One hundred and twenty-one: hamentaschen

One hundred and twenty: hamentaschen, originally uploaded by meganknight.

I'm baking today. It's a bank holiday, and tomorrow there is a three-hour-long academic meeting. Way back when, I promised my colleagues that if they distrubuted my survey request to all of their former students, I would bake them cookies for this meeting. I don't know whether they have done that, but since then I've also had to deal with the chaos of getting people to double-mark sixty project modules, and while it is part of everyone's job, I do feel like I've been asking favours of people, so I figured I'd bake cookies. These are hamentashcen, which I love, although filled with plum jam, not poppyseeds, this time.

One hundred and twenty: couch surfing

One hundred and nineteen: couch surfing, originally uploaded by meganknight.

There is a discussion going on among friends of mine about cats on the backs of couches (yes, I know, we have such intellectual and high-brow conversations), and well, this is my contribution: Giles on the back of the couch.

One hundred and nineteen: homeward bound

One hundred and eighteen: homeward bound, originally uploaded by meganknight.

These geese on the King's Staithe in York have such an air of purpose to them: marching off home after a hard days' paddling, I like to imagine.

One hundred and eighteen: classic

One hundred and seventeen: classic, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is the river Ouze, in York, and a more classic scene of English river tranquility you could not imagine.

One hundred and seventeen: waves

One hundred and sixteen: waves, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is actually the roof of York railway station. I love the Victorians' ways with iron, glass and brickwork, and the grand sweep of the rail lines into York is reflected in the sweep of the roof, which curves round, like a shell.

One hundred and sixteen: futility

One hundred and fifteen: futility, originally uploaded by meganknight.

When the solar panels went up on campus (there are two of them) people cracked lots of jokes about the futility of trying to make electricity from sunlight in the [supposedly] wettest place in England. I like them, though, they add a certain eerie sci-fi feel to the place, moving as they do, to follow the sun, or the place where the sun should be.

One hundred and fifteen: zombie apocalypse

One hundred and fourteen: zombie apocalypse, originally uploaded by meganknight.

Another phone pic, this one explaining why the university bookshop has closed. It's appropriate, as far as I'm concerned: a university without a bookshop being one of the harbingers of the apocalypse.

One hundred and fourteen: Stickers

One hundred and thirteen: Stickers, originally uploaded by meganknight.

The sticker in the middle originally said "why not hang a fascist from this lamppost?" It's been there a while, and I've wondered about it a lot. Recently, someone scratched out "a fascist" very clearly and deliberately, later, someone added the sticker for the Manchester Ant-Fascist alliance. I don't think the Gohar Shahi poster has anything to do with either of these things, though.

It's all quite odd, especially since the original sticker predates the English Defense League march in Preston earlier this year.

One Hundred and thirteen: hmmm

Data Journalism Camp, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This was taken at Data Journalism Camp in Manchester, an event I was involved in with Francois Nel and Tom Johnson. This is Francis Irving, from a company called ScraperWiki that creates tools for data scraping and does it for companies with money as well.

That's Jon Snow of Channel 4 news behind him - they worked on a big project with Channel 4 recently, and Francis was discussing it.

One hundred and twelve: teeny tiny functional hotel room

One hundred and eleven: teeny tiny functional hotel room, originally uploaded by meganknight.

In Manchester. And yes, I know, it's 40 minutes away on the train. Except, in true English travel fashion, it's not, it's good hour and a half, and not in rush hour, or after 8pm or before 8am. I need to be here early, and needed to be here late, and well, teeny tiny functional hotel rooms go for £33 a night, and I'm not paying.

It doesn't have a kettle, but it has everything else you could need, two beds, a shower, a toilet (in an enclosure so small you have to get undressed outside and back in to it), sink, TV set. Only one power outlet, though.

Oh well, you can't have everything.

One hundred and eleven: spikey!

One hundred and ten: spikey!, originally uploaded by meganknight.

At this rate, it's going to take two years to do 365 pictures, and you know what, I think I may be happy with that.

Some days, I forget completely, some days, I just don't have time to think of anything at all. I may start uploading two a day, if I have time and space to take multiple pics, but until then, this will have to do.

I like little flowers. I like unassuming flowers, and these are both, hanging on a bush on campus. As usual, I have no idea what they are.

One hundred and ten: soup

One hundred and nine: soup, originally uploaded by meganknight.

Or, more specifically, organic veg box soup. We get a box of assorted organic veg every week, and every now and again we look at the overflowing veg crisper and think "it's time for soup". This is minestrone, with, I think, four kinds of brassicas in it, and very good it was too.

I've been very busy, writing and marking, and have barely left the house. It's not going to get much better any time soon, so expect lots of pics of food and knick knacks. Plus, the weather's turned foul again.

One hundred and nine: hungry

One hundred and eight: hungry, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is a sight and sound that greets me every few hours, whenever I am home. I suspect it carries on in the night, but I sleep through it. Oliver is hungry. So so very hungry. He's starving, he hasn't been fed since before the rinderpest and that time, the black cat ate all his food. And all the other times. He's never had any food. Ever.

And so on and so on and so on.

When we first got him, we figured he had been neglected or something, but FIVE years later, he's still doing it.

And believe me, we feed him. The guy who delivers groceries for us must think we're running a shelter - pretty much all we buy is a truckload of cat food and some coffee. And Oliver eats it, and stays skinny.

Cat has several hollow legs, he does.

One hundred and eight: sky

One hundred and seven: sky, originally uploaded by meganknight.

I was in Manchester all day and forgot my camera, so this was taken on my mobile phone while waiting for the bus home. This is looking up Friargate, the main road north from the city centre. There are several pairs of shoes dangling from the overhead phone lines, I have no idea why, but this was really about the sky, which was an appealing mackerel pattern.

One hundred and seven: wordle

One hundred and six: wordle, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is kind of cheating, I know, since it's not a photograph, and really only a picture in that it is a graphic rendition of words, but it's what I've been doing.

This is based on about 15000 words of my research, the most recent 2000 of which were created today or yesterday. It's pretty slow going - at one point I had realised I had spent 35 minutes tweaking data in order to get enough information to write ONE sentence. One whole sentence, and not even a very long one, at that.

Oh well, at least the 'puter's co-operating.

One hundred and six: innards

One hundred and five: innards, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is the inside of my main computer, a Sony laptop. It's never a good thing when you can see the innards of pretty much anything, and that is as true of today as ever.

I caught some kind of blackmailware yesterday, one of those things that make you think you have a virus and then pay them to remove it. I've had it before, so this time I leapt into action and removed it, I thought. The problem is, though, that this particular make and model of computer has an overheating problem, and something along the way started to trigger that, so I opened it up to let some of the crap out from the fan and generally let it breathe and cool down.

It's still not quite right, but it seems to be getting better, I think. Wish me luck - much as I love my netbook I would rather not do all my marking and writing for the next month on this dinky little keyboard and screen.

One hundred and five: bluebells

One hundred and four: bluebells, originally uploaded by meganknight.

Bluebells are a mythical kind of flower to me. They seemed to feature heavily in the very old-fashioned children's stories and poems we read (or had read to us), and I always imagined them much larger, and more sky blue than they actually are. I like them better this way, delicate and subtle

Here in England they're a protected species, and bluebell woods are highly prized locations to visit. This isn't one of them, it's a neighbour's front garden (that's the lid of city of Preston recycling box you see there in the bottom left corner), but they're still lovely.

One hundred and four: Frogged

One hundred and four: Frogged, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is the result of having to undo most of a sleeve for the cardigan I'm knitting because I stupidly thought I remembered the pattern. I didn't.

Full-scale ripping out of knitting is called frogging, because ripping out sounds like ribbet. Working backwards in a row to fix a recent mistake is called tinking, ie, knitting, backwards.

The things you learn from me.

One hundred and three: earworm

One hundred and three: earworm, originally uploaded by meganknight.

Today I had to go to Blackburn, Lancashire, for a doctor's appointment and I have been plagued by an earworm the whole day.

You bet I went looking for holes to photograph but I couldn't find any, so you will have to settle for this rather strange building facade. I don't believe the text has anything to do with the bull's head, which is also above the doorway of the place next door, which seems to be a night club. All very odd.

Edited to add: apparently this building is Thwaites House, which may well be the original headquarters of Thwaites, a large northern brewery, although I still don't understand the bulls. Thwaites' logo is two horses' heads.

One hundred and two: sky

One hundred and two: sky, originally uploaded by meganknight.

England doesn't really do the dramatic skies, at least not in the way Africa does, but this did catch my eye. The tree is a local one, just a block or so away, and although everything else is green, it is showing only the faintest of reddish buds, even now.

One hundred and one: flowers

One hundred and one: flowers, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is a random bush on campus, and I'm afraid I have no idea what it is. Although this looks rather like a hydrangea, this bloom is much smaller, about eight cm across, and the bush is much bigger and bushier, with fewer blooms on it than a hydrangea would have.

I love white flowers, and loose and soft flowers, like these ones. I like things that look fairly natural and unforced, unmanipulated. Of course, having no idea what this is, it could well be some weird artificial hybrid never seen in nature, but I like it any way.

One hundred: object

One hundred: object, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is a little pewter object that we found in a flea market in Glasgow. We don't know what it is, although the shape seems somewhat religious to me (although the shell is not, I suppose). It's beautifully made, and doesn't seem to have been used, but then, pewter never really looks used.

It's a lovely, odd, unintelligible thing.

Ninety-nine: Mill

Ninety-nine: Mill, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is Tulketh Mill, just up the road from us, and clearly the most important building in the neighbourhood. It was a cotton mill, the largest and most modern in Preston when it opened in 1905, but it didn't last long as such. THe cotton industry went into decline after world war one, and by the 1960s the mill had shut down. It was converted into a distribution centre for Littlewoods, a clothing catalogue company, and then in 2005 was turned into a call centre for a mobile phone company, which is what it still is. They've been building a kind of strip mall along the Blackpool road frontage which will house a couple of restaurants and a Tesco's I believe.

The Tesco's is sneaky. When we first moved here there had just been a fight to prevent a Tesco's opening up across the road from the mill, which had been won by the anti-Tesco's campaigners, led chiefly by the Booth's supermarket a few blocks away. Since then, the Booths has become less a supermarket than a convenience store, doubling the amount of booze it stocks and severely limiting the amount of fresh and raw food. Personally, I'm hoping for the Tesco's to bring some competition back.