a splendid duck-billed platypus

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Want to be knighted? Click on this link and give my name.

( needs a rewrite )

Insofar as I have a friending policy, it's this. I friend people whose journals I like to read, and I hope people friend me for the same reason. I think people should friend and unfriend without needing to ask or apologise.

( old friending policy )

All comments to this post are by default screened.

Abusive creep (5/8/07)'s IP address is: 72.195.181.227.
Abusive creep (1/4/08)'s IP address is: 76.247.137.153.
Abusive creep (6/2/10)'s IP address is: 76.232.121.66.

( Flashy slideshow of my photos )

Blurred vision, etc. So: new lenses. At this rate with these lenses my eyes will cost me £600 a year, which is approximately 2.5 times what my glasses used to cost me.

It's a bugger. I feel poor.

(To people reacting with "My lenses don't cost that much!" yeah, but your glasses probably don't cost that much either. I am extremely short-sighted. You're almost certainly not as short-sighted as I am, and frankly being reminded of how expensive this is really annoying. I'm about due for another visit to the optician, and I think I'm just going to tell him frankly - I can't wear the monthlies - not for a month, anyway: I can't afford the weeklies - £520 a year plus all the other expenses of contact lenses.)

Of course there is the option of telling my optician I want to stick to glasses and getting a fresh pair (which goodness knows I need, it makes me feel uncomfortable to have one pair usable and a rescue pair with my gym kit) and buying lenses via contactlens.co.uk - if I'm right about this I can get a years' supply of dailies for £232, which is not so far off what a pair of glasses costs me.

But. I like my optician. I like the personal connection. I want them to stay open, to stay viable, to go on getting eye tests there where they've been checking my current prescription since I was 7.

Do I value them enough to pay them that extra? The answer is beginning to feel like no, I don't, I'd rather just get contact lenses much more cheaply by post.

Yesterday, with Bee and Ajay, I cleared out the downstairs bedroom, from henceforth to be "the lodger's room". Ajay mistressminded the whole thing, as I knew she would (that's why I asked her) and Bee helpfully took three car loads of Stuff away - one load to a charity shop, two loads to the dump. (Some of the stuff that went to the dump was stuff that I'd been crossly saving up for a special uplift FOR WHICH YOU NOW HAVE TO PAY, but at least one full car load was stuff that as we sorted out the room, I realised there was no reason to keep.)

It took us seven and a half hours, from time of their arrival (whem we drank coffee and Bee drank Irn Bru and we planned out the order of the day) til when we were all three sitting down with strawberry wine (Bee was still drinking Irn Bru) and ate delicious curry from Ocean Spice, the nearest curry house to me. As far as I can tell, being run by a small team of enthusiastic young men who bought a large multi-coloured tiger to sit on the floor in front of the food counter. A tiger model, I mean. Painted like the planet facing the sun.

The room is now completely clear but for one box of fragile stuff that I'll take along to the charity shop next week. There is also a cabinet in the kitchen that's clear, and a cupboard in the bathroom (that we cleared and moved out of my upstairs study) that can be lodger-space for the bathroom. It's big enough for her to store towels and facecloths and such there.

The lodger's rent will pay for a weekly cleaner, which is fab, and still leave nice amounts over to make a cushion for a rainy day.

But. The other thing. Almost the first thing I told Ajay I wanted her to do.

I've got Bob's ashes in a casket. I have got to the point (seven years after Cally died) when I'm ready to bury Cally and Gallus's ashes in the garden. But I realised that whenever I thought about it, I was deeply unhappy at ever burying Bob outside. She loved the garden, sure, she loved being petted and fussed over by everyone on the street, but she was so happy to come into the house again, always. I couldn't bear for her to be outside. Which I said, rather embarrassed, and bursting into tears in the middle of it (Ajay and Bee, bless them, completely unphased). So Ajay transferred Bob's ashes to a pretty wooden box I'd bought some time ago, and put them in the cupboard that has the water heater in it that I don't use (and the door opens only with immense difficulty because of the heavy carpet). It occurs to me that if I get the carpet up in the hall and do something with the floor, then that would be a time to put the box under the floorboards before they're re-sealed.

In other news, while the official temperature is 5 above zero, it felt really bloody cold last night.

This - Bromance Isn't Dead - bears absolutely no resemblance to Sherlock as I love and watch it, but it is deliciously gorgeous and I rec it lots.

What other Sherlock recs can you rec to me?

Which cost £60 for 6 lenses by the way, at this rate I might just bite the bullet and move on to daily lenses again, contact lenses are great, I'm a convert, but expensive.

I must IJ more. That's a noun that shouldn't have been verbed.

Stuff has been happening. I'm feeling very relieved. None of it is really good stuff.

*sigh* How many days has it been?]

(37 days. My new normal cycle? I hope so.)

It's taken nearly nine years but I finally became a Blood Deity.... Bite me!

( Christmas Day 2011, in 750-word detail )

( The Doctor Who Christmas special, with spoilers )

The old Scottish double bed is unbelievably comfortable and besides is in the downstairs room so last night Stepdog got to sleep out of the cage, as he isn't allowed upstairs and we both doubt that he would stay downstairs if both of us were upstairs.

Altogether it was a good Christmas: a better one than many. It helps that neither K nor I are particularly "Christmassy" people. Down with tinsel!

On 6th November 2010, thirteen months ago plus four days, just about three months after K and I first met, we first tried the experiment of introducing Wolf to Stepdog.

At the time, this wasn't very successful. Wolf reacted with appalled horror and Stepdog spent the entire night in my airlock, because there was nowhere else for him to go.

Six weeks later we tried again - by this time I'd got Jazz - and it still wasn't very successful, though Jazz reacted a lot better than Wolf did.

K came through with Stepdog last Sunday, and on Monday night as we were both sitting in my front room with Stepdog ordered to lie down and stay still, both Jazz and Wolf came through to the room to snuggle up to us and assure us we were loved - especially K - and then try to steal bits of her fish supper. (I was eating chips, peas, and sweetcorn, and they weren't interested in that.) This was huge - Stepdog had visited before without spending time in his crate, but through the summer, he'd been chained up in the garden most of the time he wasn't in his crate. I had figured Wolf was getting used to him, but last Monday was the first time Wolf had ever voluntarily entered a room when Stepdog was in it.

Today when Stepdog and K arrived (they went home on Tuesday), Wolf was in the front room, and I got Stepdog to lie down in the airlock with the door open until Wolf had walked from the front room to the stairs up to my bedroom and bathroom (which Stepdog is permanently forbidden), in that kind of slow dignified way that says "Yes, I know you are watching, and I am in no hurry, see me walk slowly not being in a hurry" if you're a cat. Thirteen months ago Wolf shivered in my arms and his tail was a bottlebrush just from being in the hall when Stepdog was in the airlock: today he walked within inches of Stepdog's nose and jaws, with a conscious air of complete insoucience.

This evening as we watched Wolverine Origins and I installed Framemaker (prep for snark hunting), at some point when K went out to give Stepdog a chance to pee and for herself to have a rollup, Wolf darted in and joined me on the sofa in the front room.

Where he has stayed ever since, even when Stepdog came back in: Stepdog is now curled up submissively on the rug in front of the TV, and Wolf is curled up on the sofa just within reach so that I can stroke him sometimes (his tail is still twitching a bit). He's purring. Wolf has a great purr.

We agreed a year ago that the thing to do with Wolf and Stepdog (Jazz has been generally easier) was to go slow: gradually and gently desensitise Wolf to this big dog being in his house. And it's worked.

We're not at the end of the road yet - ideally we won't have to keep yelling at Homer to lie down and keep still because he should be able to get up and move around without panicking Wolf - but I'm really pleased with how well it's gone.

Oh my: Wolf's tail is really twitching now. Though he's also purring very loudly.

Stepdog's tail wags like he was generating electricity for the National Grid. I've seen Jazz sitting contemplating it, in much the same way as she sits over the food bowls and waits for Wolf to come in so that she can dart at him with her paw. One of these days, Jazz is going to pounce on Stepdog's tail. According to K, Stepdog is more likely to be puzzled than annoyed. (Jazz is a very little cat.)

Jazz has also sat on K's lap, which makes K the second person Jazz has ever sat on. I've had her for nearly thirteen months - she has calmed down to a remarkable degree. It feels really great to have decided that time and patience would work, and to be able to note down that yes, they did.

Jazz will be two years old at the end of this year. Wolf is four and a half. Stepdog is five. We can hope to have the three of them for another six years. It's good that they are learning to get along.

Work still sucks. I woke up this morning thinking "Oh NO I have to go to work" and it took me a little while to remember that I didn't, and all morning to recover from the grey horrified depressed feeling that I have to go back there.

By this time my bleeding time is definitely over - a very short, light period.

Or possibly hello, blurt, and hello, doctor's appointment.

Hopefully squid having started, will go on.


It's sort of almost practically normal: 36 days.

I wonder if my mother would feel less policed if she had a chatbot to talk to about her diet?

I have sent my CV off to a company in Edinburgh that is looking for a technical writer for the next year to pull their documentation together - translate techspeak into plain English. Thanks to Linkedin, I know that I have four second-degree contacts on the staff - though my two first-degree contacts are neither of them people I know all that well. (We've had dinner together when we were all on Techwr-l.)

Anyway, I was sort of looking mildly through health-infomatic news items and finding word of a PWC survey that had been done in the US about patient concerns about security, and references to links between health infomatics and IT, and I wondered:

My mum, newly diagnosed diabetic, ought to be keeping a food diary which she could talk through with the practice diabetics nurse. She doesn't do it because she doesn't like to feel policed about what she's eating: she needs a change in perception, to see this as a tool with which she can receive the best possible health advice. (Yes, if we're still friends in how ever many decades when I develop diabetes, as I likely will if I live long enough, you can remind me about this, because I expect I would feel exactly the same way.)

Supposing, I thought, instead of keeping a diary which she had to take to someone she hardly knew to talk to her about what she was eating, she had an ALICE or ELIZA on her computer, and she could enter each day's food and time of meals, once a day or several times a day, and her blood sugar levels, and the bot (DIANA? SULIN?) would respond in a pseudo-friendly kind of way. Maybe she'd even earn points or easter eggs for logging in at least once a day, more points if she logs in twice or three times. And the bot gives her positive feedback about how she's doing, and offers friendly or random conversation about her choice of food (there's a Fake Kirk Bot that, if you enter a meal, will ask you "Isn't that poisonous?") and maybe suggestions about how she could have made her day more diabetic-friendly.

So I googled on diabetics chat bot, and wow, someone already thought of it! Very cool.

I have a lot of very mixed feelings about Anne McCaffrey. But she was a true creator: she made a secondary world so real that she changed how we write about dragons. She was the first woman to win a Hugo and the first woman to win a Nebula. I still re-read some of her novels and novels-out-of-short-stories.

I had not enjoyed reading anything she wrote for years and years - I quit reading Pern even from the library after Dolphins of Pern splashed out - but when I heard she'd died I remembered the little cave by the seashore where Menolly hid through Threadfall and Impressed a choir of fire lizards.

There's a verse Kipling wrote, about Jane Austen, which is annoying in many ways but which opens with the lovely image of Jane Austen being met at the gateway to Paradise by an honour guard of the greatest writers Kipling could imagine. And I thought - I literally thought this within moments of hearing that Anne McCaffrey had died - that I could see McCaffrey being greeted at the gates of Paradise by an honour guard of dragons.

So that's what I wrote.

I spent half an hour last night writing 610 words before I gave up in disgust - a short detailed wealth/escape fantasy about how K and I could get out of our respective jobs and live happily ever after in a lovely big house at a location satisfactory to us both... which is tougher than you'd think, because I adore Edinburgh and while K doesn't actually adore West Lothian Town, she wants to live somewhere you can go long walks in the middle of the country quite close to home. On the other hand we're both in agreement that it's essential to live reasonably handy to a train station. K is not addicted to city driving. Though she's said several times that if she won the Lottery, her top three purchases would be mortgage, camera lens, four-wheel drive for off-road.

Mainly I want to quit. For multiple reasons. Staff meeting today. Applied for a job last weekend, deadline was Monday, would have been a really exciting job to get... didn't hear back.

I find it strange yet weird to stumble over a lengthy post about OTW.

I was interested in OTW when it started out, but I'd been banned from livejournal a year earlier and found I wasn't allowed to join in without an LJ. Now I gather it's more diverse - you can join in if you have an LJ or a DW. Cool.

But really, and finally...

The author of the post I linked to writes about the need to defend fandom from corporate copyright law and how this is something American fans should be doing in the US, and, well, (a) fine, nothing to do with me then and (b)... No, (b) has two values. (B-i) On the one hand, fandom cannot win against the Corporate Copyright Monster. If the CCM decides to shut down every fannish storysharing site they can find as soon as they find it, they will. Disney bends the US government to its will: the can crush each fannish site like a bug. (B-ii) Conversely and with equal truth, the Corporate Copyright Monster cannot defeat fandom.

I am a fan because when I watch TV or a film or read a book, in the back of my head I'm always analysing the text: and I am a fanfic fan because what my analysis does is make stories. And I am a writer because I can write those stories down and when they're written, Corporate Copyright Monster cannot stop me from sharing those stories with other fans. CCM can make it much more difficult, as can CCM's Mini-Me (or is it Maxi-Me?) Institutional Homophobia, but neither one of them can stop me sharing or you reading. I am old enough to remember the days when slash fandom was zines under the dealer's table that you knew to ask for, and while I have no wish to go back to those days, well, we will if we have to.

Work at the moment is such hell that if any of my lovely friends would like to dress up in a gorilla suit and squish shaving-foam pies in the faces of all my co-workers, I will give you a huge hug and make cupcakes. K is lovely but we have mutually figured out that the earliest we can meet is Sunday, and we haven't met in so long that I had to eat the Welshcakes whatho gave me all by myself or they'd have gone past the useby date. The rest of life is slightly kind of grim shadows through which I peer like a kitten lost in a huge dark room wondering what that noise over there is.

But fandom is always there for me. Because it's really inside my head. I was a fan before I knew other fans existed. I am a fan even though sometimes the only fan of my fandom. Fandom does not create groups that I must join or hierarchies that I must cope with: fandom is the edge in my mind on which I sharpen words, the subtle knife with which I take a text apart, the engine that weaves stories out of the sheep my television herds across my mind.

I am a fan.

How many days is that? It was formally due on 9th October if I had been having a normal-for-me-back-then cycle.

46 days.

Is this menopause?

According to my GP, they do not consider a woman to be menopausal until she hasn't had a period in 6 months. According to NHS24 nurse, at my age this could be menopausal, or it could be something else, but according to both of them, this is a normal pattern of approaching menopause: some women start to have unusually frequent periods, others have steadily fewer and more irregular.

Except for my age. This is 10 years or so too early, with nothing in my maternal heritage to explain it.

The plus factor is of course; periods are not fun. Fewer of them is good. The downside is, just... well, it makes me feel old. Dammit.

As far as I can tell, my mum is doing the diabetic equivalent of taking up smoking. (She is not and never has been a smoker, or indeed a drinker.) It is interesting and provoking of insight, in a way, when I consider that if I or anyone else in her immediate family and friends had told her "I'm diabetic: please help me by serving the kind of meals that will keep me healthy" she would have responded promptly and with enthusiasm. When this means considering what she eats and changing her own pattern of appetite and meals, that's another matter.

My mum has issues about people policing what she eats. So do I. She feels guilty about developing diabetes, I think, because diabetes is presented to us via the media as the Suitable Punishment for Being Fat. And my mum is fat. So am I. If she actually sat there and considered it sensibly, she's 76 with a family track record of diabetes and an illness is not actually a punishment for anything. But she won't join a diabetics support group because I think she thinks this will mean she would have to help other people and at the moment she is not able to help herself and knows it. (She has the kind of mentality that assumes that in any support group she will shortly be running it.) She won't keep a food diary and talk sensibly about it to the practice nurse. She won't consider her diabetes scientifically and how best to manage it and still enjoy her food, because the thought (I'm guessing) makes her tired and she feels tired already.

It's type-two late-onset diabetes. I am 44. I fully anticipate that by the time I'm my mum's age, I'll probably also have developed type-two diabetes - so far my great-grandfather, grandmother, and mother have all developed it. I would prefer not to, but this looks like a fairly committed gene complex coming down the line and it is entirely possible that my dad's family have it lurking somewhere too. (What we also have from both sides of the family, my dad's and my mum's, is osteoparosis - my dad's developed it, despite eating well and exercising hard, and my mum's aunt developed it. Both in their 80s.)

These are firstworldproblems - were I living in an undeveloped country, it is likely I would not live long enough to worry about diabetes or osteoparosis. But there it is. (I am also significantly more likely to develop glaucoma - my dad did, in his late 70s.)

Sorry, I didn't mean to get distracted into my health problems in thirty years time.

My problem for Christmas - two months time - is that I need to give my mum and dad something that (a) does not add to the clutter in their home (b) that they will genuinely enjoy (c) that is not heavily Oh Look Mum, You Have Diabetes Now! like diabetes-friendly cookbooks (if my mum starts buying them, then the rest of us can, but at the moment she still seems to be heavily in Denial Land) though if anyone can recommend The Perfect Book To Do With Diabetes that doesn't look like I'm policing her, I'll take it - and (d) yet which isn't calorific.

Pretty boxes of biscuits used to be the thing. Or interesting boxes of chocolate. No, I will not get diabetic-versions with fake sugar.

Cinema tickets! I could buy them another pair of cinema tickets for the local cinema, VIP tickets so they get the comfy seats and a free cup of tea.

Or Oxfam Unwrapped, I suppose. If I can think of Nothing Else. Dammit.

I have spotted THE PERFECT PRESENT for my older nephew. Sorry to go all caplock at you, but it's a radio-controlled flying shark. You have to buy the helium for it. But really. Am I over-identifying? I would like someone to buy me a flying shark. It is exactly the kind of thing that I would never ever buy for myself, because, well. But if someone else bought it for me...

Flying. Shark.

I actually don't see any way that can go wrong.

I need to get stuff for my younger nephew, who is not yet old enough to remember Christmas, but his mum and dad are.

I need to get presents for my brother, his girlfriend, my mum and dad, my sister, her boyfriend, both my nephews, and post them to Sheffield in a box by mid-December or earlier. Considered at that it's not so much of a chore. I guess.

And I also need to post a massive package of sweeties to Jekesta for the rugby. *guilty*

I am slowly working my way back into the habit of Daily Writing. But YAY for 750words - Buster provided me with a Scheduled Time Off feature. (Well, others had asked for it too, so not just me, but I noticed in September that I had something like a dozen Cups of Patronage I'd not used, so I poured them ALL into one note to Buster really begging for it - and it's here!)

It seems petty to sulk about it but I am really slightly sulky that the feature arrived Just Too Late for me to take advantage of it from my outtake on Davaar Island. I wrote and thanked Buster (I'd drop a Cup of Patronage on him but I have none right now and I'm not on Paypal so cannot donate).

I resolved Christmas! There are three Christmasses in any one year: there is National Disaster Christmas (this one happens on 25th December), there is Family Christmas (this one may coincide with National Disaster Christmas, or may not, depending on your family) and there is Real Christmas, which is the day K and I get together to celebrate a feast of joy and thanksgiving and presents and delicious food. (Yes, okay, for you Real Christmas is probably a different day. Real Christmas for you may even be Family Christmas. It's happy time off spent with your loved ones nurturing each other in a web of mutually-created delight. I have moments of Real Christmas even at National Disaster Christmas.)

Anyway, my brother, his girlfriend, and their son (now to be known collectively as DAM, my sister has discovered) are planning to visit Sheffield, where my sister lives, for Christmas. My sister is planning to reclaim her son from having Family Christmas with his father's family on 24-26th December. I am not quite sure why she's doing this, unless nephew has indicated a wish to quit - my nephew has ALWAYS had big Family Christmas with his dad's family since he was very small: his dad has four older sisters and they all have children. My sister's self-described motivations for doing this are all "Well, I won't get to see enough of my son this year if he spends Christmas with his dad's family" (because he left for university in September, and she misses him). But it's entirely possible there are other factors at play - his dad is moving to Bath, apparently.

Anyway, so, that's one family tangle. DAM visiting is potentially another. My brother had his last-but-one psychotic break in Sheffield, and stayed with my sister after the last, and he may be planning to reclaim the city where he went to medical school from bad memories, but it seems equally likely that this will all go Horridly Wrong. Of course it needn't - brother's girlfriend is a lovely person and she and my sister get along beautifully.

My parents - well, my mum - have decided to go down to Sheffield to visit the week between Christmas and New Year. My mum contacted me to say would I like to go, and I thought no, not under any circumstances, but I didn't have to make a decision (or a coherent response) until my sister asked me. And yes, she did, and I responded (there was other stuff too, but it's not relevant):

I really, really don't want to come down to Sheffield for the week between Christmas and New Year. It would be lovely to see you and Nephew, and also lovely to see DAM, and not insupportable to see the parents. (I have a whole set of rants about mum, re Denial, Houseclearing, Moving, and Diabetes, but really, I'm too tired to think about that right now.) What would not be lovely would be (a) travelling that time of year (b) heading down to Sheffield and missing whatever opportunity to spend time with K during the week she's working and I'm probably not (we've both booked week starting 2nd Jan off) and (c) well, I like all the sets of my family individually, especially you and Nephew (though Flow is lovely and I'm sure OtherNephew is too) but all together this tends to be a stressor situation just waiting to happen and it feels like intentionally deciding oh, let's go visit an earthquake zone, that'll be fun!

And whatdoyouknow, she responded with "thank you for your honesty" and agreed that I shouldn't come, so now I'm good to look forward to a lovely week between Christmas and New Year in which... um... my family are all Somewhere Else.

Really, it would be cheaper to pay someone with a car to come round and pick everything up and then we could flytip it.

Which would be WRONG. Of course. I understand that. Flytipping is very bad.

It's just that under the old system of free special uplifts, even if you only got one a year, at least I didn't worry so much about getting the bloody form wrong.

However, I have ordered a new TV! Really. I have. yay TV. Also a working microwave (I mean, my old one worked, but it was unbelievably old and so rusty inside that it was seriously worrying me) and a new office chair.

So, items for Special Uplift:

- A whole lot of cardboard boxes that have been lurking in my shed since 2004.
- A TV that no longer works.
- A broken office chair.
- A probably-dangerous microwave.
- Whatever stuff I dumped into a box and shoved under the stairs back when special uplifts started getting charged for. I hate to think. Must remember to add the non-working slow cooker and the old DVD player.
- Probably the ancient TV that still works, though I'll make a good-faith effort to get rid of it via Freecycle. Freecycle is usually a waste of time, but at least I then feel I TRIED to get rid of whatever it was via a recycling method.

And that's six items, assuming I can get all of the crap under the stairs and the old DVD player and the slow-cooker into one box.