Category: Challenges
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Drudgery is a fact of life . . .
I remember so well, back in the day, thinking about why I loved research. In so many ways it was the physical experience of planning, and then setting the experiment up, so that the waiting could begin. Anticipation and wonder were all very lovely, but it was actually the joy of asking the question that…
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The soft twilight . . .
I awakened early this morning with a persistent toothache. And it’s weeks before I can see a dentist. I felt a bit sorry for myself, until I looked up and saw the softness of the early morning light. Outside, it was soft, so soft, in the cool glow of morning twilight. The full moon (or…
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The joy of directed exercise
I’ve always been a kind of get-up-and-go sort of person. Never thinking about stretching exercises, or anything that healthy, but rather just getting on with life, doing activities. Until I couldn’t, after an injury to my left hamstring, which grew progressively worse the more I walked about, the more I tried to ignore it. After…
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The joy of logistics
The only way I could consolidate all our scrap metal was to carry things into a staging area in front of our sheds. But the stacked row of vehicles in front of the pile, and additionally the small host of additional vehicles that have accreted around our place, posed a different challenge: how might the…
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Clearing joys
It was a hard job, but somebody had to do it! Over the years I’ve been accumulating defunct items in a corner of the field. The weeds have overgrown the small heap so it was as if there was nothing there. But I knew the day of reckoning would arrive, and yesterday morning it did.…
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Learning new things . . .
Embarrassed as I am to have been writing earnestly for the past three years and only now discovering a wonderful editing tool, I’m delighted at the same time. I’ve been fortunate to join a specialist writing group: five would-be novelists working in the science fiction genre, who have begun to share their work together. As…
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Oh we do love to be beside the seaside . . .
Early Monday morning, everyone is struggling to wake up and pack up for the off, after a delightful weekend of fish and chips, pizzas, and then a complete Sunday dinner. Food and drinks have been in copious supply, just like the sunshine. It seems the whole country was filled with sunshine, actually, as the reports…
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Forget it, corvids . . .
We’ve finally finished sorting out Mr Duck’s patch with biosecurity netting. It turned out that the rails I had laying around were exactly the right size to be supports for the jackdaw-proof netting, and so the task was relatively easy to facilitate. The challenge has been that the jackdaws, especially if they go in two-by-twos,…
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Palpable relief?
Over time, I think it’s natural to develop work-arounds, ways of accommodating when things don’t go according to plan. So if the fan oven element could not be repaired, or if the problem was deeper in the electronics somewhere I couldn’t reach, there was still the other side which works without a fan. Work-arounds are…
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The joy of the reveal
When the power flicked off, right in the middle of the bread baking, we thought it was probably a valley-wide outage. But no, the special indicator light showed me that power was still coming in to the house; actually the domestic RCD switch had tripped out. We wondered, as you do, what could have set…
Roads to Joy 