ten good things//when you're learning to face the path at your pace every choice is worth your while

1. I got home to find a Terrifying Letter From The DWP... letting me know that my DLA's been autorenewed through to 2016 without me needing to do anything about it. :-)

2. I am now down to two half-written poems in the stack - one's a villanelle and will be hard; one might grow up to be a sonnet but is probably going to just be my usual style of thing.

3. Domestic bliss: doing the washing up while P curled up on the sofa with my complete works of Donaghy (he of Machines and Midriver), dipping in and out and reading me bits.

4. Swedennn. Snow and sunsets and AMINALS and RIDICULOUS FOOD (the ridiculous round thing with the whole in the middle, of which I have eaten approx my own bodyweight with butter and cloudberry jam over the past few days; ditto pepparkakor; ditto ajvar; I am a predictable human with predictable tastes) and exciting new food! Semla were not a thing I had previously consumed. (hahahahaha yes I win "simnel" is indeed finest wheat flour, semolina, which means semla is too, surprise)

5. Poking around etymonline.com after triangulating through all our mutual language; the -lic of garlic is in fact the same word as leek, and the Swedish for onion and (with modifiers) misc allium, and the German for misc allium. (Spem in allium, etc etc.) We were pleased.

6. Being helpful at my mother. :-) I mean, it is deeply weird to be grown-up enough to be helpful when it comes to casting an eye over CVs etc, but pleasant! Also she e-mailed me about pirates (and did not give me any updates on the rugby).

7. ... Elementary, though, okay. ELEMENTARY. SHOW.

8. Useful work done! Retweaked abstract (hopefully I'll be able to submit it tomorrow) for baby's first talk; did a quick blitz on an area I wasn't terribly clear on the specifics of and needed to be, wrote myself a summary, and have some questions for discussion with my supervisor; did an extremely sketchy first pass on the thesis outline I'm required to submit for my 21-month assessment, and slightly to my astonishment realised that it... continues to approximately make sense?

9. Mush. (SUCH TEENAGE.)

10. I am really really enjoying hair-adornment in the shape of tulmas courtesy of khalinche - they're beaded, and I reckon they're kind of like blue roses and P reckons they're kind of like a peacock and either way they make managing my hair marginally easier when it's hanging down in a braid, and are very very pleasing when I manage to arrange them either side of a bun. Sensory misc. Yes. :-)

ten good things//when every no turns into maybe

1. The machine is working??? Approximately??? Barry worked magic and my first set of standards came off looking decent and I have a halfways-to-plausible plan for the next few days.

2. I am not freaking out about psychiatrist tomorrow morning. This is a little bit unsettling looked at straight-on, if only because it says a lot about how much I've decided to trust my GP.

3. I've been given the go-ahead to submit my abstract! Nearly a week before deadline! I'm going to hold onto it until I get first data-numbers off the machine tomorrow, though.

4. I have the firm intention of finishing the actual knitting part of the guiltknitting tomorrow or, at the outside, Übermorgen.

5. I tamed my hair! (context: it is waist-length; when I went proper crazy in 2011/2012 I stopped being able to brush it every day and haven't been able to reestablish the habit reliably; lulz ensue)

6. I tidied my room a little (it was starting to look like I'd spent most of the past fortnight passing through on my way to and from lab and hadn't had time to clean, and it was starting to stress me out).

7. recessional made there be another your blue-eyed boys-'verse ficlet. About a useless kitten.

8. Facesfriend's response to me saying that I strongly suspect that my primary partner is the world's most expensive etch-a-sketch was to make a desultory effort to turn up examples of more expensive etch-a-sketches. I was extremely smug when they failed to turn anything up (though to be fair this is largely because at that price point it's all "if you have to ask you can't afford it"...)

9. Access to sensory wossnames in a range of calming and soothing formats. I am very lucky.

10. ... I am just having a lot of feelings about Stars and about Vienna Teng, okay. They are very comforting at the moment. They both manage the kind of mood I am after having on tap. It is great. Technology is magic.