hello from a chilly and windy Glasgow

Life is busy... but I wanted to pop in for a post today.

It looks like Iris has given up on attending college. When I was walking to an appointment on Monday, I spotted Iris at the local park... and that was after I bought a weekly train pass for them to go to college. I am not sure if I can be bothered to argue the importance of attendance because lack of attendance means that the care-experienced bursary is cut, which is good news because no money means no coming off the rails. The last instalment did of course trigger a derailment, although thankfully of a short duration. That means we should be on relatively safe grounds for the foreseeable future because the type of bursary Iris gets is limited to term time. 

James meanwhile has applied to join the army. He still has a medical assessment and a fitness test to complete. He is surprisingly motivated and has so far attended all events, spoken to his recruiter regularly and has even done a bit of training. He’ll not find the fitness test difficult, he is fit and healthy and it appears the fitness test is a run and a throw. I don’t want him to be deployed of course but I think the structured routine and rigorous training might well be his making. 

The puppy had another training session with James, the dog whisperer. I am full of admiration for James and if you are local and need some help with a badly behaved dog, do drop me a line. For this second session, he brought a colleague and two very well behaved dogs. Frankie had to learn to notice them, walk past them and walk with them without losing his rag. I am learning as much as Frankie but more slowly, for sure. I suppose I don’t get as much praise and definitely no treats for good performance. That seems not entirely fair. 

We are in our final and third term at university. The third teaching term is a neglected child of sorts, the services that support teaching essentially ignore the fact that our online distance programmes are still teaching and that we are particularly reliant on our virtual learning environment functioning well. It is little things, for example this year our term three courses are not listed on the online automated assessment extension request submission form and the annual maintenance of the virtual learning environment scheduled right in the middle of term means a shutdown of it for a couple of days. The reading lists have been rolled over to 2026 while we are still updating our 2025 reading lists weekly. Not related to the teaching term but equally annoying, we’ve also been given a three week notice that our institutional Zoom licence is discontinued, which means all recordings are lost, unless downloaded and saved, and re-uploaded using a university specific system that is very inelegant (views on that might differ). The videos and transcripts and chats have to be downloaded separately and I assume we’ll have to figure out a system to re-integrate these again somewhere else. That isn’t helped by the reduction of online storage on our OneDrive from 1 terabyte to 100 gigabytes. I managed to reduce my stored files to around 230 gigabytes but I can’t really delete any other learning resources without violating our retention policy. We are advised not to use external storage. The joys of working in academia are few at the moment. 

In other news, my magic Airpods were replaced with a functioning pair after I took them for testing. This was independent of my discovery of their mysterious ability to detect when I fall asleep. I thought my left ear hearing was shot but I asked Richard to listen to something on my Airpods for a reason I can now not remember and he mentioned that the left one was much quieter than the right. Just a well it is not my hearing because the waiting list for a hearing test is much longer than the waiting list for a service appointment with Apple. The replacements are just as magical as the broken ones. When I visit the Apple shop, I always want to purchase something I don’t need. Like an iMac or something else fancy. They are really good with their marketing.

I am concerned that summer has been and gone… it is stormy and windy and miserable and I am sick of it. The other day I actually wore my winter jacket and I am still using a hot water bottle. In June. Seriously. The miserable weather is evidenced by the late blooming of the elder. I only just picked some today. Last year I made cordial in May. I know because I put the date on the labels. 

Finally I feel the urge to complain about modern bras. I have a few of those wireless jelly bra things for different purveyors of fine undergarments. These are very comfortable bras, for sure but they all come with a thin pad, which is not stitched in place. Every time a bra goes through the wash, the pads dislodge. On my sports bra the pads always move right to the back because the whole things is constructed like some kind of tunnel. Whoever designed the prototype must employ someone who deals with their laundry. It is quite frankly infuriating. I am yet to find a model with the padding stitched in. And then there is the price. My favourite bra cost me £64. Considering it has about £5 pounds worth of fabric and it takes less than an hour to make (no fancy cups, or underwire, just a shaped crop top of sorts), the markup must be considerable. I should just go back to making my own bras. That’s it, rant over. 

Now I need to sort out my face for a 10 pm podcast recording. We are on the YouTube and I like to look put together for it. 

Last but not least, I am going to the ballet tomorrow, a matinee in Edinburgh. Very excited!

Thanks for visiting 😊