Rebuilding journal search again
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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dw_maintenanceMeanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
Joint Union Statement
Jun. 30th, 2025 05:53 pmlnrWe did finally meet with the university senior management on 10th June, over a month after we originally requested a meeting. It wasn't a complete success, but we did come out of it with assurance that the existing policy on gender reassignment was still in place, and trans people can continue to use the toilets that match their lived gender, that no-one should be challenging people in the toilets, and that any changes to the policy would not happen until after the EHRC guidance is published in the autumn, and would involve a proper consultation, and a full Equality Impact Assessment of the changes
We asked them to respond to the EHRC consultation as an institution, and gave them a deadline of 20th June to communicate the above facts with all members of staff, including information on how to seek advice and support (other than just the staff counselling service!)
Instead they published a statement on Sharepoint on Tuesday (24th June), which did not meet our requests. The unions have put out a joint statement today (drafted last week, but it took a while to get it online) as a result:
EHRC Consultation
Jun. 30th, 2025 05:49 pmlnrFinished my response and submitted at 11:30 last night, having had to start from scratch on Sunday because a browser refresh had lost my previous attempt. I copied and pasted my responses into a document before submitting, as I'd been warned it wouldn't save them or send them to me. Tired now, and too hot today too, but glad I got it done.
Not sharing it all here, but from the final question:
Overall, as a trans inclusive feminist woman, I find this Code of Practice to be incredibly upsetting. I want to be able to include trans people in my life. I want to accept them in their lived gender. I'm happier with women's places which include trans people than I am with ones which exclude them. I want to have advice on how I can do this, and it's completely lacking here.
The Code is unclear in many places not just on how trans inclusive policies can work, but also on how the suggested trans *exclusive* policies can work in practice. It relies too much on the idea that you can always tell which people are trans and which people are not, and it seems willing to change existing practice significantly even where this will disadvantage trans people.
I don't think this is what the ruling in the Supreme Court was trying to achieve. The changes here are so incredibly broad, and so much at odds with other legislation, that they seem to go far beyond what is necessary, and it feels like an ideological stance to exclude trans people. If this is not the intention than it needs re-writing considerably.
Wicked (2024 film)
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:25 pmemperorThe songs are reasonable (though none of them have stuck in my head), the leads are very good, and it's very pretty. And I was pleased to recognise Peter Dinklage by his voice :) But I don't think I'd recommend it as a film.
Packing
Jun. 30th, 2025 10:03 amrmc28Regrettably, we have to go home again this afternoon. I am packing with the intention of leaving our luggage at the hotel while we do one last amble along Southsea beach.
Swag count:
- 11 pens
- 9 commemorative guidebooks (to the various ships, museums, and the dockyard as a whole)
- 2 notebooks
- 2 postcards
- 1 travel mug
- 1 fridge magnet
- 1 birthday card from the Spinnaker Bar staff
Also some chocolate from the Lindt outlet store. My suitcase was fairly full when we came. I'm sure I can make it all fit ... somehow.
The seed for choosing Portsmouth for this getaway came from seeing a sign for "Explosion Museum" while driving a bunch of hockey players to Gosport rink back in May. I'm very glad I went with that impulse, it's worked out well.
vital functions
Jun. 29th, 2025 08:16 pmkaberettReading. ( Scalzi, Wells, Gordon + Ziv, Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster )
I have also done a bunch of variably directed online reading about models and theories of pain, and will happily recommend the British Psychological Society's Story of pain should this be relevant to your interests!
Writing. I am several thousand words and 18 (of 52) questions into the consultation on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. The deadline is in a little under 24 hours. Approximately two thirds of the questions appear to be very simple and straightforward tickboxes. I am not super enjoying the free-text responses, and especially did not enjoy that despite the total lack of any indicator of a word limit there is in fact a word limit and it's 1000 words. I discovered this having written 2511 of the damn things.
More cheerfully I am also, as mentioned, enjoying playing with my pens for the purposes of notes about pain. I am increasingly convinced (cannot remember if I mentioned?) that I have Solved the Problem of one of my fancy pens having an unwelcome tendency to dry up when looked at funny, via the method of "giving the cap a bonus little wiggle once it's on". (It's the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age which, second hand, was a PhD completion present from A, because -- for those of you who aren't massive fountain pen nerds -- it's made out of a resin that's got crushed Etna basalt mixed in with it; I spent a while going "is it just because red-family inks are typically quite dry???" but nope, the effectiveness of the extra little wiggle suggests quite strongly that the spring for the inner cap isn't quiiite activating when I'd ideally like it to. This isn't necessarily a huge surprise given how sticky it was when I first got the pen, but it still took me... a while... to catch on.
Watching. Up to date with Murderbot. Remain grumbly about Decisions including "how little time the poor thing spends with its helmet up" and "how bad people are at poly" and also, fundamentally, the word "throuple" (I AM TOO OLD AND CRANKY FOR THIS NONSENSE, APPARENTLY), but am also mildly peeved that we've run out of episodes.
Listening. An Indelicates gig, which I almost could not make myself leave the house for but was very very glad I did. Not having yet managed to scrape together the brain to listen to Avenue QAnon significantly increased the proportion of new-to-me songs!
Cooking. Bread? Bread.
Eating. The branch of Tonkotsu a short way from the Indeligig venue turned out to have outside seating! And an updated menu since last time we made it to them, so we both delightedly consumed the chilli tofu ramen and also shared the cauliflower 'wings' and some edamame and the very pleasant yuzu lemonade and also also I tried A's Smoked Hibiscus Margarita and it was great. (I mildly regretted not being in fit state to actually want an entire cocktail of my own.)
Growing. I... harvested and processed 1.7 kg of redcurrants! And ate several handfuls of raspberries! Depending on how badly my neglect since Wednesday has damaged everything given The Heat there's at least as much again to come off the redcurrant bush, and the jostaberry and gooseberry were also both looking extremely promising. AND the second sowing of kohlrabi has started to come up.
much yelling
Jun. 28th, 2025 11:32 pmkaberettThere has been A Great Squawking audible through the open windows for much of the last week. Yesterday A got to witness the source and then this morning so did I.
You see. There is a slightly scruffy, slightly scrawny magpie, which we wouldn't even necessarily have clocked as a juvenile if we'd seen it by itself? But we didn't. What we saw was it being attended by two actually filled-out adult magpies... up to and including it sitting back on its haunches and raising its mouth to the sky and continuing to yell until food was placed in it.
We have also got to watch it hop around in important little circles, intermittently pecking disconsolately at the ground, because apparently this is how the grown-ups make food appear!!! and it has not yet quite managed to work out why It's Not Working for baby, who is a Good Brave Baby who is doing All The Right Things and yet??? no food?????
And now that we have matched the yelling up with the culprit, I am grinning every time I can hear it, not just when it's visible. :)
Holiday fun
Jun. 28th, 2025 09:37 pmrmc28Friday:
- Mary Rose, worth the admission fee all by itself, thoroughly absorbing exhibition of the many many objects found within the wreck, and amazing to see the preserved timbers themselves from lots of different angles.
- lunch
- dockyard boat tour, including a good look at the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier currently in dock (I cannot look at aircraft carriers without Danger Zone playing in my head)
- HMS Victory, audioguide version with dramatic retelling of the battle of Trafalgar. Very absorbing, impressive amount of the ship available to visit even while restoration is ongoing, very tiring.
- back to hotel and flop for a little
- walk, ferry, bus to Gosport ice rink, disco skate, bus, ferry and walk back to hotel; ice is rather worse than Cambridge, but ferry+bus beats 2x Cambridge buses any time
Saturday:
- sauna and swim for me
- walk to the dockyard, waterbus to the Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower
- lunch
- walk ~2 miles to Submarine Museum
- walk through of HMS Alliance, also a look around HMS Holland 1 (the first ever Royal Navy submarine)
- my body in full rebellion against "museum walking" by this point, we took the waterbus back to the main dockyard, got cold drinks, and got back on the dockyard boat tour - different guide, different focus, well worth it
- little wander around Gunwharf Quays and a little shopping in the outlet stores; having forgotten to bring my ereader, I resorted to buying a newspaper and we sat quietly ignoring each other in a curry gastropub for a while. Eventually we ordered some curry, which was really rather good, and then toddled back to the hotel
- I decided I'd had enough moving for the day, so now I'm lying on the hotel bed with Glastonbury on the TV, life is good
Tomorrow I think we'll do a couple of brief museum things at the historic dockyard, and then perhaps go for a wander through Southsea. I'm going to watch England v Jamaica tomorrow afternoon (I think R has less than zero interest in football, women's or otherwise) and we've a reservation in the Spinnaker Tower for sunset cocktails tomorrow evening.
physical issues
My leg muscles, especially the ones that stabilise hips, knees and ankles, have been giving me some grief since I went clubbing after the Kodiaks won playoffs at end of May. I'm reasonably sure it's muscular fatigue and not joint/ligament damage. Rest helps, but so does gentle movement: if I sit still too long everything has seized up a bit when I stand up, but loosens up again as I start moving. Skating and hockey are fine once I'm warmed up. Yoga and general stretching seem to help, as do hot baths and sauna. Steady walking is a lot better for me than the stop-start of museum walking, as the last two days have made clear. I love museums but right now the spirit is willing and the flesh has Had Enough.
Hoodies
Jun. 28th, 2025 09:56 amrmc28I have been resisting buying a number of great hoodies from the assorted Historic Dockyard museum shops, on the grounds that I already have More Than Sufficient Hoodies, related to either ice hockey or musical theatre. R said obviously I need to wait for an ice hockey musical and get that hoodie.
Suggestions welcome for the topic / plot of such a musical.
some good things!
Jun. 27th, 2025 10:34 pmkaberett- Went on an Adventure to post a lost item back to someone (hopefully in time for the next thing they want it for...), and was rewarded with DUCKLINGS.
- Not too warm to achieve fallback dinner of I Don't Know, Bake A Potato, with the result that we finished the lurking salad leaves and also stuck some of the cook-from-frozen pasteis de nata into the oven once potatoes were done.
- Ridiculous organic greengrocer had an option on sending us rainbow chard this week, which means I might actually manage to cook one whole new recipe this month (!), which was otherwise... not looking likely. (I have been comprehensively failing to sow any, but there we go.)
- Went fossicking in sofa to try to at least rationalise my horrid piles. Found one (1) of the two (2) fancy watch chargers I own, and not the one I was expecting to turn up (because I thought I'd probably mislaid it in a field), which hopefully means that given a leeeetle bit more fossicking I might even find the second.
- Really enjoying playing with pens for the purposes of making notes on the pain reading. (Today has been Mindfulness for Health, with detours to read up more on the gate control and [neuromatrix] theories of pain; I was surprised that Model First Proposed In The 1960s is still apparently more-or-less the best we've got for "how the fuck does psychology and emotional affect and other sensory input actually affect how pain is experienced?")
Girls weekend: ships and skating
Jun. 27th, 2025 08:39 amrmc28Uni buddy R and I made it to Portsmouth last night, despite the best efforts of signal failures to scare us off. (Half the trains were showing as cancelled around 3pm; by the time we actually got to Cambridge station at 5pm things were looking better; by the time our train got to Finsbury Park it looked like service was nearly restored and we continued to change at Three Bridges as originally planned.)
I was working up until about 4pm, with a couple of colleagues very amused that a) I didn't start packing until a gap between meetings at 2pm, and b) my "girls weekend" consists of naval museums and ice skating.
We had an easy walk to our hotel in the midsummer twilight, and settled in to our respective rooms. I'm doing admin until R texts me she's ready for breakfast. And then: the Mary Rose! (who else has formative childhood memories of watching it being raised?)
pain-related articulation of the past 24h
Jun. 26th, 2025 11:15 pmkaberettIf you have had long-term pain, of any kind, for any reason, a component of your pain is neuroplastic. Neurons that fire together wire together: you've had lots of practice at being in pain. This comes down, fundamentally, to how we learn.
Which means that while neuroplastic pain management approaches may very well not solve all of your problems, they'll treat a component of them, and that's worth having -- in exactly the same way that we don't want to e.g. give up painkillers that "take the edge off" but don't solve the whole problem.
(None of this is actually novel except insofar as most education about chronic pain blithely asserts that "most" healing has completed within 3-6 months, so pain persisting beyond that timescale Is Neuroplastic unless you've got cancer we suppose. So in the context of My Project, the framing of "this is an approximately unavoidable complication of your underlying condition that requires active management in its own right" strikes me as important.)
[bats] today's brilliant idea
Jun. 25th, 2025 10:35 pmkaberettIt is warm. We have the bedroom window open at night. Dusk is currently around when we are heading to bed.
... I realised I could prop the bat detector up in the open window while we went about our Bed Things and it worked. (Alas A missed most of the activity on account of being in the bathroom, but Proof Of Concept still valuable.)
Other achievements of the day include "1.7 kg of redcurrants picked, processed, and in the freezer" and "finished All Systems Red: the reread" and also "almost finished The Way Out reread".
(I am so so pleased about the redcurrants; turns out that mulching and pruning heavily and watering... works?! Who knew.)
today's questionable research hole was the sex ratio of adult zebra populations
Jun. 24th, 2025 10:45 pmkaberettI was trivially able to dig out an example of a documented 5:1 female:male ratio.
Why yes I am rereading The Way Out (previous commentary) for the purposes of making notes on content and structure.
vital functions
Jun. 22nd, 2025 07:22 pmkaberett... is a placeholder because I am doing so badly at routines in general and bedtime routines in particular, still, augh.
Reading. Adventures in Stationery, James Ward. Not entirely sold on the way anecdotes were strung together, and definitely dubious about the broader social history, but a pleasantly undemanding diversion in a week where I really needed that and for bonus points it finally explained The Thing About Blackwing Pencils to me.
Watching. One more episode of Farscape (S02E02 Vitas Mortis), while bleaching A.
Cooking. Mostly Pasta With Things. (Things have included "kohlrabi and misc other greens from the allotment" and "psuedo puttanesca".)
Eating. STRAWBERRIES. Have also nibbled, from the allotment: peas! broad beans! aforementioned kohlrabi! cherries! the first raspberries! redcurrants! jostaberries!
Exploring. ... bits of a field? OH and I bimbled down to the post office and, en route, checked how the local quince tree is doing. (FRUITING.)
Creating. Painted A colours!
Growing. Iiii just about made it to the allotment to water things on, like, Tuesday, but I have otherwise been... struggling.
... the ginger at home continues to go zoom, though! And I really really need to pot it on, eesh.
Observing. BAT.
Events of note this week (mostly hockey)
Jun. 22nd, 2025 10:33 pmrmc28You may have noticed it's been hot in England. So a lot of this week has just been the extra routines to cope with that (airing out the house at night / early morning, extra hydration, more naps).
It was a three-day week at work for me, with Monday my travel day back from Prague, and Wednesday a multi-errand day. Tuesday was a hectic day at work, but a rare evening with very few plans, so I actually rested. Wednesday had EHCP review for one child; a lunchtime skating lesson for me; a school bowling trip, hospital appointment and shopping all with the other child; and then Kodiaks practice in the evening.
This week and next are 4-day weeks at work for me; I am having a long weekend away in Portsmouth with one of my oldest friends from university. Probably my only trip away this year that isn't directly about ice hockey. (But there is a rink in Gosport and both of us skate.) We plan to visit the Mary Rose, and I at least want to visit both the Submarine Museum and the Explosion Museum. I have been intrigued by the latter since I saw a road sign for it on the way to Gosport rink last month, but haven't yet found anything else about it apart from name and location. No spoilers!
egregious backdating for completionism's sake
Jun. 20th, 2025 11:40 pmkaberettI went "HOLD ON I HAVEN'T POSTED--" at 00:01 last night, when I had already been in bed but failing to sleep for about twenty minutes, and so I will tell you that part of the reason that I did not manage to actually post, actually yesterday, is that my reward for having finally e-mailed the headache clinic and said "so yeah I took my loading doses in mid-April, sorry I didn't manage to e-mail at the time, executive dysfunction has been eating my entire brain"...
... was of course a response like "well ideally your follow-up appointment would have been last week but, okay, fine, how about Monday? :|"
"... oh and by the way you know those questionnaires we want you to submit a minimum of a week in advance? yeah if you could get those done too--"
-- which: ENTIRE brain.
(I managed to confirm the Monday appointment. I did not manage to get the headache diary and questionnaires done.)
A week ago I was in Prague
Jun. 21st, 2025 12:39 pmrmc28(I forgot to mention that for about twenty minutes of the day I flew to Prague, I couldn't find my passport, because it was not in the box where it normally lives at home. That was not a fun twenty minutes, and much love to both Tony and Charles for joining me in the search. We found it eventually, it had fallen down the side of the shelf on which the passport box lives, in a way that meant you could only see it from one specific angle. Thankfully, I eventually stood at that angle and spotted it.)
The ice hockey camp continued to be excellent and very hard work, and I feel like I learned a great deal (and now I need to remember to keep using everything I learned and not fall back into bad habits). The coaching was very supportive and kind while pretty much pushing me to my physical limits. I very much hope to return on future camps.
The Saturday evening we went into central Slaný where there was a kind of beer festival happening, lots of different beer stands around the town square, a live rock band on stage, and a bunch of fairground rides. Sunday lunchtime, after the camp was finished, the original three of us got an Uber into Prague in the gloriously hot and humid afternoon. The other two had been to Prague before so I went off on my own to do some tourist things (boat tour! historical tram! walking across the Charles Bridge!) and messaged them when I was ready to meet up again. Turned out we were about five minutes walk apart at that point.
I took a load of photos but actually this random selfie for my family is one I'm really happy with:
We had dinner in Prague, during which time the hot weather broke into torrential downpour, and did a bit more walking around once that tailed off into intermittent showers, but eventually got back to Slaný for the evening. We got packed up and out of our rooms as requested in the morning but were able to leave our kit in storage while we had a leisurely walk and hipsterish brunch in Slaný before it was time to head to the airport.
Getting home was tediously delayed by train cancellations but I still got home in time to put the first washload on and repack my kitbag for Warbirds practice Monday evening.