Catching up

This is all jumbled up, as I remember it. Yesterday we did a bit of DIY – fitting a couple of capping strips to the garden fence. J helped to saw them to length, K was nail monitor, and I did manly wielding of the claw hammer. Katy is starting to turn our collection of soil-filled trugs into a raised bed; this has got as far as planting some carrot seeds which may have sprouted.

That reminds me of an interesting article I heard on the radio about druids (in this country) celebrating Lammas. What was interesting to me was that it was the start and end of the year to them, a time to reflect on the year just gone, what they had achieved or not, how they had reaped what they sowed and so on. We are so out of touch with the seasons – early summer used to be the lean time of the year when the harvest hadn’t yet arrived and the food stored from last year was running out. These days it just means that the apples in Tesco have to come from New Zealand rather than England :(. Anyway, I found it interesting how there are different ways you can choose to define when your year starts, depending on what’s important to you.

Talking of food, there has been some cooking, including J tackling meringues and A joining in by trying to chomp on wooden spoons. I finally got around to getting a chimney sweep to sort out our chimney as it was disgorging crud in the front room. Katy, J and K took some photos, which I think the sweep found bizarre but it’s not a boring everyday thing for us.

There have been occasional nice sunsets and fly pasts by flocks of geese in the dusk. I love the way they fly in a big V without being able to communicate with each other the finer points of aerodynamic theory or navigation. The whoosh of their wings and honking sound great on a quiet summer evening too.

Also there has been much Story of the World (basically catching up), some Pen Pals, phonics desk, reading aloud and being read to. L treated me to the actions for some silly songs she and Katy learned today which were fab.

At tea last night we were talking about spaceships and floating about, and I asked them why is there no gravity up in space. J came out with the rubber sheet analogy, which I think he’s seen in a museum somewhere. I was amazed, but then I suppose it’s a good picture that makes sense and is easy to remember once you’ve seen it. I only got as far as special relativity at college, so I know he’ll not get the general relativity behind it all from me!

K remembered about black holes and so we talked about the rubber sheet and them, and I mentioned how as you accelerated faster and faster as you fell in towards the black hole time would slow down (not your clock running slow, but the universe itself slows down). J said that your speech w-o-u-l-d s-l-o-w d-o-w-n t-o-o which I said is true, but your brain would slow down at the same time, so you would hear that your voice sounded normal. If you don’t have to worry about the equations and are young enough for bits of your brain to still be flexible, physics can be magical and weird rather than boring.