Biting off more than I can chew

The corollary to my post about being either a Goddess or Gormless is that I have now completely and massively bitten off more than I can chew.

Tonight I need to assemble and ice LittleBear's birthday cake, and wrap his birthday presents (how do you wrap a bicycle? I have no idea. I'm just hoping 9m of dinosaur wrapping paper will do the job) and draw a giant dinosaur for playing "pin the tail on the dinosaur". Not to mention the cooking, washing up, laundry, and getting stuff ready to take the whole family to London tomorrow morning.

Last night I sat on the kitchen floor assembling children's party bags while waiting for the timer to tell me that I could take the sponge cake out of the oven. The sponge cake that had required 6 eggs, despite the fact there will only be 5 children at LittleBear's party. I think there may be a cake surplus...

The night before last, I sat sobbing on the sitting room floor, watching Billy Elliot while sewing closed the last seam on a beanie volcano. My tears were many-fold...

... I cried because I'm a complete sap, and tear-jerking overblown nonsense that it is, Billy Elliot makes me cry (Not necessarily for the reasons you might think. Billy's mother has died before the film even begins, and I cried at the thought of my beautiful, precious boy facing growing up without me. I cried at the thought of dying myself and missing every moment that my sweet child's future holds. I cried because I have a beautiful, wonderful, inspiring, adorable boy and he's growing up and he won't be my baby forever).

... I cried because I was desperately disappointed in the volcano beanie. I had had in my mind an image of what I wanted, and I had fallen short. I had spent hours and hours and hours making the stupid thing, and I was suddenly utterly convinced that it had been a waste of time. That LittleBear wouldn't be interested in playing with it with his dinosaurs, that all he really wants is armfuls of cheap plastic rubbish, and that I'm wasting my life, time, energy and love making pointless space-consuming stuff that nobody wants and isn't very good anyway.

... Mostly I cried because I was so very, very, very tired. It was 10 o'clock and my list of Things To Do  didn't seem to be getting any shorter, the days left until LittleBear's birthday and then party were diminshing faster than I could keep up with and I was floundering. I couldn't imagine getting everything done that I wanted to get done and I couldn't see the wood for the trees. I couldn't see what could be dropped as non-important and what was essential. I couldn't prioritise, all I could see was the looming, growing, lurking, threatening LIST that I would never complete.

And then the film finished, everyone lived happily ever after, I poked and prodded my volcano a bit more, and imagined some dinosaurs scrambling up its north face, exploring the cave, hiding in the caldera, and (just like last week) life didn't seem so bad after all. Oh, and I had a glass of wine and some chocolate, but I'm sure that had nothing whatsoever to do with my change in mood...

So here we are:

Volcano with cave for hiding dinosaurs in

Volcano with large caldera, also for hiding dinosaurs in

The geologists among you, or perhaps even those who are more than 30% awake, will have noticed that though there is lava pouring down the outside of the volcano, the caldera is strangely empty. This is because the extra red and orange felt I ordered  on expedited delivery LAST WEEK was only delivered while I wrote this post. Therefore the red and orange beanie balls that were to be hot rocks filling the caldera have not been made. And there is not a chance that they are going to get made between now and Saturday morning. I'm moderately certain LittleBear won't mind. I'm also moderately certain that my little pedant will notice. On the other hand, I'm not planning to wrap this present, I'm planning to set up a little prehistoric scene downstairs for him to discover, so I'm hoping excitement will overwhelm pedantry. Just this once.

A sow's ear from a silk purse

Anyone who has received a Christmas card from me in the last few years will know that I make my own. I generally do some sort of calligraphy or illuminated piece of text. A few years ago I (along with a few of my colleagues) made some rather disparaging remarks about the quality of Christmas card we were using at work. When I then sent out my own cards, the Chairman was sufficiently taken with my design that he asked if I would design a card for the company. I did so last year, and then somehow it was assumed I would do so again this year. More fool me, I made another one this year. More fool for more than one reason. For one thing, even after only two years, it's now being taken for granted that I will spend hours of my free time producing a piece of artwork for the company. For another thing, I rashly completed work's card before my own, and mine is now languishing at the back of a queue of other more urgent projects (see LittleBear's birthday cake, LittleBear's birthday presents, LittleBear's broken toys that need mending, keeping the family fed, clothed, bathed and if at all possible sane). I fear for the chances of actually finishing it and getting it printed in time to write, address and post cards before Christmas. Again. Same as every year.

However, that's not my main problem with this particular project. My main problem is what the Chairman has done with my design. It's a hand-painted, hand-lettered design. In fact, here it is, in not-very-well-scanned format:

 

You get the idea. At its heart it is a piece of lettering. It is all about the font. 

And do you know what the Chairman has done? Do you know what font he has used inside the card for the greeting? He has used Microsoft Comic Sans. An excrescence on the face of the world. An insult to every well-proportioned font known to man. A festering pustule on the face of typography. When shown his draft of the greeting, I objected to Comic Sans in the strongest possible terms (translation: I swore like a navvy). His answer? "Well I like it". And now I've seen the proof back from the printer, and there Comic Sans squats, lumpen and ugly inside my card. What I want to do is stomp in, snatch my design back and say "screw you! If you can't respect my views of my own artwork, you don't deserve it!" But I won't, because I'm feeling a bit too munchkin-like for that. But it's the last time I design a card for work. They can used another crappy photoshopped picture of the cathedral in the snow next year.

 

Goddess or Gormless?

I am, quite frankly, pretty awesome. Either that or deranged. Yes, well, perhaps the latter.

Today, in no particular order, I have:

• read a lot of dinosaur encyclopedia entries to LittleBear
• made a beef casserole with LittleBear, during which he was sensible and funny and helpful and used a knife and a garlic crusher and a corkscrew and no blood was drawn
• taken LittleBear swimming and then managed to keep him happy even though swimming was cancelled because of excessive chlorine levels
• provided the wherewithall for LittleBear to make firework pictures with glue and glitter (and words cannot express how much I hate all crafts that involve glitter. The mess... oh the mess....)
• read an enormous book about deep-ocean creatures to LittleBear
• made train tracks and scared the trains with dinosaurs
• taught a variety of baby Emperor penguins to swim across the carpet
• planted 60 crocus bulbs and 2kg of daffodil bulbs while LittleBear watched "Spy in the Huddle" (about penguins)
• provided three square meals plus snacks to LittleBear, all of which were met with approval
• made shortcrust pastry and turned the aforementioned casserole into pie for me and BigBear (in the length of time it took BigBear to read bedtime stories)
• cuddled LittleBear. A lot. Because... why not?
• hand-painted a sugarpaste tyrannosaurus rex made earlier in the week, to go on his birthday cake
• at 9pm headed to the 24hour Tesco to acquire 9m of dinosaur wrapping paper to wrap LittleBear's birthday bicycle, plus a large white sheet for making the inside of a volcano bean bag*, plus a wide variety of chocolate and beer.
• done laundry. There's always laundry
• sat down with a glass of red wine and wrote about how amazingly efficient and awesome** I am

* Normally, I would go to a fabric shop and buy the right length of fabric for the job in hand. However, my goddess-like competence suffered a minor malfunction in the planning stage and I have run out of plain cotton, and I'm pretty certain a felt beanie volcano that will be pummelled by dinosaurs needs a strong inner bag to prevent bean-leakage. Normally, I would nip to the local fabric shop in WorkTown during the week, but this week I'm being visited by the Chinese again. You remember the Chinese? Well, they're coming back for more training, and I'm down for large chunks of it. Which means no ducking out of work for sneaky shopping trips. And I've been so busy stressing about making LittleBear's absurdly complicated birthday cake, trying to make a volcano beanie, getting his birthday presents, organising his trip to the London Aquarium that I have done no preparation for their visit. That's right, the anxiety-monster in the corner is planning to wing it tomorrow morning for 3 hours of training on leak detection, analyte valve maintenance, stepper motor drive and who knows what else. Admittedly I should know what else. I wrote the training schedule. I've just forgotten. But at least I can lie awake all night worrying about it as a bit of a change from lying awake worrying about LittleBear's cake.

** Or perhaps excessively bad at planning and time management, with stupidly over-optimistic assessments of what it is possible to get done in a day.

Not so bad after all

Sometimes I find it hard to remember the good things. To hold in my mind the things that I've achieved. The times that I've succeeded. The occasions when I've been genuinely good at something. For the most part, when I look back at my life, as well as remembering with vivid, painful clarity every mistake, every embarrassment, every misjudgement, I see a background of mediocrity. I see someone that I perceive to be very ordinary. And then, just occasionally, something happens that jolts me out of that perception, and I have a pause of wondered puzzlement and think to myself that actually, I'm not so bad after all.

I know that a there are people who would look at my life, at the things I've done, the places I've been, the accolades I've received and think I must be deranged not to perceive myself as a success. And that when I say, "I'm no good at anything" I must just be fishing for compliments. I had an ex-boyfriend like that, who rather cuttingly said to me, "I'm not here just to bolster your ego" when I was feeling particularly down. I think he genuinely couldn't imagine that the way I saw myself was so divergent from the way the rest of the world appears to see me. So I ask you to know this: I am not fishing for compliments; I am not looking for praise or validation; when I say that I feel mediocre, it doesn't matter what you see. What you see is not what I feel.

Back to my recent jolt. There were two of them actually. Firstly, one of my lovely cousins referred to me as "brilliant". OK, so she called me "flawed and brilliant", but since I know I can't argue with the first adjective, I'll gaze in wonderment at the second one. The second jolt was seeing someone I studied at University with presenting the weather on Al Jazeera English. This prompted me to Google her (obviously) and I found her Wikipedia entry, which claims "she was awarded an MA in Physics, gaining the University's top marks for the final year presentation project". And I instantly thought to myself, "she certainly didn't get the top marks". Why do I think that? Well, the final year presentation project was a joint project, and I was in the same group of 4 people as weather lady. And all four of us received the same mark. Since I know I can't have got the top mark, she can't have done either.

Except... hold on... I don't actually remember what mark I got in that project. I do know that I was awarded very high marks in all my other projects. In fact, I know that overall my project work alone was classed as a starred first, which was enough to salvage my abysmal performance in exams and get me an upper second at the end of the year. So, it's not completely implausible that weather lady and I did get alphas in the presentation. And, now I come to think of it, I was awarded a prize for my project work. How did I forget that? How is it possible to spend so much of my time thinking I'm not good enough that I forget I was awarded a prize during the final year of a Cambridge degree? How is it that my immediate reaction on seeing a statement that implies I was good at something is to assume the statement is a lie?

So, here I am, wondering if it's too late to change the way I see myself, the way I view my past, the memories that are strongest. But also having a moment of thinking to myself that actually, sometimes, I'm not so bad after all. And maybe that's a start.

Dinosaurs still rule our world

My son has, to put it mildly, a dinosaur obsession. This obsession does not simply express itself in reading dinosaur stories or playing with toy dinosaurs. It expresses itself in reading every single dinosaur book in the library. No matter how advanced you or I might think these books are, they are the only ones he will allow his devoted parents to read. No more Mog. No more Winnie the Pooh. No more tigers coming to tea. This obsession also expresses itself in playing only with dinosaurs. Only dinosaur figurines, only dinosaur cuddly toys, only dinosaur jigsaws, only dinosaur board games, only dinosaur games on my tablet. Even lego is now used only to make dinosaurs with. His rather lovely cuddly cheetah has now been declared to be some kind of predatory dinosaur. As has our poor cat on occasion. And me.

The upshot of this dinosaurcentric world-view is that he is now an alarmingly well-informed nearly-4 year old. When we went to the Sedgwick Museum, the nice lady undertaking a survey of visitors suggested perhaps he should be invited to give talks. It also gives rise to some quite startling questions and pronouncements...

"Mummy? What did the first animals evolve from?"

"Mummy? Did the animal populations recover faster from the end-Cretaceous mass extinction or from the extinction at the beginning of the Triassic?"

"Mummy? I don't think the carers at nursery even know there is such a thing as saurischian and ornithischian dinosaurs..." <said with a remarkable degree of regret>

"It's very sad that the dinosaurs are all extinct isn't it Mummy? I think it would be nice if they were still here. Only the friendly ones though."

After I insisted that my dinosaur (forever the victim in our games) was going to run away to the middle of Pangaea, where it's dry and dusty and his dinosaur won't want to follow:

"No Mummy. These are late-Cretaceous dinosaurs, and Pangaea has already broken up."

"Mummy? Is Ornithocheirus bigger than Quetzlcoatlus?"

Yesterday I conceded to allowing LittleBear to take one of his favourite library books on the subject in to nursery today ("Only for the adults to look at Mummy, because they don't know very much about dinosaurs"). I thought it might be a good idea for them to see what it is that he's reading at home. I rather get the feeling that he's a little... unusual... in his interests and vocabulary. Every day I am told by one carer or another that Robert knows a lot about dinosaurs. As though this could possibly come as any kind of surprise to me.

And finally, when we were in the library this week, he pulled a new book from the shelf, pointed to the cover and read aloud "Discover more Prehistoric Monsters". He appears to be teaching himself to read. About dinosaurs. I think my life might be going to get quite challenging.


Footnote:
LittleBear can't really, properly read. What he can do it recognise some words instantly and take intelligent guesses at the overall sentence. He clearly absorbs the start of the word and then takes a stab in the dark. Turns out it's quite an effective strategy, though doomed to failure in certain circumstances. Ichthyostega, Ichthyosaurus and Ichthyornis are indistinguishable unless accompanied by a picture, in which case he knows them immediately. I can already, however, see him being condemned to the same academic future as me: if things are easy and he can jump straight to the right answer, then all is rosy and he's happy. He's bright enough, as I was, to jump straight to a lot of right answers. If there's a challenge, I can already see the look of despair and failure sweep across his face as he mutters "I can't do it Mummy". I try to cheerfully encourage and support, because I don't know what the hell else to do, and allow him to try and fail and try again and succeed. I don't want him to be too much like me - giving up at the first hurdle, instantly convinced he's a failure. I want him to know it's OK not to be able to do something first time. That it's OK to have another go. That sometimes the things that are worth doing take practice and effort. Instead I have a take-the-easy path LittleBear who guesses and then gives up. Oh well, he's only 3 (for another week).

What do you do?

So, there I was, sitting at work, when I realised that there are quite a lot of people out there who don't really know what I actually do on a day-to-day basis. Sure, I'm a physicist, and I do physics-stuff. But what does physics-stuff look like? So then I trawled through the server hunting out some old photos of my time here, so you could all have an opportunity to gaze in wonder laugh your socks off.

Being a contortionist

I do appear to spend alarming amounts of time attempting to get under, over or into the scientific instruments we build. This did not change, even when I was heavily pregnant.

Do not adjust your sets. I am upside down.

For reasons that continue to escape me, every single time we build an instrument, as part of the pre-test, one component is mounted upside down, at  the back of a vacuum chamber with no room to manoeuvre. And every single time one of us (usually me) has to dangle upside down to measure tiny voltages. One day I might try and change this working practice.

It also escapes me why there are quite so many occasions when my colleagues sit on a chair while I climb into precarious positions to sort things out. 

Here, let me get that for you.

Now you mention it, this step-ladder is quite painful

 Or under things:

No, I'm fine, it's quite comfy in here thanks.

You do realise I may now be here until I give birth don't you?

 

 Wearing silly clothes

Another feature of my working life is the opportunity to wear silly things. Sometimes these are work-related. Sometimes not.

You'd wear breathing gear for 20 litres of acetone too.

It was cold at work. We had hats.

This isn't me deliberately pulling a silly face. This is me carefully aligning an ion detector.

The gloves in the preceding photo are the bane of my existence. We cannot use powdered gloves, since the whole point is to absolutely avoid any contamination. Especially powder. So inside the gloves becomes instantly sweaty and vile. Instantly.  

The Day I Spilled Coffee Down My Trousers

Last week, I spilled an entire, very large, mug of coffee down my trousers. My only alternative was a white paper cleanroom suit sized for a 6' tall man. I think I carry it off rather well, don't you?

And just because I can, I think it's worth mentioning what a family-friendly place I work in.

Me and LittleBear visit at 3 months

Me and LittleBear visit at 8 months

LittleBear helps me work (aged 2)

Writing about not writing

I seem to have run out of steam. Run out of things to say. Run out of the energy to say them. Run out of the will-power to be bothered.

I read an article in the Guardian at the weekend by Jack Monroe and in my head I "wrote" a long post about gender identity and stereotyping. And then I thought, "why bother?" It wouldn't have been funny, or amusing or erudite, just more "blah, blah, blah" from inside my head.

I nearly wrote about the irritating features of my new pyjamas, but that seemed too trivial, even considering that one pair of pyjamas has managed to wind me up in two different ways. And I still like them.

I could have written about my challenging emotional relationship with a large fuchsia shrub in my garden, but that seemed too peculiar, even for me.

I could have written about the things that LittleBear is saying and doing, but he's just so lovely, and wonderful, and funny, and clever, that if I try and write about him I know I'll just come across as the worst kind of bragging, smug mother in the world. So I didn't write that.

One of my friends suggested I could write about the reaction in the UK to one policeman's death while on duty, and in some way contrast it to, well, something, about the US. But I didn't want to start a flame war. And I'm not even sure what point he thinks I could or should be making.

I could have written about being tired. About being tired of being tired. Of being tired of complaining about being tired. But I'm tired of writing about being tired. And having spent time with fellow mothers recently, I know I have it easy in so many ways.

I thought about writing about work. But then I remembered that it would probably be a good idea to keep my job, and this is a public blog, so I shouldn't write the things that I'm thinking. Besides which, the minutiae of our office politics are minute, and tedious even when you live them, let alone for someone else to read about.

I might have written about the giant beanie volcano I'm making (no, really I am). But it's not finished, and I don't know if it ever well be, or quite how I'm going to manage to make the cave inside it. So perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it at all, because now if I never finish it, you'll all know about the failed project.

So I haven't written for a week. And this is just a holding pattern, to explain why I haven't written. I don't think this is the beginning of the end of writing. Maybe it's the end of the beginning and my initial enthusiasm has waned. Or maybe I'm just in a blue funk and can't really be arsed with life at the moment. That sounds more like it. I just can't be arsed.