Earth man

Mark watching Earth: The Power of the Planet on TV last night. I doubt he learned anything new, what he doesn't know about geology isn't worth knowing! The series is beautifully shot but somehow each week I've managed to fall asleep before the end - it's a bit late for me! We enjoy spotting places that we've been - two of the most spectacular being Iceland, where we saw the split between the European and American plates and western Australia where we saw stromatolites in beautiful, warm, shallow waters, thought to be the oldest known life on earth.

Mark was watching a programme on astronomy before that and as usual I got very irritated. I firmly believe that much of what astronomers claim as fact will eventually be proved wrong. One such fact that set me off was the presenter telling us, as if we are supposed to gasp at their superior knowledge, that one astronomer's new calculations doubled the size of the universe as we knew it at a stroke. Seeing artifically coloured images of far distant galaxies just makes me see red. Pretty as they are, surely they are too important to doctor? Don't we have a right to see what's out there in the same way that the scientists do? And how come we can't get highly detailed images of our own solar system when these people claim they can see the very edge of the universe? (Is that edge simply where their equipment no longer picks up light?) I don't mind at all that they get their theories wrong, only that they are presented as facts until proven otherwise.

Drawing the family was one of my goals for 2007, believe it or not. I was heartened by Nina's admission that she had failed one of her goals this year too - seeing some of the goals set by others can make me feel quite inadequate! But, she said, the year is not over yet, and inspired by that, I did this sketch. (It also helped me calm down after that programme!) However, this may be the only one, the two teenagers are refusing to co-operate this year even when offered the hourly rate!