Bye-bye bones

I decided I was a fool. Bones and pots were not for me. Little essays, whose only difficulty factor, was to ensure that you put their words into your words - where was the challenge? I'm back with the rocks! I'm going to try to woo the MSc Earth Systems selectors by adding extra courses to my portfolio and I'm doing it because I LOVE EARTH SCIENCE! So, I have signed up for the new short course in Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis, S186 - which I'll leisurely run through over the next few weeks, as a very gentle reminder of what I've been missing. Then I'm going to register for S339: Understanding the Continents, next year. It won't matter if I fail even - but I missed out S339 and S369, because I used U316 for my degree - and I know there is a gap in my knowledge, which I'm hoping to fill.

Meantime there is a whole heap of work to be getting on with in this house. The weather is beautiful, but we have to stay in to do that. Bummer.

Mustn't grumble

I was going to write a piece about how TIRED I am, despite having slept til 11:41 this morning! Tired because of the work on the bedrooms and the building of wardrobes and chests and the laying of new carpet (twice, cos we didn't like the first one!) Tired because of the new bed which is strange to me. Tired because there is a whole heap more work to do on those rooms, including the building of 2 more wardrobes and the laying of yet another carpet and the house is a TIP! Tired because my PC went funny last week and I put in a new hard drive, but XP wouldn't install. So I bought new RAM and installed that yesterday and XP installed - but the thing kept crashing. So I took out the new RAM and put in the old and now it works. Tired because I had to reinstall all my software and drivers and tired because I lost so much stuff (I MUST buy an external hard drive).

But I must not complain about being tired. This morning, I learnt, with great sadness, of the untimely death, last night, of one of my OU friends. Keith Blomfield. He and I studied together on S103 and we were both 'punished' by Audrey, because we wrote too many messages! He was a great guy - funny, witty, to the point, kind, helpful, encouraging. He loved his physics and wanted others to love it too! He helped me with my maths. He read my A174 stories! He will be sadly, sadly missed.

Keith was diabetic and suffered for years with pancreatitis. But he got on with life and helped others whenever he could. He was taken quickly by cancer. He was only in his 40's.

Life is too short to be tired.

Bones, bones, bones

With AT272 finally out of the way (dire course), I bought myself a second-hand copy of the A251 World Archaeology book and have read about 100 pages of it. It's all bones and rock fragments, much like S292 (Emergence of Humans), which I disliked intensely. I have to MAKE MYSELF get into this and enjoy it - I MUST become enamoured of broken pots. I am getting very depressed.

I also registed for AA310, starting next February. That is, the History of Film and TV ... seeing as I'm not much of a cinema buff or much of a remote couch potato or a lover of history, I can see that that's going to be fun also!!!

I miss science.

(Very) unfit??

I decided to test my fitness, following instructions on a website. (1) Exercise and take pulse. Mine was 100. (2) Wait one minute and then take pulse again. Mine was 82. (3) Minus the second figure from the first and divide by 10. So I'm 1.8. Apparently, a figure of <2 is 'poor' and you should aim for something like 4. But my resting pulse is only 72, so even if I'd managed to get down to that in the minute, my figure would've only been 2.8, which isn't much better. Perhaps I should've exercised for longer than the one minute running on the spot and got my pulse rate higher! :)

There are now 80 000 people classifying the galaxies. There are (initially) one million to classify, but they want each to be classified by 20 different users. We're over halfway through that task, it seems - what then?