Looking Out To Sea

Last night was the first meeting in a new stage of the Sign Edinburgh group. Nothing has really changed from then to now, but there have been interesting things happening in the background.

First of all, we have moved venue, and I think the move is permanent. We used to be in the Elephant House, which I think is the cafe where Joanne Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book. I hope I’m remembering that right. Anyway, it wasn’t a great place for what we wanted. Now we’re in the Boardroom in the Central Library, which is literally next door to the Elephant House but we’ve got the room to ourselves and no interruptions.

We also have a change in our web presence. The organiser, Dee — well, she’d gone radio silent for a couple of months while she moved jobs, but now she’s back and we’ve got a little website set up. The Facebook group had been silent this whole time too. Now Dee’s made me an admin on the Facebook group and I intend to keep everyone up to date about meetings and stuff. The local Cafe Sci group have been very good recently about sending out “event” invites whenever they meet, which is a great thing for monthly groups to do. Otherwise it’s so easy to forget about these things.

So last night was our first night in the new place. We had a few new faces, including at least one person who saw a poster that had been pinned up at the library entrance. How’s that for the power of advertising? I think last night’s session went quite well. We don’t seem to have much of a stride yet. It’s really difficult because I’m sure we’d all like to just turn up and have a chat, but no-one knows each other very well so it’s difficult to “just chat”. And then, if there is something you want to say you can’t be certain you’ll have the language skills to say it.

I hope if we maintain the group that we have at the moment we’ll build those relationships we need so that we can all have free and easy conversations without recourse to, as Sarah suggested, topic cards and “circle time”. (You can tell she’s a teacher, right?)

I still haven’t thought what’s going on the website yet. I mean, we’ve got the “come to our meeting” spiel, and some links to other BSL-related pages, but nothing that approaches content. Just information. If you see my distinction. Although we’re working on making the group more official (read: getting funding) so there will be a constitution and stuff too.

Now if only I did more practice, because nowadays we don’t do much apart from these monthly sessions. But we’ve got a PVR, so we can start watching SignZone. Or just check Facebook again…

From a Bad Science thread on Echinacea:

I tried SJW [St John’s Wort] a few years ago and it did seem to help but I have no idea if it was a real effect or not. I did a controlled trial, comparing it with shopping and found that it performed no better…

But was cheaper, and thus more cost-effective?

Have you ever been to Primark?

;-)

We watched up to episode 8 (“Hero”) of Battlestar Galactica season 3. Then we opened the second box to find two copies of disc 4 and no disc 3 at all! Horror! I took the set back but every single replacement the shop could muster had the same fault. Doubleplusungood.

So this seems a good time to look at what’s happened already this season. Obviously, major spoiler warning. Don’t look further if you haven’t seen the first 8 episodes of season 3.

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It may be hard to tell, but we’re doing a metric crapload of cooking at the moment. I know, you would never have guessed. The real trouble with cooking (apart from the time, and the expense and the motivation and…) is finding people who want to eat food! Hard to believe, but people apparently have lives and obligations which take precedence over free food. Can’t understand it, myself.

Luckily Nick had no life excuse and came round to help us with a Thai curry this evening. We had a good laugh and great food, which you can read about on Helen’s blog right now.

That means we’ve done at least one recipe every day this week, in case you were having trouble with the numbers. Obviously that might not seem odd — doesn’t everyone eat several times a day? — but let me tell you it’s fraught with difficulty. Getting someone round for a relaxing evening and still getting through a recipe was quite gratifying. We often end up very stressed when there are lots of people coming for a meal, which probably makes everything seem all the more awkward.

I guess that’s the perils of entertaining.