Blogs: Pandammonia 
The world that revolves around Caity Ross.
Archive for the ‘Nature, Science and Technology’ category
Song of the Day
Today’s song is dedicated to everyone affected by the flooding in Cumbria and Scotland: November Rain by Guns ‘n’ Roses.
Photographs
I have added some photo streams to my photography page for your delight and perusal.
Update (28th October 2009): the XHTML produced by Picasa fails W3C validation because of the use of the non-existant font property and because it fails to put a space before the forward slash at the end of the
Test from mobile
This is s test post from my phone using a Wordpress app.
A journey in arachnophobia
If you know me well, you will know I have arachnophobia.
At the weekend, I drove to Leeds. Before setting off, I removed the wing-mirror cobwebs with a handy stick. On the way, I stopped off at Tesco in Bar Hill for petrol, and on the slip road back onto the A14, a spider appeared! A reasonably large one, at that. I shrieked, and panicked and paid no real attention to where I was steering the car. Luckily, the slip road is fairly wide; unluckily, it goes round and round and there was also a car behind us. I don’t know what they thought was happening. The spider was on the door where the window meets the frame, if you can call it that. I opened the window slightly, with a view to the spider going outside and me shutting the window and everyone would be happy. This plan didn’t quite work. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but the result was the spider was trapped by its legs in the window. This was horrible, but at least it wasn’t wandering around inside the car. I didn’t dare open the window again in case it fell inside the car. When we arrived in Leeds, Colin opened the door and the window, and it fell to the ground. Relief!
The next day, Saturday, I drove to my mam’s. After parking outside, I opened the door and a spider – very similar to the previous day’s – dropped from its web. I screeched and panicked and shut the door again. It went back up the web. I moved as far away as possible from it without actually sitting on the handbrake. Colin, meanwhile, was faffing about and not moving and not being helpful in general. I opened the door again; it ran down again. I closed the door again. The spider went back up again. I tried to push Colin out the car. He wouldn’t budge. Finally, he got the message, and moved. He didn’t do anything about it though, and started rummagiing about under the seat while I urged him to do something about the arachnid. Putting the map away under the seat was apparently more importent. Anyway, he went round the other side of the car, and opened the door and removed the spider. Relief!
On Sunday, I was stroking one of the cats, who was on Mam’s bed. I noticed a little spider a few inches above her and to the side. I shuddered, and rubbed the cat under her head so she’d see the spider and do something about it. She did: she caught it and killed it. Relief!
I went downstairs, and sat on the sofa and started telling my Mam and sister all about it and how brave I’d been. When I got to the bit about the cat looking up to see it, I saw a big spider – bigger than the car ones – on the ceiling above me! I panicked a bit and sat in Mam’s seat and mam sat on the other chair. Later, Colin came downstairs and sat where I’d been sitting under the spider. My sister and I weren’t happy about the non-removal of the spider, but as long as we could see it, it wasn’t so bad. While we were all chatting, my sister and I saw the spider drop very rapidly to the floor. We looked at each to confirm this had happened. My mam got a glass and a newspaper and manoevred the spider into the glass to take outside. Relief!
The relief was shortlived. And turned into blind panic and terror. I didn’t realise how cruel my mother could be! She came towards me with the uncovered glass of spider and waved it at me, putting it right up close, with the spider moving its legs. Ugh. I escaped and ran away to the other room. From this safe vantage point, I saw her do the same to my sister. She was terrified as well, but didn’t run away. Mam finally stopped terrorising her daughters and put the spider out the back, over the wall. Finally, relief!
No other arachnidian events occured. Relief!
Henry is fixed
At long last, Henry is fixed. He feels nice to drive again, without all the clunking and knocking and sloshing that was going on before.
It’s also a beautiful day outside. It’s autumnal, there’s leaves on the ground, the trees are starting to turn colourful, there’s conkers everywhere, it’s crisp, it’s sunny. It’s glorious.
I want to go for a drive! But I have to stay in and write about Spanish verbs. It’s hardly the same thing at all.
Bar codes
Google’s home page today shows a bar code to mark the invention of the bar code, so says the explanatory title on mouseover.
Google's bar code marking the invention of the bar code
I had just got back from the shops, actually, where I had been scanning my shopping myself. I got some pick and mix tomatoes, but couldn’t find them on the screen. I scanned them in as cherry tomatoes because that’s what kind I got. I hope I didn’t diddle myself! Anyway, I had a message from Colin with the link to the Google home page, and saying to scan it. I didn’t know what he was on about at first, because I hadn’t seen the Google home page, but then I did and had and other past tense auxiliaries, so I got the scanner from the cat’s bedroom, where I’d been scanning all the ISBN codes for my Library Thing, and plugged it in and waited for it to install, like USB things do by magic, then I scanned the bar code, wondering whether it would work on the computer moniter, and it did!
It says “Google”, which wasn’t really a surprise. The cursor was in the Google search box, so it went off and searched for Google on Google, because it effectively presses the enter key after scanning.
I bet you were all dying for confirmation of what it said.
Shoe spam
What’s with all the shoe spam of late? Akismet, which is excellent at catching blog spam, caught eight spam comments yesterday and one it wasn’t sure about, which was actually spam.
Six of these comments are saying my blog’s great, like they all seem to do these days, and tell me I can get information on various shoe and boot brands, such as Converse, UGG (seriously, why on earth would I want a pair of these? I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that their name is also the first syllable of the word ugly), New Balance and so on.
I wonder if anyone’s ever done a study on spam topics. I wonder what the seed is.