To be a chicken keeper or not to keep chickens? Which came first the desire for the chicken or eggs?

As a child I won goldfish at the funfair but the fish died. I kept tropical fish. They died. (When I was away in India.) No it was not the cat. I did not have a cat. Unfortunately I was allergic to cat and dog hair as a child.

Every now and then we discuss how nice it would be to keep a cat or dog. My first desire was to keep a cat or a dog, only later did I want to keep chicken which laid eggs. Why keep a cat or dog? My late father's family had a working cat to catch mice - also a working dog to patrol the local church and catch or better still deter would-be thieves.

I like cats, or at least pictures of cats, For five minutes. I have no desire to keep a cat in the house to catch mice because we have no mice, as far as I know.

My relatives had a cat. They moved house and spent days hunting for their cat which went missing. It turned up in their old garden.

What about a dog? First there is house training. The cost of the food.  Finding somewhere to park your dog, or pay for kennels, every time you want to travel has never been an option for my family who are frequent flyers.

We started buying farm eggs. We went to a talk at a Science fair about breeding chickens to lay eggs.

Then I thought, why not keep a chicken and get fresh newly-laid eggs every day? it surely won't be miserable without me if I have to go away for the weekend.

I thought I'd research it. The knowledge might be useful for my novel starting in 1880.

I quickly went off the idea. To keep birds outdoors you have to register with the government. Government websites tell you what to do if your birds get bird flu and what to do about it. How do you recognise bird flu? Bits of your chicken turn swell up and or turn blue. They stop laying eggs and die.

Meanwhile, back in the supermarket, those half a dozen eggs no longer seem so exorbitantly priced. Quite a bargain really. Saves me such a lot of trouble looking after hens.

A post about a poltergeist

Ants, flies, mice, moths, pigeons, spiders, termites; cooling, condensation, draughts, heating, minor earthquake, sloping shelves, vibration from elevators, vibration from underground trains - watch out for sinkholes next year, caused by large ghosts. 

Hall of Heroes in Find My Past

Find my past emailed me about their Hall of Heroes. The only one I already knew was Edith Cavell in WWI. The others included stories involving Wales, the Basque children, the Irish, and Serbia.
findmypast.co.uk

Saving Photos and Finding Lost Photos for blogs, books, emails, greeting cards, cakes and memories

Writing a blog about preparing for Chinese New Year in 2015, I was hunting for my old photos showing hotel decorations with red lanterns, Chinese dragon dances outside restaurants, Orchard Road and Shopping Malls decorations. My laptop ran out of photo storage space so all my photos are lost on a disc storing them somewhere in the office. I could not find my old Chinese New Year photos in my Facebook pages. I found some photos in Wikipedia but it's a whole hassle and delay trying to check whether you have to credit the author and how do you spell their name, can you copy it, do you run the danger off copying the link but not the actual photo.

Facebook For Storing Photos
I found old photos of me and my books and myself in libraries with children on Facebook. But not Chinese New Year in Singapore.

Photos saved in Emails
Finally I checked my own emails with the search for the word Chinese New Year.

Success! Hooray! I had sent photos of Chinese New Year in Singapore to friends.

So now I can stop complaining that gmail has stored over 7,000 emails in the cloud and insists on trying to send me the lot every time I log in. I am truly grateful to gmail for storing my emails forever.

Whatever happens to my laptop, lost, stolen, upgraded, my photos in old emails and still intact and recoverable. So now anything I want to be sure not to lose, I shall email to another member of the family.

Here's an old photo. It has to be one of mine before I found the editing programme I bought for iPhoto which enables you to correct the horizontals.
Orange lanterns for Chinese New Year and a lion.

For my posts on travel go to my blog Angela Lansbury author travel.
You might also like my books on lulu.com

Ghosts and mental health

Adding further to scientific evidence for experiences of ghosts being not ghosts but having other causes from outside the person claiming to experience the ghost or inside their head. Even intelligent people can be fooled into thinking that they have met and spoken to people who cannot be caught on camera, seen by others, nor found next day in broad daylight.

Apparently ghost companions are a real, recognised danger when people grow light-headed on mountains and imagine phantom friends or enemies.

Here is an example of a fit, resourceful man, who in the night has a conversation with a man in his tent who is not there next day.

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2745714/My-battle-death-angry-hungry-polar-bear.html

Cuddle cots for the stillborn - what about mourning for mothers? Last photos? Hospital photographers?

Cuddle cots. Any new idea which helps grieving families is welcome. I do wonder about the hygiene of adults and children (siblings of the stillborn) touching a dead baby. I also wondered why a mother of three healthy children would go on to have three stillborn babies. I suppose you keep hoping that the next live birth will replace the feeling of loss and write over the memory of the baby which died with the memory of a baby which lived.

Why would anybody want to keep cuddling the baby for 48 hours? Maybe it takes 48 hours to accept that the baby is dead and you can do no more for it.

Some people never move on. They keep the bedroom the same. They keep the photos on the wall. One family, the Alexander wine company, keep on a wine bottle the photo of Alexander, the father of the current (writing this in 2014) company owner's father.

People try to keep the name of the dead person, calling all children, grandchildren, or future sibling by the name of the ancestor or deceased relative.

That's what a graveyard is for. Even if you don't think that on the day of judgement the bones will all jump out of the graves. The authorities just want the name on the gravestone and the date of death in case the police need to exhume the body. But the family often wants a poem or picture. They vista the graves of the dead.

I have moved from mourning a stillborn baby, which doesn't happen to every family, to losing a parent, to anybody living a full lifespan. Now what about increasing number of people whose elderly mothers die in hospital? Should they have cuddle cots?

The mother of a stillborn baby might be in a hospital bed. But what about the widower with the walking stick, worrying about his car getting fined in the hospital car park, or the daughter of pensionable age herself has no chance to rest in hospital before seeing the body for 15 minutes in a morgue (queue and wait for your body's 15 minutes in the morgue bed) or getting the body back in a coffin.

In Victorian times when most people died at home, the dead baby was set up on the mother's knee or in her arms for a first and last photo. The Japanese still have open coffins. (One can still hope that the body will revive. It happened twice in South America in the last couple of years.)

Maybe we are moving slowly, gently, in that direction. Next we will have hospital photographers to take photos of the family with the recently deceased, propped up in bed.

Newspaper story on cuddle cots in Daily Mail online.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2744458/Meet-parents-using-refrigerated-cuddle-cots-buy-time-stillborn-babies.html

Read more quirky, thoughtful and informative posts by Angela Lansbury on travel, restaurants and other subjects.
Quick Quotations by Angela Lansbury in Lulu.com

Blue eyes began only up to 10,000 years ago. Oops - no blue eyes in the bible

If blue eyes started maximum 10,000 years ago everybody in the bible, old and new testaments, had brown eyes. So any oil paintings in the national art galleries showing blue eyed saints and prophets and biblical scenes will need to be re-painted or given texts on the walls explaining the artist's mistake.
(Research reported in Daily Mail online about findings from university of Pittsburgh.)