Love-hate

I have a love-hate relationship with essays.

• I love planning them.
• I hate writing them.
• I love editing them.
• I love submitting them.
• I hate waiting for them to come back.
• I hate referencing them.
• I love reading for them.
• I love the ordered chaos around my desk as they are written.
• I hate typing them up.
• I love rubbing in hand cream as I pause for thought mid-sentence.
• I hate losing my train of thought and grinding to a halt.
• I love that carefree feeling once they are handed in.

My desk - and surrounds - this weekend

Embracing autumn

It's my very favourite time of year, but this time round I've barely been outside to enjoy it.  This weekend I fixed that, and headed out with Graham early on Sunday morning for a brisk walk through Epping Forest.

 

The colours, the wind, the chill, the colours, the damp smells, the leaves, the colours - they're all still there.

 

 

I breathed deeply, turned my face towards the sky and my camera towards the colours.

 

 

I came back home and knit a few more rows of my autumn hurricane hat.  Then without realising it, the hat was finished.  I feel like this hat knitted itself without me really noticing.  Surely the sign of a good pattern?

 

This means I now need to go back to the forest and photograph my hat (and my autumnal scarf) amongst the leaves.  Maybe this weekend.  Autumn's nearly over, and I've barely noticed it.

Seen on the tube - very early one morning

Central Line - Leyton to St Paul's

• A young man, loudly chewing gum and trying to spike up his hair with the palms of his hands.
• A teenage schoolboy asleep in a corner seat, rubbing his eyes occasionally.
• Five builders in a row. Each wearing multiple layers of jumpers finished with a tatty grey hoodie, plus steel capped boots and shaven heads; each clutching a can of redbull and with a hard hat on their lap or by their feet.
• Two women, heads together, handbags tightly clasped on their laps, whispering intently before one passed the other a wad of folded money

Leaving the house at dawn

 

The early morning tubes - before about 7:10 - are full of semi-asleep builders.  They are very peaceful trains, with an air of respectful pre-dawn camaraderie amongst the travellers.  I don't usually get a seat - even at that time - but I lean against a pillar, reading my Kindle and looking up occasionally to watch everybody else doze.  It's a surprisingly unstressful time of day to travel.

The next step

The first term's teaching is finished, and we have covered what the undergraduates cover in their first year in just seven weeks.  Yes, really.

Caroline Bowen in Nurse's Uniform by Roy L. Parsons

I am reeling, tired, thrilled, motivated, emotional and overwhelmed all at the same time.  I'm also in the middle of another essay.

Joan Saxton, by Frank Cadogan Cowper

I now have my uniform and am about to embark on a four month placement of actual nursing.  The first little bit in mock wards at the University, and then on real wards, with real people, in a real hospital.

Nurse at work, unknown artist

My uniform is not as elegant as the ones in these paintings.  I don't think any of the uniforms in these paintings are made from nylon.

Portrait of a Nurse, by Eric Meadus

Nor do I feel as serene as these nurses appear to be.  I flip between being incredibly excited and incredibly nervous, several times a minute.

Nurse Ellis, by Beryl Trist Newman

But I have already made some wonderful friends on the course, and I know that they all have the same jumble of feelings that I do.  Once we're wearing those uniforms, and walking through those hospitals, we're going to start to feel like nurses.  That's going to be quite something.

Nurse giving an injection of penicilin, by Henry Marvell Carr

~~~~~~~~~~

All these pictures are from the wonderful Your Paintings website.

Happy and lucky

As a Friday treat I left my flask at home and bought myself a cup of coffee when I got to the campus early this morning.  I settled into a window seat, with a view over the square (the same square I ate my breakfast in during the first few weeks of term), plugged myself into my iPod (listening to this, which always reminds me of lying in the sunshine at summer festivals) and finished off a piece of work.

 

 

And as I sat there - with beautiful music, a glorious view, a hot cup of coffee and interesting work - I thought how very lucky I am to be this happy at 8:30 on a Friday morning in November.

10 things

• The University is a 7 minute walk from Loop.
• I have been running errands to Loop for my Mum.  She needs some nice projects to knit whiles he recuperates from a second hip replacement operation.  Nice projects need nice yarn.  Loop has verrrrrrry nice yarns.
• Mostly I have been terribly well-behaved and just bought what Mum wanted, but yesterday my resolve crumbled and I bought myself a skein of Malabrigo Worsted in  the Rhodesian colourway - a wonderful burnished orange - to make myself an autumn hat.

• I don't really have time to knit, as I am too busy practising my aseptic technique, writing biology notes and submitting my first essay.
• My first essay in eighteen years.
• That makes me feel even older than saying 'my son is thirteen'.
• Olivia has decorated the chimney breast in the kitchen with A5 sized manga portraits of everyone in the family.  It looks wonderful.

• Some of the likenesses are uncanny - Uncle Richard and Granny are particularly good.

• I am still cooking - almost as much as I did before I started my nursing qualifications.  I am still baking all our bread, and making yogurt, and making midweek suppers and packed lunches.  Olivia's doing most of the baking though, and Graham is cooking on weekends.
• It is not easy to let other people have their turn in the kitchen.  Doing the cooking is what I do best.

The raspberry pi

Some of you will have heard of the raspberry pi, but many of you will not.  Ours recently arrived, and is already making its presence felt.

It is a tiny little computer, about the size of a credit card, that comes with no peripherals (such as keyboard, mouse, cables or monitor).  It doesn't even come with a case - it is just the green circuit board with various ports attached.  Because it is so small and basic it is very cheap - just £25 - and the idea is that pretty much any family will be able to buy one, and children (and adults, if they wish) can use it to learn how computers, and programming, really work.




Our raspberry pi - we bought a plastic case to protect ours, but the pi itself is just the green circuit board

The designers of the raspberry pi wanted to see a resurgence in programming skills in the UK, which they felt was something that had been lost over the last twenty years.  Children at school today are very familiar with IT, but more and more as users and consumers rather than as programmers or designers.  The IT syllabus focuses a great deal on being able to use Powerpoint or Excel and evaluate the design of web pages but not so much on how these tools came about. The raspberry pi hopes to rekindle people's understanding and enthusiasm for programming and help them understand how the computers that we now all take for granted, actually operate.

We bought a plastic case to protect our raspberry pi, and have been able to add things like a keyboard, cables and mouse from leftover bits of computer we had lying around at home.  For a screen, we use the TV or the Xbox monitor.



Cam, with the pi plugged into the TV



In the picture above you can see Cam with the pi on the floor in front of him, a keyboard plugged in to the pi and the pi itself plugged in to the TV.

You might look at this little green circuit board and think "where on earth would I start?", but that's okay - there is, of course, a wealth of information out there about how to get to know your raspberry pi and what you can do with it.  We bought two books to help us out - one a user guide to the pi and one on a simple programming language, Python.

The raspberry pi website has a quick-start guide, and there are a plethora of Twitter accounts and online forums to help you too.

Cam had learnt about the Scratch programming tool at school, and now uses it on the pi at home.  It's a fun and quick way to start that doesn't seem to techy for somebody new to programming, but actually requires you to think about things in the minute steps that programming requires.

I love the fact that the pi is all about learning and not about consuming.  At thirteen, Cam is already a 'gamer', and would spend his every waking moment on the Xbox if we let him (we don't).  But I don't mind his enthusiasm for computer games so much if there is a core of knowledge behind it, and he has an understanding of how games work and an ability to create his own if he wishes.

We all know knowledge is power, and the raspberry pi aims to give the knowledge of how computers really work back to anyone who wants it.

The two of them

There is one day in between their birthdays.  Yesterday Cam turned 13 and tomorrow Olivia turns 10.  Today is the day in between.

Aged 7 and 4

Aged 12 and 9

They've always been close, and for that I am thankful.  But this birthday season makes them into even more of a unit than usual.  They become quite twinny as they plan wishlists, outings and birthday menus.  The excitement of the other one's birthday seems to make their own even better.  They spend weeks secretly drawing each other birthday pictures and working out what to buy one other.

Aged 5 and 2

And if they can keep this closeness through their teenage years I shall be delighted.  It doesn't always happen.

Aged 12 and 9

Happy Birthday, my two loves!

Barbican

I arrive at Barbican station each morning. 

It has long been one of my favourite stations on the whole tube network, because of the view of the Barbican estate tower blocks stretching up above you when you step off the train (when I win the lottery I will live in one of the appartments near the top of these towers).

 

The enormous recessed arches on the eastbound platform are the other delight.  I admire them as I walk past in the morning; and I lounge within them, feeling tall and elegant as I wait for my train home in the afternoon.

 

10 things

Dry, unadorned nurse's hands (late at night, while I should have been studying the nervous system)

• There is no space in my head for anything other than nursing.
• The tunica interna of an artery is made up of the endothelium, the subendothelial layer and the internal elastic lamina. Did you know that?  I didn't until this week.
• For practicals, and when we are on placement at a hospital, we can't wear any jewellery at all.  Our fingernails have to be very short and neat and our hair must be completely tied back.
• I didn't realise I would feel so naked without my jewellery.
• This weekend I am (amongst other things) preparing a presentation on the biology behind the government's Drink Aware campaign. 
• I didn't fancy my usual Friday night bottle of Weston's organic cider last night.
• On Tuesday we measured lung volumes and breathing rates. I have big lungs.
• For the urinalysis practical we used sugary tea (no milk), instead of actual urine. I was slightly disappointed by this.
• Already, I wash and dry my hands thoroughly and methodically like a proper nurse.  Even if it's just after chopping garlic. 
• The heart is an amazing organ.  It's so amazing that if I think about it too deeply, I start to wonder why on earth it's still beating if it's got that much to do.

 

Weekend work