Bless me, Blogworld, for I have sinned.
It is a week since my last posting…..

Life has been a bit on the hectic side for the last week or so.

First of all, I was coerced into redoing all the graphics on Head Rambles.  He seems to be happy enough with it for the moment, so that should give me some peace.

Then there was a rush to finish off a couple of sites.  They are nearly ready for launch at this stage which is a major relief as neither was an easy job.  This was made all the more difficult by the health, which has not been good.

I have been pretty much laid up for the week, alternating between bursts of work and naps in the armchair.  To make matters worse, Grandad has been driving us mad with that flaming book.  He had a newspaper interview and his radio interview and he won’t shut up about them.  He is really doing my head in.  God help us if the national press get involved!

To cap it all, he insisted that I stay up late the other night to record his fecking interview which was a classic example of pouring salt in the wound.

In fairness to Declan Mehan who did the radio interview, he did mention my name as the author of the book, but even then that bastard Grandad dismissed me, on air, as just being a nobody who does the typing.

Quite frankly I am sick of this.

I think it’s time to kill Grandad.

M.E., or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis is not a pleasant complaint.

One of it’s most insidious problems is that it is invisible to others.  There are no streaming noses, or rashes.  You don’t look any different and others are therefore unaware of its existence.

To the sufferer though, it is a debilitating affliction.

Its symptoms are many and varied and seem to bear no apparent relation to each other.  The most obvious one is the fatigue.  Any form of physical exertion leads to an aftermath of pain and exhaustion.  And by physical exertion, I don’t mean running a mini-marathon – it can be anything from going shopping to mowing the lawn. 

Once the fatigue sets in, then all bets are off.  The sufferer can do nothing but rest and wait for the aches to pass.  Again, one of the symptoms is that the fatigue doesn’t set in at the time of the exertion, but rather a day or two later.  That person, dancing their heart away at the party may look absolutely fine to others, and in fact the dancer feels fine, but a day or so later is a different story.  That party could result in an aftermath of days of suffering.

There is no current cure for M.E.  Occasionally sufferers go into remission, but this is uncommon.  It is apparently a lifelong condition.  There is no medication as the illness itself is not really understood by the medical profession.  Medication is purely a matter of relieving the symptoms by taking pain relief.

The best way to cope with M.E. is to take the philosophical approach.  There is no point in complaining, or waiting for a miracle cure, so acceptance is the only answer.  The critical lesson that sufferers soon learn is the approach of pacing oneself.  If there is a function in the offing, then rest for a few days beforehand, and build up the energy.   Be prepared for a period after when the fatigue sets in.  Never plan on doing two exerting things within days of each other.

M.E. is predominantly a woman’s ailment.  60% to 85% of sufferers are women so the male with M.E. is uncommon.  Recently I read an excellent article by Darragh who has discovered that he is a victim.  It was a brave post, as the majority of men will not admit to such things as physical weakness and tiredness.  It is seen as ‘unmanly’.

Take heart, Darragh.

You are not alone.

Life has been busy.

I recently was asked to host an existing site.

Fine, says I.  I’ll do that.  I transferred everything across and everyone was happy.

“Now,” says the client, “seeing as you have full access to the site, could you do some minor changes to the wording?”

“No problem,” says I, and then I looked at the site.

Some bright spark had produced a lovely looking site.  It’s clean, with nice images and showcases the client’s business beautifully.

But it is all images.  There is no text anywhere.  All wording is embedded in images.

I rang the client and talked him through disabling images in his browser.  I then told him to look at his site.

“Where the fuck is it?” he cried. 

“Exactly!” says I.  I then explained to him that the search engines won’t be able to see it.  The visually impaired won’t be able to use text-to-speech software, and that the damned thing rtakes an age to download.

I have been commissioned to rewrite the site to make it work.  The only problem is that it has to look exactly as it did before.

It’s a nightmare.

Is it any wonder I want to get out of this game?

So Christmas is finally over.

Technically we should have removed the decorations a few days ago, but we sort of forgot.  It’s amazing how even after a few days, things become part of the scenery and you don’t notice them any more.  That’s the way it was with the decorations.  It wasn’t until one of the ceiling streamers fell onto the guinea pig that we realised they were still up.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, but now that everything is packed away and the house is back to its usual scruffy self, the weather seems to have become warmer.  Is there a correlation between mean daily temperatures and the decor in this house?  It wouldn’t surprise me.

I’m not a winter person.  I hate it, to be honest.  Its only redeeming feature is that it is followed immediately by spring, which is my favourite time of year.

Spring seems to be showing its face particularly early this year.  Already the snowdrops and the daffodils are showing, and the sap is rising in the trees.  Even the birds seem to be friskier than usual.

One of the few things I do like about the winter is our weeping birch.  This is a magnificent specimen tree at the best of times, but in winter it takes on a different aura.

We floodlit it.

Not a very good photograph, but it was freezing at the time, and I wasn’t going to hang around.

You must admit – it looks nice and mysterious.  The little statue fountain adds to the mystique.  Looking out on that scene is one of the little pleasures of winter.