Danskcolin: Sunday March 24th 2024

Today is Sunday, and the 7th day of mine and Lois's "80% voluntary self-isolation", ahead of my operation after Easter. Self-isolation is mostly hardest on Lois, as she's the social animal in this marriage, but I have my regrets too. I don't need to tell YOU that, however, because no doubt you saw the story about me in today's Onion News.

Don't be fooled by the man in the picture, by the way, he's just one of their standard, in-my-humble-opinion slightly overpaid "models", who make their living out of illustrating "area dads" - and what a madness THAT is !!!!

Lois has certainly been the one who's paid the bigger price for our self-isolation, and once again this Sunday, for the second Sunday in a row, she's taking part in her church's two Sunday Morning meetings online, via zoom, rather than attending in person - a definite sacrifice on her part, because I know that seeing and talking to her fellow church-members once a week helps her a lot with her day-to-day living.

flashback to last Sunday: Lois taking part online

in her church's Sunday Morning Meeting

At least it means that we can get straight into bed after the meeting is over if we feel like it, which is nice, without having to go through the annoying 25 minute drive home from Tewkesbury and the village hall where the meetings are held.

And the house is really really quiet again this afternoon, perfect for a relaxing 'nap time', although only after the first 10 minutes, because as soon as we lie down, Lois's Huawei begins beeping like crazy under the bedclothes, as usual, and demanding attention. Let's hope it isn't also sending messages to Beijing, which would be alarming, to put it mildly!

This afternoon will allow us to "catch up" after 36 hours of joyous mayhem, when once again we hosted our daughter Sarah and her 10-year-old twins at the start of their school Easter holidays. They left us earlier today to return to their home in nearby Alcester.

flashback to earlier today: a tearful, if chaotic, farewell

to our daughter Sarah and her 10-year-old twins

It's the start of the twins' 2-week school Easter holiday, and when we they get back home today Sarah will be busy arranging a packed calendar of "play dates" with their new English buddies.

We don't like to boast, but Lois and I are particularly pleased that the girls finished their school's spring term in 1st and 2nd place in their class, an incredible achievement considering that for the last 7 years they've been living in Australia, at times being "home-schooled" out in the bush by their engineering-graduate dad Francis, while Sarah was out doing her accountancy job in Perth WA.

It just goes to show that teachers aren't always "a plus" in a child's education, are they. And you don't have to go far afield to see that reflected in the local press [Onion News], that's for sure!

Randall is okay, local parents say, but he's not a lot of fun now, is he, to put it mildly. Compare that to the twins' experiences out in the Australian bush, learning real physics from stay-at-home dad Francis, like this experiment Francis staged, to forewarn the twins about what the English climate might do to their supposedly "all weather" heavy duty Australian camping-gear, if the family were indeed to move back to England as planned!

flashback to March 2023: the twins' engineering graduate

stay-at-home dad Francis gives the twins a crash course

science lesson in in "how to cope with English rain"

in their back yard, under the merciless Australian sun

21:00 We go to bed on another documentary in New Yorker John Wilson's fascinating "How to..." series from the US HBO network. This one's all about "How to Track your Package".

New Yorker John Wilson checking over one of the purchases

he can't remember ordering

Another fascinating programme. As Wilson says, an advantage of living in a big city like New York means that you can just maybe walk a few hundred yards down to a store, pay some money over and bring your purchase home to your apartment, with the reward of enjoying it for the rest of your day or maybe your life. And Wilson says that he personally has never had the experience of a purchased item "going astray" on that short journey home.

All a bit dull, though, isn't it, compared to the excitement of searching online for what you want and then ordering it to be delivered.

And there's nothing quite compares to that feeling of completeness when you finally get to open the package that's been dropped off right at your address. But even that satisfied feeling doesn't last, Wilson has found.

I think that if Lois and I were asked for what the flaws might be in Wilson's otherwise excellent documentary "How to" guides, it would be to say that he doesn't really answer the question he himself has posed. After about 5 minutes in which he starts to describe the misery of getting a phoney "your package has been delivered" message, when it clearly hasn't, he quickly gets distracted and goes wildly "off-topic" pretty quickly.

It turns out that Wilson hasn't really got any good answers for how to track your package, and Lois and I have fun after the programme, doing another sort of "tracking":- a "post-mortem" "lessons-learnt" brainstorming session about where Wilson went wrong this time. And we dare to pose the question "why doesn't his HBO producer keep Wilson more in line?" Are they just afraid of the guy? He seems quite harmless to us, to put it mildly!

Looking back, we agree that Wilson's first mistake is when he's talking about what to do when the more serious cases of "organ mis-deliveries" when medication or body-parts go astray, like these legs:

"legs in box" - what you'd think would be a pretty

obvious warning to delivery-guys or potential thieves, wouldn't you.

Wrong !!!!

When delving into "organ" mis-deliveries in general, Wilson makes a surely avoidable but fatal mistake by moving into the related, but clearly different, topic of "delivering the kind of organs you can get a tune out of". He goes to interview a firm involved in this, but - typical Wilson error - he shows his lack of flexibility by not departing from his already prepared set of questions, when interviewing the top guy at the organ manufacturer.

This particular organ - the one the company's "big cheese" is sitting at - has been ordered by somebody in Arizona, apparently, and it's fascinating tonight watching it being carefully loaded into the back of some delivery truck or other, ready for the long trip.

What Lois and I can't remember, is how Wilson got onto the subject of cryogenics, which take up the remaining 20 minutes of this 30-minute show. Lois thinks that, while in Arizona, Wilson just "bumped into" an employee of the Arizona cryogenics specialist company Alcor, which is taking people's money to freeze them when they're dead, even though nobody's sure they know how to unfreeze you at some point in the future. I take Lois's word for this - I frequently doze off for a few seconds, even during the most fascinating of programmes.

And it's riveting tonight, to see glimpses of some of the barnstorming speeches made at this year's "jubilee" Alcor convention.

Wilson's train of thought is not entirely clear at this point, but, as baby-boomers, both Lois and I enjoy tremendously the Alcor people's rewrite of an old Beatles Classic, which ends a special anniversary Alcor cryobiologists' convention on a positive note, which was nice!