That softening around someone’s eyes during that fraction of a second they first see you and recognise you – fondness, or perhaps just an involuntary relaxing of some obscure eyeball muscle upon the sight of a familiar face.  Who knows?  I can’t even work out whether it’s something about the eyes themselves or the face immediately surrounding them.

The reason I had realised I took it somewhat for granted was when it wasn’t there the day before yesterday.  I had gone with my Dad and my Granny to see Grandad in hospital, who is in an increasingly bleak terminal condition thanks to the ravages of bowel cancer.  Whilst his frailty and obvious illness is upsetting, his sharpness of mind had been pretty intact.

It was a bit different this time, his eyes glazed and no flicker of recognition for some time, and the words he managed to utter didn’t seem to make much sense – although I get the unquantifiable impression that the thoughts behind the utterances were fairly robust, and sensed the frustration he must have felt at not being able to communicate them.

Certainly it is a difficult experience – particularly for Granny who, after over three score years of marriage isn’t able to offer any comfort to him.  So very sad.  Particularly since with her dementia issues she might not necessarily recall exactly how poorly he is before she sees him.  As we left Grandad managed to utter that he was sorry and call me by name, and there was that softening of the eyes that betrays recognition and fondness.

Whether he was exhausted, needed time for his faculties to warm up or whether the ravages of his cruel illness is spreading to affect the reliability of how he can think we can only casually and macabrely speculate.  This process does make one think more philosophically though, that’s for sure.  It’s good timing in many ways to be heading away for a few days next week, I do feel quite drained.

I can only imagine how the rest of the family who have taken on much more of the burden of dealing with Grandad’s illness and the care of Granny now he’s no longer able to provide her with care.  In the meantime I selfishly reflect on an ethereal facial flicker, and how it made me feel… sheesh!

School-based music seems to be something popping into my head with alarming regularity of late.  Blogging about it is a useful way of brain-dumping and hoping that these songs of yore stop echoing around my head.  Apologies if they are now echoing around yours.  I’ve graduated from Primary School in this latest reminisce, and now find myself firmly ensconced in Secondary School circa 1989 or 1990 ish.

We do a subject called ‘Integrated Studies’ which is a mish-mash of Geography, History and Social Sciences – and for much of this period we are absolutely fixated on the Rainforest.  We even create a Rainforest-like environment in the school area devoted to the subject, complete with buttressed trees and extensive foliage everywhere.

In quite well joined-up learning, as well as more factual based learning about the Rainforest area a musical interlude is also incorporated.  A well-meaning but ultimately quite patronising expose on the treatment of the Amazonian tribes people as us Westerners do what we do best and strip the assets from a place with little care nor thought for the longevity of the area.

I’ve actually found reference to it too – although details are scarce – the musical was called ‘Yanomamo’  – ostensibly one of the tribe names (it is actually a tribal word meaning ‘human’ or ‘man’ and not a name as such at all).  The bit that sticks in my head isn’t listed much on the internet at all, and since it involves the supposed names of different Amazon tribes – I’m almost certainly going to spell them incorrectly… but this is how it sits in my head phonetically at least…

‘We are the Forest people,
The Forest is our store
blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah hidden lore

Yano-mamo, Mayo-luno, Too-cana, Moo-raaah,
Yano-mama, Yano-mami, Ticanus, Ai-ee-caaa’

Of course, as young Forest fans (as in the football team), it was with much gusto we were able to join in with a lusty rendition of ‘we are the Forest people!’.  I can also recall some kind of video accompaniment, with particular recollection of a solo song sung by a girl about a lonely Jaguar.  That went “Jaguar-uar-uar-uar”… which led to much “Oooh Aaar” farmer based humour.  Sophisticated people that we were.

Details, such as I could find, are here.  I must admit I’m not curious enough about it to go to the lengths of buying a songbook – I can’t believe I can’t find much by the way of definitive lyrics to all the songs though!  I’m not really sure why I feel compelled to do so either…!

A day of small but varied occurences today…

• Thanks to my research and Cat’s slender fingers the MX-5 can now happily play music from a wired-in iPod and stream via bluetooth (and do hands free).  Very trouble free aside from the fiddly small space in which to fit the plugs in.  I do miss the awesome functionality of the stereo from ‘the nail’, but I didn’t want to rip out the factory stereo.
• New entertainment options in place, a trip to the O2 shop in Beeston saw me acquire an adaptor to convert my iPhone’s microsim to a normal sized sim card.  Cat had posted my iPhone to the insurance company in the morning, so I bought the cheapest pay as you go phone they stock – a £12 Samsung GT-E108oi.  Wow, it’s basic!
• Some observations about this dramatically backward step in mobile telephony:
• It doesn’t have predictive text – making writing text messages a real chore, and quite frustrating for anyone in my proximity due to the clicky horrible buttons
• It doesn’t have any internet or email functionality. None. It certainly doesn’t have apps like Tapatalk or Forumrunner (or Facebook or Twitter)
• I couldn’t import any contacts into it from my backups – so I had to type them in, with the horrible clunky buttons.  I hadn’t missed that process.
• It’s tiny!
• It doesn’t play any music or multimedia, has no camera.  It only has one game on it.
• The battery lasts for ages.
• I can’t wait to not have to use it any more!!
• People were right when they suggested that I perhaps had a warped opinion of how important an iPhone is to life and living life – clearly I had under-estimated the pivotal nature of this magical device!!!
• I’ve been harrassed by a Welsh gardener who seemed to really want to cut down our Leyandii for £90.  So much so he sent a minion to ask Cat after I’d said no, and I bumped into him again in the local Sainsbury’s where me mentioned it again!

Look, I admire your entrepreneurial spirit, but begone – confounded Welshman!  Never darken my lawns again!

I had one of those ‘random things from school popping into my head’ moments again today. Being firmly of the Google generation I duly searched for it, partly to see if it is something I imagined – to validate my strange mind, and of course to see if anybody else out in Internet Land had remembered more of it than me.

We’re back at Primary school time, so mid-to-late 80’s, and it was one of those strange music-book-story type things.  I seem to recall it being about a catalogue in which you could order pretty much anything you could possibly want.  Pretty much the only thing I could recall in any detail were the words (and tune) to part of a song: “It’s easy as falling off a log, when you order from the giant ginormous catalogue.”

All Google really unearthed were a couple random Facebook groups such as this one and this one.  Given the myriad of randomly and wonderfully obscure information on the Internet I can’t believe there’s nothing more than that.  Can anyone remember any more? I’m wondering if any Google hits that find this page might reunite me with somebody who can remember what the hell I’m talking about in more detail.

While I’ve been pondering this I can remember another musical type thing that we endured at school.  It involved some kind of song-writing competition in which there was a hero and a villain – the villain realised he wasn’t very talented so arranged to copy the hero’s song to cheat and win.  The hero gets wind of this, and creates a dirgey tuneless song to trick him – whilst of course secretly having a real song in reserve.

The only real detail I can remember are the lyrics to the ‘fake’ song, although I may have some details wrong… it goes something like this: “The blackbird sings a tuneful song, with turns and trills so fine, such skill has he, such majesty, but it’s not as good as mine. La la la la la, La la la la la, no it’s not as good as mine.”

The only potential reference Google could find for this was this Tweet. One solitary Tweet.  On the whole Internet – and hardly conclusively about the song I’m thinking about.  After all, the blackbird does sing a tuneful song.

Does anybody else retain these meaningless trinkets of memory to the extent I do?  I often think when I’m at work struggling to remember what I was working on a few weeks ago when somebody has a follow-up query that if I could somehow empty my cache of these silly recollections it might give me a more efficient mind.

It would be a shame to lose silly recollections though, wouldn’t it?  I think on reflection even if that was an option I would keep them.  I would love to hear from anybody who stumbles upon this post through searching for either of the song lyric fragments above, though!

For a fair while now we’ve been using a Cisco Linksys WRT160N router – a fairly bog standard wireless router that connects to our Cable connection and spreads out the interweb via both ethernet ports and of course wirelessly.  You can probably get them dirt cheap now, although when I bought it it was reasonably new and shiny!

I’m not right sure whether or not it has always done it, or whether it’s a recent phenomena now we have more-things-than-ever hooked up to it by hook or crook (at last count two phones, three laptops, one desktop, one Wii, one XBox 360, one PS3, one Blu-ray player, one Television and one NAT.  I think that’s it.  Rarely all at the same time too, I might add!

Anyway, for whatever reason the router required rebooting to restore connectivity.  It seemed to have topped out at twice a day this occurred – annoying when you may be downloading a big torrent or hoping to use AudioGalaxy to access your music library when at work or out and about, I’m sure you’ll agree!

I investigated new official firmware releases – I was already up to date, and eventually happened upon this alternative firmware (having done something similar with the NAT which was playing up before).  Not only has this added all manner of geekish functionality that I don’t fully understand, more importantly it has delivered a much more stable router that has been up for nearly three days and counting…

So, if you’re having difficulty with  your router I can recommend DD-WRT if you’re feeling suitably confident in fiddling around with things at a fairly fundamental level.  It’s a shame the router doesn’t have more space to install a few more things on it – but never mind!  At least the internet connection in the house stays up now!

Not the most illuminating or fascinating of stories – the main reason for writing it was because I only pieced together the solution from numerous different sources, so should someone else out there with the same router as me be suffering the same fate, they may well – thanks to Google – stumble across this solution!

The only teeny issue is that since the change an amber warning light is now illuminated on the router, but this is down to the rogue firmware not quite properly talking to the hardware on this small instance.  It’s a small price to pay!