I also built a teepee type thing for beans and to get the gourds to grow up. I’d been looking at a tiny little squash (I think a turban squash) for a little while, wondering if it was going to get any bigger, and then today found a couple of much larger ones hiding under leaves at ground level. We’ve also got round courgettes, but one has got big enough to be called a marrow. Help! Too much courgette.

The ambulance with with us in a matter of 2 or 3 minutes. The paramedics gave her a nebulizer, which seemed to help a bit, but not completely. Given her history (sinus node problems, amongst others) they did an ECG, which had a few anomalies, but they weren’t sure if they were normal for Hannah.

After a bit of discussion, they decided to take her in to the Royal Berks and I stayed home to get Oscar dressed and breakfasted, to follow later.

Once we were ready, I called the emergency ward to check on the status, and was told she was about to go for an angiogram to check everything was OK. I decided it was best to drop Oscar with Hannah’s mum, and headed in.

When I arrived at the cardiac care unit, I was told that she had gone for her angiogram about 25 minutes earlier and should be back soon. I went to the waiting area to await her return.

After some time, a doctor came to talk to me. “She’s had a little heart attack…”

Wait, what?

To tell the story from Hannah’s point of view, she had been in the ambulance and had suddenly felt a lot worse, and in a lot of pain. The paramedics did another ECG, and this time it set off an alarm with something like a “severe ischaemic attack” warning. On went the lights and sirens, and red lights no longer posed a delay.

Not entirely sure what happened next, but the angiogram still seemed to be just for checking purposes. I guess you don’t expect a 26-year-old woman to be in the middle of a heart attack. Once the consultant saw the results, however, things changed.

“I need more staff, where is everybody?” (roughly, from Hannah’s account)

They did emergency angioplasty, went in through the femoral artery and removed a clot (not clear if it was 3, or 1 in 3 pieces) from her coronary artery. I don’t know how long she had, but it’s safe to say that it would have been fatal if not dealt with so quickly.

I was completely unaware of what was going on the other side of the doors, and was a bit too stunned to really take it in.

We’re about 36 hours on, and I’m knackered, so more details to follow. She’s doing well so far, though. The road to recovery appears to be at least a few weeks.

Go to Community and Living > Waste and Recycling – Reading Borough Council and enter your postcode, then click on your house number and you’ll get a summary of information tailored to your address.

Under Bin Day there should be a link to a pdf of the collection calendar from May 2010.

It might help somebody else…

UPDATE: The prize goes to Carl:

It appears to be an air stone for fish tanks/ponds.

Since yesterday evening it found its way through our rear windscreen:

I’ve held back on the vitriol, but if I could get hold of the person responsible, I’d happily introduce their head to both the missile and the glass.

I didn’t win the best costume prize, but I did win the “Most Creative Way of Completing the Course” award, and got a nice calf massage afterwards from a nice Microsoft Wellness lady :-)

Followed up with SOSSIDGES. A modern persistence hunt. I ran them down until they threw themselves from the barbecue into my mouth!

Hannah, Oscar and Paula came along to watch, and I met Colin‘s lovely wife, who came to check out whether I was keeping my word :-)

It was a lot of fun. The stoney bits were challenging but I coped with them OK and finished pretty strong. No idea about my time, because I didn’t remember to time myself. Hardly world-beating ( a lot slower than the “winning” time of something under 19 minutes ), but it felt faster than the 3-mile run in March.

UPDATE: I should mention the excellent response I got for both the costume and the bare feet. Lots of encouragement, clapping and whooping and “amusing” comments. My favourite, heard a couple of times from different people “it’s depressing when you’re overtaken by a barefoot caveman”. grin

Click on the photo below for the full set on Flickr:

I used a garden fork to aerate it a bit, and tried to sweep sharp sand into the holes. Seemed to leave a lot still above ground, at the roots, but I left it. As I was packing up, I found some lawn feed in the garage, so I chucked a bit in a watering can and gave the bit I’d worked on a drink. I’d run out of sand, so I gave up at that point.

Yesterday, I noticed something…odd.

The dark green bit is the bit I worked on. I wasn’t expecting such a noticeable change!

The downside is that now I feel compelled to treat the rest the same way. More work.

Flock only provides 32-bit (i686) binaries so if you’re running 64-bit (x86_64) Fedora Linux, you probably don’t have the right dependencies.

First step, download the archive file from flock.com

Then, uncompress it. I choose to do this straight to /usr/local

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xf /path/to/flock-*.linux-i686.tar.bz2

Create a symlink in /usr/local/bin so it is in your path:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/flock/flock-browser /usr/local/bin

If you run flock-browser now, you’ll get an error:

error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

If you satisfy this, you’ll get some more, so here are the packages you need to install with yum (which will pull down lots more). Don’t try to satisfy them yourself, it will only cause you pain. Just use yum.

sudo yum install gtk2.i686 libXt.i686 PackageKit-gtk-module.i686 libcanberra-gtk2.i686

You might still get some errors about a gtk theme, but I ignored them as they appear to be fairly harmless (at least I don’t care about them):

(flock-bin:19147): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "clearlooks",

Images courtesy of Dave Renshaw

Can anybody tell me what kind of fungus this is? There were several groups of them by the lake at The Vyne.

We’ll see how that turns out :-)

If you’d like to sponsor me:

http://www.mysportrelief.com/joewrigley