Wed 2006-11-01 
Last Sunday evening Zoe and I noticed a ladybird walking slowly across our living room ceiling. A little later we notice it had become entangled in a web and this spider was attending to it. As with the spider in the bathroom, this is probably a member of the species Pholcus phalangioides.
Sun 2006-10-29 In the last month or two a bug seems to have appeared in the login software of our fully up-to-date Windows XP Pro installation. We have the login screen set to display the users' icons. If I log in as an administrator and then l log out again and try to log in as another user, then the login screen does not detect the keypresses used to enter passwords. It might be that logging in as any user and then logging out again is enough to produce the problem, I haven't tried it (and I don't care enough to do so).
There is a work-around: pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete twice brings up the old Windows NT login box and this does detect keypresses correctly.
Sat 2006-10-28 
A pen drawing by my mother, Clare Brelstaff, probably from around 1966 when I was 7 or 8 years old. The bare toes and the length of the trousers suggest that I was in my pajamas ready for bed. This was the days before we had television: my father and mother would listen to the radio in the evenings while I would keep quiet hoping to be allowed to stay up late. I don't remember what the book was. [Note added 2019-02-03: possibly the Life Science Library book on Mathematics or maybe just some book on dinosaurs.]
Fri 2006-10-27 
This spider has been living on our bathroom ceiling all summer and I have watched it raise at least 2 broods in that time. I have tentatively identified it as Pholcus phalangioides, a common long-legged house spider. Zoe pointed out to me that the ghostly pale spider shape in the lower right is one of skins that the young spiders have shed as they have grown.
Fri 2006-10-27 
This is one of several wonderful photos of slime molds taken by Kim Fleming (alias myriorama). Slime molds are strange beings that come somewhere between fungi and protozoa in the tree of life. They are sort of fungi that have a mobile stage in their life cycle. I will certainly be keeping an eye out for them when I go for my next walk around the Reading University grounds. I would expect that, with this warm wet autumn we have been having, there should be lots about. I will also try to read up on them if I can find a decent book.
