Chaplog tries hard

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  • Yorkshire Sculpture Park

    Just down the road from us is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park They ban climbing on sculptures so it is not a place I would normally visit but being disabled, in the climbing sense, we made a visit.



    Northern people are a talented lot Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and David Hockney could all be considered local. The countryside is pretty they filmed the League of Gentleman in our village and we passed Holmefirth on the way – “Last of the Summer Wine” countryside. I only moved to the area to be close to Gods own rock gritstone! The place is full of surprises. There was a lot of Barbara Hepworth’s work that I have decided I do not particularly like, Elizabeth Fink’s work that I did enjoy and the Molecular man I thought was stunning.



    They have an interesting policy, which I like, free to enter and you have to walk even though the distances are large and they do not tell you where the individual pieces of work are. You have to go and find them, that I find refreshing in a world where people put cairns to help you walk around a lake.

    They advertise it as 500 acres of historic landscape and international sculpture, looks a bit like Chatsworth Estate with sculptures every where. What surprised me was the lack of security. These sculptures are presumably valuable yet there appears to be no effort to keep the things there. Now I know security is an issue in the North of England. Only the other day someone drove up to our house in the middle of the night and put in the boot of their car, I am surmising here, an imitation stone trough with pansies in. Now I say a car drove up but you could hardly lift the thing. People take computers and projectors from schools why not valuable sculptures from parks?







  • One Blog or two?

    I went for free hosting Netfirms before committing myself to the cost of purchasing some web space. I was not sure whether I would be capable of installing and configuring Movable Type. I succeeded, but unlike some of the other Weblog writers, I do not feel capable of writing a mini guide on how to do an installation. It has taken awhile!

    I was not a lot quicker on my second attempt but more confident I would succeed. The tricky bit for me was working out; no some of it was trial and error, the paths to various files. The problem being I can work out a path as long as I know where I am starting from and finishing. That is the problem; it is hard to write a guide to installing and configuring software in a variety of environments. You probably need to be working in these environments to do this easily. Yet so many people could use the software but not cope with the
    installation.

    I hope I do not have to do it again soon. How hard are the up-grades? The reason for doing it is to get the chance to use a very sophisticated piece of software that can be adapted in so many ways. One blog or two? Shall I have a photograph album? Should I use one for each course that I teach?

  • Paid a man to do this!

    Not for the squeamish but stuff happens.
    Plastic surgery for you

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    If I was asked the question What do you think happened to him? I would suspect some type of accident. A mountain bike accident would be favourite as the elbow frequently gets damaged in falls off a bike and severe bruising can be expected I’ve done it, but not this time. A climbing accident would be my second choice, as I did a lot of that, note past tense. I am not sure if I am going to do much in the future. No, neither of these were the cause.

    I had to beg, yes beg, a man to do it. An elbow and shoulder consultant – they specialise. I was offering to pay him lots of money but he was scared. Two days before going to have some shrapnel – bits of bone – removed from my elbow, two of my fingers had started to have continual pins and needles.

    When I discussed this with the consultant his face dropped. One operation had become two, I needed ulnar nerve decompression as well. The problem for him was that he was 99% sure that was what was needed and it was no big deal to do both operations at the same time, but if it wasn’t necessary, something went wrong and I cared to sue him I would win. On the other hand he could not do the shrapnel removal and not the ulnar nerve decompression as I would then need a second operation. We had a long chat about how one could be sued so easily in education, medicine and if you ran climbing walls. I have never understood how you can forget to tie on to your rope properly, fall off, and have the audacity to sue the management of the climbing wall. Insurance premiums go up and things become more expensive!

    One operation that was meant to start at 2:30 pm became two operations starting at 5:00pm. When I came out at 8:00pm I was told I had spoken to him and he had told me how the operation had gone. I remembered nothing. I was told to give him a ring; he was in the Sainsburys café having his tea.

    I never did find out why I was so bruised but look at the URL below “Plastic surgery for you” Well who’d have thought”!

  • Julius Caesar kept a weblog!

    I have just found Julius Caesar’s weblog!

    If you archive entries by month, Churchill’s weblog would make interesting reading
    and so would an imaginary diary by Hitler, in weblog format. I wonder who had the
    original idea of historical weblogs?

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    The scope for independent research at all age
    ages is large as you can do searches for names and places or look at what was happening
    at different dates. If weblogs were constructed that told history from different view
    points then the student could be left to draw their own conclusions.
    During the summer break I must look at this in more detail.

    My first idea when playing with the idea, was a weblog that students could use
    to review books. I am sure this would be a success for our Young Readers and
    Writers club because it would immediately give them a wide audience and a chance
    for other readers to add their own comments. Even if we kept this on our own
    Intranet it still would be an interesting idea which I am sure has been done
    in other schools, though I have not read about it.

  • Two views of Kate

    Decided to have them on a “if you do not like them you can take um back basis”.

    A discovered walk

    This photograph taken of Kate, stood on a post, is part of a walk starting from the house that we have embarrassingly only just discovered after we have lived here for eighteen years.




    Kate posing in a hat and necklace that Lynne bought from a shop that only she would enter – when old people die and house contents are sold… This item is from the thirties. The top does not go with the hat, well, so I am told.


  • End of the year

    I have mixed feelings at the end of the school year, pleasure in the thought that I am going to get a break and remorse that I did not finish a lot of the things that I had expected to. There are always a few jobs that spill into the holidays.
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  • New teeth part 2

    Decided to have them on a “if you do not like them you can take um back basis”. Please excuse the wild look but it is hard to take a photograph of yourself with one functional arm and a frozen jaw. Maybe I should have waited?




    This means they are only stuck on with glue not cement. What I had not realised was that your teeth make a big difference to the way you speak. After I had said things like “Friendly fireman fight fires” to practice the “f”s and Sally sails serenely to practice the “s”s I was becoming unsure of the whole thing, hence the temporary option.



  • Another great day Teeth Part 1



    The agenda for today is new teeth.

    At a certain age one becomes long in the tooth. My front teeth got ground down by holiding wire runners in them while climbing. That led to crowns and now the older man has to replace his crowns. Today is the day. Why do you have to replace them you might ask, well, it is all about being long in the tooth. No picture of this yet. A before and after shot might not be in good taste but could be a good advertisment for the dentist. I hope!

  • They were bigger than I thought

    I went to hospital to have these fragments removed from my elbow. The question I am now asking is “Why did I not have this done 18 odd years ago?” I could have avoided a locking elbow and the like.

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