November 30, 2006
I know it really feels like it but now it’s been proved mathematically. IKEA is really more crowded than Hell. Using Dante’s masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy” as a guide (and assuming that everyone who has ever lived is in Hell,), Gary Rimmer calculates that each denizen of hell has at least 38.45 square metres of space. The average amount of space each person has during an afternoon in IKEA is about 20 square metres of space; that’s about as crowded as Jakarta, but more crowded than Hell!
He also calculates that annually, the British consume 3,221.5 metric tonnes of caffeine from tea. Weight for weight this is apparently about 4 times the global production of cocaine.
He also discusses such questions as – how much chocolate could you legitimately swap your boyfriend for, and how many Olympic sized swimming pools would be needed to contain all the eyeballs in the world. I know you’ve always wondered about that one!
This is all from the book “Number Freaking. The surreal sums behind everyday life.” I’ve bought it for my cousin for Christmas and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes Maths or the bizzarre or both.
November 28, 2006
Hooray! At last I have proper internet access again. Hopefully everything should now be fine and you should be hearing from me a bit more recently than of late.
Well now to the title. Thanks to a book I bought my cousin for Christmas, I now know what the Isle of Wight is actually for! Did you know that if every nominally Christian household in the United States opted to have a real Christmas tree this year, the land needed to grow them on would be (equal to) the Isle of Wight? Sorry Smudgie, but if you have a suspicious number of fir tree seedlings suddenly appearing in the garden, just think of how your self-sacrifice is helping our cousins across the pond to celebrate Christmas in style. Oh and in case you were wondering, us Brits would merely have to requisition Guernsey in order to indulge our taste for the smell of pine in our living rooms at Christmas.
November 17, 2006
Well many apologies again for the scarcity of my posts recently. Things have been pretty busy! Here is some of my latest news!
Things have been a bit up and down with tutoring – people saying they wanted me and then cancelling etc, but I now have seven tutoring sessions a week. In addition my church have agreed to employ me for 8 hours a week to do gardening/outdoor maintenance. I have an agreement that if the weather is too bad outside I can do some indoor maintenance instead which means that if it rains I get to decorate the gents loos! Guess which I prefer!! Anyway this means that for the last 2 weeks I have made my weekly minimum target salary which is good news! So far the church work is just until Christmas but I am hoping that they will agree to me carrying on in the new year.
Leaves are featuring very large in my life at the moment! We have 31 trees on our church site and the big problem (apart from actually getting the leaves raked up) is what to do with them. Our 3 compost bins and 1 leaf cage are full and we have 4 local authority “green waste” bins. These were full (and I mean “climbing in the wheelie bin and jumping up and down in them to compact the leaves” full) in a week and they only get emptied once a fortnight. I’ve had to resort to putting stuff in black plastic sacks which I believe the recycling men will also take. They better do, as I’ve filled 16 of them in the last 2 days I worked at church this week. We also have about another 20 odd black bin bags stacked round in various places to make leaf mould but I reckon you can only use so much leaf mould!!
I’m enjoying it all though; working outside is a really good balance to the rest of my work and I enjoy being able to feel/experience more of the change in seasons. In addition to dealing with leaves I’ve been able to do a little basic woodwork, repairing the playgroup garden gate (it was vandalised) and I’ve been given various donations of bulbs that I need to get planted. I’m also working up to getting the ladders out and clearing leaves from the roof gutters! I’ve organised another work afternoon for church members on 2nd December so I am hoping and praying that it doesn’t rain and that all the leaves are off the trees by then! Then we can have a real blitz and get the leaf clearing sorted.
The tutoring is settling down now. I’ve been pretty tired the last couple of weeks but this has really mainly been getting into gear with new tutees. Hopefully things will be a bit less hectic/tiring as I settle in to what I hope will be a new working routine.
Counselling for me is still going well though sometimes it is pretty upsetting. I had a difficult session last Monday but I think I’ve got over it mostly now. I’m finding that there are sometimes little differences now in what I think or the way I do things that I’m not conscious of deciding to do but just seem to be “there”. It’s good anyway. I have hopes that over time some fundamental changes will take place.
Well that’s about all for now – hopefully I’ll try and post a bit more regularly from now on!
