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Sometimes one thing can become every thing…..

Against everything my head tells me, I pick up the phone and call my elder sister. Growing up, she and I at best had a tenuous relationship, at the worst of times we barely spoke to each other for long stretches. She always had this way of taking bluntness to illogical extremes in my opinion. Lately, Mother has put her on the job of hassling me. When my call connects, she is in the middle of mixing up some cereal for her youngest child. She puts my call on speaker phone mode as she juggles her child, the phone call and the bowls she is using. ...

Out here, spring is very much upon us at last. Across the land there is an almost sudden profusion of colour; purples, yellows, blues, reds and whites suddenly dot the landscape where a dull, depressing green was standard fare a scant few weeks ago. Standing in front of the door to my modest lodgings, flowers are all I see when I look up the road. Those who should know say the unseasonably warm weather beguiled the flowers into blooming early. The upside to it all is that my otherwise bland commute is now transformed into a celebration of colour, colour not restricted to flowers but extending to women. The warmth and the sunshine mean that around town the hemlines and necklines are coming together quickly, and a lot more skin is visible. ...

I wake up to the insistent whine of my cell phone. I try to let it ring, hoping that whoever it is will leave a voice mail but when the call ends there is only a respite of a couple of minutes before the next call comes in. I drag myself to my desk and pick up the phone on the third ring, it is my mother. - Oohjay how are you, she asks. ...

I am checking my emails when a LinkedIn notification comes in. Over the past few months, LinkedIn has morphed into a Facebook for professionals - never more so than in its ability, and willingness, to dreg emails and address books for connections to suggest. This particular suggestion is for a connection to a friend of my father’s from back in the day when he was a struggling academic, labouring under the especially onerous conditions of the Abacha era. I add him, and after a few minutes he accepts. He emails me, asking me where and how I am, how my parents are, and then adds the marriage question.. ...

Someone shouts my high school nickname in the middle of Union Square, just as I am about to take a left turn through the train station. I am more than a few minutes late having allowed my typical Sunday morning lethargy - part relapsed faith, part lingering hangover - to leave me in real danger of arriving late. By the time I finally pull myself off my bed, complete my preparations and grab the number 16 bus to the city centre, it is already 11.10am; meaning Sunday school is over, and the opening hymnal is just about to be sung. ...

*Grosspost alert* I wake up with a disturbing case of the growlies. Last night I binged on chocolate flavoured milk, an impulse buy as I trawled the aisles at my local Coop shop sorting out my groceries. The thing is lactose intolerance for me is hit and miss. Some days I can ingest a lot of milk and yet not get any serious symptoms. On other days, even a little has my stomach in cramps and me passing gas. ...

I wake up to the sounds of a quiet house. It has taken all of twenty four hours but finally my benumbed brain connects to reality. Last night, EJ and I split up officially. It was very amicable - no shouting, no crying, no theatrics - just two adults recognizing that the time to end our tenuous grip on each other and move on had come. It is a strange place to be. We’re still friends, we intend to keep the lines of communication open, but our nine months of being official have ended. Now that reality has hit, I feel like a large, gaping hole has been torn in my very existence. ...

If there is one thing I have learned from returning to work after a year and a half off studying, it is that there is a very tangible credibility deficit that us early-mid-career professionals have to make up when they switch jobs. I define the early-mid-career phase as that stage of the working life between the five year mark and the ten year mark generally corresponding to the period within which the professional exceeds 10,000 working hours. ...

Quick reads…. On-the-job relationships come back into the limelight - one Police Unit seems to have fallen apart over the Team Leader’s dalliance with a female team member. On paywalls, one of the more rational arguments I’ve read. (HT - The Daily Dish) Artificial leaves currently in development may one day power an entire house by electrolysing water and providing hydrogen for fuel cells. Robotic bird flying becomes a wee bit more realistic. The genetic basis for loving working out. Sounding a note of caution for using GPS-aware apps indiscriminately. Color gets another (light) bashing. Slick sleaze, or ill advised expenditure? A short history of the bomb-zapper that never was. Google aims to turn phones into credit cards. App of the Week? Social Media meets shopping for dresses - an app for your friends to help you select a dress. The boobs have it. Apparently, there is a connection between length of time spent breast feeding and brain size. However there is no guarantee that breast milk is all that, especially when the mother isn’t eating well herself after all.