is that rain outside I hear pitter pattering ?

and judging by the river this morning we only need another few hours rain and I'll need to put floatation tanks on the Pug to get to work, it was absolutely hammering it down last night and our babbling brook at the bottom of our field is now a raging torrent, the roar of which can be heard easily from our back door, the river Cowin has already burst it's banks by this morning



so other than the weather everything is fine at Chez Brabrook, we bought a


"Bumbo" chair for Freya off Ebay....and it works a treat, it basically makes her feel very secure, it supports her back up to just below her shoulders and her arms rest on the sides, not to mention the holes for her legs which clamp her in, she can't fall out of it and it's very secure and made of soft latex, so must be pretty comfortable to sit in, it's quite funny watching her sat in it, think of Buddha and the wobbly head dance and you're almost there :)..... she is a little sweetie, she is sleeping now from about 9pm till she is basically woken up whatever that time is, on the weekends is frequently 10am....she does like her bed that girl, and she always has a big grin for anybody that asks her, even at 8am in the morning !!! she must be getting gold top off her Mother, not that her mother can be a cow at times (I'm so dead for that one) ;¬)

Nah everything is tickety boo, kids are ok, dog is alive, hamster even gets topped up with water from time to time when it's banging it's head on the bars for attention....

One thing I am trying to do and that's educating the kids to turn things off after they have used them like LIGHTS and COMPUTERS and ANYTHING electrical, in fact after dark you can't miss our house on the hill, it's that MASSIVE SUPERNOVA of light that blinds you as you come over last hill from Carmarthen, yes that house that has EVERY light switched on in EVERY room along with EVERY computer and EVERY other electrical appliance, no wonder our lawn thrives so much it's getting perpetual light 24/7..... and it's not so much a Carbon footprint more a Carbon stampede......so far I'm having about as much impact as a Jehovah's witness giving out watchtower magazines at a witches coven on Halloween, I'm seriously considering setting up remote shut-down scripts on a schedule to automatically switch off computers after say 11pm (no arguments.....byeeee) all I have to master then are the light switches !!!!! I could always just super glue them off and give them a rechargeable torch each, that's gotta be cheaper ;¬)

Where are the lions when you need them eh ?

I'm joking of course, but recently I seem to be attracting a lot of discussions about some fairly deep questions, the most recent was someone who got into a discussion with me about Darwin and various other lines of questioning obviously based around his beliefs, it wasn't anything I said to him that started him off, it was something he said to me and I gave the other side of the argument, he was basically saying that Carbon 14 radio dating wasn't accurate, I sort of disagreed stating that it was accurate but only to a point after which Carbon 14 is replaced by other isotopes and testing methods which have half lives of billions of years rather than 5730 +-40 years for Carbon 14

the thing is people tend to hear something and rather than research it and find out the truth they blindly state it as fact, some people don't even know that Scientists can check their accuracy by using different isotopes OTHER than Carbon 14....

The first radiometric dates, generated about 1920, showed that the Earth was hundreds of millions, or billions, of years old. Since then, geologists have made many tens of thousands of radiometric age determinations, and they have refined the earlier estimates. A key point is that it is no longer necessary simply to accept one chemical determination of a rock's age. Age estimates can be cross-tested by using different isotope pairs. Results from different techniques, often measured in rival labs, continually confirm each other.

There is only a 1% chance of error with current dating technology. Every few years, new geologic time scales are published, providing the latest dates for major time lines. Older dates may change by a few million years up and down, which is no big deal when we are counting in billions, think of it like a few minutes lost or gained in an hour :)..... younger dates are stable. For example, it has been known since the 1960s that the famous Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, the line marking the end of the dinosaurs, was 65 million years old. Repeated recalibrations and retests, using ever more sophisticated techniques and equipment, cannot shift that date. It is accurate to within a few thousand years. With modern, extremely precise, methods, error bars are often only 1% or so.

after bombarding him with this information he then went on to state that fossils were nothing more than left overs from the biblical flood, I then asked him if that was the case then how does he explain all the marine life suddenly not surviving too well and laying down massive fossil records, and if indeed there was a flood of biblical proportions then why would the massive armoured fish and other marine life suddenly not be able to survive in their own (deeper) habitat post CT boundary ???? maybe they died out of boredom ? ;¬)

I also told him that Hippos are related to whales..... "how ridiculous" he guffawed..... hmmmmm how ridiculous indeed :)

The flying red brick

or basically I could have won "Dancing on Ice" with my recent escapade in the jeep.....I had a timely reminder this weekend not to take things for granted ie/ the road conditions, up on our hill the roads were dry and I set off to pick up the x-box recluse from his cinema experience of "I am Legend" anyway, he missed a train so was due back in Carmarthen at around midnight, so off I set at ten to midnight.....not very impressed that I was family taxi at that ridiculous hour, which probably contributed to my lack of attention, so about 2 miles down the road I came to this sharp turning right and had that horrible feeling every driver dreads where the steering goes ultra light with no feedback from the tyres..... I'd hit black ice and lots of it, it didn't help that I had a 90 degree bend to negotiate and thinking the worst I prepared for a sudden stop, luckily I was only doing 30-ish-mph or thereabouts and despite the jeep starting to slew out at 45 degrees as I tried to take the corner the back end whipped back into line as I tried to take the corner slewing out in the opposite direction and despite the overwhelming desire to hit the brakes I knew that would have had the complete opposite effect to what I wanted....anyway before I knew it I was around the corner and rather messily and I should imagine anybody witnessing the manoeuvre would have thought it wouldn't have looked out of place on a Starsky and Hutch episode, but without crashing through strategically placed cardboard boxes ..... I got to the T junction and that's when the adrenaline kicked in rather too late for my liking !!!

Needless to say I became very aware of the road conditions from then on and since!!