Wednesday 11 January 2012

January 2012 – Where Does Time Go?

That was a rhetorical question and I don’t expect an answer – unless anyone has a better knowledge of ‘The State of The Universe’ than I do – or even more importantly than Professor Stephen Hawking does.  Happy Birthday! to him – a few days late but I don’t suppose he will mind.

A quote from Hawking is "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet."  I like that and we will continue to try and meet that target this year.

I’d like to follow his advice literally as well as metaphorically so perhaps at least one meteor shower will arrive when we have a clear sky?  The first didn’t so I have to wait till April to find that out.

We hope to make another trip to the USA this year for a family holiday and to see places we have not visited yet.  It looks as if there will be 10 – 13 of us and finding a house we can rent for us all is difficult.  After all, how many families nowadays plan trips with that many members?

We’ve also got a list of places to visit with the caravan this year that would require  some manipulation of the space-time continuum to manage.  We do like a challenge and are bidding on e-bay for a Police Box.  Worth a try?

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Alan’s book comes on apace and he still gets a lot of contact and information from his old students – I should, perhaps, call them Alumni rather than ‘old’! To catch up on them go to his website.  It may take a bit of scrolling but we are hoping to improve that soon.  Web technology has come a long way since he started it 7 years ago.  In those days, you had to learn Dreamweaver to build a site and neither of us had the time or inclination to do that.  This blog took me less time to set up than Alan’s site.

My venture of A Yorkshire Cook, born out of numerous queries about recipes and cooking has come on well.  It is climbing the Alexa rankings nicely and visitors are beginning to comment.

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As we get to eat the results of my experiments, Alan is happy.  I’m enjoying writing it and also the photography – though food photography turns out to be a tricky new skill to learn.

The weather has been as unpredictable as ever!  Far from the nasty snow and ice of last winter, so far, we have had mild weather.  The rhubarb crop is hampered by lack of frost which is needed to set it into growth. 

We have been lucky in a couple of weeks dominated by high winds.  The most we have seen is the dash for freedom of local wheelie bins which may have caused problems for those who had to go out – we just hunkered down and waited it out.  Then we handed a stray waste food bin, which had wandered into our front garden, to the recycling collectors when they arrived (a day late).

Halifax did make it into the national news when a dormer window was blown off, over a house, taking the chimney stack with it and crashing into the street!

Now we are beginning to put our heads above the parapet and today we are going on an expedition to find the right surface for our front garden.  Small as it is, I can no longer manage it and it depresses me to see weeds and a tangle of growth.  I kick myself that I didn’t think of this when we sorted the tiny back yard which has worked very well with a raised bed.

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We hope to sort it this spring and leave me with a rather nice raised trough to play with.  Photos will follow when we have the job done.

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