Does size matter? I've always been slim—always active. Yet, my waistline has expanded lately. I hate the way I have no control over sagging muscles. Old age approaches. What? Old age? It's just a number, isn't it? Okay, I've experienced a lot of adventures during the last 71 years so I must be old.

However, I'm inactive because of a disability. I eat a really healthy diet, drink herbal tea and exercise within my boundaries. I'm strict with myself because I want to stay young and slim forever. Ha. Ha. To no avail. Anyway, nobody can keep their youth. In the end, our body turns to dust—so they say. Earth or ashes anyway. But I hope to keep my mind active as long as I live.

Doctors in the U.K. are calling for a tax on fizzy drinks and a ban on junk food advertising before the watershed in an effort to reduce the alarming rise of obesity, which is causing serious health problems. Apparently, as a country's wealth increases, their rate of obesity rises along with it. Click here for the video which shows the charts.

Fizzy drinks are nothing but sugar and water, yet bubbles make the drink acceptable. Sometimes a person will drink a litre of the drink at the cinema. There's nothing wrong with an occasional treat, but people are including the drink in their daily diet, along with sugary food and fatty treats.

Nobody welcomes an obese body. Most want help to slim down to their ideal weight.

I don't like any of this type of food and have never eaten it. Well, when I say never, I lie. At the age of sixteen, I drank a cola product offered by my father during their evening social drinking time. I drank it for over a year and I welcomed the taste and pleasant fizz. I guess the dreaded substance coke was included at the time—the fifties. Later, I developed tooth decay. I've seen a video of a slowly dissolving tooth dangled in the liquid at the end of a piece of string. Not good. I can't remember why I stopped drinking the stuff, but I assume it happened because I left my father's house to return to my mother. A major factor was a lack of funds.

And there we go full cycle. Disposable income contributes to obesity. I may have an expanding stomach but at least I'm healthy.

With the cost of living rising, people on a low income naturally choose the cheapest products. The money they save stretches their limited funds.  I understand their plight. Yesterday, my husband splurged on a bunch of red roses for our 24th wedding anniversary. We married in our late forties and have shared so many adventures through the years. He wants to care for me now that I can hardly walk, and delights in cooking wonderful meals. Now, here's the rub. We have to buy the food put out at special prices from week to week.

The poor might have scruples about how animals are treated, but what can they do? They have to survive.

Their decision reflects on the Earth's resources. Producers cut corners to make their goods competitive.

In the U.K. employees took Amazon to task over poor pay and working conditions last week. They earned 1p over the national average. Today, the news has revealed that security staff harassed German workers at Amazon. Their poor working and living quarters were shown on a television program. This could be how the company offers good prices for its products.

Cutting corners.

The same thing could be said for food in the U.K. Chicken meat is reasonably priced at the moment. When I worked and brought in a good pay, I insisted on buying free range products, assured the bird had room to run and peck in the soil under the open sky. Now retired and living on a pension, I consciously turn my head away when my husband chooses cheap products. No matter how much I wish otherwise, I am forced to join the masses. This encourages the practice, yet I have to eat and live a harmonious life with my husband. Even when we both brought home a salary, we argued about buying a product twice the price of another.

The scales must reach a balance. Cheap prices drag quality down, which lowers our compassion for other living things—cereal, trees, animals and people.

And there is the moral dilemma. I'm acting against my conscience for the sake of personal survival and marital harmony. If single, I'd choose a vegetarian diet. But I pray my husband and I will live together for many more years.

I'm worried by the meteor hit in Russia's Ural Mountains. It landed in a lake near Chebarkul rather than on top of the town. I can imagine how frightening it must have been for the residents nearby. The shock waves knocked out windows and, besides injuring nearly 1,000 people with flying glass, must have damaged eardrums. Mothers would have hugged their children to combat the fear of the unknown. In times of stress, it is natural to think of our families and pull together to help each other.

Thank goodness the 2012 DA 14 passed by at its closest at 19.25 GMT on Friday without a hitch as charted. The experts say they can't predict every rock of flying debris heading our way. A worrying report in the BBC news notes how little warning we had about several other comets over the past few years. Click here to read the full story.  Space rocks can take us by surprise at any time.

Astronomers don't know anything about many near-Earth asteroids that are 20 times larger and radically heavier than this week's visitor. Any of these up to 1 km rocks could be civilization-ending.

A spokesperson at the University of Kent reported that they were far from having the problem covered. Some help is potentially at hand - the dedicated Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System or Atlas, designed to give at least a few days' notice of impending asteroids by scanning the whole sky every night. Also, amateur asteroid enthusiasts share vital information. But the problem remains. We could be taken unaware by a completely unknown asteroid at any time.

The best thing to do is live each day as if it will be your last. How often do we suffer from the, 'if only'  thoughts when a beloved pet or relative dies? Love your family and those around you now. I've often read these, or similar, words from wise men, 'Now is the only reality'.

In the latest worrying news, the H-bomb asteroid DA 14 hurtled past Earth yesterday at a distance fourteen times nearer than the moon. Although experts had predicted the 148ft rock would not collide with our planet, it sent fragments in a meteor shower over central Russia, injuring over two hundred and fifty people.

Bright burning objects illuminated the sky for hundreds of kilometres as they crashed into the Ural region. Chelyabinsk residents reported shaking ground and car alarms being set off by shock waves. Windows shattered, causing most of the injuries which hospitalized over one hundred people. Emergency services are rushing to the devastated area full of collapsed buildings. The Chelyabinsk region is Russia's industrial heartland, an area that has many factories, a nuclear power plant and the Mayak atomic waste storage and treatment centre.

I find the whole scenario worrying—so much so that I've written a rough draft of a novel set in the future where a comet-strike sends the world out of kilter. In some sci-fi movies, the experts send men in a spaceship to disintegrate the meteor before it collides with Earth. Can we rely on our experts in the eventuality of another collision?

Recent new evidence has revealed that dinosaurs did die out after a six mile long asteroid hit the planet. Before the cosmic explosion, many creatures were brought to the brink of extinction by dramatic climate swings in the preceding million years, including long cold snaps. The asteroid collision with Earth has now been dated to 66,038,000 years ago. The new extinction date is precise to within 11,000 years.

I don't want to vanish like a dinosaur.

A BBC news correspondent has released another report about the recent rapid decline in Arctic sea-ice. Follow the link here.Have you ever thought how mankind would handle a higher water level?

In 1893, the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen ventured through the "titanic forces" of the ice, amid the "howlings and thunderings" of the floes splitting around his ship. When he reached 860 north, he found himself in a stretch of open water and wanted to head along the open crack in the ice. He thought he might find land on the cap of the world. Nobody had thought of global warming then. Of course, he didn't find land—only more ice.

Atlases convey a solid sheet of unbroken white but this frozen ocean is heaving with tides, constantly shifting, breaking apart and reforming, its condition varying year by year. The total dark of the winter guarantees that the ice will reform no matter how much melts. However, the extent of melting ice follows a greater trend over the past three decades.

The Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet and the loss of sea ice affects populations.  The light-colored sea ice bounces back warmth into space. If it disappears, the Arctic Ocean will absorb more heat. That will cause more warming which will in turn contribute to sea level rise. The link between sea ice and the jet stream dominates some of our weather patterns.

Scientists cannot be sure how much of the Arctic warming is natural and how much it is being driven by manmade climate change. However, data discovered by the Cryosat spacecraft points to a recent decline in the depth of ice covering the Arctic Ocean. Over the past two years of the study, the increased ice growth during winter is not compensating for the summer melt. Techniques have begun to reveal how the changing ice cover might affect the interaction between the Arctic Ocean and the atmosphere.

I am very interested in the subject of what would happen to the Earth after a catastrophic event caused flooding. With my writing partner, Edith Parzefall, I've written a series of five post-apocalyptic books, which take place generations after the Great Flood. The plot doesn't follow the lines of Mad Max or The Book of Eli, where brute force rules and bullies take over. Instead, normal people, displaying varied personality traits and abilities, face the future with courage and band together to rebuild a caring society despite threats from powerful men—in other words ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. You can find two of the published books in the Higher Ground series at the bottom of the page. The rest are scheduled to follow six months apart.

Two vast regions on Earth remain unexplored: the ocean depths and Peru.

Archeologists have just announced their uncovering of a new temple at the ancient site of El Paraiso, near the capital, Lima. They unearthed the temple under fine yellow clay that contained traces of red paint on the right wing of the main pyramid. The complex is estimated to be 5,000 years old. With ten ruins, El Paraiso is estimated to be one of the biggest archeological sties in central Peru. The farming and fishing community supported hundreds of people.

At the heart of the temple, they came upon a fire room, where priests would have inhaled smoke to aid their contact with their gods. We use the word gods in a scoffing manner, as if their belief held no importance or relevance. We know better than they did. We know there is one true God. And yet, weren’t the ancient ones trying to contact the same creator? Each race and creed follows their religion right now. Aren't we all linked to the divine?

Five thousand years is a long time in the history of man's existence on Earth. We can't envisage such a great span. That was back then.

Time has different realities for each of us even though a clock marks each minute precisely. As a child, time dragged for me. I know now I was bored. I wish back in the 1940's someone had realized that some children require more from school. Now, time flies. I only just stretch the time in each day to achieve what I want. Yet, when I fell in the house a couple of years ago, the seconds slowed down. I had enough time to break my fall with my hand rather than hit my head on the hard surface of a marble table. I laughed with relief when I landed on the floor. Minutes stretched while I ascertained the damage to my thumb and dragged my body over the floor backwards, to lift myself up to my chair. Time seems to be flexible. We say, 'That happened at just the right time'.

With potential new discoveries in Peru, let's hope mankind can use the information they gather to good advantage at this point of time in our development. Thousands of ruins are thought to remain undiscovered, making Peru a treasure-hunting destination for archaeologists and looters alike.

Life is so easy now. Sometimes I wonder how people survived in bygone days without medical teams to help in times of crisis. For instance, in the past, women gave birth with only the aid of people close by—maybe the local midwife if the village was big enough to need one. What happened if the pregnant woman was carrying several babies?

I watched a BBC television last night on that subject. The British Cold Case team arrived at a site which had been occupied from the earliest times in Baldock, Hertfordshire, which is north of London and close to where I live. They'd been called to investigate the former life of a woman lying on her side, who had been buried two thousand years ago with the skeletons of three babies around her. Tests put together an interesting picture of her past life.  

The 4ft 11 inch tall woman lived in 100AD beside a Roman occupation, midway between when Julius Caesar arrived in 55BC, was driven off, and returned one year later, and when the Romans left in 500AD. The tale of Kind Arthur dates from this latter period.

However, the woman wasn't Roman, but Celtic, so she wouldn't have had any assistance from their doctors. By linking DNA to two of the three babies to the thirty-five-year-old mother, they ascertained that she was the earliest recorded mother of triplets in Britain. She must have died in childbirth. The second child couldn't get through the birthing canal without aid, and the third remained inside her. The man buried above her could have been her husband. In those days, a couple married for life and supported each other into their dotage. He could have asked to be buried close to her.

Has the human race grown too soft and reliant on procedures to become pregnant and give birth? Could we survive unaided now days?

A space robot is drilling on Mars. Click here to see the news story. It will process the material it brings to the surface with a view to ascertaining if there was ever life on Mars, or if the planet is capable of sustaining life. That reminds me of the song 'Life on Mars', sung by David Bowie, with whom I share a birthday: January 8th.

For the last few days, workmen have been drilling beside a very low dip in the road close to where I live. It's all hills and dips in this area. With heavy rain yesterday, the problem worsened and the lower portion of road sank beneath two feet of water, spreading the freshly dug soil across the surface in the form of mud.

People all over England walk the fields looking for treasure beneath the soil. A jobless treasure hunter unearthed the greatest ever Saxon hoard at Staffordshire. He unearthed 1,500 pieces of treasure. Click here to see the amazing golden artifacts and a wonderful article about the history of Britain. The treasure is currently being held at the Birmingham Museum.

Slice of moon rock is displayed at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. When man first walked on the moon, it shattered everyone's belief that such a thing could be possible. The stars in the sky are real planets. Now, with a robot landing on Mars, we await the findings of Mars dust with baited breath.

The Earth isn't flat as our ancestors once believed. Is there life on Mars?

Should we shun the siren's song of social sights?

Sirens from Greek history were beautiful half-woman, half-birdlike creatures who sang such sweet songs that listeners forgot everything and died of hunger. The Sirens are mostly mentioned by Greek poet Homer in his Epos "Odyssey", where the Sirens encounter Odysseus and his companions on their journey back to the island of Ithaca. The Sirens were expecting Odysseus’ arrival and immediately started singing. Odysseus prepared for the situation by telling his companions to put wax in their ears and bind him strongly in the boat’s mast and to not free him despite his begging. This way, Greek hero Odysseus was able to escape from the temptation and continue his long journey to Ithaca.

I loved that book Odyssey as a teenager. I wonder how many teens read it now.

Yesterday, someone commented on the 'siren song' of the internet dragging them away from writing. I must admit to the same thing happening to me ever since I began a two-week long blog tour with four other authors. Torn between reading the forthcoming schedule for that, several groups' activities and writing my blog, the morning is nearly over before I've resumed editing my current novel.

And yet, we are advised to create an online presence to draw attention to our name, which should affect book sales in the long run. Well, I haven't reached the end of the road. So far, I've seen no results. I hold on to the hope that, by remaining true to my goal, I'll achieve my aim.

Meanwhile, a comet is heading for Earth. The asteroid with the destructive power of a hydrogen bomb will hurtle past Earth next Friday. It will come within 17,000 miles, 14 times nearer the Earth than the moon. I hope it will be a near miss.

I've written a draft on a new novel set in 2027 where a comet hits our planet and changes England's future. I pray it doesn't happen. Best if get on with writing so I finish the final draft before the fantasy comet hits in only 15 years time. I should lash myself to the helm of a ship like Odysseus or the Captain's daughter in the Hesperus.

The advice I give to you as well as myself is to concentrate on the target. It may be establishing a presence, selling a product, developing writing skills or sharing ideas, recipes or knitting etc. Whatever your aim, resist the siren call and remember your goal.

What is infection? Contamination? Something that corrupts somebody morally?

Two types of an infecting microorganism or agent are rife at the moment.

Firstly: Authorities are alarmed by an emerging spread of measles in England.

Any unvaccinated children are open to infection. The measles virus can spread through droplets in the air that come out of the nose and mouth when an infected person coughs or sneezes. It can easily spread among communities that are poorly vaccinated, particularly toddlers and unvaccinated teenagers.  The initial symptoms include cold-like symptoms, red eyes which are sensitive to light, a fever and greyish white spots in the mouth.

Measles is often associated with being a disease of the past and as a result people may be unaware that it is dangerous infection that can lead to death in severe cases. Before measles vaccine, nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age.

The infectious period is from around four days before the appearance of a red-brown rash, to around four days after its appearance. In addition, abdominal symptoms may include nausea and vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea. Symptoms usually last about 14 days in all.

One of the earliest written descriptions of measles as a disease was provided by an Arab physician in the 9th century. In 1757, a Scottish physician discovered measles to be caused by an infectious agent present in the blood of patients. In 1954 the virus that causes measles was isolated in Boston, Massachusetts.

Secondly: The computer virus.

I clicked onto a facebook friend's blog yesterday to find a warning in red. Get me out of here. I use Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, which is free from their site. A computer virus is a program that can spread rapidly from one computer to another. Malware is harmful software such as viruses and Trojans designed to cause damage or disruption to a computer system.

I read another news item this morning. Children are playing God by spreading a virus over the internet. Children as young as 11 years old are writing malicious computer codes to hack into accounts on gaming sites and social networks. We teach children they can't take someone else's toy, or steal one from a shop, so schools need to teach them the same message when writing software.

Everyone should be protecting their computer in the same way as a vaccination is used to prevent measles.