2012 — 19 September: Wednesday
Having "flung wide" the curtains at the back of the living room1 and thus let Monsieur Sunshine pour freely in, I can see all too clearly why I generally keep them somewhat closed at this earlyish point of the morning. It's not so easy to read a screen bathed in such an external light source.
But it affects the early morning cuppa not one jot.
I surely hope...
... never to develop schizophrenia. Source and (hopeful) snippet:
No one really knows why Indian patients did so well, but increasingly, psychiatric scientists are willing to attribute the better outcomes to social factors. For one thing, families are far
more involved in the ill person's care in India. They come to all the appointments, manage the medications, and allow the patients to live with them indefinitely. Compared to Europeans and
Americans, they yell at the patients less...
Many of the doctors didn't mention a diagnosis. Many of the families didn't ask. There was a good deal of deception — wives grinding medication into the flour for the daily chapattis
they made for their husbands, doctors explaining to patients that they were completely well but should take strengthening pills to protect themselves from the ravages of their youth.
A fascinating article, though it says little for psychiatry of even the recent past. "Gene of the week", indeed.
Guess who!
Hardly surprising, I know:
Reminds me of the IBM peons' opinion of what were known (though never to their faces, of course) as Corporate seagulls.
The new door...
... is very nearly all fitted, in less than two hours and four cups of real coffee, but the final adjustment of the locking mechanism seems to be a bit tricky. We shall see. [Pause] All done, and very neatly too.
Mitt Romney, class warrior?
Hard to disagree with the concluding paragraph of this 'Op-Ed' piece:
The right wing has long been whining about people who don't pay taxes and who, therefore, don't deserve a say in government. They have it backward. The shame is not that those people don't pay income taxes. The shame is how many poor people there are when the top 1 percent can amass uncountable fortunes fed by tax breaks and can donate tens of millions of dollars to political candidates to keep it that way.
It's the American Way, I guess.
Now, I know it was me who phoned BT last Sunday to sign up for an Unlimited Anytime call plan. So why is it Christa who receives this morning's letter of acknowledgement in an envelope marked "To be opened by Addressee Only"? Then there's the dentist's fee for examining dear Mama. The bill for the new door. I shall have to keep my financial head down for the rest of this month, methinks. (Apart from paying Brian for the Raspberry Pi, of course.)
I'd fitted solar film to the previous patio door. It was a mirror film that lasted at least 14 years longer than it was guaranteed for. The new glass is toughened, rather than laminated, plastic framed rather than aluminium, and rated "A" for energy saving...
It lets a lot more light in, and gives me rather less privacy. But at least I shall be able to read at night by the light of the streetlamp without even having to slide the door open. Plus, it shuts and locks properly, and cuts out noise remarkably.
Time (16:22) for my next cuppa and a plum or two.
I fully realise...
... it's rapidly approaching what would have been my 38th wedding anniversary, let alone the fifth full year post-Christa. That makes my little stroll to the post box a few minutes ago quite sobering as it's a walk we very often did together. Despite the high barometric pressure, the twilight is stuffed full of rather moist-looking clouds, too. Ho-hum... KBO.
Our deputy PM is apparently going to apologise next week for making a promise (on university tuition fees) during the election campaign that he couldn't deliver while propping up the Tories in guvmint. He's decided, on balance, (and after thinking about it every night for two years, no doubt) it was wrong of him. Golly! Whatever next? Bankers' heads impaled on spikes, perhaps?
Speaking of heads, tonight's 'entertainment' is the film Gorky Park which, for some reason, has evaded me ever since it was made. Everyone in it was so young... And, before I even checked on IMDB, I was certain that the chap (James Horner) who did the music had also done it for Walter Hill's 48 Hrs at almost exactly the same time. I was right.
A suppa cuppa, methinks. I've also given in, and ordered the 3-DVD German set of a Wim Wenders film that's now 21 years old: Bis ans Ende der Welt.