Random jottings
Feb. 6th, 2004 01:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purpletigronI cut because I care about your Friends page... hope you will still read on...
I've found the printed music to "Salterello", as in a transcription of the original 14th century manuscript upon which my No 1 favourite "Dead Can Dance" track is based upon! I can't wait to get together with three other people who can play the round with me :-)
Now my knee is pronounced officially Healed of Tissue Damage, I have started a full re-hab workout programme. The first session was last night, and with the help of a hot bath afterward, I'm comfortably non-achy today. Hooray! Any weight that I gain from here should be muscle ... I'm aiming to train thrice weekly, and do aikido weapons weekly, until my knee is strong enough to start aikido body art again.
Must get on with my biology studying. Anyone here an expert on glucosamine? Everyone says it's good for healing cartilage, and there seems to be research evidence to back this up. However, I strongly disprefer taking food supplements. Moreover, my research suggests that the body naturally synthesises glucosamine from glucose and glutamine - both these precursors are readily provided by food, whereas the product is not. So I'm looking for any research on how to optimise the production and use of glucosamine in the human body.
My Well Kitty, who is now Alpha Kitty because of the sad loss of Sick Kitty, is spookily acting more and more like dear departed SK. WK was never a lap kitty; SK used to purr just to see you: now WK always wants to be purring on my lap...
A bizarre saga of foul water welling up, high-pressure water jets, CCTV footage of 'builders rubble' blockages, insurance companies, and a 'survey' which finally solved the problem ... we think. You really don't want to know...
Being the most cost-effective energy saving measure one can take, I've been working on improving the insulation of our new house. In particularly, getting the regulation depth installed in our loft. After being extensively given the run-around since September, I have finally been given a quote. Still, the upstairs rooms were unlivable in the hot weather last summer, too, so there will be reasonably immediate benefits even at this late date...
My contact in the local LETS has been to survey our pear tree, and we are set to do the major restorative pruning next Saturday. This will be drastic - taking out the top 30% of the main trunk, for example. However, with a more gentle summer prune, and a year or two of patience for the tree to recover, this should give both the tree and our pear crop a new lease of life. Then we hope to find out whether it is a Williams, or some other variety.
Mater and I have been collaborating on genealogy for some time. We seem to have discovered a mysterious, long-lost great-aunt of hers, and her daughter who may only have died some 10 years ago. I have a birth certificate on order to see if the older lady really is my great-great aunt. I need to find the reference so I can order the death certificate for the younger lady, too. If these women are who we think they are, then we need to find out how the man who would have been my great-great uncle came to be married to a different woman by 1905... I can find no death, divorce or re-marriage records to show what happened... Intriguing! [Yes, Mater and I tend to focus on the female line, even though the system of record keeping in the UK makes this markedly more difficult than sticking with a single surname].
And to think, I'd not been updating because I couldn't come up with anything to say...
I've found the printed music to "Salterello", as in a transcription of the original 14th century manuscript upon which my No 1 favourite "Dead Can Dance" track is based upon! I can't wait to get together with three other people who can play the round with me :-)
Now my knee is pronounced officially Healed of Tissue Damage, I have started a full re-hab workout programme. The first session was last night, and with the help of a hot bath afterward, I'm comfortably non-achy today. Hooray! Any weight that I gain from here should be muscle ... I'm aiming to train thrice weekly, and do aikido weapons weekly, until my knee is strong enough to start aikido body art again.
Must get on with my biology studying. Anyone here an expert on glucosamine? Everyone says it's good for healing cartilage, and there seems to be research evidence to back this up. However, I strongly disprefer taking food supplements. Moreover, my research suggests that the body naturally synthesises glucosamine from glucose and glutamine - both these precursors are readily provided by food, whereas the product is not. So I'm looking for any research on how to optimise the production and use of glucosamine in the human body.
My Well Kitty, who is now Alpha Kitty because of the sad loss of Sick Kitty, is spookily acting more and more like dear departed SK. WK was never a lap kitty; SK used to purr just to see you: now WK always wants to be purring on my lap...
A bizarre saga of foul water welling up, high-pressure water jets, CCTV footage of 'builders rubble' blockages, insurance companies, and a 'survey' which finally solved the problem ... we think. You really don't want to know...
Being the most cost-effective energy saving measure one can take, I've been working on improving the insulation of our new house. In particularly, getting the regulation depth installed in our loft. After being extensively given the run-around since September, I have finally been given a quote. Still, the upstairs rooms were unlivable in the hot weather last summer, too, so there will be reasonably immediate benefits even at this late date...
My contact in the local LETS has been to survey our pear tree, and we are set to do the major restorative pruning next Saturday. This will be drastic - taking out the top 30% of the main trunk, for example. However, with a more gentle summer prune, and a year or two of patience for the tree to recover, this should give both the tree and our pear crop a new lease of life. Then we hope to find out whether it is a Williams, or some other variety.
Mater and I have been collaborating on genealogy for some time. We seem to have discovered a mysterious, long-lost great-aunt of hers, and her daughter who may only have died some 10 years ago. I have a birth certificate on order to see if the older lady really is my great-great aunt. I need to find the reference so I can order the death certificate for the younger lady, too. If these women are who we think they are, then we need to find out how the man who would have been my great-great uncle came to be married to a different woman by 1905... I can find no death, divorce or re-marriage records to show what happened... Intriguing! [Yes, Mater and I tend to focus on the female line, even though the system of record keeping in the UK makes this markedly more difficult than sticking with a single surname].
And to think, I'd not been updating because I couldn't come up with anything to say...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 01:31 pm (UTC)(I wonder whether everyone else is just earning an honest living, or if there are lots of problems being caused by current livejournal maintainance?)
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 01:33 pm (UTC)Or, maybe, we're blown away by the breadth of subjects and activities in the one posting!
The genealogical research sounds fascinating.
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 01:40 pm (UTC)Or, maybe, we're blown away by the breadth of subjects and activities in the one posting!
Well ... I really don't know why my brain couldn't have processed these things one at a time, on the numerous occasions earlier in the week when I thought 'I should write something for LJ' and then went blank :-) Then again, one or two people have said that they find my LJ entries 'too intimidating for comment', or something... which is pretty perverse when I'm sitting here craving 'company' ;-)
The family history stuff is indeed addictive - Mater was quite close to her grandmother, so if this mystery woman was her grandmothers sister, there must have been some quite big reason why she was never mentioned!
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 02:11 pm (UTC)I'm not certain I find your posts intimidating, definitely interesting.
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 02:20 pm (UTC)Oh ... and I wish you were more sure that you were unintimidated :-)
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 02:06 pm (UTC)Glad to hear the knee is coming along. I'll be curious to see if you feel there's any positive effect in the body arts from the time you spend now working on weapons.
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 02:21 pm (UTC)I feel really good after the workout last night, which is ... interesting. Must not overdo things tonight!
I'm pretty confident that concentrating on weapons for the rest of my convalescence will have to have a positive effect on my body art ... but only my instructors will be able to tell me that, as it's already so long since I trained compared to my total time doing aikido, that I'm sure I won't be able to tell :-)
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 03:31 pm (UTC)Glad to hear Da Knee is healing! And kitty personality transplants seem to be pretty common, actually. Mouse underwent at least three separate ones in his long life.
-J
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 08:00 pm (UTC)Did Mouse really change that much? Was it when you moved house? Poor Mousie!
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 09:38 pm (UTC)And yeah, in Mouse's case the three separate personality transplants were all of the times he was moved. It can also happen if you acquire another cat, and I'm sure the loss of a cat can trigger it as well. It sounds dramatic, and probably is for a little kitty brain, but it's not always a bad thing. In Mouse's case he became much sweeter and much less of a bully when he moved to D.C. and then, later, to Edmonton.
-J
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 05:29 pm (UTC)::peruses post::
so where did you find the saltarello music? Can't rmemeber if I've heard any dead can dance offhand, heard *of* them of course..
glucosamine - right, Forest's mum has arthritis and swears it does her good to take it, Forest has tried it and wasn't impressed, but he loathes taking tabs anyways. No medical evidence, solely anecdotal, sowwy.
Family research sounds intriguing indeed, hope you manage to track down the mystery lady!
Re: Deafening silence
Date: 2004-02-06 08:03 pm (UTC)The music is in a collection of medieval dances, found when I was allowed to look in the stacks at the huge city library. (They had to put a road cone in the aisle to warn people that I was there, in case the someone wanted to slide shut the rolling bookcases...). DCD are ace, you should hunt some down...
Thanks for the comments re. glucosamine. There's a lot of hype on the Web, but I think I'm starting to turn up some useful medical research too... hmm, maybe I should ask my doctor and physiotherapist, just on the off-chance :-)
The birth certficate for the mystery lady, senior, should be arriving in the next day or two :-)