who only by moving can balance

So. Last week I wound up taking a ( minor head injury )

... and then this morning I picked my glasses up from my bedside table and the relevant arm detached from the body of the frame in such a fashion that I had to get A to come and rescue me by using Eyes to Find Things.

Today has thus involved a whole lot of wearing sunglasses; a visit to Specsavers, who took one look at it and said "you need to buy a whole new pair of frames :)"; some fucking about with electrical tape (unsatisfactory); some fucking about with trying to move an arm from my previous pair of spectacles (prescription NOT compatible with the current state of my eyes) to the newer pair (only to discover the hinges were extremely not compatible); and, finally, remembering I'd brought a pile of unclaimed glasses home from the field to donate/recycle. The first pair I selected were no good (hinge anatomy incompatible); the SECOND pair look silly but! I am comfortably! wearing! my untinted lenses!!! so that will do for at least as long as it takes Specsavers to respond to my grumpy e-mail, following which I shall angrily buy replacements from people who are not them, maybe.

(It has also involved A Trip To The Gym, where I went waaaaay down in weight after a week of pushing my body very hard in a field... sufficient to massively cut my between-set rests, which is extremely welcome! Legs much tireder than arms, unsurprisingly; feels like I'm probably gonna be sore tomorrow, second protein shake notwithstanding; really looking forward to next squat session, and mildly impatient that I gotta get through next deadlift day first...)

The DRAINAGE (ie Thursday rain that would have rendered the previous site wretched all weekend was mildly inconvenient on Thursday and then became Fine Actually). The friend we brought along had a really good time with sledgehammers. Social overtures. Once we'd made it through Thursday, things ran... smoothly? Gigglefests with multiple groups of people. Yes Good.

We engaged in what is now our Brunch Date tradition, in that we visited the fancy bakery and then we bimbled around the aqueduct looking at baby birds while slowly consuming our spoils.

Baby birds the first were at coot nest #1; we spotted the mallard sitting merrily on top of it to start with, and then I went HOLD ON THAT'S A TINY FLUFFY DUCKLING. ... THREE DUCKLINGS. The coots (a) are not shy about chasing ducks off and (b) tend to move gradually down the not-exactly-a-river with successive clutches, so we are not too concerned about them.

There were also: another clutch of (rather larger) ducklings, with no supervising adult; some extremely teenage coots; some extremely baby coots going WHEEK WHEEK WHEEK at the tops of their tiny lungs; yet another coot nest containing one (1) adult, two (2) teenagers, and three (3) tiny fluffy cheeplets, the teenagers being actually in the nest and variously sitting on top of and preening the cheeplets. The Egyptian goslings meanwhile are very nearly all the way grown up, but continue to spend most of their time clustered together.

I am not entirely sure why I had decided baby season was probably over, but I think we can definitively say that It Is Not!

I am going to lead, moderately emphatically, with: this is not a recommendation for this book (which in any case I haven't finished). The strapline is "how successful couples turn conflict into connection"; it was published in 2024. As recessional has pointed out to me, some of what's going on is that their target audience is specifically people who are treating each other shittily but don't want to break up/divorce/etc, and do want to learn to do better, but don't have the tools for how.

I, however, am very much coming from a perspective of being much more inclined to push for, if not breakups, the idea that there exists unacceptable behaviour one gets to just nope out over, and also of the tradition of DBT workbooks where there is a heavy emphasis on explicitly acknowledging, out loud, with your words, that the shit you just did is not okay.

All of this having been said, there are two things about this book (so far) that I Must Share.

The first is about a tool the (Schwarz) Gottmans' research group uses. Their research group, for context, is called the Love Lab.

Much of the data and observations about couples in conflict in this book comes from our decades of work in the Love Lab and from other important and groundbreaking observational studies by ourselves and other researchers. But now we are getting even more sophisticated and granular information from the AI we trained with John's emotional coding system, called SPAFF, short for Specific Affect Coding System.

... the second, I say, moving swiftly on, is that a little further on in the book I have encountered a genuinely new-to-me evopsych argument: that because of evolutionary pressures it is men who get Extremely Emotional very quickly, and take a long time to calm back down and reach a point where they can engage rationally again!

... At this point: He's flooded. She's flooded. Both hearts are hammering hard; adrenaline is zinging through their veins. Stan's physiological response has ratcheted up and overwhelmed him even faster than Susan's, and he'll take a lot longer to come down from it.

Here's why: For evolutionary reasons having to do with protecting the tribe and hunting dangerous animals for food, our prehistoric male ancestors gained a survival advantage by being able to quickly mount and sustain an adrenaline-packed response to danger. Those with this rapid response were better able to fight off enemies and hunt for food, and because they were better survivors, their genes were more likely to get passed down and eventually inherited by our men today. That kind of enduring fight-or-flight response might have helped Stan's distant ancestors survive, but it isn't doing him any favors now.

tl;dr for all that I regularly kind of want to throw it across the room there are some amazing moments in this thing. I'm only about halfway through! WHO KNOWS what wonders await me!!!

1. The smitten kitchen pesto chickpea thing remains excellent. As does the ridiculous strata.
2. On my way back from the gym today I did An Explore of a Different Route and along an excellent winding little path I found A Walnut Tree!
3. I remembered to put the bat detector out at dusk; we detected bats!
4. I did actually feel deadlifts down the back of my legs today! -- I don't think I was doing anything different, I think it was just that they were slightly sore when I started today which made it easier to focus on them.
5. I have spent a lot of time today that I was not Moving My Body mostly horizontal and managing to actually read some fiction. It has been lovely.

1. On my way home from errands this afternoon, I spent a bit of time meandering around some back streets I have not otherwise been terribly well acquainted with. The temperature had dropped enough to be actually fairly pleasant, and also everything smelled of the roses to an extent I am not sure I have ever previously experienced outside of a dedicated rose garden in season.

2. The ridiculous protein powder (I knoooooooooooow I am being SUCH a stereotype) I ordered has arrived; ( read more... )

3. Despite sleeping terribly for reasons, I picked things up and put them down again! and some of them were heavier than any things I have ever previously picked up or put down in that fashion! and I failed out of a squat set in the "bailed onto the safeties" sense, and I am feeling pretty good about having thereby unlocked Another Achievement. (Tuesday's Achievement Unlocked was getting diffidently asked by someone if I knew how to adjust a particular piece of equipment, on the basis that I clearly did because I just HAD but she'd not managed to catch the how. This was particularly delightful because the specific thing is the one I fled from in terror when invited to use it in my first gym trip a whole five and a half weeks ago.)

4. The Child is delightfully excited about getting to see me TWICE next week, both on a day when I am Doing A Babysit and on our normal visit day. ♥

5. Therapist induced me to identify some potential next steps for handling a Minor Situation that feel actually possible and maybe even constructive.

Pilates on the terrace: delightful, except that every time I stopped weighing the mat down with my personal body (due to, for example, lifting up a limb to wave it around) the wind started folding it back up under me.

Pilates more generally: realised today that in addition to normally doing clam and hip stretches at the end of Pilates, and the current Hip Trouble having started after a couple of weeks of not managing that part of the routine because I was only getting as far as doing my bare minimum get-on-the-mat-and-breathe... a whole bunch of the movements incorporate, essentially, sciatic nerve glides. There's another entry to the list of But What Has Pilates Ever Done For Us...

Meanwhile I am out of routine and therefore also eating less protein than I've been managing upcountry, and o have just for the first time since the initial DOMS wound up with post-gym soreness. I have a horrid feeling that my medium term future might contain protein powder; in the short term, dinner was heavy on eggs and tofu.

And, regarding DOMS, last night's "... huh" was about the (extent of) overlap of symptoms and progression with those of post-exertional malaise. This is not yet a fully-formed thought, but it's definitely trying to be a thought. (As part of the theme of "a whole bunch of the experiences of disabled people around embodiment actually do form a continuum with those of the temporarily able bodied, and so do management strategies".)

1. Today in birds: choughs, stonechats, the flock of goldfinches, cormorants, and infinite gulls and jackdaws and crows.
2. Nerve glides continue to sound like bullshit but they are also actually and immediately helping with the mistake that is the sciatic nerve, so that's cheering.
3. Finished the current puzzle! Less the one missing piece. Absolute nonsense, would almost certainly happily do again. The thing about it, right, is that it has lots of textures and internal edges, so it was often very easy to put a big patch together and very hard to work out where it actually went. (Shocking nobody, I was much less into the landscapes and figures in the middle of the big platters...)
4. Made it down to the beach multiple times, both at approximately low tide and approximately high tide. Spent some quality time watching the waves. V good.
5. Sleepy pile with A remains extremely good. <3

1. successfully bought a leek. spent several whole minutes with reduced bad brain. (local combo of prodrome and therapy hangover, I think, not anything persistent or concerning.)
2. the delay arising from the combination of Difficulty Leaving The House and Emotional Support Leek worked out just fine; we still made it to the wiggles household only a little behind human #1 and very slightly ahead of humans #2 and 3, and still in time for A to sequester themself for Union Meeting. hurrah for things working out.
3. it has rained on the plants (hurray!) and mostly not on me (also hurray!).
4. sweet potato slips have perked right back up after being put in a glass of water this morning (having failed to manage to get them in same last night).
5. orchid continues flowering exuberantly. only three of them but my goodness they are staying.
6. some fantastic rainbows on way to wiggles; ditto clouds-fraying-into-rain.

Reading. I am so close to being Fully Up To Date with She's A Beast!!! I have just hit Feb 2026!!! Maybe my brain will let me read literally anything else???

... having said which, I totally managed to take a break from SAB to inhale Platform Decay (Martha Wells), the new Murderbot. Very little of it has stuck with me and also it was a very pleasant way to switch off brain for a few hours.

And I got close enough to the autoreturn on the library loan of another memoir about embodiment -- Run Toward The Danger, Sarah Polley -- that I am actually trying to blitz through it; so far it is not doing a great deal for me but all this really means is that I am not the target audience for everyone!

Watching. In celebration of David Attenborough's 100^th birthday, we have now watched The Year Earth Changed. I had an lot of feelings.

Playing. ... yeah so I completed The Game About Shelving Books, in that I now have all of the Steam achievements including the speedrun achievement (I never normally get speedrun achievements; I never normally even bother trying to get them), and am now Taking Breaks from other things by loading the game back up and wandering around reorganising subject shelving bays according to what makes me happiest (by and large: pick one of "colour" and "thematic grouping"; I am not here for trying to work out how to impose Dewey). At this point, though, that is feeling like a small soothing achievable task that can be A Smol Treet, rather than having the driving urgency of hyperfocus, so that's an extremely welcome development.

Eating. Strawberriessssssss. So many strawberries. I Am Luxuriating. Also: British asparagus! Fancy goats' cheese! The supermarket, having Taken Away the raspberry and passionfruit cheesecake Apparently Forever, has reintroduced it as a seasonal food!

Exploring. We went for one of our normal walks! Adam spotted a deer! We pursuit predated it for a little off amongst trees we had not previously poked around in, and discovered a series of neat rectangular brick walls, all of uniform roofless height, now full of mature trees that had clearly been there for Some Time! We have no idea, OpenStreetMap has nothing to say on the topic, and there is something that has merrily dug setts or dens into and around the foundations...

Making & mending. Bike... works again? Bike works again. Still need to unfuck the rear brake some more but maybe I will manage to take it to see the nice bike shop halfway down the hill tomorrow morning on my way Elsewhere.

Growing. Potted up the lemongrass! Have not potted up the aubergine. Ancho flowering merrily. Maybe I will make it to the plot this week and get some of the things I'm intending to put in the ground into the ground?

Observing. A deer! (Probably muntjac.) The bat! Several excellent front gardens!