He tracked down his sperm donor father using his own DNA test and the Internet.

I think he’s a really enterprising kid and should go far.

Regular readers of my lj may remember that I conducted an ISEB Foundation Course in Software Testing in Wiltshire a few weeks ago. I had doubts as to whether the majority of those in the course would pass, judging from their responses in class and the results of their mock exams. Well, I got their results today, as well as the results at Searchspace. In Wiltshire, 11 out of 13 passed; at Searchspace, all 8 passed. So my lifetime “batting” average is 90.6% (58 out of 64 delegates to my courses have passed). I am really pleased for all the delegates who passed and hope that my good lifetime pass rate will continue. Good pass rates mean more work for me. The agency that developed the course and also delivers it has about a 76% pass rate overall. Congratulations to all!!

Perhaps the content of my dream (see below) came from watching the last episode of Six Feet Under. I know it was shown months ago in the US (I even knew how it ended) but we’re always a bit behind.

I thought the last scenes, where the deaths of the main characters were shown, was touching. HWMBO, on the other hand, thought they were silly. This is the difference between Western and Chinese culture, I guess.

I think that one aspect of the show that is very important is the commonplace way in which it dealt with death as a part of life. Death was the Fishers’ life. And, for several seasons, it was part of ours too. Death is sanitised these days. Years ago, when people were waked in their front parlours, you couldn’t escape it. When Grandpa died, they put him in a suit, in his coffin, with a block of ice beneath, and had visitors come to the house to pay their respects. Today you go to a funeral home, where everything is taken care of, no ice is necessary, and you don’t have to go upstairs and sleep with Grandpa dead in the front room (unless you own the funeral home, that is!) Death is often messy, horrible, and terrifying, but it’s the last chapter of life and is one that we’ll all have to read, sooner or later. As I get older this is often brought home to me forcefully because of the deterioration (slow but steady) in my own health.

I’m sad that it’s over–I wanted to watch the kids grow up a bit more; am curious as to how Keith and David dealt with one of their sons’ homosexuality (note that in the scene at the end where Claire was getting married the son on the left was holding hands with his Asian boyfriend).

I guess it’s better to leave ’em smiling through their tears rather than keep a show going until the bitter end. That’s especially true about a show that was all about endings.

….that I was a worker in the Prine Minister’s office. I may have even been a junior minister (and thus a member of Parliament). However, there was turmoil in the office. It was the end of the parliamentary year, and the Prime Minister was going through all those who worked in the office and judging whether they should continue or not. One by one those who worked in the office were called in to his office and told of their fate; some left smiling, others in tears. I wasn’t called until next to last. At that point, I went in, some Prime Ministerial aides hovered around, then l sat down, the aides left, and the Prime Minister lookd me straight in the eye and asked, “Chris, is life but a fly?” I became quite indignant and told him of my friend Richard, who had just died at a tremendously young age, and ended: “Prime Minister, life is very important; it is not just a fly.” He smiled and said, “I’ll see you Monday.” (meaning that I had kept my job, I guess). Another co-worker and I then went to a party for the office.

Now, I’m not a Labour voter (I’m a Liberal Democrat) and I don’t admire the Prime Minister, so there must be a deeper meaning to all this. I don’t usually remember dreams very well, so the fact that I’ve remembered the situation and the phrase about the fly must be significant, in some way.

I think I’ve passed some sort of test, anyway.

…and followed that with some computer or ‘net activity that you’d have dearly loved to have done but hadn’t the faintest idea where to start?

Phil Bradley’s I want to page is a gold mine of such wishes. His main page has lots of interesting links on it too.

Normally they pop the skull fragments in the freezer. But for this guy, they made an exception.

especially baptism by immersion, and if you’re the baptiser.

I did think this was a hoax, but from what I can gather, it seems to be OK.

Can you balance a full pint glass on them? No? Then go here!

Today I attended Richard’s funeral. I had only known him for a few months; however, he volunteered in June to become Treasurer of our Deanery here in Southwark. We don’t have a lot of expenditures, but we haven’t had a functioning Treasurer for a couple of years. So we were delighted when Richard volunteered. He was only 31, but was a registered financial adviser as well as being a busy volunteer at the Cathedral, which was his parish.

He warned us that he was undergoing treatment for cancer of the testicles, which was dealt with through surgery, but which also needed chemotherapy. However, he expected to come out of the chemo OK and regai his strength and life.As I mentioned in a previous post, he had a massive stroke in reaction to his last bout of chemotherapy. He died a week and a half ago on Sunday without regaining consciousness. We were all shocked and sad. The funeral was good (as such events go)–the Cathedral was about 3/4 full, which is pretty good for a regular person’s funeral. He was much loved, had many friends and a large family. He had married only in January of this year, too. Such a waste of a wonderful life.

So George Bush is in trouble yet again. Not only is his brain about to be indicted (oops, I meant Karl Rove), but his nominee for the Supreme Court has withdrawn her name in the face of a barrage of criticism from both sides. I think this will be quite a bizarre time. If he nominates a diehard conservative, he may have some trouble in the Senate. If he nominates a middle-of-the-road person, he’ll have some trouble with his conservative power base. How sad for him. I’m crying. Can’t you tell?

Charles Clarke seems to be having some trouble with the Terrorism Bill 2005. Good for him. Half-baked ideas make bad law. As many people have observed, no law against terrorism or terrorists is going to stop 100% of the terrorists. Thus, every time there is a problem, the government will cut down on our civil liberties in order to try to stop the next attack. We will end up in a police state. While my friend Samantha was killed on 7/7, and I take buses and the Tube regularly, I would rather have civil liberties than absolute safety; there are civil liberties but there is no such thing as absolute safety and the Government is wrongheaded to try to say that there is or might be. We are led by a bunch of dunderheads. I hope that I can still say that publicly without being charged with some offense under the Terrorism Act.

Almost November. That’s a bad month for me. My birthday’s in November. Both my parents died in November. The best teacher I ever had died in November, as well as a very kind priest from my childhood. I often get bronchitis in November. Thank God it’s only 30 days long. I don’t know whether I can take any more of it.

I’ve finally gotten possession of the domain “luti.org”. You may or may not know that the founder of Integrity, Dr. Louie Crew (another one of my heroes), also founded an email discussion list called Luti, after one of his many writing personae, Quean Lutibelle. The domain was registered by a former owner, but at the time the former owner became “former”, I was not savvy enough to figure out how to deal with domain name registrars, so I didn’t bother. However, I finally figured out how to do it, and am now the proud owner of chrishansen.org.uk and christianphansen.com, as well as luti.org. I am hoping that the transfer of registrars from the US to the UK will happen soon; I want them all under one roof. Then, I’ll transfer my website to christianphansen.com (making it better in the meantime, I hope) and make a webpage to encourage people to join Luti. I may even put some list management software on the server and take the hosting back from Yahoo!, which is not terribly good at hosting nowadays, in many respects.

Had lunch with my chum Steve yesterday. Looks like there is a good chance that I’ll have a permanent job in March 2006. Not that I’m looking, mind you–even the recruiters have stopped calling!!! But, he’s working with an exciting product (a tool to assist software testing) and an exciting company. It’s German, however; I may have to learn some…oh well, I hope one can teach an old dog new tricks.

Another chum, Mike, is arriving here for a weekend jaunt from Chicago. Nice to see him again; we haven’t seen him for almost three years. He’s bringing gifts (although not Greek): Irish Spring soap, lots of chunky peanut butter for HWMBO, three copies of a picture I retouched of my parents’ wedding. Two will go to Marblehead as gifts for my sister and brother. I’ll keep the third. He’s also bringing some 8-1/2 x 11 picture paper so that I can print that size myself in the future. Remember, we’re benighted here and only have A4 size paper. HWMBO is taking tomorrow off, bless him, as he’s been working his socks off at the shop. We’ll be picking Mike up then going to the Tate and God only knows where else.

Half the results of the ISEB courses taken at Searchspace have come in: all four reporting so far have passed, most with very good marks. I’m quite chuffed: it’s a tribute to the good staff Searchspace have recruited for their testing department. Steve’s wife Anne, the head honcho of Electromind, the consultancy that I work with and for, also passed with flying colours. She isn’t even a software tester or programmer. Well done, Anne! I wonder how many of the people in Wiltshire I taught the previous week passed. I may or may not find out. It’s too soon for last week’s crop.

Enough for this entry!

…is about Rosa Parks. What a classy woman she was.

Link may require registration, I fear.

is here. Please don’t call me; HWMBO is on the phone.

is in this ad…also something for bear-lovers.

present their version of “I Want it That Way”.

Very cute.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

The last time I took any math was in 11th grade, when it was something between geometry and calculus, whose name I forget. I took one day of calculus but couldn’t understand the review. I reasoned that if I couldn’t understand the review, then I wouldn’t understand the course and dropped out.

But I seem to have remembered my 8th grade math pretty well.

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2 . You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers for your family of 3.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don’t have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

12. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message, you are going to hit the little icon below this and email it to someone.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this list.

Shamelessly stolen from NakedBoyChronicles.

As I got off the Underground train at Paddington station, I realised that I’d forgotten to pack dress shirts. GBP 77 later, I had 4 Van Heusen shirts. What an expensive omission.

I’m currently sitting in my hotel filing this on the hotel’s broadband. The hotel in Trowbridge had no internet access at all. I got on a train yesterday and had four seats all to myself. However, I wasn’t prepared for Cardiff, where I had most of the downtown main train station to myself at 7 pm. Ate a quick dinner in the only cafe that was open, then got on the train to Ystrad Mynach. It was a two-car puddle-tracker. When I got off at the station in YM (It’s too tiring to write the entire name), I called all three taxi companies in YM listed on the notice boards at the station. One was now a fax number, another was non-working, and the third was only able to send a taxi in two hours’ time. I called the hotel and pleaded for a taxi, and they sent one in about 25 minutes. Meanwhile the local teenagers were congregating nearby and, the night being dark, I was a bit worried, but I got here in one piece.

The hotel is a combination hotel and country club, with a leisure center and a golf course. Too bad that I think golf is human fetch. They do have broadband access (GBP 7.50 for 20 hours) and the TV is quite posh (flat screen, lots of options). There is also a TV over the bathtub, oddly enough. No mints on the bed. I miss mints on the bed.

So I got up and, after being told it would take 1/2 hour to get to the customer site, asked for the cab at 8:00. It took 5 minutes to get there. The site is a high-security one, so they took my cameraphone off me and I had to be escorted whenever I went to the loo. What a pain. The class is mostly motivated, with a couple of old hands who know everything. Old hands are difficult to teach this stuff to, because they believe they know everything. If they don’t pay attention, they’ll miss some stuff and get hauled up on the exam. There was also building work going on in the next room. It sounded like a combination blast furnace and a horde of mice scurrying up and down the walls. At one point one of the ceiling tiles disappeared and a face appeared in it. We did our best but there were no quiet times to be had.

So, now we’ll see what the dinner is like here. There is no place else to go so I shall just have to take whatever I can get. Breakfast was a rather hurried affair (it’ll be much more leisurely tomorrow because the taxi won’t be here until 8:30) and the food was kind of sad–one might expect that kind of English breakfast in a seaside b&b.

Anyway, cheers to all and hopefully I’ll be home on Thursday but reading all your blogs in the meantime.

Addendum: I tried to file this from the hotel using its broadband. Unfortunately, while I could see my blog I couldn’t post to it. So I’m posting this on Thursday night, with addenda.

The dinner was quite good, but of course while they needed reservations, it didn’t say so anywhere. So I had to sit in the smoky bar waiting for a table. The steak was very nice, but they put me right under the tv. Everyone was watching me eat.

The delegates at the site were a bit too laddish, I’m afraid. They were all nice guys, but I think that probably only 6 or 7 of the 8 will pass the exam.

This evening when I got home I saw my emails (750 or so of them) and one was from someone who wanted me to fill in for an ISEB course tutor who had to take one day off during a course. I said, “Why not?” and called him. It turns out that he got my name from a Google what took him to a reference on my online CV. What a surprise! More money!

I’m off to Wales in a few minutes. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything important.

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, and if I don’t have access I’ll see you all Thursday evening.

I just took a look at my first post in lj. I said: “I should be revamping my website, doing some more geneological work, getting the house clean, getting ready for our trip to Singapore in two weeks, but instead I’m writing a live journal entry. Oh, well.”

Now, more than a year later, I’m still not revamping my website, still not doing more geneological work, somewhat getting the house clean (although my attempt to wash the kitchen floor two weeks ago was interrupted by that emergency work call…).

I need to get this stuff together.

But now, for melon and raspberries with HWMBO.

I acutely realise that I’ve been silent for some days.

The ISEB course at my former place of employment (and current place of consulting) went well. The delegates were attentive, intelligent, and motivated. Thus I believe that they all passed the course. Now for Wales next week.

Something that the sadist in me wants to point out is that this last week was the first time in more than a year that I’ve worked a 5-day week. Three days of ISEB, Thursday at the Qbit software testing conference, and Friday back at the ISO9001 consulting. I felt gutted, although it is mostly psychological. Once I get a permanent job (sometime in the new year I’m likely to be recruited by a chum’s software testing tool company as a full-time consultant) and start doing 5 days a week again, it’ll be OK.

Worse than the 5-day week was the fact that I was on my feet for most of the workday Monday through Thursday. My legs felt like jelly after a while and I had to haul myself in and out of chairs as much as possible. The main presenter (who was doing technical walkthroughs at our stand on Thursday) hardly got enough time to sit down, eat, or have a Tic-Tac. I expect that he remained silent the rest of the week. I don’t know how teachers stay on their feet talking for 40 weeks of the year.

Yesterday I had lots of things to do. I’m getting my other laptop (a Dell) ready to take to Wales with me. So I have been getting it ready to roll with various pieces of software, the coursework for ISEB, the wireless mouse, and the like. I had to send a cheque to the person who presented at Deanery Synod on Monday for his expenses. I had to order my ticket to Wales andpick it up at Paddington Station. I needed to pick a parcel up at the post office. I need to get a cable for my network switch (didn’t get around to that one). So I’ll unpick some of this.

The parcel was “The Complete New Yorker”. From 1970 until 1994, I was an avid reader of The New Yorker. However, the foreign subscription was a bit too pricey for me. However, getting all the copies of The New Yorker from 1925 to last February on DVD for $197 (a bit less than £100) was just too tempting. I bought it and it arrived this week. I can’t wait to get my teeth into it. I miss it.

Deanery Synod on Monday elected Richard as Treasurer. We haven’t had a functioning treasurer for years, so it was a relief when he volunteered after the last meeting. He told us that he was recovering from cancer, and that his chemotherapy would be going on through October. After that he would be OK. On Monday, while we were electing him Treasurer, Richard suffered a reaction to the chemotherapy: a massive stroke that has placed him in a persistent vegetative state. He’s not expected to live. I am gutted: he was a very good man, a doer, and someone who would have been a good asset to the Deanery.

Update: Richard died Sunday morning at 11:10.

We decided to take a bus to Paddington yesterday to pick up the ticket I had ordered that morning. There are “FastTicket” machines available there to pick the ticket up. However, I had to try four before I got one that would work. One thought it was another kind of machine and wanted me to put my card into the (non-existent) slot it was pointing to below the screen (while the real slot was to the right). Another one thought it was selling a ticket, not picking one up. The third one wouldn’t read my card, and then the fourth one finally, kind-of, worked. I went to pick up my tickets and found that only the outgoing one was in the tray. A bit more investigation showed that the return ticket was still sticking out of the printer above the slot, and hadn’t actually dropped into the tray. I think that others may have had the same problem as there was a receipt in the tray from a previous user of the machine.

After this we walked to Whiteley’s at Queensway, an indoor mall, where we bought nothing except a coffee but enjoyed walking around. I tried to find an interesting book for the cold nights in Wales, but saw nothing that piqued my interest. Oh, we did, however, spend some money in Marks and Sparks to buy dinner. We had chicken breasts with sweet potatoes in a lime and chili sauce. Very nice it was too. Surprisingly, HWMBO agreed when I expressed in a Beef Wellington, which we duly bought. When we were walking out he said, “£9.99! How expensive! We shouldn’t have bought it!” I said, “I saw the price, and that’s why I was surprised when you agreed to buy it.” He’s convinced I tricked him into buying it (in a teasing way). I hope it’s good, or I’ll never hear the end of it.

Oh, well, off to the shower now to prepare for the Divine Mysteries.

But for everything else, there’s Mastercard.

Well, I’m back from the first ISEB course (of three that I’ll give this month). It was, frankly, somewhat of a disappointment except for the money.

I went to a town in Wiltshire (think Salisbury, Stonehenge, and stuff like that there). It’s dead, really. Nothing to do. And this company that I trained at, which shall remain anonymous, has dragged about 20 or 30 twenty-somethings there to do software testing. I had 13 of them in the class, all except three being those twenty-something guys. Some cute ones, too. But, they were bored out of their skulls, nothing to do in the evenings, working in a sweatshop, for low wages, at something that can be simple rote work. No wonder they paid little attention.

Problem 1: In a classroom meant for 8-9 people at best, we had 13 people and one trainer (me). It was cramped, and went from boiling hot to ice cold all day.

Problem 2: In a sweatshop, there is no leeway. After the course, the delegates all had to return to their desks until 5:30, which is quitting time. I am presuming that the same thing happened when they finished the exam on the third day. Very much a downer.

Problem 3: Being young, disaffected, and bored, they had the attention span of gnats and the short-term memory of flies. So many of them took in little or nothing of what I taught. Neither did they react when something I taught went counter to the practices that were current at their company.

This meant that they all got one question wrong on the exam because their term for what most software companies call “test scripts” or “test cases” is “test plan”. I don’t know what they call their test plans. However, I had emphasized this point in my lecture and no one bothered to tell me that their company did it differently. Oy veh!

I believe that maybe 8 or 9 out of the 13 will pass. This will drop my lifetime pass rate for ISEB course delegates from 91% to 85.7%. Still pretty good, but I’m not sure.

Amusingly, I discovered during the day that their company had a policy on retesting. If you took the ISEB exam and failed, the company will pay for one re-sit of the test. However, if you fail it twice you need to pay for the second re-sit yourself. Now, I’m certain that the reason they have this policy is that some people there have, indeed, had to re-sit the exam twice. It’s only 25 right out of 40 questions! Perhaps the company trawls the parks and picks cans of Strongbow Cider out of the hands of vagrants. Then they ask the new “recruits” whether they want to be software testers. If they say “Yeah, sure mate!” they lend them the money for a suit and they start work.

Oh, it was also an all-white group. I find this oddly disconcerting as I’m more comfortable in mixed situations.

Next week, here at my former company. The week after, in Wales. All I need now is to get paid for August, September, this week, next week, the week after, and October’s ISO9001 work. It would be nice if large companies would pay their bills on time.

I got a call this morning from the manager at Electromind. Another training company’s trainer is ill and they needed someone at short notice to present an ISEB course in Wiltshire; was I interested? Well, for

Here is his official website, with pictures. He is in good shape, but the pictures are, of course, not prurient, but probably not safe for work, as they include his fellow walker, Melanie. The pictures are behind another link on the website.

All the kerfuffle about Steve’s walk, and the jail time he’s spent because he refuses to cover up while walking, is terribly overblown. If you don’t like a young, good-looking, naked man walking through your village, just look away and, poof! he’ll be gone shortly.

Oh, and if you’re so minded and in Scotland, you can join him on his walk, clothed or not.

…is here; Miss Muffet would have loved it.

…I was received into the Episcopal Church at Holy Apostles on 28th and 9th in Manhattan.

I’ve not regretted it for a millisecond.

Last night I had a dream, one line of which won’t go away.

Some of you may be familiar with the New York radio station WINS, whose slogan is “All news, all the time” (or it was, when I lived there).

Well, part of my dream was a radio station WPHL, whose slogan was “All philosophy, all the time”.

I really wish that, like many, I could remember more of my dreams. If the above is an example of what my subconscious is up to when I’m asleep, I’d probably be able to tap into it, write fiction, and make a mint.

…is xenoglossophobia. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

Why the Milton Bradley game “Mr. Bucket” wasn’t very popular. And no, it had nothing whatever to do with Hyacinth.

Teledildonics

I so want to get that into a sentence three times in the next hour or two so that I’ll remember the word forever.

On the other hand, I’m afraid that if I do, it’ll creep into a sermon or a conversation with the bishop.

Watch out, the picture at the end might distress some of you.

FOUR GHOSTS OF THE WHITE HOUSE

One night, George W. Bush is tossing restlessly in his White House bed. He awakens to see George Washington standing by him. Bush asks him, “George, what’s the best thing I can do to help the country?”

“Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did,” Washington advises, and then fades away.

The next night, Bush is astir again, and sees the ghost of Thomas Jefferson moving through the darkened bedroom. Bush calls out, “Tom, please! What is the best thing I can do to help the country?”

“Respect the Constitution, as I did,” Jefferson advises, and dims from sight…………….

The third night sleep still does not come for Bush. He awakens to see the ghost of FDR hovering over his bed. Bush whispers, “Franklin, what is the best thing I can do to help the country?”

“Help the less fortunate, just as I did,” FDR replies and fades into the mist…………….

Bush isn’t sleeping well the fourth night when he sees another figure moving in the shadows. It is the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Bush pleads, “Abe, what is the best thing I can do right now to help the country?”

Lincoln replies, “Go see a play.”

Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest THIS one.

is of a gay anthropologist. The headline is:

Tobias Schneebaum, Chronicler and Dining Partner of Cannibals, Dies.

Now how could you not read an obituary with that headline, I ask you!

The article is likely to expire by the end of September 2005, I fear.

…in a book review I read this morning just cries out for quotation. The book is:

Callie Williamson, The Laws of the Roman People. Public Law in the Expansion and Decline of the Roman Republic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. xxvii, 506; 39 tables, 4 maps. ISBN 0-472-11053-5. $75.00.

and the reviewer’s contention is that the thesis of the book is at the end not proven.

“In the end, this book has all the gory fascination of a terrible train wreck, but one in which the broken cars have split open to reveal interesting and thought-provoking contents, and the fate of the entirety in its jackknifed agony provokes very large thoughts about why the cars of the train locked together and moved at high speed in the first place — and what, in the end, causes a train to jump its tracks.”

Yesterday evening, before I went to my Lodge meeting, I was putting on my socks when I noticed that there was a great big bruise on the tip of my left big toe. As a diabetic, foot health is absolutely crucial as if infection sets in you can lose the toe, foot, or even your leg. So I went to the quack this evening. Luckily, I was seen fairly quickly and by the other diabetic specialist in the practice (my own quack was seeing someone else). She looked at it, gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and said that if it gets much worse over the weekend I should go to the emergency room (A&E here). I expect I’ll lose the toenail. That’s three in two months.

The problem is that I cannot remember or place the injury anywhere. It’s possible that I kicked something, or someone stepped on my toe. But I don’t recall it. When you live in the big city it’s sometimes hard to distinguish the little shoves, pushes, and knocks from those that injure you.

I am hoping that the bruise will go down over the weekend and that the antibiotics will do their work. I have a software testing conference this week at which I am to give a co-presentation, and I should be doing time on my co-presenter’s company’s stall. However, that means lots of time on my feet.

On the positive front, I’ve just joined the British Computer Society. I feel a bit like Groucho Marx (besides the moustache) when he said “I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.” There are lots of advantages, including software discounts and Computing magazine, which you get when you join. I also seem to be qualified to get a certification as an experienced IT professional. All these things help on a CV if you’re looking for consulting work. So that’s good. I’ve also got a nibble for an ISEB Founcation Course in Software Testing to be given in Wales (unsure where, but would guess Cardiff). I haven’t been in Wales in 11 years. If I get the gig, it’ll be really nice and hopefully I can do some sightseeing in the evenings.

They’ve got Bush’s face on flags in odd places in Germany.

I think it’s too good for ‘im.

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing.

He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.”

“OH NO!” the President exclaims. “That’s terrible!”

His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.

Finally, the President looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”

and seem to be relatively OK. I do not feel shaky or anything and, although I haven’t checked my blood sugar yet, I’m sure it’s within acceptable levels.

As for pill boxes, although I don’t have time now, nor will I have time tonight, tomorrow I shall take a picture of the pill boxes I use, which come from Muji, the Japanese chain store, and post the picture here to illustrate my description below. They are little round stackable barrels which are threaded and thus can be stacked on top of each other. There is a threaded lid for the top barrel and the borrom barrel does not have threads on the bottom. I have stacked them in a pile of seven, one for each day. There are three different stacks: a morning stack, a dinner stack, and a night stack. I confused the dinner stack for the night stack last night.

The solution I have come to is this: I shall put the dinner stack on the kitchen table rather than next to the night stack. The morning stack is already there, and I have not recently forgotten to take my morning pills as I see the morning stack when I sit down for breakfast. This way, when I go for the cholesterol pills, there will be only the night stack over there and I won’t accidentally pick up the dinner stack.

I need a personal assistant, like Prince Charles has.

I took my sugar level reading at 12:30 and just now, almost 1 am. The first one was 9.7 (after I ate the sweet bread with jam), and this one is 12.5. Normal is 5.1-7.1. After a meal (especially one with sugar in it), you’d expect that kind of steep rise, so I think I’ll be ok. So I’m off to bed: HWMBO has just come down to enquire about how I feel so I think I’ll be safe enough in bed.

I have transferred tomorrow morning’s diabetes pills to tomorrow evening’s pill box. I shall try to dream up a good labelling system.

Oh, PS, I hate sticking myself to take the blood sugar reading. It sucks, big time. I feel like a penny-ante Dracula.

Occasionally I’ve forgotten to take a dose of some pill or other. Luckily there haven’t seemed to have been any ill effects from this. However, tonight, as I was preparing to go upstairs to bed, I went to take my cholesterol pill as usual before retiring. Instead, I chugged down tomorrow night’s complement of two diabetes pills. They are kept in similar pillboxes next to each other and while I looked at it, and saw the diabetes pills in it, they didn’t register. As I was replying to another ljer’s comment somewhere, I suddenly realised that I’d taken the wrong pills. I went and took the cholesterol pill, but it was too late for the other two.

I am aware of the danger of this: my blood sugar could get dangerously low. I have eaten a sweet Caribbean bread, toasted, with jam. I think this should be OK but I am going to stay awake for a while, just in case.

I need to label one of the two pill boxes so that this does not happen again. I suppose it’s carelessness on my part; I’ve been taking pills morning and night for 13 years now. However, this is the first time I’ve taken the wrong pills at the wrong time. What a pain! I have work tomorrow, and dinner tomorrow night with the neighbouring vicar and his partner. Thursday evening is my Lodge evening. I so do not need this danger and aggravation right at the moment.

I hate pills. I effing hate having to live my life taking pills.

LJ Interests meme results

1. :
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Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.

Result: I have no interests.

Last night I was one of the co-chairs for the Southwark election to the House of Laity of the C of E General Synod. It was quite interesting. Besides two troglodytes (on whom I would not piss if they were on fire) the rest of the candidates ranged from the barely vocal to the very erudite. I made my choices this morning: there are 16 people running for 7 places, and I used my transferable vote to rank 10 out of the 16, and did not bother with the rest. As Chair, of course, I couldn’t ask questions or make rude comments. However, when one of the troglodytes mentioned that Bp. Gene Robinson had left his wife for his male lover (he didn’t meet his current partner until well after he had divorced his wife) I wanted to give him a smack upside the head.

Of course, when this “gentleman” mentioned that when he had spoken with the Dean of Southwark (a stalwart liberal) about what the troglodytes would do if woman bishops were consecrated in the C of E, the Dean told him “you can bugger off”. I agree with the Dean. And the sooner they bugger off, the better.

There is one candidate from my Deanery; she is also a dual US/UK citizen, but from Virginia, and is a very straightforward liberal candidate. I do hope she gets elected. We will know the results sometime after October 1st.

This morning, when I got the post, there was a questionnaire from London Energy asking me to fill it out to tell them why I had switched electricity providers. I had done no such thing! So I called London Energy and they told me that British Gas was now my electricity supplier. British Gas has an appalling customer service record, and I wasn’t about to let them get their hands on my money. So I called the numbers for British Gas that London Energy gave me. I was on hold (on a local-rate phone number) for 10 minutes before a so-called “customer service representative”, Sue, answered. She couldn’t help me, but promised to connect me to the Erroneous Transfer Office! Seemingly they have so many erroneous transfers that they need a whole office full of people to deal with them. After another 10-minute wait, she came on and chirped that she couldn’t get through; could she take my details so they could call me back? I demanded to speak with her supervisor. After another 1 or 2-minute hold, Marie came on. I said, “It seems that some scam artist has tried to transfer my electricity account without my knowledge.” She indignantly denied that they did any such thing, confident in the surety that someone in the household had signed the contract. I told her to wise up, and she asked for my name (again), and then HWMBO’s name. Oh. It seemed that neither of our names was the one on the contract. I told her that it was her fault (just to rub it in; I was incandescent by this point) that this happened and that it was to be reversed immediately. She said, “We will reverse the transfer, and you should be back with London Energy within 6 to 8 WEEKS.” (emphasis mine!) I was livid! She told me to ignore any material that British Gas sent me, but that they would send me a letter within ten days confirming that the transfer would be reversed. I wouldn’t have to pay them a thing.

Of course, the cost of my time, and the cost of the telephone bill are not covered. So I’m still out of pocket because their shyster salesperson got the flat number wrong on the contract. I still think they do it on purpose and hope that people don’t notice.

On that cheery news I went to the gym.

comes this lovely Dubya joke:

Q: What’s Dubbya’s stand on Roe vs. Wade?
A: He doesn’t care how you get out of New Orleans

Naked Boy Chronicles

You may remember that I occasionally do Mystery Worship visits for the Ship of Fools religious humour site. Well, they’ve recently done a survey on the 10 funniest religious jokes and the ten most offensive religious jokes. However, I laughed at each one of them. The funny jokes are here, while the offensive jokes are here

I’ve downgraded the “G” from a capital letter as the guardian itself seems to have done the same and spells itself “theguardian”.

In todays “Corrections and clarifications” we find the following:

“In our obituary of the pioneering photographer and pilot Anne Noggle, we attributed to her the most unlikely job of dust-cropping. Crop-dusting was what we meant.”

Much better than “etaoin shrdlu”, innit?

I went to the quack last Tuesday for my 6 month checkup. After a lot of toing-and-froing trying to find the records of my last blood test in the computer and finally getting St. Thomas’s Hospital to fax them in, we discovered that my blood sugar level (on average) was 9.2 over the 4 week period before May. Worrisome when the “normal” range is 5.1-7.1 or so. So she changed my medications: out with the Avandia, in with something-starting-with-gly- .

I started taking them (2 per day, breakfast and dinner) Tuesday night. Wednesday, in late morning, I felt a bit shaky and had to eat something to get my blood sugar up. Thursday morning I woke up at about 4 am feeling odd. I got up and noticed that I had the shakes a bit. So I went downstairs and tried to take my blood sugar, but because of the nerves I couldn’t get a good enough blood sample. I drank a Danone Actimel drink and felt OK a few minutes later. Nearly the same thing happened this morning, but I was successful at taking the blood sugar reading: 5.4. Somewhat on the low end of normal. Another Actimel. This afternoon, after being on the exercise bike for 45 minutes at the gym, I began to feel shaky again. I had to eat an energy bar.

Pattern: I think that the new medication is too strong for me. However, I’ll have to have some history of blood testing behind me before I go back to the quack and demand that my medication be adjusted. So I will have to test myself every time this happens at home. I hate this as it involves a pen-like object shooting a lancet into the ball of your finger, then squeezing a drop of blood onto a test strip in a machine.

On the other measurement fronts, all my liver and kidney function is OK, but my blood pressure was up (160 over 91) and my cholesterol was slightly high at 5.1 (5 is the optimal upper limit for a diabetic). Taking my blood pressure at home has afforded readings that culminated in 124 over 81 last night. So I think it’s white-coat syndrome in the doctor’s office. As for the cholesterol, it could be that we’ve started to have butter instead of margarine. Wotta world, eh? I feel like I can’t eat anything anymore. As my mother said just before she died of a heart attack but after she went on a crash diet, “You wouldn’t want to eat here anymore.” because of the dietary austerity.

However, I made meat loaf with Cream of Mushroom soup frosting, mashed potatoes (made with a ricer, of course), and peas tonight. More cholesterol (although there was lots of rendered fat in the pan that didn’t get into me). Oh, well.

Oh, and that little unpleasantness I had after I returned from India? It was viral, not bacterial. They couldn’t culture anything from the sample I provided. I wonder where I caught it and what it was.

and today’s meme comes from , who is a real sweetheart, adorable as all getout, and a new Californian by way of Savannah and Connecticut.

1. Reply with your name and I’ll respond with something random about you.
2. I’ll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I’ll pick a flavor of jello to wrestle with you in.
4. I’ll say something that only makes sense to you and me. (This possibly will not apply to all).
5. I’ll tell you my first memory of you.
6. I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I’ll ask you something that I’ve always wondered about you.
8. If I do this for you, you must post this on your journal.

No one is tagged by this meme, by the way; those who answer may request that #8 be ignorable (is that a word?) and that’s fine.

I don’t follow American sports anymore, as it’s too difficult to get any news about them here (I just took a look at the Sports Illustrated website and I see that the Red Sox are still in first place in their division. Go Sox!) However, this story shows why at least one NBA player is a hero in my book.