Many years ago mum made me a blanket for my bed. It’s made from woollen garments left at the end of a jumble sale, all in my favourite pinks. I put it on my bed when we first got the cats, and Lacey sees it as her own. Recently I noticed that it had been eaten by moths, so I brought it downstairs and put it on my yarn chest, intending to mend it. Of course, it is now Lacey’s new bed, as you can see. So now I am stuck with darning the matching cushion (actually, this is one of Cagney’s beds, so I’d better be quick before she misses it!
As I was searching for ideas for mending this and celebrating the wear and tear, rather than hiding it, I came across Sashiko, which is exactly the ethos I was looking for as it’s a way of celebrating the remix.
Now if only Lacey will let me darn her new cat bed …
A week away on Mull, one of my favourite places in the world. We had a beautiful lodge – big, top quality, nestling in the middle of nowhere. The neighbours were …
Not all that friendly – tolerating us, at most.
Some of them were fairly shy, only letting us look at them from a distance, through a window.
But the weather was kind to us, and the views were stunning.
While we were there we stopped at the abandoned boats, as we always do.
And took a drive over to Fionnphort, to find sunbathers.
Do you tidy up at the end of a beach party? Are you happy to walk away from the embers of a beach barbeque, ignoring the empty drink cans and food wrappers, or do you carefully collect any rubbish that is there and leave the beach as clean, or cleaner, as it was when you arrived? if you hosted a party in a public place and left before the end would you return once it was all over to take down the gazebo and put away the deck chairs?
Of course you would – or you’d ensure that someone else was doing it.
If you saw others having a party, would you barge in and start talking loudly, ignoring everyone else there? Would you leave your rowdy toddler to stampede through others’ conversations, denying any responsibility for him when others gently mention it?
Of course you wouldn’t.
Two things have got me thinking about this. The first is the tragedy of the commons that is happening in the Scottish Highlands, where hordes of thoughtless tourists are defiling the beautiful beaches with litter, and worse. This makes me cry – the Highlands are beautiful, and fragile. They deserve our respect, our love, our care. Some humans suck.
The second is the tweeting of Twitter bots to some hashtags I use. One of these is a cautionary tale for educators. Some time ago, I am told, a class activity for a course was for each student to create a bot. One such bot still tweets, regularly, to the course hashtag. The creator is long gone, nobody takes responsibility for closing it down. When a friend commented that it was wrecking the tag feed, I realised I’d blocked it. There should be a mechanism for removing this digital clutter.
Soon after this conversation, I noticed another bot had tweeted to #CLMOOC. I’d not have thought much about it, but the other bot was on my mind, so I quote tweeted it. The bot owner replied from her personal account: dismissive of our point of view, arrogant, lacking in empathy. Creating the bot had been fun for her. She did not care what others thought – her five minutes of fun trumped everything. (Looking just now I see that it tweets nonsense every hour – random words taken from the owner’s blog. Not funny, or clever – pointless at best.)
Earlier this year I attended the OERxDomains21 conference, where one of the main platforms was Discord – a multi-channelled happening that had been well designed. It made the conference for me, and as the event ended and we all began to wind down, I appreciated being able to dip back in and see what I’d missed. But what I really appreciated was how the organisers returned some time after the event to tidy the space away and leave no trace of mess.
Over in our CLMOOC Facebook Group we post lists of daily doodle prompts. Some of us are better than others at daily doodling, but whether or not I’ve had time to draw anything I enjoy popping in and seeing what others have posted. We have three sets of prompts for August (not that anyone is expected to do all of them every day, they’re there to dip in and out of).
A year ago Mugdock was a place we knew about, but never really thought to visit. When lockdown relaxed last year it became our escape from our computers and our work. A year later, it is the place we go to stretch our legs. At this time of year, if we are lucky, there are damselflies flitting around, catching the sun.
On Monday I passed my PhD viva. This thesis has been a long time cooking – I began on Jan 7th 2013, took a year out due to ill health, had two changes of thesis title and lost three supervisors along the way. At times I thought I would never finish, that my research was not serious enough, that I was not cut out to be an academic. I’ve been through redundancy and two job changes, I’ve got married and moved house. And, despite a pandemic, I finished. Somehow, over the last few months, I have cobbled together enough words of sufficient quality to be able to call myself a doctor. I have a few small revisions to make (including far too many typos!), and then I can work out what I want to do with all this research.
But for now, as I want to thank the community that made it possible. Thank you CLMOOC for all the fun and inspiration. As soon as my revisions are approved I’ll share a copy of my thesis with anyone who is interested.
I’ve been thinking about sending some postcards recently, but not having a theme in mind to motivate my doodling, so this tweet from Karen was just the prompt I needed.
Team #clmooc (#postcards), what do you think about this for a pop-up round of postcards: "What good has come out of the pandemic for you that you will be carrying forward?"
As travel restrictions lofted, we were so happy to be able to travel up to the Highlands again. As usual, we stopped at Inveruglas to stretch our legs. We were surprised to see show on the top of the mountain.
Onwards to the ferry for the short journey over from Corran to Ardgour
Strontian itself was wonderful. Here’s the view from the pub beer garden
And the view from our cabin windows
We did so little – just sat and enjoyed the scenery.
