What a week!
I worked at my full-time job all week, and had the evenings off, which was wonderful. I worked at my old part-time job on Friday and Saturday. Attila worked his usual six day week.
On Sunday last I finally had a whole day off work, the first since Easter Monday. Attila and I made a whirlwind trip to the little house in the city. It rained cats and dogs, it was a deluge! The lawn looked a bit like a hayfield the grass was so high. Despite the rain, this was Attila’s opportunity to cut the grass, so that is what he did in the pouring rain.
Attila cut the grass. Most of the cut grass formed largish green wads that looked a lot like cow pies. Attila and I laboured for hours and hours to pick up and/or rake up these clumps of wet cut grass. We deposited them across an area in the back yard where we plan to plant a garden. The cut grass will kill the grass and weeds below it and hopefully we will have a high nitrogen area in which to plant our first small garden.
We worked very hard while visiting the little house in the city. We did get to see Terra and Lares for a few hours after Terra got home from work on Sunday, which we enjoyed very much. Then we packed up the car and headed back out for our four hour drive home.
We were both very tired, yet satisfied.
Here it is, Tuesday morning and we are both preparing to leave for work.
It has been raining. The skies are grey, they were grey yesterday and they are grey this morning. The trees and vegetation are enjoying the showers. Along the road are carpets of trilliums, and everywhere you look the forest is dotted with wild hobble bush blooms. The world smells wonderful.
Japan Nuclear Catastrophe
“TOKYO | Sat May 14, 2011 2:31am EDT
(Reuters) – A worker at Japan’s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant died on Saturday, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said, bringing the death toll at the complex to three since a massive earthquake and tsunami in March.The cause of the death was unknown. The man, in his 60s, was employed by one of Tokyo Electric’s contractors and started working at the plant on Friday. He was exposed to 0.17 millisieverts of radiation on Saturday, Tokyo Electric said.
The Japanese government’s maximum level of exposure for male workers at the plant is 250 millisieverts for the duration of the effort to bring it under control.
The worker fell ill 50 minutes after starting work at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday (2100 GMT on Friday) and brought to the plant’s medical room unconscious.
He was later moved to a nearby hospital and confirmed dead, a Tokyo Electric spokesman said.
Working conditions at the plant are harsh. Goshi Hosono, a special adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan and a ruling Democratic Party lawmaker, voiced concerns about the working environment at the Fukushima complex on Wednesday.
“I would like to spend my energy to improve working conditions. Many people told us working environment (at the plant) is way too bad,” Hosono told a news conference.
The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11 triggered cooling system malfunctions at the plant, and caused radiation to leak into the atmosphere and the ocean.
Engineers are still struggling to bring the plant under control. Two Tokyo Electric employees went missing while patrolling the plant soon after the quake and were later found dead.”
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/14/us-japan-nuclear-death-idUSTRE74D0G920110514?feedType=RSS&feedName=japan&virtualBrandChannel=10464&dlvrit=175933
Worldly Distractions
Weather
6 °C
Condition: Cloudy
Pressure: 101.7 kPa
Visibility: 16 km
Temperature: 6.0°C
Dewpoint: 5.1°C
Humidity: 94 %
Wind: 4 km/hr
Quote
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
Bertrand Russell
1872 – 1970
Note
Bertrand Russell
” British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life, he imagined himself in turn a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things, in any profound sense. He was born in Wales, into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Britain…
Political and social activism occupied much of Russell’s time for most of his life, which makes his prodigious and seminal writing on a wide range of technical and non-technical subjects all the more remarkable. Russell remained politically active almost to the end of his life, writing to and exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various causes. He was also famously noted for saying “No one can sit at the bedside of a dying child and still believe in God.””
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell