Crumble pic as requested:
Archive for March 2009
Lyme Disease petition
Lyme Disease is on the increase and it can be a particularly debilitating condition. If you've been bitten by a tick and you suspect that you might have contracted Lyme Disease, you should go to your GP as soon as possible. Unfortunately, there's a fair chance that he/she'll have no idea what you're blabbering on about. Even if they do know, there's (allegedly) a lack of proper clinical guidelines for dealing with the condition. This needs to be put right, as early and ongoing proper treatment is much more successful than delayed action.
To this end, Gill Reese of Lyme Disease Action has raised an online petition, which can be found at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Lyme-guidelines/ .
Here's the pitch:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to put in place Clinical Guidelines, SPECIFIC to the United Kingdom, for the diagnosis and treatment of all patients, including children, who have acquired Lyme disease or associated Tick-borne diseases.
These guidelines should be part of a national strategy to combat this increasingly common threat to health in the United Kingdom and should address the UK presentation of Lyme disease and other emerging Tick-borne Diseases.
Please sign the petition (and get as many others as possible to sign) before it closes on April 7th. The current number of signatories is 1775 - that's nowhere near enough.
Thank you.
No-Show
The OS Outdoors Show 2009 was in full swing at the NEC today and there were plenty of OutdoorBloggers forum members there doing the rounds and reporting their findings and opinions. Notable among the roving reporters is John Hee, who didn't take long to start adding details to his blog. Hopefully his reports will fill out with more juicy details when he gets back to base and has time to collate his data.
I'm not attending this year, for a couple of reasons. First up, I was never going to attend as a punter, as I've done that bit three times before and although it's a good way to meet old friends, the day eventually turns into a shopping spree. OK, so there are some good deals to be had, but there's not much that I need. Second, WD's offer of a press-pass came to nothing when all went silent after he took the huff over the way I manage my blog's RSS feeds.
No matter. The weekend's set fair, and I've plenty of outdoors stuff to keep me occupied.
Stay happy 🙂
Fiddler’s elbow
Just because I was named after a famous violinist shouldn't mean that my life has to be up and down like the proverbial fiddler's elbow, but just lately that's the way it's been.
I'm now about to start week two of a bitch of a cold, which I caught after a pleasant evening of beers with Nick and Steve. Personally, I blame the guest brew. Other may well be more specific and blame the quantity of the guest brew, but I couldn't possibly comment. Either way, it's having a prolonged effect. I've missed so many things over the last fortnight that I'm considering rebooting the calendar and starting again at Jan 1st, and giving it another shot.
The first "miss" was Titan's transit of Saturn on the 12th, which couldn't be seen directly here but which I was going to watch from an antipodean site via the web. Titan transits like this don't happen very often, as they only occur when Saturn's equatorial plane is roughly in line with the Earth, and it'll be ages before I get another chance. If you're interested, there's a pic and a cool movie of the Feb 24th transit over at http://heritage.stsci.edu/2009/12/index.html, reproduced here (with permission):
After four days of living under a duvet, I managed to crawl out to attend a family get-together on Sunday to celebrate the 80th birthday of my mother-in-law, but the day after that was spent undercover again.
On Tuesday I had no choice, as I had to spend most of the day at the local A&E due to "unusual circumstances". Wednesday was pretty much the same.
Thursday and Friday were more duvet-days, which meant that I missed my chance to don the "Father Jack" costume at what turned out to be an excellent fancy-dress birthday party for a good friend, but there was no way that I was going to miss Saturday's pool-party celebrations for our Annabelle's 10th birthday:
Mother's Day was spent at home feeling rough, which meant that Chris was a bit short-changed when it came to celebrating her day, and I didn't get over to see my mum either, so I've a lot of grovelling and catching-up to do this week. 😐
Anyway, I'm on the mend now. Even the boiler-fixing man says that I'm on the up, and he should know - he's been here three times during the last few weeks wrestling with (and losing to) our unruly Halstead Quattro, which has decided to play up now that it's a teenager.
Let's hope that tomorrow's better, and that the boiler gets fixed soon thereafter.
Of course, all this means that dates for our annual wildie, originally scheduled for sometime during the next two weeks, have had to be reconsidered.
I'm off to do some more coughing. Bye for now. 
Never rub another man’s rhubarb
I've never tried forcing it before...
Oo-er, Missus
😯
What’s in a name?
News just in from the Manning household is that John and Steph now have a beautiful baby girl named Sierra Jane. Well done, folks!
It's interesting to note that outdoors folk still name their kids after places that they hold dear. Ian and A Pennington have their Skye Farsai, we have our Elanor Skye and Annabelle Shannon, no doubt there are many more proudly-named geo-kids out there. Long may the trend continue, I say.
Luckily, my parents weren't as outdoorsy as most, otherwise I'd probably have been called "Osmington Mills", which sounds quite posh but wouldn't have fit with my working-class background.
