Here we go again

I’ve tried and failed to blog before.  I start with keenness and vigour, but it drops away and then I don’t post for a while and then I have no ideas and then nothing I write is funny, or entertaining, or comprehendible, so I stop.  The trouble is I want to focus on a single something; build a source of knowledge for others to references thanks to wonder of the search engine.  So the solution is to be vague, and ramble, and just write about me and my shizzle.

The title of this blog alludes to the fact that I am a man without a female to supervise and sanction my decisions.  This is either extremely liberating or highly dangerous, depending on your view point?  There is now no one to prevent me filling my house with pictures of combat jets and steam trains, dropping a Buick small block in to my Land Rover, and spending all remaining money on Lego Mindstorms.

Well, almost no one, there is a woman, she is two and called Florence.  You see I am also a single parent since my wife died last year.  I suspect I will return to the subject of round the world single handed parenting, as it is nothing like dual parenting.  I have friends who help out, and all of them are binary, and bless them for trying but they can never understand it.  It’s not like standard parenting but one of them has popped down the shops for a bit, times twenty four, or even times a thousand.   My best friend is a single parent and for two years she told me all about it in great detail and I never got it, it seemed illogical and mad at times, till it happened to me, then bing; now I get it.  No regular parent can get it, they are part of something bigger and responsibility and roles get spread around and smeared.  They are a monomer in a polymer family.  I am in the smallest unit possible, and for the next ten and half million minutes it’s just me.  The difference is connections.  I often hear other parents saying how it’s nice to get a break and get away from the kids and all that.  I don’t ever feel that; why would I want to be without her?  I’d miss her; I’d miss out on all this.  I have a father daughter relationship that normally only mothers get to enjoy.  I have actually thrown tantrums with people helping to babysit, so they won’t and I get her to myself.  I don’t actually do that anymore, just a phase I went through; now I am in a more long haul frame of mind.  I thinkI  was being miserable; I’m not sure?  I’m not very good at miserable.  Some years ago a friend of mine stopped mid-sentence and suddenly proclaimed, “I’ve figured Dave out!”  This garnered immediate interest from my other friends, as most people never figure me out, “In a former life you were a Labrador!” he said with some flourish.  Radical atheism of the Douglas Adams variety aside, I’ve never seen reason to disagree with that sentiment.  Things that make me unhappy normally just get jettisoned from my life and the gap filled with alcohol and sugar.  For completeness that list, with Oxford comas should be alcohol, sugar, rock, and science.

I like science, and I like science communicating, always have and now my interest has been heightened, mainly because I have Florence and she’s going to get a very good grounding in cosmology, evolutionary biology, engineering, and everything else I can fit in that little head.  Having read the proposed Key Stage 4 science curriculum she’s going to need all the help I can give her.  For some unfathomable reason it seems to have nothing after the 1950s in it.  But then I completely messed up a question on nuclear decay in my physics A-level as no one told me that deterministic physics died in 1926 when Schrödinger finalized his equation, so perhaps the school system has always been 50 years behind?

That is what I’m going to be writing about, the science that is interesting me as I accelerate and try to stay ahead of Florence for a few more years yet, interspaced with what I’m going to do about the bits of metal that came out my Landys gearbox last weekend, and where I’m going to put the disco lights in my lounge.  Hopefully some of you will read this or maybe even enjoy it, otherwise it will just be me in an empty room talking to myself, but then I tend to do that anyway, so it will actually be me talking to myself, but in silence.

Now, if I get rid of the dinning table then I'll have space for one of these; only £2,995.