ARGON (by alaric)

I've been tinkering with the design for ARGON since I was about eleven or twelve, I think.

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Misalignment (by sarah)

Yesturday saw me back at the Dr - he had gotten half way through my notes from Chelsea and Westmister which have been tracked down - yay! Last time this was all be looked at the notes where missing!

Anyway the clicking and back have shown a major deteriation since it was last looked at and he examined all my reflexes again and looked at my neck.

Apparently I have vertebra that are obviously misaligned which needs looking at and maybe causing alot of the back pain. There are other issues too but it is all complex and mashed up together so I am being refered to a specialist and there may have to be an operation.

When it was last looked at outside of pain management was just after the birth when I was still on the crutches and it was desided it was too much for me to cope with. It also turns out that if you are being treated by the pain management team you can't be refered to else where.

So the Dr gave me the option of pain management or the specialist. I said I wanted a definate answer to what it is as it has been getting worse.

He said he agreed and that is the course he suggested but how did I feel about the possibility of an op and stuff. At the end of the day I'm having to look at the long term here - stuff wasn't done whilst I was at Uni cos it would interfer with studies and then not done becuase of Jean but if that carries on I wont be able to do anything anyway.

And so I am back to waiting and have another perscription etc... he said he'd also look into other pain meds for me.

I am trying not to be too optermistic that stuff will get sorted as thats what leads to the crushing hopelessness.

At the moment it appears that there is some chronic under laying condition that means that my body reacts badly to injury and of course stress. Its also going to take a while to sort out but things could not keep going the way they were - when I think on it I'm amazed I didn't collapse sooner.

I am having a flare up/set back as far as the back is concerned at the moment anyway but I'm back to dropping pans and the like which is always upsetting.

Magic Pipes (by alaric)

One of the neat things in Unix is that you can make 'shell pipelines' of commands, from a suite of tools that come with most Unix systems, by feeding the output of one command into the input of another.

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French Breakfast (by sarah)

Jean wanted to have chocolate tea with her breakfast and as she tends to have croissant with jam and honey I descided that she could indeed have hot chocolate with her breakfast if she foresook the jam and honey. She agreed and from some where in the back of mind a thought that this was a proper French breakfast emerged and I told her so - I then got down the two dish things with handles we have. For some reason I thought that you had to drink the hot chocolate out of a bowl for it to be proper and continential but where I got this idea from I can not say.

She loved it, and we discuessed different types of breakfast - she asked if she could have an English breakfast which I still have to organise at some point.

Anyway Dad is always asking me if I want a dish of Tea (or rather Tay) and to my amusement Jean asked me if this was a Dish of Tay! Chocolate Tay of course!

Anyone got any other types of breakfast she could try?

She's had Canadian - pancakes, baked beans, fruit and maple syrup at the Maple Feast back in the spring.

Tea With George (by sarah)

Last weekend Barbara went to a Mill with her friend George and then came back to have tea and cake in the garden. George is like 90 yrs old and done all sorts of amazing stuff. He is also a techy - yes he and Alaric have whole conversations that I can bearly follow.

Anyway we had been out and Jean gotten a little dart board thing with velcro darts etc... which she took round to each of us in turn and made us throw the darts and balls at the board.

Barbara had bought a guide book of the place they had been but had left it behind so we listened to their tales of what the place was like.