yonmei

07:20 pm: Work SUX
I hate everybody.
I'm tired.
I don't want to do Event tomorrow.
I don't know what my Yuletide assigment is.
*cries*



Tags: i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, i want a hug, work

02:22 pm: Apparently today is Hug a Vegetarian Day...
...why does that make me suddenly want to eat meat in a conspicuous and non-huggy way?

Except that would give me a stomach ache.

Oh the dilemma.

Why couldn't today be International Make A Vegetarian A Nice Cup of Tea Day?



Tags: eating some delicious food, i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, tea

09:01 pm: Suddenly this is not a good Friday
I just finished two exhausting days of working collectively with my colleagues, and logged on to check my e-mail and got bad news.

Tired. Sad. Sad. Tired.



Tags: i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa

09:15 pm: Yay personal failure yay
Once you get into evening time at Stirling station, the trains - while still perfectly reliable - are once-an-hour-too-bad-if-you-miss-thank-you-very-much.

And - having missed trains from there before - I know that it's really not worth it to get a lift back to solo's for the portion of an hour before you need to get back to the station. Unless it's actually blowing a gale or mizzling a blizzard. Or at least the nearest to blizzards that Scottish snowy weather gets in the lowlands.

But, on this occasion, we had pulled ourselves away from the aftermath of dinner in their favourite restaurant (buffet curry: beautiful enormous freshly-made nan breads, and red wine, and tarka daal, besides two beautiful and different vegetarian curries, and an array of delicious starters... we were full. And sleepy. But, we'd both set alarms on our phones (solo and self) and the Historian and solo walked me to shouting distance of the station, and I got there with 10 minutes to spare before the train was due.

So I wandered up to the bridge and played with the zoom taking pics of the hills, and mirror shots on the windows in the station, and then was trying for a good shot of their spiffy new bridge, and then ... I glanced over and saw that the 21:06 to Edinburgh was gathering speed and leaving the platform. (This is the Dunblane to Edinburgh train, stopping in Stirling for 3 minutes or so - two and a half of which I spent staring interestedly at cloud formations and bridges and entirely ignoring the platform behind me. *sigh*)

Yep. I managed to miss the train despite being on the platform, at the right time, and knowing that was the train I had to catch.

Oh well. It's a very nice evening, and my T-mobile dongle has coverage, and my laptop battery is fully charged, and altogether it Could Be Worse (except that the waiting room has evidently just had its daily scrub down, because it stinks of bleach rather: a very unpleasant smell to have in one's nose after eating delicious food.

I shall now get into Edinburgh about 11pm, instead of about 10pm, but there will still be buses running.

I took many photos at Aberdour today, which I shall upload ... er, later. Yay personal failure yay*.

*Very fine line stolen shamelessly from ruthi.



( their spiffy new bridge )

This and other photographs I took are available on Redbubble tagged Stirling or Aberdour.

Tags: eating some delicious food, i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, just my life really

06:10 pm: Just My Life Really
On Tuesday evening, which is cheap night at Vue, I went to see Star Trek. It wasn't good. It was the sort of kind of film where, having taken care to check how long it lasts, I keep glancing at the clock on my phone to establish how much plot there must be left.

There were three women in the film who had names and lines, and a fourth who I think wasn't named: an Orien green cadet who has sex with Jim Kirk and a few lines of dialogue and let Kirk see Uhura in her underwear. One of the women existed to give birth to Jim Kirk, and is thereafter never seen or heard again (she wasn't even allowed to be the voice on the product-placement phone telling Kirk not to steal the car and drive it to Arizona). One gives birth to Spock, and is thereafter used to make Spock go apeshit: she gets pushed into a metaphorical refrigerator fairly early on. One is supposed to be Nyota Uhura, and exists to be appallingly, skeletally skinny, be hit on by Kirk, prove that in the modern Starfleet men don't obey women officers (in that bar fight? If the real Uhura had yelled at them to stop the redshirts beating up Kirk, they'd have stopped), and to hit on Spock, thus (the director and scriptwriter and stockholders presumably hope) forestalling the slash fans taking hold and writing the K/S for this universe. Because these are het guys. Straight, straight, straight. Hell if it'll work: I say Uhura and Spock are totally cousins. The young Bones was OK even if the old joke got taken away from him and replaced by a new and much stupider joke referring to one of the few other women in this AU; Baby Sulu and Baby Chekov and Baby Scott were ... okay, I supppose: Janice Rand and Christine Chapel and Number One, the first First Officer of the USS Enterprise, were... absent. (See also: feministsf and jekesta being brilliant.)

Afterwards I wandered home and Bob was missing and it turned out a neighbour had accidentally shut her into his bike shed, because late at night when the street was quiet I went out again and heard her yell and it was too late to wake up my neighbours, so I left notes in their door and on their fence, and went to bed and slept badly. My Twitters are full of me Not Panicking. She got let out first thing the next morning, and is fine, though very clingy: but the part where it turned out I have the nicest neighbours in the world?

The neighbour who had shut her in the shed (by accident! I know he wouldn't have done it on purpose!) came round on Wednesday evening with a card and a bottle of white wine to apologize. Which I found myself without a polite way of refusing, though the bottle of white wine is still lying on the couch where I put it (the card is on the mantelpiece) and fills me with helpless rueful giggles whenever I think of drinking it. Because, after we were dialoguing on the step and he was saying how sorry he was and I was saying "Thank you for letting her out!" (it was actually his partner who had slipped down first thing and let Bob out, as soon as she saw the note) and then Bob wandered out. And I picked her up (she feels terribly light and thin these days, which I'm worried about, because this reminds me of Cally, but she's still eating....) because I did not want to let her go wandering again... and my neighbour started chucking her under the chin and apologising to Bob. So I accepted the card and the wine, and still think I have the nicest neighbours in the world.

Thursday I had a meeting in Glasgow, and after the meeting I went to the SH[OUT] exhibition in GOMA, which was absolutely fantastic and I want to go again. Maybe I can persuade Ajay to come with - it had several things I thought she might like, especially a picture of a Thai man, a prostitute, standing on a stage, not quite looking at his audience - but the whole picture was so richly painted, and the frame was ornamented, and it looked as if he/his image was a gift to us. The other I remember vividly was a picture of two older women, who had been burlesque artists in their youth, painted as they lay holding each other on their bed. It was the kind of oil painting that looks more real, has more depth, than any photograph could. But, speaking of photographs: the Mapplethorpe photo. I'm told there was some dispute about including it, and its inclusion was probably the main reason the exhibition has been banned to children under 12. But I am so glad to have seen it. I had read about it - it's a famous photograph, politically as well as artistically, the depiction of a standing man pissing into the mouth of a kneeling man, which a court case formally established as having artistic merit and therefore (in the US) protected under the First Amendment. But words and reproductions do not do the photo itself justice: it is an extraordinary work of light and shade, balanced images: it is simultaneously a depiction of a sexual act in pornographic detail and it is a work of art. In many ways the exhibition felt like a series of windows into other exhibitions, that I wanted very much to see as well - if there had been money to produce a catalogue, I would have bought it.

After I had looked round the exhibition, I wanted to see if I could get my T-Mobile dongle to work, and after trying unsuccessfully and calling the helpline, it appeared that the problem was I'd put the wee card in the wrong way round - and it was fairly jammed. So I asked the helpline to find me the nearest two T-Mobile shops in Glasgow, and set out to find the one in Buchanan Street. (On the basis, as I told them frankly, that if someone were going to break the card getting it out, I had rather it was someone working for T-Mobile than me.)

The T-Mobile shop was in the Buchanan Street Galleries, which are just above the Buchanan Street Tearoom, where one can get a very nice cream tea for £2.50. So, after I'd got my dongle working (oo-er) I went there and had tea and a scone with cream and two sorts of jam, and it was very nice. (They supplied me with butter as well as jam: I ask you, what kind of person puts butter and cream on a scone?

Then I walked round the GOMA exhibition again, to fill my eye with it a second time, and caught the 4:15 train back to Edinburgh (safely in the cheap zone) and surfed the net and wrote a bit on the way home. I was due to meet my parents and the young man who is helping them clear out their flat (a bit) at the Ann Purna that evening.

We had a nice meal: my mum told me about seeing a sign in Bakewell, where they'd gone for their holiday, about marriage between a man and a woman being the law of the land, and she said she'd wanted to add a sign about civil partnership but hadn't had paper/tape to do it. Still. It was nice of her to want to.

Friday has been a fairly ghastly muddle, in which I got not enough done and that too late. But I am drinking wine and eating nice food, and TGIF: it's the weekend now.



Tags: bob, glasgow, i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, just my life really, scones, star trek, yarg

09:05 pm: Oh. Ugh. Aargh.
Throwing up when you have just taken your anti-histamine tablet for the day is... not good.

( cut for squeamishness )

There is light at the end of the tunnel with regard to work. But I need to spend hours tonight working. Ugh, again.

Tags: i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, just my life really

10:28 pm: Nose bleed
Not a major one. But enough to make me consider that operation on my nose to straighten out the kink.

I am also half-watching a movie with Alan Alda playing the national security advisor to the President. It's all about someone getting murdered and dumped on the White House front lawn after she has sex in the Oval Office.

There are lots of other things to like about Barack Obama being President, but one of them is definitely that he spoils the lazy-movie-casting tradition that anyone can be the President in a movie providing he's a middle-aged white man.

I need to write 200 words of fiction tonight. At least 200.

One of my nostrils hurts. It is a very odd feeling. I mean quite distinct.

Tags: i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, nose of a nose

10:37 pm: Any three guys
( what happened tonight )

Tags: i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, i want a hug, just my life really