kaberett | Entries tagged with ps longer letter later

today I took a deep breath and dove back into the electronic annex I'm providing with the manuscript I'm about to resubmit. the data table's 180 or so lines long and 100 across, all in, compiling data from 28 papers, the oldest of which was published in 1915. I was aiming to do spot-checks to convince myself that I hadn't, at any point over the last six years, made any egregious transcription errors... and instead discovered that, in point of fact, I have. sufficient that I really do need to double-check every last value, cross-referenced against the shitty PDFs of shitty scans of papers dating back over a century, and I spent... some... time staring hollow-eyed into space over this.
I have empirically determined how to tell when jostaberries are properly ripe: the stems start changing colour, just a little, right up against the fruit: they gradually flush purple. this is great.
sorted another box of Photographic Equipment. one more to go.
success with the hair stick: I've worked out how to apply it such that when the hair it's stuck through tries to unravel it actually holds it in place rather than gently drooping to point down past my shoulders. this is An Improvement. I am A Fan. definitely much more comfortable for me than hair pins, and it continues to survive the rigours of allotmenting.
sitting underneath a redcurrant bush covered in ripe fruit on a sunny day remains one of my favourite places to be.

adam FIXED the GARAGE. (... garidge.) We'd both spent some time failing to work out why you needed to nudge one side closed with your knee or your toe (or whatever) to lock it, instead just ingraining the physical habits and muscle memory, and then last week A spent Some More Time messing about with the wiring and spotted what was wrong and fixed it. So now I'm having to unlearn the automatic but redundant knee-wiggle. (I am interacting with the garage most days, when I go to the plot: it's where the Tramper is stored, so this is a big quality-of-life improvement but also! a b i g adjustment.)

Duolingo French, today: I realised (again?) that I do in fact know the word that's the other half of double entendre, and it's to hear. I am always charmed when I trip over things that I hadn't connected.
We acquired a cheap electric keyboard from my parents' last weekend, which for one will probably put paid to me sulking about A about how this household Doesn't Have A Piano (because I think my general sense that All Households Should Have At Least An Upright will not carry much water in the face of how little I play the thing, howsoever much I protest that it's UNPLAYABLE, how can he expect me to LIVE like this, I learned on a STEINWAY), but for two means we are now better equipped for Cousin Music Jams, and most importantly and for three I wish to state for the record that I am both Insulted and also deeply Offended by Adam's fondness for its """French horn""" setting.
Minor victories, brainhack edition: I needed some routine blood tests done at the local hospital "around the beginning of March". The weather has been a bit grim, and my Tramper needs some TLC I'm not equipped to provide it, so getting as far as the allotment has been hard... but the allotment is round the back of the hospital and there's a greenhouse on it, so post-bloods this morning I betook myself there, parked up the wheelchair, deposited the Tramper cover over it, and retreated to the relative warm and dry of the greenhouse... where, being Penned In By The Weather, I made good progress on several tedious tasks I ordinarily disdain, and also established how the sun lounger Works, and also had the aforementioned realisation about French loans.
I need to sort myself out A Reference for this counselling certificate. The thing I am mulling over is, I'm not sure I've got someone who can speak to all of (1) my suitability for A Counselling Course, (2) my listening skills, (3) my organisation of study (with respect to e.g. meeting deadlines), (4) my interpersonal skills (including Engaging With People... in a structured environment), and (5) my attendance and punctuality. My therapist is happy to cover most of them, but would sort of like someone else to address 4; my PhD supervisor understandably has no idea about 1, 2 and 4 at least as pertains to this context so I haven't even asked her yet (and not just because I'm scared of what she'll say about deadlines based on my, uh, protracted period of getting to grips with them over the course of this degree). I also kind of get the impression we're collectively overthinking this, given that I need one (1) reference, not from a family member, that I hand over a copy of myself at interview, but whatcha gonna do, eh.
I HAVE FOUND ALMOST MY PREFERRED STYLE OF WOK FOR SALE. Double-handled (i.e. symmetrical, none of this one-long-heavy-handle-destabilising-everything bullshit), round bottomed, proper thin iron. I have spent a lot of time fruitlessly hunting same through Chinatown and anywhere else that sells woks; I know they existed for purchase in this country at some point because my parents have one, with bonus wooden bits on the handles. You can get more or less the right thing from Amazon, which I Disdain and indeed Diskard Utterly, but if you're okay with bare metal handles they also currently exist on eBay! ... shipping from Germany or, alternatively, Tokyo. I continue mildly baffled about this failure of the market.

At orchestra, several weeks ago, I came into possession of a ceremonial bugle once owned by David George Hall Esq., High Sheriff of Glamorganshire 1927-28. The mouthpiece is attached with a little chain. There's metal loops for a carrying strap. At some point in its 93 years, someone sat on it. It was being furtively shopped round the brass in the hopes that one of us would Make It Go Away; I felt sorry for it. (This is why I own at least two other somewhat sad and somewhat squashed brass instruments that honestly probably ought be allowed to retire to the great pit in the sky.) I... have no idea what to do with it, but I should probably do something. I am tempted to see if I can persuade my middle brother he wants it.

While haunting charity shops in search of cutlery this afternoon, I found a Shaun Tan I'd been previously completely unaware of for £2.99 and... acquired it. Title: The Singing Bones. Concept: he's taken a couple of paragraphs from each of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, made a sculpture illustrating some aspect of them, and then very carefully lit and photographed it. It is, as might be expected from Tan, quite peculiar; I dithered over it for a long time, not entirely sure whether it appealed to me, but the more I looked at it the more I wanted to look at it from the comfort of my own sofa in the absence of (1) muzak and (2) a nearby alarm, and thus in despite of my own Best Intentions regarding Not Acquiring More Books until I've read some of the existing ones... it has now joined the pile of hardbacks on the sofa for reading Real Soon Now. (There's another pile on the coffee table, and a pile of paperbacks on the arm of the sofa, and another pile of paperbacks on the TV unit, plus the half-shelf of Things I Want To Read on the bookcase, and that is before we even get into the ebook collection. But I am, at least, managing to not add volumes I'm not Actively Enthusiastic about, so that's something.)

I've even got about 600 words of the final lab-based What Do I Even DoDid All Day post written, and I had sincerely planned to get it written up for you and posted today, My Last Day In (Proper) Lab (Bar The Beaker Cleaning) (as it begins so shall it end), and instead I... got a whole heaping pile more data, and then I came home and... made black sesame ice cream (up to the point before actually churning it) and got some bread started and unbent the core of a roller blind and, also, not coincidentally, got a mop handle... very thoroughly... stuck... in the blind roller... so, you know, it would now be possible to install in the place we first intended (and indeed got the brackets up for!) except, er, mop handle.

Simple application of WD40 and a heat gun hasn't, alas, let me shift it, and obviously I'm keen to not rebend the wretched thing in the process of extricating said mop handle, but at this stage in proceedings I rather suspect that discretion is the better part of valour and I should get some sleep and see if I consider the problem more tractable having once done so.

(Had I just used the broom handle in the first place, and skipped out on the mop handle altogether, it turns out It Would Have Just Worked, ALAS and eheu, but. Bed time for Alexes. Maybe you'll get the explanation of the very expensive vacuum leak tomorrow.)

Today was a Long Science Day -- I was doing big columns -- so A came down to South Kensington for dinner, and as is fairly traditional we went to Thai Square...

... whose background music was, this evening, a very particular kind of Piano...

... such that we both kept going "hONK?" because, right, there kept being passages that sounded like "important speedy goose sneak" or the rising spread chord of "you are a Goose and you have just done a Thing", or at least enough like them over the sound of conversation etc etc etc

that

... goose???

(we honk for roses, too)

I am slowly and tentatively in another patch of practising the horn at all. It's much harder on days when I'm going into lab (surprise!) but I did get five minutes in today. Slowly working my way back up; currently on the first two canonical Warm-Up Exercises & finding that my face thinks that much concerted playing is Quite Enough, Thanks, but tone and accuracy are improving and I'm rediscovering things I'm supposed to be doing with lips and tongue and teeth and breathing.
I spent a bunch of this afternoon (around some slightly tedious labwork) finalising edits to the manuscript. Tomorrow I'm back in lab again for more things that need babysitting for 20 minutes at a time and then leaving for a short age, so maybe I will make some progress on submitting it. (Or at least finding out how many of the figures I want to wrangle A Lot More in the process of submission.)
I had my most what's-the-difference-between-a-USB-cable-and-IKEA-furniture experience with the latter yet this evening. It's particularly galling that we had to turn it over three times because it's not even the first time we've reconstructed this piece of furniture and, well, one sort of hopes one might learn, eh.
I made a tomato-based pasta sauce on Saturday. It was Kind Of Dubious. This evening I discovered that that the reason for this was that, instead of the half-bag of sweet basil I'd meant to put in, I'd carefully chiffonaded half a bag of Thai basil. Which, well, explains a lot, and also means I have a whole bag of sweet basil to use up. (It is okay there are lots of things I can make. <3)
Tomorrow morning's experiment with breakfast bread is: I have been in lab A Fair Bit (actually, I should probably write this up), so this batch of dough has been fermenting away to itself in the fridge for about 48 hours at this point. Is there any gluten left? Will it rise? Is breakfast going to be a disaster? Tune back in etc.

earlier in the day: a multi-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer

currently: my grandmother's darning mushroom; needle & threads; A Laptop Computer

botanical illustration colouring book, showing example and part-coloured page

At least some of my problem with responding to e-mails from friends is that they go and do shit like ask "how are you?" and that's an unbounded open-ended question that means my Fear Of Not Being Interesting To Other People kicks in and I just... don't, because clearly anything I say will be Too Much and Too Boring.

Having recognised this I have at least managed to reply to one such friend, at great length, within 36 hours of... a "no really, how are you?" e-mail sent after I had utterly failed to manage a response to their previous message (exactly two months previously in August, good grief, where does the time go), and while I'm now having to squish the anxiety about Too Much E-mail Too Many Words Nobody Cares I have at least tried.

I think this also feeds into my reluctance to leave substantive comments on other people's Dreamwidths or even, often, in response to your (much-appreciated) comments here: when I'm just typing into the entry box I can pretend that it's just me talking to myself, a lot of the time, which is supported by the asynchronous communication and the bit where I don't feel like anybody's Waiting, all of which sort of unavoidably collapses a bit when I find myself unambiguously in conversation with people. I need to poke gently at my brain some more, apparently, about the bit where engagement and interaction isn't fundamentally predicated on me possessing sparkling originality of thought. I mean, yes, some of the problem is that I am fundamentally currently Forever Thesis, and most of my words-brain is going on that, but c'mon, Alex, be a little kinder to yourself, if people weren't interested in what you have to say & in spending time with you maybe they wouldn't be commenting on your blog, hmm? Just a thought, love. There you go.

Diarish: various putterings about, today, with vague gestures toward housework and doing a lot more science (not, of course, that I am anywhere close to done yet, or at least not as close to done as I'd like to be given that it's very definitely my bedtime). The rest of the fennel seed heads are spread out on some ancestral linen on the floor of the study to dry; I used my grandmother's secateurs to chop some dead sunflowers down to a vaguely transportable size; I fed my mother some Potitze, and we played Scrabble with a set liberated from the mouldering ancestral pile; my parents took us out to dinner and I might finally have got the Turkish for "leaf" (yaprak) into active vocab by dint of finally recognising it as a constituent part of a menu item. We talked, over dinner, about the amount of time Papa Hase spent in Turkey; both he and Mama spoke Turkish. Threads of continuity.

in that I showed up to about 10 minutes of the protest in Oxford (we... were later setting off from London than we'd planned) before a combination of "smoke exposure" and "people we had been planning to attend with were hungry" meant I'd Had Enough Again, but hey, Did The Thing.

Now about to collect my second Oxford college slept in, both beginning with W, which is a slightly ridiculous collection to have but I'm nevertheless amused.

there has been so much packing I am so glad it's not me moving house good grief

we were supposed to pick up a van at 9am
when we got to the van hire place at 9.30, there was A Singular Van... that we weren't allowed to have... because it needed its brakes bled and they'd lost their engineer
that's okay, they said, there's another one due back in at 11.30, we were told it might even get back in a bit sooner than that, we'll give you a ring when it's ready, terribly sorry, we'll do you a partial refund
so off we trundled to poke at Sainsbury's and B&Q and such just round the corner
reader
the van was not, it transpires, going to be available to collect by around noon
the van was, in point of fact, very much in Cornwall
...
at about this point we went "fuckfuckfuck", went back home, and I passed the fuck out for an hour or so while Adam panicked, because this was More Excitement Than I'd Budgeted Energy For
... BUT THERE'S A HAPPY ENDING, to wit, they found their mislaid engineer!
... at around noon
... the van still didn't have, you know, Enough Oil, or Working Indicator Repeaters, or Screenwash, or A Side Door Sensor That Works, but it turns out you can dial the pop music up high enough to drown out the MY DOOR IS OPEN panic-beeps until they succumb to learned helplessness
so via Some Adventures we in fact ended up In Approximately Brixton, dismantling & getting into the van: A Rather Nice Sofabed, A Small Wardrobe, A Desk, A Chair, and Bonus Bookcase
we then meandered very slowly home, via me ducking into lab for a whole 10 minutes (I... should have stayed in very slightly later on Tuesday at the point at which I was all "shrug.emoji whatever I cannot possibly bring myself to care about any more of this")
and also picking up a cheap sun lounger I found on eBay from more-or-less around the corner (it folds, it can live in the greenhouse, it is something for me to crash on when I need A Break at the allotment)
and dinner at one of the Turkish places in town because we wanted (1) hot-weather food (2) a pile of salad (3) a lot of hydration (4) To Not Have To Cook
and now we are h o m e and I will need to Reorganise the van contents tomorrow because my stacking was Non Optimal, but right now we are going the heck to sleep
and then our first job tomorrow morning is to pick up some packing boxes kindly volunteered by a freecycle human in response to a wanted ad
the internet is pretty great
I'm so glad we're not moving house, we're just helping someone else move
... sleep now

Spent dusk this evening in a hot tub with cheap Co-op prosecco and raspberries and did, in fact, catch a glimpse of a bat. I hope you are doing well. <3

got in at 9am to Do Columns and... the positive air pressure wasn't.

I have therefore spent a lot more of today (1) reading a book and (2) sleeping than I'd intended, though I also got a couple of productive chats with colleagues in, and am now resigned to a long lab day on Monday, though this will require some negotiating as someone else has booked the hood.

ASSUMING, OF COURSE, THAT THE AIR HANDLING UNIT IS FIXED BY THEN, which it very well might not be.

meanwhile I have spent the evening (1) watching The Blue Planet and (2) getting started on my talks, which I'm not actually sure when I'm delivering, the easier of the two of which is Aren't Rocks Great Though in the style of tumblr infographics i.e. entirely in comic sans and lower case except for EMPHATIC CAPS. it is currently ~20 slides long (and I have no doubt I will be adding more) which means that it is Sufficiently Done for a bit under an hour of shouting about rocks, so I should... move on to actually writing the serious one about debugging.

I am PICKING UP MY ROCKS from a partner institution tomorrow
these are The Last Rocks Of The PhD
I have 'til end-December to Measure All The Rocks
- ... which is a bit stressful because What If The Very Expensive Vacuum Leak Doesn't Cooperate
- which is something I can't really schedule for, which means I can't make concrete plans for how quickly I'll get through stuff
- not least because I've only got enough beakers for 2x sets of (=20) ready-to-analyse samples
- and while I am only picking up ~26 samples, a bunch of those I will effectively need to analyse twice, for Reasons
- so I can't even go "right let's get all the chemistry done and then blitz the analysis", I gotta actually swap back and forth between them, and if the mass spec isn't behaving then I gotta keep trying mass spec before I can do more chemistry
- which would be less stressful if it hadn't taken me four multi-day sessions to get any data at ALL off the last sample set I was trying to measure
and then once I've done that I have? to finish? writing the PhD?
and I'm "only" going to have five chapters (introduction, three data chapters, conclusion), which I am currently feeling Inadequate about because the thesis I'm reading as background on these rocks has eight (EIGHT!!!) (8!!!!!!) chapters
and by the way I'm having a prolonged mental health crash for indeterminate reasons of therefore uncertain duration AND I'm still sleeping all the time FOR reasons that are still unclear
...
so if I am being Even More Dilatory Than Usual in responses/engagement/etc, it's not that I don't care, it's just that
*waves*
aaaaaaaaah?
oh right and weekend after next I'm going on An Holiday at which I need to be able to give Two Talks and, like, they're SKETCHED and IN MY HEAD but. um. I should probably make slides. and have a slightly clearer idea of what in the hell I want to say.

apparently nobody had ever explained to A how to navigate the garlic bureaucracy. he was startled and dismayed when I looked at him mildly baffled the other evening and pointed out that if you squish-and-twist the cloves a little with your fingers before Dealing With The Paperwork it goes more easily. I... am not entirely sure how he'd been dating me for four and a half years (more or less) before discovering this.
HE FOUND MY DRESS SHIRT. He! was putting together kit for a LARP this weekend! And rummaging through a wardrobe I had already been through at least three times increasingly frantically! and found a wing-tip pleated-front dress shirt, and was surprised and dismayed that it no longer fitted him really, but hey it worked tolerably well with a cravat for the purpose he had in mind! it was not until he was taking it back off... and putting it back into the wardrobe... that he started going "... hold... on... a second..." so NOW I HAVE MY DRESS SHIRT AGAIN. (This is particularly exciting to me because it FITS, and I had thought it lost forever but had not quite got together the cope to buy a new one, for which I am at this point very grateful.)
Ein Teufel sitzt darauf, Mama always used to say of this manner of thing: there's a devil sitting on it (to hide it, to spread misery and strife, as of the M25, thank you Crowley). Ergo I should probably offer a small prayer to St Anthony.
A small blessing also upon the gods of cut-price supermarket cheese, for the Cornish yarg wrapped in wild garlic.

Food: I am now within hailing distance of Usefully Achieving The Effect I Want with both profiteroles and sourdough. All hail Leiths How To books, which include explanations of why the various steps are important, in terms of what they actually do. (I suspect I am also, therefore, going to achieve Actually Neat Shortcrust Pastry Cases, which has been a vague goal for a while now, which will make me feel very smug about culinary skill acquisition this year.)

Unwise purchase decisions: the Waitrose bargain bin contained... quince. At two-thirds off. And A enabled me. Which is why the fruit bowl now contains seventeen quince, which with I am going to have to do Something. (Yes, yes, quince jelly and membrillo, I know -- but I've already got some of each made by my mother, so really I'm going to have to poach them or make sorbet or something.)

Allotment: bin continues merrily creeping its way back up to 50degC and making space for me to put more things in the top, thank goodness, and I've got some of the first Actually Nice compost out of it (while dragging out some more of the undigested first base layer) in order to repot the lavender A bought for 50p from an unmanned stall on the seafront on the south coast, the day we went down to pick up a friend's wheelchair. (Dear friend: he didn't have 50p in change so actually put in a quid... which is going to support the local gang show. In a delightful moment of serendipity.) Additionally and furthermore, the squash look no worse (and tentatively a little better); more of the spinach are showing true leaves; and I'm making more substantive new progress on weeding again (i.e. clearing more beds, rather than "just" doing maintenance weeding).

Movement: as of tomorrow I am going to be at three sets of six reps each on gym stuff, and I'm up to five minutes of stationary bike at both beginning and end (and get to up the resistance another notch, I think).

cesy is also very kindly physio-buddying with me via the magic of IM, so I'm getting a bit more dopamine out of doing various exercises (because they are Seen and Recognised, etc etc etc).

1. GREEN PASTA. (~100g spinach, cooked and blended, mixed in with the egg.) Excitingly, at least for me, I actually got the amount of egg right first time, rather than ending up miserably adding more (and more and more) with increasingly sticky hands. (Also, I am very much enjoying the ridiculous pasta drying rack I acquired.)

2. RAVIOLI. I found a cut-price ravioli stamp, decided to experiment, and Was Successful. Fillings: the rest of the spinach, and some Experimental Cheese.

3. Turns out, and I had totally failed to realise this due to not thinking things through, that it is sort of important that you use hetero milk for rennet-based cheeses. Whoops. So next on my agenda is sourcing some Hetero Milk (yes, yes, bi erasure, I know) and having another go at that. (Context: back when I was a very baby queer -- this was the trip of Accidentally My First Pride, Thank You Vancouver -- we made a trip to Canada to visit relatives. I was thus introduced to Homo Milk, i.e. what appears to be standard Canadian marketing of homogenised milk. I was delighted. I remain delighted. I am frequently easily pleased.)

4. One of A's local friends was having a Rhubarb Problem with their allotment, so we have over the past couple of weeks eaten a lot of rhubarb-and-pear crumble, during which I have learned that (i) you really do have to stew the rhubarb first, (ii) this means you achieve Lumps Of Pear as a textural contrast, and (iii) putting hazelnuts in the topping along with the oats is excellent. Which I did not previously know, having previously been intensely suspicious of rhubarb, but I rather suspect this marks the completion of its rehabilitation. (School dinner rhubarb crumble was Bad Textures.)

1. Yedi Kocalı Hürmüz at the Arcola several weeks ago now, performed by the in-house Turkish-language company (Arcola Ala-Turka), with my friend D. A little rough around the edges (e.g. the surtitles frequently just sort of... didn't) but the energy & the audience engagement were fantastic, particularly in the segments that were just sort of... mini interconnected folk gigs? Lots and lots of clapping (and singing) along. I was very entertained -- there was comedy "whack people over the head with an inflatable stick and over-the-top sound effect" that worked really well -- and I even understood the occasional word and sentence fragment, go me.

2. Baby's first paper has been formally accepted. It is going into various preprint archives as we speak; I will link once it's actually usefully available. (Did I mention how good it is that I fixed the graphics driver issue with my desktop such that it's actually usable? It is SO GOOD.)

3. Off to Cornwall on Thursday, for approximately a fortnight, for the hundredth-birthday-that-isn't, coming back for the middle weekend because Reasons. I am looking forward to it. I will be bringing wild garlic back to plant out. Cornwall in early May is, in my unquestionably objective opinion, the best place in the entire world.

4. Frantically getting lab work finished up for pre-interruption-of-studies before that, so far as possible. Cocked up yesterday in a way that adds an extra week in lab (boo) but it was one I would otherwise have been anxious about not doing (yay), so that's worked out fairly well.

5. British strawberries, reduced in the supermarket. Yes. Good.

6. Started thyroxine (low-ish dose) on Friday last (the 20th). So far no conclusive changes, but excitingly the water is muddied by the part where I finished the most recent course of iron supplementation right before I started the thyroxine.

7. Have had first salad-and-cheese-and-bread dinner of the year on the PATIO. We have a PATIO. It has been WARM. I am very excited by this, and also by linens.

8. I have participated in A Bunch of research recently -- autism + the social model of disability in higher ed, intersection of trans status + disability, Being A Grumpy Tran At Market Researchers for fun and profit (and actually they were really great and give me hope), miscellaneous cognitive function for the long-term psychiatric study I'm participating in (£15 in vouchers, whoo).

9. Voucher has thus far been used on a bamboo travel mug, with a succulent pattern and duck-egg-blue silicone bits. (

staranise, I keep restraining the urge to put together the succulent-themed care package you did not ask for and probably don't want because it would be silly to do the Shipping To Canada thing if you don't, but if you'd like preposterous succulent-themed tat let me know and It Will Happen.)

10. I spent a lot of the weekend making friends (at A's step-relative's Significant Birthday Thing) with both nibling S (who has, correctly, decided I am interested in them, and now greets me with enthusiasm) and -- which is what I was going to go with when I started this point -- a ridiculous ornamental cherry, which had the big-blousy-white blossoms as most of its canopy... and one branch, comprising about a third, that had been grafted on from a dark-purple-leaves and bright-pink-flowers tree. It was Good. I went and patted it on the graft and told it it was good, and made A admire it.

(The mint I rescued from the supermarket has established itself sufficiently aggressively that I'm starting to worry for the parsley it shares a tub with. I shall clearly just have to consume more of it.)

who only by moving can balance

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