Baby photos (by alaric)

From an old family photo album, some pictures of me as a newborn have appeared, on a visit to The Mill:

They're dated April 1979, so would be less than a month after my April birth.

Who'd have thought, then, that one day I'd be bringing up my own baby in this place? 🙂

Photos from the Party and Christening (by alaric)

There's been rather a lot, so here are some of my favourites from the ones I've seen:

And here are some links to online photo sets various people have put up:

My cousin's photos Charlee's photos on flickr

Ugh (by alaric)

Well, I survived the long bank-holiday weekend on very little sleep, but I started to become so tired I kept dozing off in chairs...

Then on Monday I began to feel the beginnings of my immune system getting busy with something; shivering cold even when wrapped in duvets, no appetite, endless thirst, coughing, aching, and so on.

I seem to be over it, but I'm still rather weak and I seem to be needing an awful lot of sleep!

Eyes (by alaric)

As I've mentioned before, I have a lazy eye.

To recap, this is because I have really bad vision in my left eye - I'm astigmatic - and have been that way since I was born, so my brain didn't properly develop to use the blurry vision that eye gave; it just focussed on my right eye. Having very different vision in each eye is called Anisometropia; when this causes a lazy eye, it's known as refractive amblyopia.

Anyway, we are of course concerned that my eye badness might be a genetic trait, so we want Jean checked for it so that if she is also anisometropic she can be treated and not develop amblyopia.

So we raised this concern with the health visitor, and she arranged an appointment with the orthoptic screening clinic. A letter duly arrived telling us to attend the "orthoptic service filter screening clinic" at Stroud general hospital this morning.

Sarah and Jean (with Sarah's father driving) set off this morning, only to find that Stroud General Hospital has an orthoptic filter screening clinic every third Friday of the month - last Friday - but their database knows nothing of Jean anyway.

Bah.

This makes me inordinately sad. I'm a bit prone to rolling in self-pity about my eye - I know it's only a minor thing, I can see and drive and stuff, but for whatever reason I'm easily upset about it. And I'd hate hate hate to think that I might pass it on to Jean.

However, while researching it for Jean, I come across:

To quote Dr. Leonard J. Press, FAAO, FCOVD: "It's been proven that a motivated adult with strabismus and/or amblyopia who works diligently at vision therapy can obtain meaningful improvement in visual function. As my patients are fond of saying: "I'm not looking for perfection; I'm looking for you to help me make it better". It's important that eye doctors don't make sweeping value judgments for patients. Rather than saying "nothing can be done", the proper advice would be: "You won't have as much improvement as you would have had at a younger age; but I'll refer you to a vision specialist who can help you if you're motivated."

Every amblyopic patient deserves an attempt at treatment.

Treatment of Amblyopia

And:

Anisometropic amblyopia: is the patient ever too old to treat?

I've spent years having opticians take one look in my left eye, shake their head sadly, and tell me nothing can be done. 🙁

Anyway... enough wallowing. We need to find out how to get Jean tested, that attempt having failed! Prevention is better than cure.

Integrated Life Management (by alaric)

I used to keep a todo list in OmniOutliner, with the help of an AppleScript that sucked up completed tasks into monthly archives, so I could easily tally the Time Spent column to generate invoices/timesheets for hourly-rate work.

However, then one client set up their own task management and timesheeting app, so suddenly I had to juggle their system for that client's tasks, and my own system for tasks relating to other clients, my internal projects, and personal tasks. Without one integrated list, it was then hard to produce a single prioritised list of what I should do next.

However, there was trouble even before then; lots of little requests to do work come in by email. I either do them there and then, reply with a reason why not (such as asking for more details), forward the message to delegate it - or flag it as a todo and come back to it later. However, those flagged todos tend to get lost amongst the drifts of spam and old emails. I really wanted a button in my mail client to turn an email message into a todo item. Most ideally, I'd want a RT instance, to manage correspondance relating to a task. But again, that would not be integrated with my todo system.

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