with an apologetic whimper

Midwives should feature quite prominently amongst the people you wouldn't expect to suffer from apparent embarrassment when using words such as vagina, perineum, episiotomy or tearing. Even if they were quite a quietly-spoken midwife who might choose to omit them in polite conversation (and who dropped noticeable inverted commas around her internets and mobiles) they're absolutely appropriate and definitely useful words to use during discussions about childbirth. Instead, 'down there' was employed to indicate any external structures inferior to navel and superior to the knees and any mechanical repairs which might be effected to the affected portions postpartum became 'embroidery' which made me feel like I should have been wearing a hat and living in the nineteen-fifties. A friend advised that she'd similarly heard the pregnants' nethers referred to as the undercarriage, even though even the lexical components of the euphemism imply a much greater suitability to the 'neath-dangling unspeakables of a gentleman. Further-oddly, we weren't given a bit of paper to provide our opinion and assessment of the course instructors, something most people would probably expect given the near-ubiquity of such a feedback process following courses and training in the workplace. There might have been a section for further comments in which some alternative euphemisms could have been suggested if standard physiological terminology was deemed unsoundly.

Despite boss-absence and the comfortable normal-clothingness of the Friday resulting in quite a productive morning I had to pop back to work for the late afternoon to debug the only fly in an otherwise elegantly spotless pot of synergistic code-ointment. It's currently nice and flexible and based on an external and easily-amended specification but it will doubtless eventually require some bodgy hard-coded workarounds when the pleasing uniformity of the standard definitions for simple telephony measures upsets a consultant or manager somewhere.

Went to see Kick Ass in the evening in a surprisingly but pleasingly empty (though only from the point of view of my ears and auditory cortex) Cameo. It does, very much. Lots of the actiony bits have been covered slightly too thoroughly by the various trailers but the speakier bits hold it all together quite well.