16 March 2010 (Tuesday) - National Science Week

I woke up at 4am again, and was disappointed to find it was still dark. I lay dozing until 6am, when I decided it was light enough to see what I was doing, and so I got up. There are those that might say I got up too early, but when I have a job to do, I want to get on with it. After all, I’ve painted the front of the house in the dark before.

I was expecting to take an age to fix the pond filter. The thing went together in about five minutes, and seemed to be working when I left it. Mind you I’ve had to bodge the lid on the base to prevent small leaks. When it’s filled with water it’s very heavy, and over the years where it’s been sitting on uneven ground the base unit has rather bent itself out of shape, and so the lid doesn’t fit quite as snugly as once it did. In all honesty the box probably could do with being replaced, but a new box would similarly twist out of shape too. Unless I re-landscaped a flat area on which the filter unit could sit. Which would be a lot of hard work as well as a lot more expense. I’ll see how the thing holds up over the next day or so before doing anything too radical.


Last night I’d managed to park my car outside the house. This was handy because I had those planks of wood to bring in. So I lugged them about, and then remembered that I’d planned to clean up the front garden last weekend, but had run out of time. I got the brush and swept up, which didn’t take long. I then experimented with my wooden planks. They look like they will fit where I want them exactly, but if I just bodge them in place, they too will rot away. So for each one I’ll need to clear out the existing gravel, lay fresh membrane under where each plank will go, screw the planks in place, treat them, then re-gravel. That’ll be an afternoon’s work. Less if any of my loyal readers fancy chipping in (he smiled hopefully!). Pausing only briefly to chat with the blue tit which had been following me round all morning, I then went and woke my darling wife from her slumbers – by now it was 7.30am. Time for brekky.


I then mucked about in NeverWinter for a while before popping to Bybrook Barn for some membrane. It was great – there was a mad woman there, having rather vocal disagreements with the voices in her head. She even tried to get me to take her side of the argument against the voices at one point. I would love to have stayed but I had to get to work.


I wonder how many of my loyal readers knew that it is now National Science Week? It is – and today we’d invited all the local sixth forms to send their science students up to the hospital for a day of science. During the morning they had talks on diabetes, cervical cytology, and dull stuff like that. During the afternoon the theme was parasites (yuk!) and one of the talks was me wittering on about the effects of malaria on human evolution. I’m told it went down well. Let’s hope so…


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