February Reading List

Look at me go! I'm managing the second month of maintaining my reading list!

Guardian of the Horizon - Elizabeth Peters

As with January's list, a comforting foray into a somewhat parodic Edwardian murder mystery. The second of my new Christmas Amelia Peabody books, and one that threw me slightly, as I'm acquiring them in publication order, but the author went back and filled in some of the story's chronology as she progressed, so this one jumps back in time 9 years prior to the one I read in January. My feeble mental state was not ready for his and I felt quite put out. Particularly as it returned to a point in the story filled with unresolved sexual tension that I'd been happy to see the back of.

Godsgrave - Jay Kristoff

Second part in a trilogy and a thoroughly entertaining fantasy romp with magic, gladiators and assassins. Extremely violent and no holds barred in killing off favoured characters to advance the plot, or sometimes just to kill them. Slightly irked by the obvious male gaze exhibited - the main protagonist is a girl, but the male author spends a fair tranche of time on her sexual desires and exploits, including an utterly gratuitous threesome. Admittedly the man involved did end up swiftly and unsympathetically murdered, but it felt very much like male-fantasy fulfillment, as did the heroine's discovery of lesbianism. Isn't the idea to "write what you know"? I was unconvinced by this being what the author knows particularly well, but very much convinced it was written by a man for other men.

The Wrong Side of the Sky - Gavin Lyall

Returning to another book I haven't read in decades. A proper rollicking adventure thriller from the 1960s with full complement of beautiful women and hard-drinking, wise-cracking, damaged men. Didn't remember any of it and couldn't put it down.

Darkdawn - Jay Kristoff

Concluding part in the trilogy, and the author redeemed himself by mocking his own writing style in a curious plot device that involved the characters finding a copy of the books that they themselves appear in. Which worked a lot better than it sounds. Really enjoyed the series, despite my caveats about the sex scenes.

Knots and Crosses - Ian Rankin

I've been acquiring the Rebus novels since about 2001, but realise (as with many of my collections of detective novels) I don't often re-read them. And it turns out I'm not sure I have ever re-read this one, the first of the series. Aside from the fact that I'd forgotten the plot, I'd also forgotten the character that Rebus started as in this book. I'm much more familiar with late-era Rebus, and had forgotten both his origins and how much he changed. I may have to gradually work my way through them all again to see how his character develops. 

So there we are, another mix of returning to books that haven't been read in years, and new books. My major revelation is that after sufficient years buying and reading books I have now reached the stage where it's very definitely worth re-reading some of them, even if they're not works of high art that will reveal new facets of themselves upon repeat visits. My memory is now faded enough and I've filled it with so many books, that I can go back and discover old books almost as if they're new. Which should save me a fortune.

What I've learnt in Week 4,792 of lockdown

Encroaching insanity, and provoked by a friend asking, "But what are you doing for you?" I have decided it's time to do more than sit on the sofa drinking wine and rotting my brain with television every evening. To which end, I have dug out some books on sewing that I acquired some time ago, and have decided to make myself a skirt. Being the kind of sucker for punishment that I am, rather than buying a regular paper pattern, all nicely marked up, I am attempting to follow instructions from a book. This is not to say that the book doesn't have a pattern in it, rather that it has too many patterns on not enough pieces of paper. In fact, it has the patterns for 24 different skirts, in something like ten sizes each, spread across a paltry 3 sheets of paper. 

Perhaps some of you will be familiar with the technique that Jane Austen and Charles Darwin both used of rotating the page when they reached the end and writing again at 90 degrees to their original screed. The result was, unsurprisingly, somewhat confusing to the casual reader. Well, I think it would be fair to say that 240 patterns on three sheets of paper is... erm... challenging.

What are all these lines for?

After several evenings I did finally manage to render this mysterious collection of coloured lines into a set of paper pattern pieces. Having conquered the mighty challenge of cutting the paper pattern, I moved onto the slightly easier territory of cutting the fabric, and was momentarily lulled into thinking I knew what I was doing. And then I began to doubt whether, despite my careful and repeated measurements, the finished object was going to comfortably encircle my comfortable girth. So during the cutting phase I actually made the lining pieces one size larger and test fitted them. And then reduced them back to the original measured size, as I was just being paranoid. 

Filled with a warm glow of satisfaction at having a neat pile of fabric all cut and ready to go, I returned to the first set of instructions that actually pertained to sewing anything. And I discovered that I don't know what understitching a seam means. And I don't own an invisible zipper foot. I don't even own a visible zipper foot, let alone an invisible one. I was beginning to regret that in a book of patterns that starts with easiest and works towards hardest I had not opted to start at the beginning but had leapt in half way through. 

Apparently neither of these are zipper feet

. 

I managed the darts in the lining. I managed to join the three sections of lining together. I even managed to join two of the pieces of outer fabric together. And then I reached the dizzying heights of Step 4, sewing the side seams. One sentence in, and I have to take a diversion to page 158, to discover how to insert pocket bags. Half-way through the instructions on inserting pocket bags, I must divert to page 139 to learn what it means to understitch a seam. At which point I have to give in and scour the entire book to try and work out what is meant by the "facing fabric" in a seam. Having pored over these instructions, and indeed made notes to myself, I retreat to the kitchen to press open the scant handful of seams that I have sewn so far. But it is late, and I am tired, and I fail to notice the setting on the iron when I start to press open the darts on the lining. It turns out that polyester lining fabric does not react well to a hot iron.

A disappointing outcome to an evening's work

So my first evening of actual sewing ended in unpicking a seam, cutting a new piece of lining, and pinning and tacking it in place. I decided at this point that I could not be trusted to do anything involving machinery. So I returned to the sofa with a glass of wine and some mind-rotting television. It's a good thing I'm making a summer skirt, as it might take another 6 months to finish.

January reading list

In an attempt to find something to focus on that is neither pandemic nor politics related, I'm going to try keeping a monthly record* of not only what I've read, but vague thoughts on what I've read.

So here goes for January

The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman

Part 3 in the His Dark Materials trilogy.  I'd decided to re-read the trilogy in December, and the final part fell in January. I had loved these when they first came out, and every now and then have thought about re-reading them but for some reason they still seemed quite recent. It turns out they're over twenty years old, and it came as something of a surprise to discover just how much I didn't remember of the details. In fact, I barely remembered anything beyond the odd vague story arc, and who the main characters were. And I didn't even remember all of them to start with. Which just goes to show there is a benefit to getting older and forgetting stuff. It becomes possible to re-read books and enjoy them almost as much as first time round. 

The Golden One - Elizabeth Peters

Amelia Peabody mysteries are a comfort blanket, a hot water bottle and a cup of cocoa; they're a soothing balm against the cold and grey. Possible to read without taxing the faculties too much, but entertaining, silly and enjoyable. For those who haven't read them, they're murder mysteries set in the late 1800s to early 1900s in Egypt with a redoubtable archaeologist heroine and her family. Firmly tongue-in-cheek. I hadn't read this one before, so it was a particularly enjoyable treat.

The Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett

First in a set of six books, the other five of which will not be troubling my bookshelves. This book slowed me down enormously as, despite having a reasonably entertaining plot, it was bogged down with too many characters, too much double-triple-quadruple crossing, a tedious habit of quoting Latin and French and, finally, unnecessarily florid prose that would have required frequent dictionary-consultation if only I could be bothered. Oh, and a transparently derivative hero - the Scarlet Pimpernel was implausible enough, without being copied and embroidered upon to a point of utter absurdity.

I blame the third of these for the fact that I only read three books in January, which is below average. Apathy and exhaustion may have played a role as well. But two hits and a miss is an acceptable ratio.

* Given my current mental and emotional fortitude, I can imagine this attempt lasting at least a month.

Still here

Hello there! Remember me? I used to blog here. Sometimes I wrote several times a week. I'm not sure I remember that to be honest. I'm not sure I remember the feeling of having the energy to write that often, or of having enough to say. I barely have enough to say to maintain a conversation with BigBear, let alone write something that might even raise a wry smile with the rest of you. We all know how it goes now, you talk to a friend on Zoom and try as you might, you just end up bleating about boredom, stress, homeschooling, whose spouse does the most/least around the house, government ineptitude, vaccinations or whichever other permutation of lockdown happens to be at the forefront of your mind. It's not as though we've all got lots of interesting films, concerts, holidays or adventures to tell each other about, is it?

So, to save time, here's a Generic Blog Post that you can pop in and read whenever you're wondering what the Bear Family is up to.

BigBear is coding, with the exact location of where he is currently to be found in the house being determined from a complex algorithm based upon the temperature of his feet, the angle of the sun through the windows, the noise from the homeschooling department, and how persistently IdiotCat is pestering him.

LittleBear is squirming in his chair, running the nails of his left hand back and forth across the fabric of the seat to make a rythmic rasping noise as he listens to a message from his class teacher. A rasp that begins to file through the fabric of your mind after approximately five and a quarter seconds. It's History first thing, to get the pain out of the way early in the day, and the entire lesson is punctuated by complaints of "I can't do this, it's too hard." Particularly as it involves drawing a picture. Why? Why must they have to draw so many pictures? LittleBear is not a child who wishes to express himself through the medium of narrative collage. After forty-seven hours on the history picture, it turns out there's another task. By this point, even I'm not sure I can face more History. It involves expressing an opinion. Asking LittleBear his opinion on anything other than football or Minecraft is akin to asking a cactus whether it wants porridge for breakfast. I think the cactus would answer quicker. LittleBear certainly doesn't have, or wish to be asked to express, opinions on the religious beliefs of Vikings and the impact these had on their life choices.

Having completed his History, and had an interstitial penalty shoot-out with Mummy, he moves on to Maths, as a relaxing treat. LittleBear is genuinely very good at Maths. And Maths is LittleBear's favourite subject. Except when his teacher asks him what his favourite work from last week is, and suddenly it's RE. The RE that he has been known to ask why they study. The RE that caused him to sob and wail about the injustices of life, not to mention the iniquities of being asked to draw a picture. (Again, why? Why always the pictures?) The Maths however, will be awesome, and LittleBear is amazing, and brilliant, and Mummy must come and see how brilliant he is. Until he makes a mistake, and then he's an idiot, and the stupidest child in the world, and he's never doing another Maths question ever again, and he's going back to bed. It's a real rollercoaster in Maths lessons round here.

Having recovered from the Maths, and forgotten that the History even happened, and had another penalty shoot-out with Mummy, it's lunch-time. A chance to wonder which permutation of bread and cheese we're having today. Or to quote one of my colleagues, "I'm bored of bread and cheese, I think I'll have pizza today..."

English after lunch. Though only after some more penalties. It's important LittleBear keeps proving his superiority over his mother. LittleBear starts the English lesson video, but the volume on this particular video is strangely loud, and Mummy can't really think straight when someone's yelling about fronted adverbials. And then LittleBear starts bleating because he's going to have to write an entire paragraph. The horror. Mummy goes to assist, but the desk is a bomb-site with pens and paper everywhere after the History-or-is-it-Art lesson. Vexed by noise, Mummy tries to clear up, but the colouring pens fall down the back of the desk. So Mummy yells at the pens. And at the computer, which is shouting back about prepositional clauses, and at LittleBear who is sitting looking bewildered. Then the books that were teetering in a heap, biggest book on top, slump sideways across the desk, knocking the pen pot over and Mummy picks up the biggest book and hurls it on the floor in a rage.

Then LittleBear is crying, and Mummy is crying and someone is still banging on about time connectives and powerful adjectives. Eventually English is paused, and Mummy and LittleBear are cuddling in a chair, and we're all sorry, and we eat chocolate together until we feel better. It's never too early to teach a child that eating chocolate is a useful emotional crutch is it?

Eventually, English is resumed at a lower volume, and LittleBear only requires "someone in your household" to discuss things with three times in an eleven minute video. And then another twenty-five minutes of help planning before he can tackle the forty minutes of writing it takes him to complete the twenty minute task. 

But in that forty minutes, only interrupted twice by complaints of, "my hand is too tired to write," and a few penalties to limber up again, Mummy has a chance to discover that she made a mistake in her own work right back at the start of the History lesson, and that all the subsequent work done today is based on one error and will therefore have to be thrown away. Because Mummy is also working from home, and it's going swimmingly. Just as Mummy begins to get into the zone of sorting out the design monstrosity she's unleashed, the English is finished, the school day is over and it's time to play with LittleBear.

Which I do. Because I love him to the moon and back, and I'm a shit teacher, but I can at least try not to also be a shit mother once school is over for the day. I don't always succeed, but at least I'm trying, which is all any of us can ever really say. 

And even though most of the above is mostly true, it's not always all of that all of the time. In fact, compared to many, LittleBear is an angel, and works hard, and tries his best. And the school have done an outstanding job of providing video lessons and it is infinitely easier to get LittleBear to do the work when he has to submit it to his teacher and there's the tantalising prospect of a star in return, compared to the soul-destroying trudge last year of working and working and the only people who saw the work were his parents. And BigBear takes charge of French and Art, and anything else we decide he'll enjoy, and he sorts out the day's Variation On Bread And Cheese. And he gets his share of penalty shoot-outs as well. So we're doing as well as anyone. But I don't have anything else to write about.

A theory of evolution

I am not addressing here any consideration of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 

No, I'm talking here about a mysterious process that occurs when you have lived in a house for a certain length of time. I do not know exactly what that length of time is, but I think there's scope for several doctoral theses on the subject. Something happens, after you have accreted enough stuff in your house, such that new things begin to appear. Things that you have no recollection of begging, borrowing, stealing, buying or being given. And yet there they are, lurking in dark corners, at the backs of cupboards, hiding under the stairs. They are furtive, knowing that once found they may no longer have a welcome home. Have they invaded? Or have they simply evolved from fluff and malice? I suspect the latter.

What other explanation can there be for the fact that I have just found, at the back of the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard, an unopened packet of prunes from a supermarket 200 miles from here with a best before date of 17th December 2011? I have never knowingly wanted a prune. I have never knowingly purchased a prune. And yet, here they are, squatting malevolently in my cupboard.

The only possible explanation is that they have evolved. Perhaps from the thirteen assorted, opened-then-forgotten packets of raisins, sultanas and currants. Or from fluff and malice.

Weight Loss Plan That Really Works!!!

 A few weeks ago, BigBear decided that perhaps he needed to be NotQuiteSoBigBear, and has been cutting back on his food and drink intake. He is doing very well, despite his wife's insistence on sitting next to him eating hot buttered toast and drinking red wine.

I, however, have been stoically refusing to acknowledge that the overhang above my waistband is a new feature, and I have certainly been refusing to stand on the bathroom scales. This morning, that resolve cracked, and I discovered that I now weigh more than I have done at any time other than when pregnant. And I'm not pregnant.

I'll tell you a little something about myself, and I think it's something that will resonate with quite a few people... I comfort eat. I eat when I'm tired. I eat when I'm stressed. I eat when I'm unhappy. All three of those states have featured this year, in abundance. And as we approach Christmas, and I attempt to undertake too much, make too much, prepare too much and be too much, all of those states ramp up to maximum. 

In light of which, and with an astonishing surfeit of self-awareness, I have decided on a new weight loss plan. And I can 100% guarantee that it really, really works. You don't have to count calories, you don't have to feel hungry, you don't have to stop drinking. My plan? My plan is to not give a damn about being slightly heavier than I used to be. Not now. Not yet. Yes, I could do with shedding a bit of weight. No, I don't fit into my glam party clothes. Was I going to any glam parties? I was not. I am just going to carry on as I am, for now. I'm going to accept that I'm not as fit or healthy as I could be, for now. I'm going to accept that this has been an incredibly stressful, tiring, distressing year, and I'm going to celebrate the fact that we, and all our loved ones, are reaching the end of it with our health intact, with roofs over our heads and food on our tables makes us a damn sight luckier than many.

I am going to eat, drink and try to be merry, and maybe in 2021 I'll be able to do less of the first two, and more of the third.

Sciencing my way through the day

Every industry has a "thing", I'm sure of it. One of those pieces of lore passed on from generation unto generation about The Way Things Are Done. Often there's a good reason behind The Way, but equally often, nobody in living memory has ever witnessed that good reason in action. Probably because everyone follows The Way Things Are Done and so doesn't have to re-visit the pain of why doing it a different way is wrong.

In my industry, of ultra-high vacuum engineering, that thing is brass. Brass, for the non-metallurgically wise, is an alloy of copper and zinc, and "everyone" knows that you must never, ever use brass in an ultra-high vacuum system. Weird things happen. Namely, the zinc migrates out of the alloy and evaporates, leaving copper behind, and coating everything inside your vacuum system with a very thin coating of zinc oxide. At this point, I shall simply assure you that a thin coating of zinc oxide is a Very Bad Thing. 

I have worked on ultra-high vacuum systems for twenty-two years, and I have never seen this happen. My colleagues have, between them, some 180-odd years of experience in ultra-high vacuum system. None of them has ever seen this happen. Obviously, we've all been good and avoided putting brass components in our systems.

I have spent the past couple of weeks banging my head against a brick wall of intransigent scientific instrument, at the heart of which is an ultra-high vacuum chamber. Nothing about it made sense, and eventually, in a cascade of exploding electronics, it finally gave up functioning completely last Friday afternoon. So yesterday I pulled it apart, and found a curious grey deposit all over sections of it. Usually when we find Nasty Things, they turn out to be hydrocarbons, and can be dissolved in alcohol or hexane. This stuff didn't want to dissolve that way.

We all stared, poked and prodded the contaminated surfaces. It was like nothing we'd seen before, and it was everywhere. Normally, we consider a faint smudge or spec of dust to be contamination. Things that are not visible to the eye can be bad enough to stop our instruments working properly. We handle everything with surgical gloves. None of us were prepared for this level of crap. My son comes home from school looking cleaner than this thing.

We looked forlornly at each other, at the floor, and at the ceiling, hoping for inspiration. We drank cups of tea. And then I looked more closely. And I noticed something odd about some of the connectors right in the heart of the machine. Little gold-coloured connectors, that were no longer gold-coloured, but a beautiful salmon-pink. Almost as though they were now made of copper.

(With the benefit of hindsight, and my little mention of brass, I'm hoping you can all see where this is going...)

A spot of hunting around, measuring, comparing, and a growing sense of horror, I realised that the connectors had been taken from the wrong packet. They were brass, and supposed only ever to be used in building electronics, and never in a vacuum system. And still my colleagues couldn't quite believe that such a tiny connector could create so much stuff everywhere. Still, there were dissenting voices asserting it must, somehow, be copper oxide, or iron oxide that we were seeing, and not zinc oxide. So out came The Rubber Bible and we were able to determine that there was a simple test - if our gunk dissolved in sodium hydroxide, it was zinc oxide, and if it didn't it was copper oxide or iron oxide.* 

Friends, the oxide dissolved in sodium hydroxide.

We actually managed to do that thing that everyone knows you shouldn't do. We evaporated zinc out of brass to leave pure copper, and coated every internal part of a beautiful mass spectrometer with zine oxide. (A beautiful mass spectrometer that was supposed to be winging its way to its customer at the end of next week, which is a teensy weensy issue now). But the thing is, despite the fact that it's all totally buggered, I'm so much happier than I've been in weeks, because I know why it's buggered. I have found a simple, elegant explanation for every problem this machine has had. I have used a simple, elegant chemical test that demonstrated that my hypothesis was correct. And I got to use The Rubber Bible.

Today, I scienced. And it was good.

* This would get very long and tedious if I went into all the details of why we knew it was an oxide, and why it was limited to those three materials. You're just going to have to believe me.