M.H. Thaung's Blog: Musings, page 2

Very short stories #61

I hope the year is starting well for you. This month, I’ve been exercising my brain with a course on logic. It’s going rather slowly since the concepts take a while to get my head round. So far, we’ve covered topics such as formal vs natural language, various sentence connective and truth tables. Already, I find myself looking more critically at what I say and write, wondering if my intended meaning is unambiguous (usually not…)

On the crafting side, I’ve been experimenting with sewing. With our...

Festive greetings

I hope you’re having an enjoyable run-up to Christmas. (Or if not, may you find inspiration for a murder mystery…) We made our annual pantomime trip last week to see the excellent Charles Court Opera perform Napoleon: Un Petit Pantomime. As there are already several reviews (such as here, here and here) I haven’t posted one of my own. In short, it’s a departure from regular panto fare while retaining the farce, singing and stagecraft that we’re used to. It’s still running for a couple of weeks, ...

Very short stories #60

And just like that, we’re in the final month of 2024! Where has the time gone? Whatever you’ve been up to, I hope it’s gone well

At home, my partner husband underwent urgent eye surgery a few weeks ago. Our routine now revolves around putting in eyedrops. Thankfully the frequency is reducing and we’ve started doing other things—like going out for more than a couple of hours! At least we’ve been able to occupy ourselves with the ongoing extension declutter/reclutter.

In my last post I mentioned ...

Very short stories #59

Summer’s definitely gone. We put the central heating on for a few days last week! Admittedly, that was mainly to help the plaster dry in our currently-being-built extension. The work’s going well, but reorganising the clutter will be a challenge. Why is it always easier to arrange more storage space than to decide whether or not to keep things?

I’ve also started swimming again, after a gap of 12 years. It’s odd to think I used to do a mile before work every day. This time round, my first session...

Very short stories #58

You may remember a couple of months ago, I signed up to FutureLearn, a site which offers a selection of online courses. I’ve now done a few of their courses, and it seems a good way to learn a bit about all kinds of topics.

Overall impressions first. The modules I chose were self-paced, i.e. no specific sign-up dates or deadlines. They each ran over 2-4 weeks, needing about 2-4 hours of work per week. (I spent longer on some, and others I skimmed a little…) There was a mix of text to read, video...

Very short stories #57

I hope your summer’s going well! We’ve been pretty busy over the last few weeks and are now having an extension built. Additionally, as you may have seen in my previous brief post, we got married at the end of July. Then we headed off to Glasgow for Worldcon. It’s the first time I’ve been to a SF/fantasy convention. The meeting covers literature, art, comics, movies, cosplay, gaming and I’m sure other areas that slip my mind. There were around nine thousand delegates, most of whom attended in pe...

Some personal news

I don’t think this photo needs text accompaniment

Very short stories #56

I hope you’ve had a good June. It’s been a fairly academic month here. While I enjoy the research projects I’m involved with, I’m glad they’re not my full-time job. I’d find it really stressful having to constantly produce “measurable” output in order to justify ongoing funding, perhaps for an entire team. Being more of a dilettante than that, I’ve instead signed up to Futurelearn. This UK-based site offers a wide range of short courses: my wishlist ranges from research ethics through archaeolog...

Very short stories #55

I hope you’ve been enjoying May. In the UK, this is a month with two Monday holidays, though since I already lose track of what day it is , it doesn’t really make much odds here.

We’ve cleared out a good chunk of stuff from the house in preparation for building an extension. (By which I mean, getting someone else to do the building—definitely no DIYers in this household.) Given that we’ve lived here for 15 years, this was not a trivial task. There’s always a tension between, “Can we seriously en...

Very short stories #54

I hope springtime is treating you well! It feels like ages since I last posted, but March was an exhausting month. I hosted a professional conference, something I do every few years. Despite using the services of a professional conference organiser for the first time ever (thanks, Louise, you were briliant!), the entire month was filled with conference prep and then follow-up. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to recover, and I’ve no idea how I’d have managed if I was still working!

Now that’s all...