The double spiral of life itself

 Back at the dawn of time (April this year) I thought it might be fun to do one of those online DNA analysis things that some people believe tell them actual non-made-up things about their ancestry. It would be nice to see how I match with relatives in the family tree, anyway. So I sent my saliva sample, and then never heard anything back. I assumed it had been lost in the post, but perhaps it had just been put on a shelf somewhere, because four months later I've had a notification that it's been received. So I might possibly be able to say things about my DNA at some point in the future! Stay tuned!

It CAN be done!

 I've done a full day's practice for the Marathon Memory Championship! 30-minute binary, numbers and cards, and three tries at spoken numbers. And though I'm so hugely out of practice generally, and my mind was wandering to a disturbing extent before long, I still achieved almost acceptable results.

I mean, it's not world-beating, but attempting four journeys' worth of data in each of the half-marathons seems like a sensible start, and I can build on it in the future if I've actually got my mojo back and found a way around my mental block. Woohoo!

Battery life

 You know, the last entry was meant to be called "Miss Bindergarten is an old lady", or something along those lines. I changed it just before posting, and must have accidentally deleted the second half entirely. Either that or Blogger automatically removes anything that casts aspersions on Miss B, which would be fine with me. Those books really are awesome.

Anyway, it's been a very long time since I used my speed cards timers, you know. When did I last memorise a pack of cards at speed in real life, rather than on the internet? It must be ages and ages ago! Long enough for the batteries to have died, anyway, so I went out and got some more to recharge my whole collection of timers (five of them still work, after all these years). You have to put some serious thought into which brands of battery to buy, of course - personally, I think you can't do better than Ordinary Zinc Batteries. I think they get a bad press. Don't listen to what the bunny tells you.

Miss Bindergarten

 If you're not familiar with the wonderful Miss Bindergarten series of American children's picture books, then you jolly well should be. There are seven of them (plus some more simplistic early-readers books), written by Joseph Slate and quite amazingly beautifully illustrated by Ashley Wolff. Go and check them out if you haven't already!

The first book was published in 1996, so there might well be people out there who've grown up with the books and are thinking 'those kids must be thirty years old by now; that's a bit depressing, isn't it?' - well, sorry to depress you further, but actually they must be even older than that!

See, "Miss Bindergarten Stays Home from Kindergarten", as you can calculate from the calendar and the number of school days they've had so far, takes place in a November when the first of the month was a Saturday:

And the most recent year that happened when the first book was published was 1986! Miss B's class must therefore have been born in 1980 and 1981, and thus be 41 years old by now. She herself must be in her sixties - she's probably retired.

But I imagine she married Chief Dave and lived happily ever after, and Coco the cockatoo is no doubt still going strong - they live for absolute ages. So cheer up, old people who've been depressed by reading this!