Category: Relatives

Funerals – an update (by )

Barbara did get to attend Linda's funeral - it was a big mix up that she wasn't 'invited' and they were upset that she wasn't being more involved and things like that - it would have been comedic if it wasn't so tradgic :/

Apart from that we still have these sick children coming to visit next month and she also wants us to go an visit a termanily ill friend of her's in Devon with Jean (the lady has grand kids so they can play). I think that the number of deaths is starting to wear her down abit even though she says she's used to it 🙁

Personally I think the kids will be hard to deal with on an emotional level 🙁

Another Funeral (by )

Today is the funeral of a family friend, he died at the beginning of the month and there had to be an inquest and things - me and Al only met him once when we made him a birthday cake and assorted other things back in the autum. The son of one of Barbara's friends he seemed very nice and we had been corrasponding via letters and cards since.

Obviously we found out too late to go to the funeral and Barbara said yesturday even she wasn't sure if she could make it. Barbara's not having a good time with funerals at the moment, in that her friend who died the other week is having a closed funeral for family only - this I personal feel is a bit harsh as they saw an awful lot of each other and Barbara was on the list to be phoned incase of death and now she can't even go to the funeral :(.

Stupid as it seems this is making me very very nervous about everything - due to human nature we look for patterns and this pattern is one I don't want to see.

I feel very sad about Simon as the death was a bit of a shock.

A Sense of Deja Vu (by )

Alaric left for London yesturday to fly out to Santa Clara for a MySQL conference thingy and within an hour of him leaving my mother asks me if I knew a neighbour - I say yes and then ask why.

She said Barbara had asked her if she had known Linda and when she had said no Barbara had just walked off.

A sinking feeling begain in my gut - Linda was a very sick woman and I was awere she hadn't been to visit for a while but then she always had spurts in hospital and stuff. So I went over to talk to Barbara and she said 'you didn't know my friend Linda but she dies yesturday.' I've been making preserves and giving them to Linda for about two years and her and her husband used to come found for a lot of meals with Barbara - we tracked down foods she'd had when she lived abroad that she couldn't find like tofu and balsamic glaze.

So I had to explain that we did know her and then deal with the fact that this was actually one of Barbara's closest friends in the village. She was very sick and apparently refused the dialysis that could have kept her alive for a bit longer 🙁

After that I found out from Barbara that some terminally ill children are coming over in May to visit and she would like it if me and Alaric could be around to take them on an outing.

I came back to the Bakery feeling troubled - I had one thought I could not shake - please god don't let this be another September. Family friend/villager dying - that was how it all started.

September - the catastrophic month - four funerals, three in one week.

Fear clinched at me - who was I going to loose? Who that I felt deeply about would be leaving me next? Stupid and idiotic, I fought the stupersticous thought. A pattern repeating, encircling me. Alaric away on business and the messages of death begin to arrive.

Insane thoughts - edged with tears for Alex once more.

Obviously no more such messages arrived but Barbara came over later that day to give me some cool gardening bits she had been sent for free/by mistake and didn't know what to do with and some recipies she'd cut out for me.

She also bought round a job advert - something she had cut out a while ago and forgotten to give me but seemed to be the perfect job for me - geologist, very local - Birdlip - walking distance really. It was the company Alex was working for when Alex died.

I saw the name of the company and thrust it back at her, 'no thats Alex's job' I cried - I don't even know if it was I just panicked as soon as I saw the company name.

'Oh he's that close is he?' Barbara asks - then she went on to ask why he hadn't been round for dinner or to visit recently. I couldn't say anything.

She carried on talking and then said - 'oh this company is the one that was involved with that poor boys death in that trench is it?'

I managed to say, 'That was Alex' and then ran out the room and locked myself in my room and cried.

Jean came and found me and 'hugged me better'. I still feel just so raw about it all. I'm wondering how often this is going to happen 🙁

Ada Lovelace Day: Barbara Snell (by )

For Ada Lovelace Day I'm going to write about my aunt Barbara.

She's never been one to be arbitrarily limited by society - in the 1950s, she went and toured the world on her own; which was quite something for a woman in her early 20s to do!

She's retired now, but her career was in linguistics. In particular, she was a technical translator, translating equipment manuals from other languages to English; I've never obtained a full list of the languages she knows, but (from memory) all the main European languages, Russian, and Japanese have been mentioned.

Anyway, she happened to be working for Xerox when the job of translating some documentation relating to the Xerox Star came across her desk.

At the time, translators worked with typewriters; they'd type up a first draft of the translation, with lots of corrections pencilled in as they went along, as it's quite common to find you want to revise something you've already translated when you come to write a later paragraph. They would then have to type up a better copy incorporating the corrections; but this might then come back with amendments proposed by the marketing department or other stakeholders. So the translators spent a lot of time doing menial work.

So imagine Barbara's excitement when she read the manuals for an electronic word processor... So, never one to let convention stand in her way, she petitioned the management to let the translation department have some. This request was eventually fulfilled, and as she predicted, translation became a lot more efficient...

But Barbara continued to be vocal about the opportunities for computers to help with translation, driving developments within the company and starting a series of conferences on the use of computers in translation, which is perhaps why Xerox is considered "is the private company that has contributed the most to the expansion of machine translation"ref.

This was all about when I was being born, of course. But when, around 2000, Barbara retired and closed down her own translation business, I had the chance to take my pick of computer equipment as she was clearing out the office; I took away a 486 that became the home router - but I always wished I'd managed to claim her Xerox Star...

From Unlawful Killing to Corporate Manslaughter (by )

Yesturday saw another fraught day for the family - my side. They had recieved a letter saying that the police where no longer going to be persuing the unlawful killing verdict thing on my uncles death. So of course everyone assumed that the case was just being dropped but when they got to the meeting about it, it turned out it is being handed over to health and saftey making it a far hueger thing.

I again will not write any details as I do not want to affect the case in a negative way - but this is good as from what I saw the night he died just about everything was wronge. And something has to be done before even more people die unnessasarily.

Dad couldn't make it to the meeting as he had to go to the eye hospital for a check up on his laser surgery - he hadn't been sure weather they were going to be doing more then and there or not. But they looked at it all - one eye which has been lasered twice is absolutly fine but the other one is a bit of a concern and he has to go back in six weeks time to have it looked at again - if more blood vessels are growing he'll have to have a laser round the whole thing which they don;t really want to do - I assume there is some sort of rosk thing involved there with the amount of lasering they need to do but I dont really know.

Barbara also managed to have another fall at the weekend and so she was back at the drs on Tuesday (we met in the waiting room) and today she went for physio session for it. It would appear shes done something to the muscel that goes into the arm pit :/

I think that all thats currently going on.

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