On 06/05/2025 23:00, Heather Madrone via Silklist wrote:
I've been rather absorbed with the self-inflicted train wreck that is the US right now and hadn't noticed that I hadn't heard from silklist in a while.The cheery international news has me thinking about you all, and wondering how you're doing.
I'm doing OK here in the UK!Incredibly busy, as ever. One child has grown up and gone off to University, but we still have a teenager about the house who does dance classes and competitions and performances and stuff several days a week, so I get lots of Dad Taxi duties! And my (disabled) wife's career in events planning is picking up, which means... lots of Husband Taxi and Carrying Boxes Up And Down Stairs duties too :-D
Work is interesting right now. I'm working for Genomics England, a body created by the UK government to do nationwide genetic surveying. We've got whole genome sequences of people with rare diseases, from which the scientists have been figuring out the genetic causes of them; and the project I'm on now involves building tools to let cancer scientists access a database of what are called "somatic variants" - the genetic differences between a person's own cells and the cells of their tumour, eg the mutations that make the cancer be a cancer. By analysing this stuff, they can figure out how cancer works in general, design cures for specific kinds of cancers, etc. I'm no biologist, I'm a database expert, but it's fun working with people who know stuff I don't - always learning!
In the time left over after THAT, I'm doing a whole bunch of DIY around the house - a few years ago we were looking after my mother-in-law in her elder years, and we had to do a lot of emergency rearrangement to make her a downstairs bedroom. We're slowly recovering from this, and we've managed to clear her old bedroom (which she made a real mess of as the dementia got worse), redecorated it, made it into our own bedroom (I had to make a bed! Woodwork isn't my thing, but I muddled through), and then we turned our old bedroom into a library (bringing our books back from the storage unit they've languished in for years). It's such a relief to get my books back, and we're close to finishing sorting the room out and then putting a sofabed in there so I have a place to sit and read, and a place to put guests up... But to get the sofabed, I need to finish repainting the teenager's room and buying her new furniture so she stops using the sofabed as a temporary wardrobe...
And in the time left after THAT, my wife and I are studying and learning how to look after our small woodland. We recently found a bat from an endangered species roosting in the tunnels, we might have a rare kind of tree, and we've picked up what looks like centuries-old bits of metal from around the old quarry and lime kiln workings. Not far from us is the ruins of the ironworks where the process for mass producing steel was perfected, and the first steel railway tracks made, and the first tool steel was developed - so the person who did that (Robert Mushet) was most like aware of the lime kiln on our land; is there a chance he might have used lime made here in his experiments? It would be cool if it was a part of some important industrial history!
After all that, I mercifully don't have much time to dwell too long on UK or US politics :-|
-- Alaric Snell-Pym (M0KTN neé M7KIT) http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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