Babs Cartland, My Day, and The Hindenburg Scale Explained
Monday, November 12, 2012
Where is your favourite place to blog?
Dame Barbara Cartland was noted for her prolific writing, her title of ‘queen of romance’ and her hideous mask of make up which she continued to slather on til the day she died. She had a policy of wearing pink, and the legend is that she would lay on her chaise longue and dictate her novels to her secretary.
my role model
I, however, do not have a secretary, but I can touch type and I have a laptop. I almost invariably blog from my bed, with my secretary, Poppet, snoring beside me. Frankly, she contributes very little in terms of labour, though she knows some key commands that I don’t. When she stretches a paw over to my keyboard I often find she has done something I wouldn’t know how to do myself. Even though she has quite big paws, that make her look like she is wearing kick flares she can’t really type as such.
In an ideal world I would wear only pink, too. but light colours are expensive to wear, and although she had a dog, I doubt Dame Barbara ever got really grubby playing ball with hers.
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As for me, I started the day in the park with the doggie, watched The Mentalist, tidied the garden up as best I could after all the busywork from yesterday, and next up is bath time. I hope to do a bit of painting later, and I will update when I have something to report. For the past few days I have not had to take triptans, but that’s because I have upped my intake of codeine. I think my earlier experience of having some time off from migraining just from the preventatives was more of a weather based coincidence than anything else. For now, I have to do what I can with the tools that I have.
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And – we’re back. Although I have done a fair amount in the way of TASKS today – including vacuuming the bedroom which really needed doing (how does a bedroom get actual mud on the carpet, it’s ridiculous) today has been regraded from a manageable Category 1 Hindenburg, to a get on top of possible flare ups as soon as possible Category 3 Hindenburg day. So it’s stopped being about possibly getting to some painting or the next bit of project garden to take some pain killers and get back to the bed and the hot blanket on the neck to try and get a handle on the situation before I end up like I did last week, with a bruise that made me look like Gorbachev and lots of referred pain and a series of small events that added together created a Category 5 Hindenburg.
The Hindenberg scale is based on a conversation I had in the thread with Lucy’s Football in this post she wrote last week.
how was your day in terms of catastrophe?
I have based the scale as expressed here on a like for like as described by NASA regarding hurricanes. I know, topical.
Here’s their scale, in case you can’t be bothered clicking;
Category 1: Winds 119-153 km/hr (74-95 mph) — faster than a cheetah
Category 2: Winds 154-177 km/hr (96-110 mph) — as fast or faster than a baseball pitcher’s fastball
Category 3: Winds 178-209 km/hr (111-130 mph) — similar, or close, to the serving speed of many professional tennis players
Category 4: Winds 210-249 km/hr (131-155 mph) — faster than the world’s fastest rollercoaster
Category 5: Winds more than 259 km/hr (155 mph) — similar, or close, to the speed of some high-speed trains
Who knew you could get such useful information from NASA? It’s not all teflon and biros that can work upside down. Okay, I have to stop reading the NASA site now, because I found a page where you can go and do space stuff if you are a US citizen and it’s making me feel all kind of sick in my stomach. Imagine working at NASA? It’d be as cool as having a degree from MIT before they jumped the shark and invented the facebook hug jacket.
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ETA
A friend asked me on facebook what the other Hindenburg Categories looked like. This was my reply;
i think a category 2 day is replete with obstacles. you know you’re not getting away with doing anything productive, battening down the hatches is the order of the day.
a category 4 is full catastrophe living. priorities are eating and drinking and taking medication at appropriate times. and that is all you can hope for. probably you won’t manage it and you will compound your catastrophe in unforseen ways.
we don’t even discuss category 5.
ALL THE HINDENBURGS!
Wishing you many non-Hindenburg days. Or, maybe just half-a-Hindenburg. Or maybe just a small radio-controlled plane day. That’d be ok, right?
YES!
oh, it’d be so great to have a small radio controlled plane day. even if the thing did crash into a bush.
Wishing you autonomous Quadcopter days:
http://boingboing.net/2012/10/02/quadcopters-playing-catch.html
they’re clever little bobbins!