Sunday 12th December 10

Quite a tough day, without Gilly around.  She rang before we got up from a payphone in the hospital, as her mobile was out of power.  Later, I rang the ward and then she rang back.  She had eaten and was feeling well, and awaiting some tests.

I made porridge for the first time in, well, decades, as it was requested by our youngest.  Apparently it was very good!

I asked the boys if they would go and buy some bread, cereal and goats milk from the Co-op, and with a bit of persuasion, they did.  Later I did a quick trip to Country Fresh where I got fruit and vegetables and 2 sacks of recyclables.

I had a short time on the computer and got a telling off from our niece for mentioning that Gill was in hospital, but I said that I'd not mentioned any gruesome details and it was the best way to tell people what was happening (and why I couldn't do several things I'd planned to do today) and also, the status privacy was limited to friends only.  She later apologised for her outburst, but I'm glad she cares so much about her Auntie. Maybe she doesn't realise that some people share all sorts of stories on facebook, like this sad and moving one.  I did get dozens of messages wishing Gill well, people saying that they were thinking of her, praying for her, keeping her 'in the light' and sending hugs, best wishes and all manner of positivity.  Let's hope it works!

Mid afternoon I told the boys they had to come off the computers to do some physical activity, and gave them ample warning of the time to get off by and said if they weren't off by that time, they wouldn't be allowed on after tea.  This worked.  We spent quite a bit of time with two spades breaking up the ice off the pavement in front of our house, and also Dave and Marion's next door.  I tried to get them started on the pavement in front of Ken and Di's but they weren't having it.  Several pedestrians walked past and thanked us, so we knew it was a worthwhile thing to do.

The boys then read quietly and I split a few logs and stacked for a bit, until it was too dark to continue.  Then I came in and sorted tea.  I fried sweet potato slices on the stove, and a large ordinary potato too, made a toastie for one of them and eggy bread for the other.  I had a thrown-away instant couscous thing someone gave me plus a (frozen) pastie that someone gave me, cooked on the stove.

At about 8pm I took bathwater upstairs for one of the boys and had a bit of a to-do, then realised I'd left one of the big cans filling up downstairs, and it had overflowed.  Not too badly though.  And then the sink wouldn't empty.  I couldn't find the plunger and my cupped hand wouldn't shift it.  I tried a wire, no joy.  Eventually I found a slim siphon tube which I slipped as far down as possible and blew hard.  This caused a black fountain to come out of the overflow.  So then I covered the overflow and the plughole as best as I could and blew hard... and bingo!  It worked.  A bit later I poured a load of boiling water down the hole to shift any grease and loose biofilm.  I could have done without this hassle today.

Gill had got herself a hire phone next to her bed (I think) and we all had a chat with her.  She'd had some investigations and nothing had been found, so she'll be released tomorrow, but will go in again as an outpatient soon to have more investigations.

So a really busy day, on the go most the time, and missed Gill... her company and her contributions to managing the house.

Thursday 9th December 10

A milder day weather-wise, so it was cold but not bitter.  This meant that I was able to go and do some work in the garden, loading sacks of compostables onto two heaps, and building two logpiles.... a dry one outside the front door and on each return trip, freshly chopped 'green' logs, heavy with sap, to be taken down the garden to sit quietly for a year or two in a tidy pile.

The space between our house and the semi next door, our shared driveway, had become extremely icy and slippy, so I spent a bit of time with the spade, breaking chunks of compressed snow off the concrete and making a less slippery path to walk along.  I worry about Gill falling and injuring herself; she doesn't need snow and ice to do that, so the slippery conditions make it a lot more likely.

I also did a bit of work inside, washing up and hoovering, and keeping the stove going (just the one today), and soon after 6pm, Melody came round to deliver her 12 year old genius of a son to me, and I took my own genius son plus Melody's on the bus down to Cafe Scientifique at City Screen to go to a talk about Dark Matter.

This talk was extremely difficult for me to understand.  The presenter was Tom Whytnie, a PhD student at Imperial College, London, and part of the High Energy Physics Group.  He explained that scientists think that the visible and measurable matter and energy in the Universe is about 4% of the total, and the remaining is 70% Dark Energy, and 26% Dark Matter.  This has been hypothesized by looking at how disc galaxies revolve, and our understanding of gravity.

Tom works at the Compact Muon Solenoid at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider, which smashes protons together at almost the speed of light.  The debris from these collisions might give hints as to what Dark Matter is... but it is unlikely that it will ever be seen, as it is 'dark' and invisible.  Whether it exists has to be inferred from what goes into the collision and what comes out.... and if there is stuff missing, that might be Dark Matter.

However, if these experiments don't come up with some results, it might be that our understanding of gravity is incorrect, and a lot of science will have to be rewritten.  I now understand quite a bit more about this subject area than I did, but my son got his head around it far more easily than me, and at the end of the talk, he asked the first question, which was a really good one, and showed he'd taken in a lot of the ideas.  I felt very proud of him.

The talk overran a bit, and finished at 9.30, the time Gill was expecting us home.   On the way out I spotted the tethered balloons floating above the Mansion House.... nice one James Alexander, not a litterbug!   We went to get the number 6 bus and didn't have to wait that long.  We got back home just after 10pm, and Melody soon set off home with her lad, and we got ours up to bed pretty quickly.