Being faced with two wild tigers (This post is not “Super-awesome”)

Last night I was sent into a state of panic again by one of the WordPress features, i.e. Surprise Me!.
To save me retyping what I have already written in the Forums here is a transcript of my response to the question “Can “Suprise me!” cue a video?” asked by windwhistle and the response by 1tess that reminded me that this is an optional feature.

Google Healthcare: an unscientific poll

That is… the Google situation with respect to China, and Obama’s Health Care reforms.

I am interested in people’s reactions to these, purely out of curiosity, and invite you to take part in a quick survey.

There are only three questions so it will only take a moment, and none of your personal data is collected.

Please click on this link to open the survey in a new tab or window.

Thank you for participating. I hope to publish the results by 1st April. (!)
(Update April 2nd: I’m going to let this run a bit longer)

Have a good day.

Waaaaahhhh ! How am I going to eat ?

I am right handed, and have just been holding a set of chopsticks in my left hand to see if I could possibly eat left handed.

Why ?

Because on Thursday or Friday (I can’t remember which) I was going out of the building where I work and, as I pressed the button on the wall by the front door to release the electronic lock, I leant against the door to push it open and my hand caught the frame of the door as I went through it.  Not the sort of knuckle hit that you might expect, oh no !  The tip of the middle finger of my right hand got caught on the outside of the frame while the rest of my arm and hand proceeded to follow the remainder of me through the door, separating the outside three fingers  from my thumb and forefinger.  :cry:

It’s not often I do impressions of cartoon characters (other than my “Donald Duck” voice… Oh, and “Top Cat” and “Benny” ) but this made me hop around in circles on one foot, alternately clutching my injured appendage to my groin and then shaking it out to the side.  I half expected to look at my hand and find that it looked like a throbbing, inflated, red rubber glove !

The red rubber glove would have contrasted with the brilliant blue that the air had turned at that point.

I remember thinking to myself that I was going to have a lovely bruise around the knuckle come Monday, and began to look forward to the ongoing pain that was destined to ensue.

So today (Saturday) the swelling has really started to build up and the ongoing pain is… well, ongoing.

Amanda had said last night that I should put some of her medication oils on it (she has left half a hospital full of assorted medicines, oils, creams and whatever here, all of them nicely emblazened with Chinese writing… very useful ) and tonight I took her advice and had a rummage around in the medical box until I found a spray with something written on it in English.  ”Point and Fire”, I think it said.

That may, or may not, help to keep the swelling at bay and assist with mobility but, while we were chatting online just now I realised that reduced mobility of my hand over the coming days would mean that I might not be able to use chopsticks when I get to China on Thursday !  So how am I going to eat ?

Well, although I am right handed by nature I have managed to teach myself to “write” with my left hand in the past.  When I play darts (right handed), unlike a lot of  ”traditional” pub players I like my darts and my throwing hand to be very clean, as opposed to covered in chalk as used to be the preferred method by many.  So, as chalk is often used to mark up the scores on the board I have taught myself to always mark the scores left handed, thereby keeping my right hand as clean as possible. (It’s that sort of attention to detail that helped me to improve my dart playing so much, which is a clue to my previous post.)

On that basis I ought to be able to teach myself to use chopsticks left handed without too much difficulty.  The first “dummy run” a few minutes ago (well, about an hour ago now, given the speed I type ) reminded me of the initial difficulties I faced when learning to use chopsticks, one of which is keeping the sticks on the same vertical plane.  The difference this time is that I know what the problem is, can remember what methods I employed to correct it and, therefore, I know how to counteract it.

Good news !  I may still be able to eat in China after all.

Also good news on the memory front.  As soon as I got them into my hand and tried to move them I remembered exactly the experiences I had when I was first learning to use chopsticks properly and the methods I adopted to correct the fault.  This is a good sign, because it proves yet again that I can retain some memories from the past three years in a way which is instantly retrievable.

If only that would happen with things which occurred only a few moments beforehand…..

What is your “Warm Blanket” ?

On the other site I use, a mutual interest site where I seem to spend most of the time responding to other people’s posts, a guy referred to music as his “warm blanket”… that certain something that he turns to when he just wants to escape from the world for a while and be comfortable with what he knows and what makes him feel good.

So I picked up on that and put up a post asking other people what they considered to be their “warm blanket” and I got some intersting replies from around our little “group”, but now I’d like to hear from people I don’t know so well, strangers even.

What’s your “warm blanket” ?

What do you turn to when you’re on your own and need the comfort of “me time” ?

(Keep it clean, or e-mail me the pictures )

Invisible support network wanted : As of Sunday I’m giving up smoking

Yes I’m finally going to do it !

It was going to be last weekend, but I never got round to putting these messages up on my blogs (!)… well that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

So on the basis that, from what I’ve seen, the blogging community is generally a fairly happy and supportive crowd… this is where you guys come in.

I’m going from 40+ a day straight to nothing… zip… zilch… so boy am I going to need some help !!!