May 2017

The great thing about flying home is that I end up with 30 hours to write my daily blog post. The problem is that I end up with no brain to write it with. So here’s a photo of a cat instead.

Both Mewton and Grabbity are purring fit to burst, which only makes me feel more guilty about being away so long. I will surely be snuggled to within an inch of my life tonight.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

One of the first things I did when I got to the US was start learning the local bird names. I’m not that big into birdwatching per se, but I do like knowing what they’re all called. We have some very cute species, so here are a selection of photos of birds I’ve seen in Sheboygan.

The Northern Cardinal, or Red Bugger as we call them, is one of my favourite birds. It’s so bright and perky!

I have a huge number of photos of gulls. This one’s looking just a wee bit surprised.

A blackbird, which isn’t entirely black.

A pair of American Goldfinches.

Two grossbeaks, which we don’t see very often.

There are lots of other birds that visit our garden that I just don’t have a good photo of, such as the indigo bunting, ruby throated hummingbird, chickadee, and many others. I suspect that I need to leave the camera set up on the tripod by the window, just in case.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Being a house owner means that we’re now having to learn how to do DIY. Last year, we worked on the front bedroom, which was a nasty shade of monkey shit brown and was offending our eyes on a daily basis. It was, without a doubt, a learning experience, but we got there in the end:

Sanding down the lumpy bits, we found some cracks…

Some of which were quite big…

We also found lots of pin holes…

Having filled and sanded and filled and sanded, we primed…

Twice. And then we painted. Twice. And ended up with…

We do still have some stencilling to do, but overall, I think this is quite an improvement!

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Busy day yesterday, going to Southampton for a meeting, but it did give me the inspiration for today’s brief blog post.

One of the things I miss about the UK when I’m in the US is the public transport. There is no easy way to get from our house to Chicago O’Hare Airport, for example. I have to pay $55 for a shuttle to the airport at Milwaukee, and then get CoachUSA to O’Hare. It costs $85 all up, and turns a 2.5 hour journey often into a four or five hour journey. There is a coach from Sheboygan to Milwaukee, but it goes twice a day at 8am or 8pm, so that’s not hugely useful. And, indeed, that “through service” coach to Milwaukee Amtrak train station arrives two hours before the next train.

Our town does have a bus service, but it’s quit hub-and-spoke, so from where we are you have to go into town and back out again, so to get to the supermarket I favour, it’s 45 minutes, instead of seven in a cab. Frankly, my time is worth the extra few dollars that a cab costs.

I was reminded yesterday, though, as I stood on the packed platform at Southampton Central as the announcer apologised for a 1.5 hour delay to the train to Bournemouth, that when I miss British public transport, I’m really missing the platonic ideal of a train, tube or bus, rather than what we actually have. Don’t get me wrong, the fact that we have any public transport in the UK at all is brilliant, but its mere existence isn’t good enough – it has to be reliable. And, when the guys sat next to me on the train pointed out that they hadn’t had any delays since “that cow was on the line a few weeks ago”, I remembered that commuting by train in the UK can be murderous.

Ultimately, whilst I’d like USA to get a bit more enthusiastic about public transport, what with climate change ‘n all, I suspect that we’ll see fleets of self-driving cars before we see widespread adoption of “mass transit”, as they call it. But whilst self-driving car clubs are likely to arrive faster than we currently suspect, there’s still a case to make for a proper passenger train network.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

I haven’t seen the Chelsea Flower Show for years, but it just so happens that I’m back home, and it’s on TV, so I’m enjoying seeing lots of wonderful flowers and plants in amazing arrangements. I can only dream of such perfection. I do have, sad to say, a bit of a black thumb – I can kill any plant, even the ones people say are really robust.

In our own garden, we do have a bit of a challenge: we have a huge swath of the garden that is bare, after the Great Hosta Disaster of 2015. (We got a gardener in to help sort out a few issues before autumn set in, but instead of helping she basically over-interpreted my requests and stripped our garden of the hostas that had filled in the space under one of our trees.)

Last year, I tried to fill in the huge gaps left, with some but not much success and we ended up with a large part of the garden rewilded*. This year, we are going for a very different solution, and instead of trying to do careful planting on the vast empty area, marked out by string in the photo above, I’m going to plant millet, rudbeckia and flax en masse. I would have planted it before I left, but you have to keep seeds well watered, and I didn’t want to impose on the neighbours. So that will be my first task when I get home.

I’ve also planted up a lot of pots.

The four big pots have taller plants in the middle and smaller ones round the outside, mixes of larkspur, delphinium and rudbeckia with alyssum and pansies. Then in the small plantable pots, I have all sorts, including more larkspur, asters, nasturtium, and four climbing plants, including morning glory, a climbing nasturtium and a couple of others I’ve forgotten (but have taken a note of!).

Last year our vegetable garden was destroyed by voles, so this year we’re just doing strawberries, which they don’t seem to care about, and edamame, which I’m trying to grow from seed. I’m not bothering with carrots again, after this dismal showing:

But it has been three or four weeks now since I sowed my seeds, and I am excited to know how many, if any, have come up! Expect a report back next week, hopefully with progress.

* Full of weeds.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

After the terrible events in Manchester yesterday, we have sadly seen some horrific behaviour from parts of the media trying to dig up “stories” on those who were there:

I have dealt with 50+ journos online today. Two found my mobile number. This cunt found my house. I still don’t know if my brother is alive. pic.twitter.com/NYbLzBsVH0

— Dan Hett (@danhett) May 23, 2017

hundreds of these. ghouls. pic.twitter.com/Ot1ddpzA20

— Dan Hett (@danhett) May 23, 2017

This kind of behaviour is abhorrent and should be illegal, but sadly, it isn’t, and it isn’t new. Just click through and read this whole Twitter thread.

When I was caught up in a terrorist incident 4yrs ago, the behaviour of UK media made the trauma much worse. They don’t seem to have changed

— Em (@DrEm_79) May 23, 2017

The way that large parts of our media behaves is absolutely grotesque and immoral, and yet there’s no sign at all that the government has any intention of reining them in. The Leveson Inquiry‘s report into media behaviour and suggestions for appropriate actions was, on the whole, excellent, and yet little to none of it has been implemented because the government simply does not want to upset the media and the media does not want to be restricted. It’s no surprise that Leveson’s recommendations were portrayed as censorship, even though they were nothing of the sort, given that the people reporting on them were the very people who would be restrained by them.

We can’t depend on the government, neither this nor any other, to protect normal people from the depredations of the vile predators that produce the hateful and repulsive rags that pass for newspapers in the UK. So what can we do? Protesting makes no difference. The press regulator, IPSO, is a sham. Your MP likely doesn’t give a shit, and even if they do they’re in a minority in Parliament. And the kinds of people who would boycott the loathsome rags aren’t the sort of people who are buying them in the first place.

But there two things we can do:

1. Be very careful what links you share on social media. Don’t link to the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Express or any of the other immoral, degenerate rags, with or without red tops. If you see a story you want to share and it’s in one of them, find another source. A quick search of Google News should turn something up, and if it doesn’t you might want to reconsider sharing the link at all as it’s probably bullshit if no other outlet is covering it.
2. Support Stop Funding Hate, who are working on hitting these vile rags where it hurts by targeting advertisers and asking them to stop giving their money to immoral hate-mongers.

No one else is going to protect us from these leeches, these scum. So we’re going to have to do the only things we can: don’t send the fuckers traffic, and help cut off their ad revenue. It is our duty to our fellow humans to do those two things at the very least.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }