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Stretch yawn faint

Occasionally I'm overwhelmed with the urge to have a really good stretch, tensing my muscles until they tremble, tipping my head back and unleashing a full on yawn. Lately this is followed by a faint spell - the world goes distant, my vision fades, and everything gets a bit woozy. After a few breaths the world re-intrudes, and normality resumes. It hasn't concerned me, but after a particularly strong episode today my curiosity was peaked, and I typed 'stretch yawn faint' into Google (hallowed be thy results, for thine is the engine, the spider and the crawler) to see what cropped up. It turns out the combo of stretching and tipping the head back starves the brain of oxygen. The stretch lengthens the blood vessels causing a blood pressure drop, whilst it also creates demand for oxygen in the tensing muscles, and finally the head tip constricts an artery in the neck which cuts off the blood to the brain. I'm not sure how common it is in absolute terms, but the f...
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Blink of an eye

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Given it is a Bank Holiday weekend and the Leeds Festival is on I took the decision today to stay home and avoid the traffic carnage. Instead I took a look at my genealogy stuff, which as per usual soaked up my entire day in the blink of an eye. Today’s project was to strip all references to living individuals, and produce a version that could be published on the internet without putting the whole family at risk of identity theft. Along the way I tweaked the code that produces the website. Every time I take a little dig into the code I end up scratching my head and cussing. I’m not a born programmer, I’m more of cut and paste merchant, so when I have to do something new it takes a long long ole time to get it right. When I do eventually get there I can't help grinning like the Cheshire Cat. Anyhow, the end result is here . Purrr… At this time of year many folks land on this page looking for a Cheshire Cat pumpkin pattern. Checkout the Zombie Pumpkin website links below, a...
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A bleak situation

I'd grown up considering myself half-Geordie, as my dad's family came from County Durham, but while researching the family tree I discovered that two branches of the 'Geordie' family originally came from East Anglia. My ggg grandfather William Rufus Lincoln , born in Saxlingham in 1837, left Norfolk with his wife and two children to go to County Durham in the 1870s, where he worked in the collieries. My ggg grandfather Samuel Littlewood , born in Great Plumstead in 1824, migrated from Norfolk with his wife and their 7 children to County Durham in the 1870s, where he became a miner. The two hundred miles these families moved typifies the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, when hundreds of thousands of people left impoverished agricultural areas to find work in mines, factories and mills. Many families emigrated to Canada, North America, South America and Australia. In the early part of the 1800's there had been an influx of people into Norfolk, as trade a...
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