I've had a rough couple of months during which I have had no income. Of course, my husband has continued to earn his (very decent) salary, but our overheads were always based on two incomes and the loss of one put things like our house and our car in jeopardy. It was scary there for a while.Not for the first time in our lives, we found ourselves on the receiving end of the kindness of friends. Bags of groceries, gifts of money and invitations for meals. It has been hard to accept these gifts, to be honest. I felt like a burden. I also felt embarrassed, because I knew there were people who are far worse off than we are. One friend pointed out we have always been the sort of people who consider it a privilege to do that sort of thing for other people, so we should realise that those who were helping us were seeing it in the same way. It was a lesson in humility.But, even though I have learned this morning that a new contract is winging its way to me, the lesson wasn't over yet. Anol Bhattacharya (who twitters as SoulSoup) tweeted a link to this site this morning.It is sobering to see that 99% of the world's population is poorer than we are - even when I don't earn a penny. We are truly privileged.If you ever travel to Cape Town by air, almost on arrival, you will be reminded of how privileged you are: right next to the Cape Town airport is a squatter camp where people live in shanty houses made of bits of wood, corrugated iron and other scraps.It gives you a sense of perspective about the air conditioning not working in your hired car!Image by GNJOR on Photobucket

They may be undersized, but they're the right colour and they taste good!There are two cherry trees on the pavement near our house. A little girl found me photographing them and eating a few and said I should be careful, because they might be poisonous. I assured her that they were perfectly safe and showed her how to choose the best ones. She asked me how I could be sure a dog hadn't peed on them. We discussed the logisitical unlikelihood of this. Her little brother came and joined us. As I left, they were trotting home with their hands full of their spoils. Their mother was waiting for them in the doorway and I heard the little girl announce that "That lady says they aren't poisonous. She says they're cherries."Uh oh.Perhaps the mother has known all along that they are cherries, but didn't want her kids eating any old cherries off any old tree. This is a fairly common stance. I might just have lost myself a few points with the neighbours!

Now that the summer is really here, and we're enjoying wonderful warm weather, all sorts of berries are ripening.This is sloe... I think. Sometimes used to make sloe gin. Also used as a metaphor for beautiful eyes (although why this should be the case, eludes me).As you can see, it is one of many sloe bushes, but it is the only one with leaves in that colour. All the other bushes have green leaves. Perhaps it is simply a different variety. Perhaps it is an anomaly. It may even be diseased. But I find the colour contrast between the leaves and the berries interesting.

When we visited Spain a couple of Easters back, we stayed in a hotel called Hippocampo. I was tickled at how similar that sounded to the part of the brain called 'hippocampus'. Since I spoke no Spanish and noticed several other hotels and apartment blocks with the same word in the name, I assumed it was the surname of the owner of the chain or the holding company or something along those lines.It gradually dawned on me that the seahorses which appeared everywhere were no coincidence. I looked up the word seahorse in the phrase book and confirmed my suspicions. Hippocampo = seahorse.Now that I knew this, I was tickled that an area of the brain should have a name that sounded like the Spanish for seahorse.Today I discovered - well duh! - that the hippocampus is so called because of its resemblance to a seahorse.Doh!

As a sports lover, I have been delighted at the growing success of the England women's cricket team. And, with the hard-fought, longstanding Ashes just around the corner, tension is mounting! I would say that the ladies' team stands a better chance of winning the Ashes than their male counterparts.If you're more familiar with baseball, Wikipedia has a nice comparison of the two sports.My one and only attempt to play cricket was during my school days. It was part of a fundraiser to help the local hospital buy a dialysis machine, so that a lad from the boys' school would no longer have to travel to a neighbouring town for treatment three times a week. We staged a sponsored boys'-school-versus-girls'-school match in every sport on offer at the two schools. When I went out to bat for the girls' team, I was very confident. Huge restrictions had been placed on the boys and I was a dab hand at rounders, so this was going to be easy. Ha! One moment, the bowler was running up to bowl. The next, I was making squeaking noises behind the wicketkeeper, and he, somehow, had my bat! Not my finest moment.The English women's captain, Claire Taylor, by contrast is a consummate sportsperson - the first woman ever to have been named one of Wisden's five cricketers of the year. There have even been whispers that she may be considered for selection for the men's national team. Of course, they are just rumours at the moment. While she was the leading run-scorer in England's victory in the Women's World Cup, facing up to the pace generated by male first class cricketers is - for now, at least - a very different prospect from that of their female counterparts, and she would be up against stiff competition for her fielding role of wicketkeeper. But let that not detract from her achievements in the women's game.As if to balance out all this sporting prowess, she is also a skilled violinist with an orchestra in her home town of Reading.Women wear pretty much the same kit as the men, and questions abound about jockstraps, boxes and breast protection. I have researched the matter on the web and am none the wiser. The previous women's captain, Clare Connor, is on record as saying women wear no protective gear in these areas... and she spoke from the position of one who had been painfully hit in the groin. But that was in 2003. During a (men's) match in 2007, one of the commentators said "I saw Rachel Heyhoe-Flint asked this question once by a really smirking TV pundit," says Tom Adam. "She wiped the smirk right off his face by answering, absolutely dead-pan, 'Yes, we wear boxes, we call them "man hole covers".'Charming.On a more uplifting note, female cricketers have, for the past few years been able to wear kit designed for them, rather than having to make do with men's trousers and the like. And, in 2008, Adidas came on board with specially designed kit for the national women's teams.Learn more about the women's game here.

Something else that ripens at this time of the year are the rose hips, which my husband calls nypon (I wish I could provide a phonetic version, but there isjust no equivalent sound in the English language for that 'y' - it's somewhere between 'oo' and 'ee'). The Swedes use them to make a sauce (or, more correctly translated, a soup) called nyponsoppa, which they serve over their desserts. My husband's family eats it with something called ris a l a Malta.My verdict?Bo-oring!To me, it's a vaguely sweet, but otherwise utterly tasteless concoction. If I must eat ris a la Malta, I sprinkle it liberally with ground cardamom or cinnamon.Oh, and you can probably buy ready made nyponsoppa at your local Ikea.

Here you see my two girls diligently guarding the house and protecting us from marauding cushion thieves!They are litter sisters, and have never really been apart. However, unlike my Mom's cats, which came from shelters some years apart, my girls show no affection for one another. They don't curl up together, or groom each other. Daisy (on the left) is a bit of a princess. Molly is more adventurous.Since the arrival of Jessie, the girls have taken refuge in the conservatory and dining room. Molly does go out of the window to explore the wider world from time to time, but this requires jumping, which Daisy does not do! So Daisy looks after the cushions. She makes sure that they are covered in just the right amount of fur. Unfortunately, one of her staff members (aka moi) keeps removing the fur, so she has to start all over again.Sigh. It's a tough life!

Someone sent me this this morning. The information purports to originate from the Metropolitan Police. I have tried doing a search on it and have found umpteen other identical posts, each making the same claim. I have yet to find something official from the Metropolitan Police, and their own site seems to have no such article.I wondered whether anyone else had more insight into the situation, since I know a great many of us travel often and stay in hotels around the world.HOTEL KEY CARDSEver wonder what is on your magnetic key card?Answer:a. Customer's nameB. Customer's partial home addressc. Hotel room numberd. Check-in date and out datese.Customer's credit card number and expiration date!When you turn them in to the front desk your personal information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a hand full of cards home and using a scanning device, access the information onto a laptop computer and go shopping at your expense.Simply put, hotels do not erase the information on these cards until an employee reissues the card to the next hotel guest. At that time, the new guest's information is electronically 'overwritten' on the card and the previous guest's information is erased in the overwriting process.But until the card is rewritten for the next guest, it usually is kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR INFORMATION ON IT!The bottom line is: Keep the cards, take them home with you, or destroy them. NEVER leave them behind in the room or room wastebasket, and NEVER turn them into the front desk when you check out of a room. They will not charge you for the card (it's illegal) and you'll be sure you are not leaving a lot of valuable personal information on it that could be easily lifted off with any simple scanning device card reader.For the same reason, if you arrive at the airport and discover you still have the card key in your pocket, do not toss it in an airport trash basket. Take it home and destroy it by cutting it up, especially through the electronic information strip!If you have a small magnet, pass it across the magnetic strip several times. Then try it in the door, it will not work. It erases everything on the card.Information courtesy of: Metropolitan Police Service.So, what do you reckon? Is this another wild conspiracy theory?

You've probably already realised that this is a Blogger blog. It's no big deal - it was the easiest to set up when I ventured into the world of blogging, and I've never really had any reason to change. I might switch at some point when I figure out how to put my website and my blog into the same space. Hopefully that will be after I've figured out how to customise the design, since I'm not really happy with the look of either of them, and none of the templated alternatives do the trick for me.But I digress...Just lately, Blogger's spellcheck appears to have taken leave of its senses. When you run a spell check before publishing, any unrecognised words are highlighted by means of yellow shading. Clicking on a shaded word generates a list of possible alternatives. Rather like Word, except you use the left mouse button, rather than the right to view the suggestions.Lately, words are being highlighted that are perfectly fine. The list of alternatives usually starts with a duplicate of the highlighted word. At first I thought I was seeing things - you know how we have a tendency to read what we meant to type, rather than what we did type? But this has been going on for a few days now, and it genuinely is suggesting exactly the word I have typed, spelt exactly as I have spelt it. This time around, the spellcheck has taken to the word alternatives, which it suggests I spell alternatives.Sigh.Anyone else having a similar experience?

I came across this question in one of my LinkedIn groups this morning:What are the 3 most sought software skills for an Instructional Designer?This was my response:To be honest, I would place the software skills very low on the list of priorities. You can always learn a new application. I would be far more interested in whether the personunderstands learningunderstands learnersis skilled at building relationships with SMEs and stakeholdersis a shining example of a self-driven, passionate learneris creative and originalis able to think beyond templates and contentknows how to create resources that engage peopleholds learners/users in higher esteem than he-who-signs-the-chequeThese are the characteristics I would consider of far greater import than "Can you use Articulate?"What do you reckon?