I started Halloween at my piano lesson and came home to find around two dozen kids (three groups, I think) ringing the doorbell of my sadly empty house. I made it in without being lynched. Ohna spent the evening helping woodcrafters combine trick-or-treating with partying. Apoa visited the church where her friend's grandad lives and contacted the other side ouija-style (yes, contact was made). But I think Kiloh had the coolest experience. She and her friends rang a doorbell and it was answered by Shaun of the Dead! He didn't have any sweets (at first - his flatmate then showed up with some) but he did supply autographs.

B-)

We managed it for once. Big woody walk on Saturday and a late family lunch/tea with Nicki and Clem on Sunday. A bit like civilisation. I still couldn't help Kiloh with her English homework but I managed to come up with some good bits for Apoa's research on fashion in the 1920s (she's citing me as 'Dr. William Clark').

B-)

Just took a too big desk out of my office and replaced it with a smaller table. Of course, the big one needed to be taken apart and reassembled. As a linguist, I'm much better at the taking apart side of things but I did get it back together again, more or less.

Of course, all through it Billy Bragg was singing in my head about 'the temptation to take the precious things we have apart to see how they work...'

B-)

SCOTS - Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech

Enjoying this. Did a quick search for bosie which is the one Scottish word the kids have grown up with and found this:

Mr Ted

Fin I pit on ma jammies, an climm the stairs tae bed
I ken that he'll be wytin, ma frien caad Mr Ted
An fin I coorie doon tae sleep
I'll haud him in ma bosie
He's made o fur, he disnae gurr
He's affa affa cosie

As Auntie Harriet says, 'there's naething like a bosie'!

B-)

healthmap - global disease alert mapping system

merry christmas, hypochondriacs

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I have to mention that I asked some of this year's new students whether they knew what chav meant and one of them, without pausing to think, instantly said 'asbo'. Meanwhile I'm very excited by the urban dictionary which another student told me about. Check out the four hundred and thirty five (so far) entries for chav there.

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Well there's too much to update you on really, but it's been domestically busy too with Kiloh having moved up to secondary and us all getting used to our first year without an au pair. Kiloh has settled in very well and has a load of extracurricular activity sorted including drama, sax, netball and the junior singers (or 'junior mingers' as everyone calls them). 'OMG' as Kiloh would have me say! The latest big news is that she got a merit in PE for doing a roly poly. The sisters seem to enjoy going to school together, which is great. And it's a major change for us to have them leaving earlier and at the same time every morning.

B-)

The web is alive with movies at the moment. My three other current faves are:

OK GO - here it goes

flashmobbers at Liverpool Street
(We're talking a flashmob of ipodders, organised by mobile-clubbing.com

London to Brighton in 2 minutes

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I say, I seem to be blogging again! Life has been pretty intense recently but I seem to have survived it. This changes video is my favourite of the recent flurry of Cameron-related youtube/blogging activity.

B-)