing out how they're completely mistaken.

Here's the argument being made. Sometimes, when people are near death, they have weird experiences: experiences that seem like their consciousness is leaving their body. These experiences are rare -- even those who believe in the soul acknowledge that NDE's only happen to a small proportion of people near death -- but they happen. And there are some reports that people having these experiences see things they couldn't have known were there. These experiences can only be explained -- so the argument goes -- by a soul, separate from the brain, that departs from the brain when it's near death, and returns to it when death is staved off.

That's the argument.

So here's the problem.

There's this phenomenon -- consciousness.

There are essentially two ways to explain it. Either it's a physical, biological product of the brain -- or it has a component other than brain function: a soul that is separate from the brain, and that survives when the brain dies.

And there are two sets of evidence supporting these two explanations.

The evidence supporting the "biological product of the brain" explanation comes from rigorously-gathered, carefully-tested, thoroughly cross-checked, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, replicated, peer-reviewed research. An enormous mountain of research. A mountain of research that is growing more mountainous every day.

I cannot emphasize this enough. Read any current book on neurology or neuropsychology... or at least, any current book on neurology or neuropsychology that isn't written by a woo believer with an axe to grind who's cherry-picking the data. Read Oliver Sacks, V.S. Ramachandran, Steven Pinker. We are getting closer to understanding consciousness every day. The sciences of neurology and neuropsychology are, it is true, very much in their infancy... but they are advancing by astonishing leaps and bounds, even as we speak. And what they are finding, consistently, thoroughly, across the board, is that, whatever consciousness is, it is intimately and inextricably linked to the brain.

Changes in the brain result in changes in consciousness -- changes sometimes so drastic that they render a person's personality entirely unrecognizable. Changes in consciousness can be seen, using magnetic resonance imagery, as changes in the brain. This is the increasingly clear conclusion of the science: Consciousness is a product of the brain. Period.

What will I do with my husband?

I've been working and raising my children for 20 years. My daughter is away at university now, but only lives in London so she comes home on weekends sometimes. My son is 16 and has two years left in school.

I vaguely realized that the kids were growing up, and I would be moving into a new phase of my life pretty soon (the old phase) but pushed it out of my mind.

Then my son Mikey went to London to do work experience for two weeks, and I suddenly had a taste of what life would be like when the kids were really gone.

I would be ALL ALONE with my husband for the rest of my life! I was panicked. Would life getting really boring now? Do we have anything left to say with each other? And would he want sex all the time now?

I couldn't handle that! I confessed my fears to him, and he laughed. On our first night alone, we watched the 1951 classic movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. The second night, a friend of his came to stay, and I went out with some girls. The next night, he played bridge. And now it's the end of the week, and the kids will be home.

Whew, I made it through my first week without the kids OK. I guess I could manage those golden retirement years now...but still I worry that I won't have enough to do anymore.

The secret to making her come

I know, isn't the title of my post a gross thing to read -- ?

I get these messages all the time FROM MY OWN ACCOUNT. So I am spamming myself!

Some spamming thing has hijacked my email address and is sending porn messages. I hate this. I've asked my service provider to help me fix it but they are unresponsive.

Do any of you know out there how to stop myself being a spammer?

Playing with hormones

I went out for a drink with my friends last night. We've been feeling tired and haggard lately, due to advancing age and the stress of daily life. But one of my friends was looking good -- her skin was smooth and shiny, and I assumed she had discovered a new foundation -- but NO!

She had borrowed some bio-identical serum from a friend (those are the synthetic hormones that Suzanne Somers touts on Oprah) and used that and said she felt like a new woman. She really looked younger. We were skeptical then she produced a bottle of it from her bag. (You can get them from your doctor she said.)

She showed us how to apply the gel, and we had so much fun rubbing in on our inner arms then waiting to look younger. (We kept asking each other, 'does my skin look better yet?' 'do I look 25 now?')

It was like doing drugs at a party -- only we were doing hormone creams instead of crack.

Mikey's Big Adventure

My son Mikey, 16, is doing work experience in London this week for a medical practice. My daughter found the work for him, and he went to stay with her in London while he's working. (Schools in England want kids to have at least a week or two of work experience but usually the kids just end up filing stuff but still they get a flavor of an office.)

You can't tell my son ANYTHING -- he already knows it. So when Katie tried to impress upon him where he needed to go and which bus he needed to take, he was too cool to pay much attention.

So he got on the wrong bus. This is London, you know, a huge city. Did he have his phone with him? NO. Did he have any money on him? NO.

Katie conveyed this info to me at 9 yesterday morning -- that's when my worrying started. My son was lost in London with no way to contact us.

Every so often I contacted Katie. She had been in touch with the office where he was supposed to work but he hadn't shown up. Hours passed -- I kept checking with my husband for news.

We don't discuss personal stuff at the office so I just kept my worrying to myself. By 3 in the afternoon, we decided we'd contact the police. My daughter went to the house in London in case Mikey turned up there, and my husband went home to see if he was there.

My son finally showed up at the medical practice after taking a million bus rides and walking for miles. I think he had a miserable day trying to find out where he was so maybe this was the best lesson of all for him. Don't jump on a bus in London when you don't know where you are going and especially if you don't have a phone or money with you.

Manager of Nothing

I got a little promotion last month to become a manager of a team. That was pretty exciting. I have to do proposals and a competitor's analysis to see what everyone else is doing and what tools they are using.

I was busy getting stuck into my new role when the news came that there will be no budget for me to hire anyone.



That knocked the wind out of me! So now I will be Manager of Nothing.

(that's a pic of my new team above -- get it? I'm being ironic.)

Lulu Guinness bag and dead fish

Went to a birthday party on Saturday night for Sabine, one of our book club members. The rest of the book club bought her a Lulu Guinness bag as secret surprise. We were more excited than the birthday girl as she unwrapped the box. (I like this photo below because I took it right after she spotted the LG initials so she suspects what her present is but can't be sure.)


Fish Looking at Me (and trying to make me feel guilty)
I asked my husband Mel to get some fish for me to make, and he didn't get fillets but a whole fish. What the hell was I gonna do with that? I took them out to put them in foil with some spices then onto the grill and they just looked at me like I was a bad person:

I can just hear this one pleading -- Please don't cook and eat me!


Well, we did eat him but it was such a pain to try and get meat from a whole fish with all the bones and everything that it wasn't worth it.

Chaos at home
My daughter and son are getting ready to go to London tomorrow. She works in a medical office, and she got my son Mikey work experience for two weeks. He's going to live in London with her during the week. I'm trying to pack for him but honestly, he'd go up there without any clothes or a toothbrush if I didn't intevene.

The house will be so quiet without the kids. I forgot and did food planning for the whole family so we'll have way too much to eat during the week. Next week, however, I think I'll go on a cooking strike and relax until Mikey returns home.

Miss NeuroScience

Congrats to my daughter Katie who just graduated from Kings College, London, with a neuroscience degree. I couldn't have done anything like that -- she's so smart.

She's back in medical school in September -- she has three more years to go before she's a fully fledged doctor.

Vacations don't make you happier afterwards

I know this is true (below). The weather was chilly for our vacation, and my son said he never wanted to go anywhere else with his family again THEN I got shingles right after from stress (my doctor said).

The jet lag from California to England almost killed us too. We felt terrible.

Article below:

"From an informal and highly unscientific survey of friends and colleagues, I can report that the reasons for not feeling happy after returning from vacation include: the flight home (red-eye to New York); realizing what they just did to their credit-card balance; getting back to work; wondering if they should have gone somewhere different; sharp memories of kids fighting constantly in the back seat of the rental car; and sadness that the next vacation will not arrive for months, typically around the end of the year, making them wonder over and over, How am I going to hold out until then?

I, in contrast, not having taken a vacation this year and with none scheduled, am positively euphoric compared with these dour souls: I have something to look forward to and a world of possible destinations to fantasize about.

Anecdotes do not equal data, as scientists say, but in this case the anecdotes about vacations failing to give us a post-trip mood boost match the results of years of research. Studies point to an inescapable conclusion: “Generally, there is no difference between vacationers’ and non-vacationers’ post-trip happiness,” as the authors of a recent paper in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life put it. One interesting exception is the period just before taking a vacation, when about-to-be travelers report feeling happier than nonvacationers, possibly because the anticipation puts them in a good mood."