Aeolienne

Correction - think it was a semi-detached house, or failing that an end-terrace, because I climbed up the side wall. And there were plane trees outside.

Mind you, nor do some adults. Whose idea was it to write a song for famine relief in Ethiopia which includes the lyrics "There won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time ... Where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow"?

I went to this one of her lectures: Back then I had not read any of her books. I have to say I wasn't overly impressed. While I'll grant that she was articulate - in so far that she had good clear diction - the overall structure of her lecture was incoherent and rambling. She stated at the outset that she'd talk for an hour, pause for tea/coffee, and then during the second half she would answer questions from the audience. In the event she ran out of time in the first half and ended up continuing her lecture after the break, which meant less time for questions. Considering this is what she does for a living, you'd have thought she could have practised the talk beforehand to ensure it was within the time limit, perhaps got someone to listen to her and give her feedback. I got the impression she wanted to rush through the Q&A bit to get to her final bit, where she sang one of her songs. The musical number didn't add anything of value to the lecture IMVHO, nor did I much care for DW's faux-American warbling style of singing. I wasn't keeping notes during the lecture, but I remember that she kept talking about a "fruit salad" as if it were some kind of metaphor. When I was back in my seat after the coffee break (before most of the rest of the audience were in) DW happened to catch my eye and asked me what I thought. I asked her to explain the "fruit salad" metaphor; she retaliated by asking me "How would you define autism?" "Er, a developmental disorder I think it is," I replied, still puzzled. And then DW continued to talk to me, while I sat there wondering what she was on about; next thing the rest of the audience came in and the sound they made drowned out what DW was saying. A few months later I read Somebody Somewhere followed by Like Colour to the Blind and was astounded at how quickly DW made her way up the British property ladder. Seemingly on the spur of the moment she decided to stay in England after having shipped her luggage to Australia and managed to rent a cottage in Essex - get that, a whole cottage on her own, not a shared flat, - with a piano too. By the next book she'd managed to buy a house in Wales with then husband while letting out the Essex cottage (which would imply that she owned the latter property outright by then - did she buy it from her landlord?). Oh for those halcyon days of knock-down property prices in the early 90s.

Slightly O/T, but what do you have to do to get an NAS support worker? Are they only available in certain cities?

According to Shimrit Elisar, author of Everyone's Guide to Online Dating, "few people can keep up with more than one site at a time". http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/consumer_affairs/article3167889.ece I'm on PoF, OKCupid!, BluesMatch and Loveandfriends.

Seems like I'm in a minority of one in being so reluctant to write my own autobio... http://www.asd-forum.org.uk/forum/index.php?/topic/15000-adult-aspie-autobiographies/

I'm supposed to be starting physio next week. The uncertainty being that I have made an appointment at Addenbrooke's but work has decreed that same day to be devoted to Matlab training - let's hope the local NHS trust is OK about rescheduling.

I had a dream last Sunday night about a guy I'd had a crush on at university - not the first time I've dreamt about him of course , but it's been a while. All I can remember now is something about having to deliver some document to him at his flat, which was on the top (second) floor of an Edwardian terraced house and I had to climb up the outside - don't know how. I didn't stay long, saying something about having to deliver something to someone else, but maybe I was trying not to seem too clingy. I guess I was hoping to catch him later but I woke up For my 2p-worth, I suspect what brought this on was one of the books I'm reading at the moment, Vince and Joy, which is a chick-lit book about a couple who hook up as teenagers, then drift apart; it seems pretty obvious from the blurb that they will get back together eventually in their 30s. That and having attended an alumni event last month; although I didn't meet the guy I'd fancied, I did meet a mutual acquaintance from our course.

Did you have to iterate through the whole periodic table to find which element affects your thyroid? I thought iodine was the critical one, anyways...

Um, I guess I don't have that excuse any more.

How long did you have to wait to attend the anxiety & communication in the workplace courses? I was on the waiting list for NAS Prospects between May 2009 and June 2010 when I was living in Exeter, but I didn't get anything out of it during that time apart from a notification of a job at Ernst & Young* and an invitation to a presentation at Goldman Sachs in London, the latter coming at too short notice to attend. Presumably Exeter is classified as being in the same geographical region as Bristol? Assuming anyone knows where it is - back in '07 I made an enquiry to the NAS regarding social skills training in Exeter and got the reply "Where's Exeter, is it in South England?" It was all I could do to resist the temptation to write back "Get yourself a ###### atlas!" Trekster - have you used this? Yet another Prospects * As an aside, this was the job description. Just how Aspie-friendly is this??

That tricky, to sentences without verbs.

As in the Steve Miller Band?

I thought the title of this thread was a line from 'You Can Call Me Al'. Turns out it's actually 'a street in a strange world'.

How relevant is a "user guide to adolescence" to anyone diagnosed in their 20s? Or has Luke written a user guide to adulthood now?

I've just printed off an application form for this housing co-operative. Just wondering if anyone here has had experience of living in a similar set-up. How easy/difficult did you find it? How much commitment is involved - is it generally compatible with a full-time job? My situation is that I'm working as an intern in Cambridge. I'm being paid, albeit below the market rate. My contract has been extended from this month until February, but there's been no word so far of a pay rise. Based on what I paid for rent as a proportion of my salary in my last job, I reckon I would have to have an annual salary of £29k before tax in order to rent a one-bedroom flat in Cambridge. I've also expressed an interest in a co-housing scheme. How do co-housing schemes differ from housing co-operatives?

Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

Do you happen to know if there is any equivalent organisation serving the Cambridge area?

I once caused a storm in an internet forum by declaring that TTE was sexist because the only female characters in it were the coaches, and all they do is scream and get dragged around by the male engines. I have since learnt that Thomas now has female co-workers, so I stand corrected.

I was - am? - supposed to be "good at languages", whatever that means. I'm old (or young!) enough to remember the high hopes of the late 80s, with all the hype of 1992 and the new European era that year was supposed to usher in. Despite this promising future, my teachers advised me against continuing my languages (French, German and Italian) beyond GCSE because I was (allegedly) so gifted there was no need to - "you can always pick them up later on". Unfortunately I've made little use of them since. The one chance I had to really use my languages was the Erasmus programme at university (St Andrews, BSc(Hons) 1998, Logic & Philosophy of Science - Mathematics), but I foolishly blew the opportunity on a disastrous semester in Stockholm. Having believed the hype about how good I was at languages, I naïvely believed I could become fluent in Swedish, no problem. Furthermore I - equally naïvely - believed that the words "approved Erasmus exchange" meant that it had been checked out, audited or suchlike by a bureaucrat from Brussels/Strasbourg/Luxembourg/wherever. In fact no such auditing had ever taken place: I ended up attending lectures on maths and philosophy in Swedish with only a basic-level language course to assist me, and even that didn't even start until half-way through the semester. The longest job I've had to date was 7 years in a branch of the scientific civil service where the furthest I ever travelled on business was London. Apart from three isolated tasks (a presentation to visiting French meteorologists, translating German comments in a Fortran program for a colleague, looking at an email message in Italian which proved to be a phishing scam) the only use I made of my linguistic skills was a weekly lunchtime French conversation class (as well as a German conversation class before that was axed owing to falling numbers). So all that leaves is holiday vocabulary - asking the way to the post office, listening to announcements at railway stations and the like. Shouldn't there be more to using my languages than that?

I'm in rehab for a dislocated shoulder (fell off my bike last week). As of Thursday, eight days after the accident, I've been given permission to stop wearing the sling - just as well, because it was making the armpit under said shoulder stink to high heaven.

Or make your own!

This week I tried to see if you can microwave a swede like a jacket potato. Didn't really work...

Enric Morera, Dance No. 1

After my disastrous experience in Skipton I wished there was a way of finding out what different areas of the UK are really like, especially with regard to adult Asperger's provision. Then I could have focussed all my job-searching efforts on the "good" areas and avoided the bad ones like the plague. I had hoped that during my time in London (cf my intro thread again) I might have found some kind of support service who could have pointed me in the right direction, but all I found were Asperger social groups (i.e. pub nights and bowling ) and Prospects, and as on the two previous occasions when I tried to use their services I never got beyond the waiting list. Plus ça change. I don't even know how Cambridge ranks on that score, but it's where I've ended up (through landing an internship here), for better or worse. Inicidentally when I lost the Skipton job, a friend did suggest that I make the move to Bristol then, in the light of my much-expressed wish to move there (or rather, wish to have had moved there), even in the absence of a job. Call me naive, but I couldn't for the life of me see how I could have afforded to pay Bristol rents without a regular income; it's hardly the cheapest place in the country. I'm ineligible for housing benefit (through owning a flat in Exeter) and too old for CSV (Community Services Volunteers). Funny how I sometimes get the feeling that other people are so clued up about support services anyone would think they'd been issued with an instruction manual along with their AS diagnosis.