Events of note
Jul. 26th, 2025 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmc28I last updated about 4 weeks ago, in Portsmouth. That was a good mini break, and I'm really glad R and I decided to do it: fun activities and good company. The heatwave hitting most of the country that weekend was less bad in Portsmouth, but despite reapplying sunscreen we both got burned on the walk back from the pier at Southsea, and didn't realise until the long (made longer by speed restrictions) train journey home was nearly over. The trains had aircon, on comfortable rather than arctic setting, so the journey was fine but stepping out into the humid heat at Cambridge came as a shock.
I took a taxi home, staying just long enough to dump my suitcase and pick up my hockey kit, and cycled (in the heat, ugh) to the rink for a scrimmage marking the last Monday night Warbirds practice, before the rink timetable change in July. Got home again a bit after midnight, and then back to work and the rest of "life as usual" from Tuesday morning.
Life as usual continues to be: work, family, ice hockey. A little cricket (playing), a little football (watching), and a theatre trip that reminded me I should go to the theatre more often.
( Family )
( Ice hockey )
( Cricket )
( Football )
( Theatre )
On the topic of both theatre and schedule, I have a livestream ticket to Phoebe Kemp's all trans/nb production of Twelfth Night (introduced by Ian McKellan); the livestream was last night but I have two weeks to watch the recording. My calendar says my best bets for time to watch it is this afternoon, or next Saturday afternoon. I'm going to try for this afternoon.
vital functions
Jul. 20th, 2025 11:24 pmkaberettReading. ( Wells, Lister, Tufte, Brosh, McMillan-Webster )
... I also technically started reading a little bit of Descartes, and more around Descartes, for the pain project -- but really not very much as yet.
Playing. A round of Hanabi with A & houseguest! We were playing with very different House Norms which led to some hilarious miscommunication, but A Good Time Was Had.
A good time was also had following the toddler around a playground, including some time On A Swing where we worked out How Legs Do. :)
Cooking. Several Questionable loaves of bread (mostly "too much liquid, ergo puddle"). Three more recipes from East, none of which were particularly interesting to us. (Piccalilli spiced rice; Sodha's variant on egg fried rice; a tempeh-and-pak-choi Situation.)
And Ribiselkuchen! I have been very very happily eating Appropriately Seasonal Ribiselkuchen.
Eating. A made us waffles for breakfast this morning. I had them with SLICED STRAWBERRIES and SLICED APRICOT and MAPLE SYRUP and also LEMON JUICE and VANILLA SUGAR and I was very happy about all of this.
Making & mending. It is Event Prep Week. There are so many potions.
Growing. ... I got some more supports in for my beans? I have just about managed to break even on the sugar snap peas this year (should NOT have eaten the handful I did...) and might yet manage to do a little better than that, with luck.
Squash starting to produce female flowers (yes I was late starting them). More soft fruit (which desperately needs processing; I will be sad if I wind up needing to just compost the jostaberries that have been sat in the fridge for ...a while, now). Many many tomatoes, none of which were actually ripe yet last time I actually made it to the plot...
Observing. Peacock butterfly at the plot! Tawny owl (audio only)! Bats (ditto)! The Teenage Magpie Persists!
Also a variety of awkward teenage waterfowl in Barking Park, along with a squirrel who was most unimpressed when our attempts to feed it mostly involved accidentally handing it an empty half-peanut-shell. It made it very clear (well before any of us had independently noticed The Issue) that it understood we were willing to feed it but that we were doing a terrible job at this and Should Try Harder. I was delighted.
(no subject)
Jul. 20th, 2025 10:17 pmvampwillowOne of these days I'm going to keel over while trying to change the bed linen. Thankfully it turned out not to be today.
But it was a close thing.
But it was a close thing.
some good things
Jul. 18th, 2025 11:41 pmkaberett- Pilates. Managed to drag myself onto the mat, at gone 9.30 p.m., and wound up smiling to myself and the ceiling.
- COOL SHOWER. LOW ENOUGH HUMIDITY TO AIR-DRY.
- Listening to the bats as I type this up. (Less active than closer to dusk, but definitely still poking their heads out intermittently!)
- Local supermarket has resumed stocking an apple-and-pear juice, and I do in fact prefer it to the significantly more expensive stuff from the ridiculous fancy veg box people. HURRAH for Treats For Me.
- Played a round of Hanabi this evening. Enjoyed discovering a Clash Of House Styles, but nonetheless pleased with how we'd done. :)
(I have also made two extremely questionable loaves of bread -- the soda bread I managed to leave out half the flour, which meant it was... not quite inedibly salty, but... definitely Really Quite; the sourdough was just too high a hydration and Wanted To Be A Puddle -- and sent a couple of e-mails I was avoiding. And ordered a Small Treat.)
[embodiment] ... well that's just rude
Jul. 17th, 2025 10:44 pmkaberettBeginning of last week: experimented with dropping my amitriptyline dose from 75 mg to 50 mg, after a week of having been really fairly good at actually taking it at or around 9 p.m. rather than... later... as an experiment in "does this reduce daytime sleepiness?"
(Prompted by the all-nighter I pulled filling out the EHRC consultation and trying to get the house to cool down overnight during the 35 °C weather: in service of same I did not take my amitriptyline and... felt weirdly good all the following day? With no naps? Like, not even sleep-dep euphoria, just... relatively cheerful and with it and so on and so forth?)
And, see, I'd been aware that last time I tried dropping the ami dose my insomnia got much worse again, so I was alert for that, but after the first night of Fretting I've actually been doing remarkably well! It is possible that I have more or less learned how to go to sleep! I'm super proud of myself!
... and then at the beginning of this week I started going "huh, I'm getting a bunch of endometriosis-y abdominal twinges. that's... interesting. like, it's about six months post-op, and that's when pain commonly recurs, but this doesn't feel like my pre-op pain at all, so what's... going on?"
WHAT IS GOING ON IS THAT I HAVE REDUCED THE DOSE OF MY ONE AND ONLY PAINKILLER.
But the really unfair bit, right, the bit I am actually aggrieved about?
... is that apparently last time I tried this my pain also kicked up a gear and I was also surprised then and I had completely forgotten about this. I remembered the insomnia!!! I did not remember the increased pain. How dare I produce evidence that Sometimes Painkillers Work. :|
some good things
Jul. 16th, 2025 10:49 pmkaberett- Really enjoying the redcurrant cake I finally managed to make the other evening.
- First of the clothes-for-me from the latest Oxfam order showed up and is in fact more or less Perfect, hurrah. (Cargo shorts. Two pairs of linen cargo trousers due tomorrow...)
- Mulberries! ewt informed me that they were starting to come ready, so I took a detour via the local tree and did indeed manage to munch a token handful.
- I made a batch of mostly-white-some-rye caraway-and-poppyseed bread, and it goes spectacularly well with the cherry plum and vanilla jam a friend gave me at the weekend. I have been having some Very Happy Breakfasts.
- My extremely late-into-the-ground squash are starting to produce female flowers!
- And I found some more lurking long bamboo to install for the late-sown beans to maybe make their way up.
- AND I might actually break even on peas-for-sowing-next-year if the second flush on one of the plants does what it's threatening to, which I would be extremely excited about because I had been mildly regretting eating (instead of saving for seed) the handful we did eat, when my original intention had in fact been to Just Save Seed this year... (... but they were very tasty.)
- We are reading Hyperbole and a Half (the book) together a chapter at a time! They are an excellent short Shared Activity.
- I have this evening spent a pleasant ten minutes playing around with the dragons game and enjoying getting some very pretty possible dragons out of it. Yes good.
- Read about three elephants graduating to the Reintegration Unit run by the Sheldrick Trust and cried a lot. (Also at the accompanying video.) (Good crying.)
today I have been dragged kicking and screaming into maybe reading some Descartes
Jul. 15th, 2025 10:01 pmkaberettSpecifically I have tracked down a copy of Treatise on Man, which is probably the source of the claim I've seen phrased several ways, most eyebrow-raisingly and also most readily to hand by Steve Haines, attributing to Descartes the idea that pain is
something similar to hearing, it is a fixed signal and measurable response
and it turns out I've got access to a whole entire PDF which turns out to be only 71 pages, including quite a lot of fairly large images, so I suppose I'm going to read Descartes now as a break from working my way through the BBC's Higher revision guides on neurobiology, which is itself a detour from reading the introductory text on nerves aimed at undergraduates...
(The things I've actually been reading today consist of two chapters of Hyperbole and a Half, a partial chapter of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, both as Shared Activities with A, and about half of A Handful of Flour, a recipe book I have owned for quite a while now and am rapidly concluding I might no longer wish to dedicate shelf space to...)