Take It As Red

"Blogging is, by its very nature, erratic and irregular, feverish effort punctuated by random silence, a conundrum wrapped in a contradiction wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an unclosed em tag. " - The Poor Man

Friday, June 17

 

Occasional Ceph Blogging No. 13

The Silurian reef diorama at the Milwaukee Public Museum

Idling around the internet this afternoon as one does, I found the Virtual Silurian Reef. You can use the cursor to 'swim' round the reef, with explanations of the animals available at hotspots. It's the artwork I particularly like, just look at these gorgeous pictures of squid precursors.


The site is a project of the Milwaukee public museum and is just the sort of multimedia educational project a museum should be doing, in my opinion. I'd've been thrilled to have found this as a child. It's nice to know not all American museum boards are infected with the Intelligent Design loonies.

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Today We Joined The Petty Bourgeoisie

Today I feel an odd mixture of guilt and happiness: happiness because yay, we exchanged contracts and got the keys to our new Amsterdam flat this morning, but guilty, because now this means we're property owners, and as any good socialist knows, all property is theft - particularly so when what you've bought is formerly social housing (it should still be social housing, but the Dutch housing corporations have been privatised and are now divesting themselves of huge numbers of properties to raise capital; not to mention putting up rents). The part of Amsterdam we are moving to is just north of the Ij river, a couple of minutes from the 5 minute ferry to Centraal Station, in a neighborhood called the Vogelbuurt (the bird neighbourhood) as the streets are, guess what? Named after birds.



The Vogelbuurt in 1983

I've decided just to enjoy the happy, the liberal guilt can wait till 3am one morning when I can't sleep. Also i need to take my mind off medical matters for a while; the hospital just rang, and the current kidney infection isn't responding to the antibiotic that turned me into a walking chemical factory this past 10 days. Now they want to try another, which in practical terms means yet another flavour of horribly upset stomach. The new one is amoxycillin - when the clever stuff doesn't work, they revert to the old faithfuls. Amoxycillin is what you get as a child with a throat infection. To me, that says this kidney infection is streptoccal. Lovely. So you can see why I want to concentrate on the happy...



Lookit the pretty amoxycillin

We now have an awful lot to do. Although the new flat has been renovated it's all very bog standard; walls papered with chip and painted white, wood work done in that disgusting Dutch institutional cream colour. The floor is concrete and we plan to install a hardwood floor if we can ever make our bloody minds up about what wood and what colour. The kitchen while new, is exceedingly basic and also has a weird tiny worktop, made of pressed aluminium, that I've noticed in several flats here. Because they're textured metal they're impractical for food preparation and difficult to clean. What a dumb idea.
It's all going to be a fair amount of work, but we should have sufficient time and person power. The good thing about the flat is that in the tiny garden there is a huge, brick-built shed with light and power outlets. So we're converting it into a study/spare bedroom as it's ideally sized, is just a step across the garden to the kitchen, and means we get some privacy as well when we have visitors.

Hmm, I note I've used the word tiny twice in describing the flat. Amsterdam flats are tiny on the whole. What you pay for here is space and location: a 1 bedroom flat in the south of the city, depending on location, can be listed from 200,000 euro and house prices genrally are very high. Not as silly as SE England, but still way beyond the reach of anyone not having two well-paid white collar family incomes. This is not a place to live spaciously, unless you're an expat on a generous housing allowance.

Still, we managed it, and I can't wait to survey my new domain now. I've loaded the bike panniers with all the necesssaries to camp out while we redecorate and rebuild: (loo-paper, tea milk, sugar, mugs, cleaning stuff and so on), let me at it. And how often do you get to go shopping for oooh-shiny things without any guilt over being extravagant? Tomorrow we're going to spend a lot of money on flooring, and no-one is going to moan about it.

On second thoughts I think I'll wait till Martin comes home before I go over. It seems only right that we should make our visit as the owners together. Besides, I'm tired and I need tea.


But first those bloody antibiotics.

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Thursday, June 16

 

Occasional Ceph Blogging No. 12-ish

I'm not sure whether to cheer in appreciation of a nice little claymation creature or march on the studio for misrepresenting the poor maligned squid...

Dancing Diablo Animates 'Monsters of the Deep' Campaign For The Franklin Institute
June 10


For The Franklin Institute’s (Philadelphia, PA) new Monsters of the Deep exhibition, ad agency Red Tettemer (Philadelphia, PA) commissioned the devilishly talented folks at the DUMBO-based Dancing Diablo Studio (DDS), which designed and produced a pair of vibrantly colored claymation :15s. The spots, Squid and Whale, began airing in the Philadelphia area on June 3, 2005.


[...]


These spots aim to show kids that monsters do not live in their closets or under their beds but reside under the sea and can be enjoyed and explored at the Franklin Institute’s Monsters of the Deep exhibition.

Squid opens in a claymation bedroom with one long purple tentacle, then another and another, emerging from under a mattress, undulating around a sleeping child, and resolving to a super which reads “Real monsters live under water. Not your bed.”



One could accuse the filmamkers of being anti-natural sciences, in describing squid as 'monsters' whn they're patently nothing of the sort. They're marine invertebrates who are mercilessly hunted and which pose little if any threat to humanity. We are destroying their habitat as surely as we are the rain forests, but with much less fuss being made. It's ok to kill 'ugly' things, they're just freaks and monsters. Cutesy cartoons like this are hardly going to encourage children to take a rational, observational attitude towards the natural world.

But on the other hand, if something gets a child interested in squid, no matter how scientifically reprehensibly presented it is, surely that's a good thing?

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The Joy of Kidneys

As people who know me will already know, I have been ill for some time with chronic and now end-stage kidney failure, resulting from complications after a bout with cancer some years ago.

We ( Martin and I) knew this was likely before and when I came here to Amsterdam, so this is not shock news - commiserations are not necesssary. In light of the fact that I'll be starting renal dialysis soon, ( at the Vrij Universiteit Academic Medical Centre , which I'm glad to say is one of the best teaching hospitals in Europe, so I'm in good hands so far) and that we have just just bought a new flat in Amsterdam and will be moving house very shortly, posting is likely to be sporadic for a while. My younger son is here for the summer too from uni, so I'll be spending as much time with him as I can.

I 'm debating whether or not to blog the whole kidney-failure /hospital dialysis experience, particularly as I'm in a foreign country and not at home in the UK, but I'm concerned it may bore people. My illness may be an endless fascination to me but not others. There's also the hardware issue: if I decide to blog it I'm hoping to get a laptop, either second-hand or borrowed, so I can blog whilst at the hospital. All donations welcome - moving house costs lots :)

I'm hardly the first person to go through this... but, on the other hand, if mine is a new perspective and gives info about the experience that someone else who's facing it can't get anywhere else, then maybe it's a good idea? What would help me deal with it all and make a decision to blog it publicly is some feedback from anyone reading : tell me what you think.

Kidney blogging or not?


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