who only by moving can balance

(1) I thought Easyjet had somehow, inexplicably, through considerable application of effort, lost the clothes guards off my wheelchair -- to the extent that I actually did the lost baggage form-filling. I then went to have one last forlorn look at the baggage carousel, stood up temporarily, and they... clattered??? out of the back of my chair??? I have NO IDEA HOW but it's much less grim than I expected.

(2) To my mild surprise, I am just about managing competent interactions in French, to the extent that I'm having to interpolate a lot and very sheepishly ask people to repeat themselves more slowly. This includes "explaining that my clothes guards vanished", "enquiring politely about having a place in a restaurant for dinner", and "explaining what the fuck we're even doing" as polite smalltalk to the airport assistance.

(3) I have spent a lot of today either asleep (in a cozy slopy-ceiling nest) or sitting on a sofa watching snow fall on the Alps and reading short fiction. I have done some physio. It is all very pleasant.

I noticed, on Friday morning, that there were small birds having a bath in the gutter along the garages out the back of the house. It was charming, and cheering, and it helped.

( Pompe funèbre; death. )

( Academia. )

( Health. )

Miscellaneous culture: I have finished my His Dark Materials reread, complete with the two tiny books and all their ephemera, and put myself in the queue at the local library for La Belle Sauvage (I'm getting a copy of my very own at the beginning of December courtesy of A. -- we're going to an Author Event -- but I want to read it before then. I still haven't got a Miltank. I've watched the National Theatre's Follies (Thursday, live at an Oxford Vue); Hunted, feminist contemporary dance about witches, Friday at Sadler's Wells (which was cuntier than I'd expected but not cuntier than I should have expected), and on Saturday the last ever performance of CUNCRETE, which we caught at the Fringe la-a-a-ast year when it was there and that I didn't write up; we bought the CD.

The Pioneer Woman's chocolate brownie cookies went down very well with my useless ex, and want baking for ~7 minutes for optimum sebastienne-bait.

Last night I got the sourdough onto its second rising and this afternoon it will do its third and then baking. I also made another vat of chilli (that recipe doesn't note and ought that I also stick in most of a lime at the end), breadmaker-bread, and 3kg of ill-advised experimental carrot cake. (I started making pound cake on autopilot, and then found myself with 500g of butter creamed with 500g of sugar plus 800g of grated peeled carrot, and kind of felt I was at that point committed. A culinary note for them of you as have not met it: carrot cake is generally oil-based not butter-based. Anyway, there is cake, and it contains additionally misc currants/sultanas and some chopped dates and some Grand Marnier and some allspice, though not enough of the latter given quantities, but o well it is cake.)

(Also also I washed my hair and went to book group and unfucked my current knitting and got another fragment of the currently-trying-to-happen-poem and did all the washing up in addition to tweaking my presentation, so I felt comfortably accomplished and was reminded once again that Making Things Feels Good.)

1. My breath was misting when I left the house this morning. I am dressed accordingly, in standard winter uniform including medium-weight corduroy trousers; because I'm Having Trouble with clothing on my torso (sensory stuff) at the moment, top half was vest top, lightweight shirt, linen waistcoat, scarf, coat. ... it is thirty bloody degrees down here. I have removed most of the layers on my top half and am contemplating how likely it is that anyone is actually going to turn up in lab if I make similar adjustments elsewise.

2. ... okay I have legit got data for >40 samples this run. Which considering the first 48 hours were consumed by a misbehaving introduction system... well, I hope my supervisor is suitably pleased, THAT IS ALL I AM SAYING. (And it is quite exciting and I am looking forward to plotting it up!) (For context, I've got multiple measurements of the majority of them; it takes about an hour to measure two samples when you're actually measuring; and there's lots of intermediate steps in terms of checking concentrations, making things up to the right dilution, etc etc).

3. Also I gritted my teeth and... fixed some of my shonky code... and it wasn't anything like as involved or irritating as I thought it would be? And in the process I made the whole thing less hacky? SO THAT WAS NICE.

4. Also nice: having managed to actually have a proper hot shower and brush and wash my hair late last night (it's... been a fairly hefty work week, I think today is going to be my fourth or fifth >12-hour day not counting the bits of support-work-not-PhD-work I've been doing); having slept well last night; gradual improvement in my cognitive function as measured by how frustrated I get by logic puzzles (as compared to a couple of weeks ago); significant progress on my list of shit I've been putting off.

5. Getting over my tail end of a sore throat means my voice actually does what I expect when I sing again, which is a great relief and great comfort.

6. Okay I know I keep going on about this, but it is so satisfying to have a session I rather grimly thought would turn into a disaster (and nearly cancelled last week!) go so well, and it's additionally satisfying that I... get to look at the data as it comes off and go "yeah, that makes sense" -- I now understand what is going on sufficiently well for this chapter of the thesis to make predictions, to have the predictions met, and to have some idea of mechanisms, and it's kind of magic; I need to remember this when I move on to zinc and none of it makes any sense again. (Except based on my thallium data I do actually have a model for what's going on, so I can take zinc in relation to that...)

7. I am rereading your blue-eyed boys, now having osmosed rather more of canon, and as ever it is a great comfort.

8. I am tired and I am low on executive function but I'm also... okay? Yeah. I'm okay, and I'm contented, and I'm happy, and I'm looking forward to trundling off to facesfriend's when I'm done here.

(-- not really here: scabbing half an hour of internet while a tumble dryer runs, to post the things I'd already written and get caught up on urgent e-mail. I went down to the beach with my cousins and my face still tastes a little of salt. Sea foam was being blown up the beach, and crepuscular rays abounded. Happy new year, to those of you who celebrate that now.)

... on checking the work calendar to determine whether you can manage an overnight run on a Friday, you establish that in fact you can because nobody has the machine booked on the Saturday or Sunday and consequently you start seriously considering blowing off (1) a friend's housewarming and (2) your mum's birthday, because data.

(Relatedly: dear Wednesday!Alex, thank you heaps for making an enormous vat of leek-and-potato soup to be eaten straight from the fridge. Love, today!Alex, who has eaten about three portions of the stuff.)

I understand I'm not always great at explaining what I'm up to here, so -- if you have questions about how things are going for me or what I'm doing or how exactly my life fits together, please feel encouraged to ask. <3

(Today on my way home from work I saw: (1) someone busking with a tuba that belched flames every time they played a note; (2) a cavalcade of police motorcycles, blues flashing, who as far as I can tell were learning how to halt a busy junction in the rush hour. It was kind of endearing.)

specifically, there's a lot of "give me your current age so I don't ask you to time-travel", but actually... I'd like to time-travel, and it will be genuinely good for me to envisage two separate (positive!) scenarios. If you're interested in answers for past ages, then ask & I'll reply in comments.

I picked 25 fairly arbitrarily as a quarter century; I'm a little surprised - mostly pleasantly - by how close that is these days. :-)

I lived in:

Now: a ground-floor bedsit room in college accommodation, next to the Botanic Gardens, with huge south-facing sash bay windows. My room contains a sofa and a desk and a sink and a bed and a fair number of bookshelves and a coffee table covered in my tea collection, and I'm next to a kitchen that contains fridges and a freezer and horrible electric hobs and a nice-enough-but-not-lovely electric oven and a microwave. The front door's up 6 steps, and the shower's on the first floor; the back garden contains purple and white crocuses and narcissi.

At 25 (i): A two-bed flat in South Kensington, in London, shared with a friend, with level access (be it by lift or not). We've got a kitchen with gas hobs and an oven and a fridge and a freezer that we're not sharing with 8 other students, so it isn't full of gross months-out-of-date raw chicken; we've got a sofa that doesn't try to eat people, and a media set-up a bit more satisfactory than craning over people's shoulders to stare at laptop screens, so we can watch shows together without being uncomfortable. The tea collection's got somewhere sensible to live, and we've got a shelf in the living room dedicated to storing the shared perfume collection. The bathroom's big enough to store my shower stool in without getting in the way, and in my bedroom I've a double bed and a view of a tree. We go to the Science Museum Lates, and I spend lunchtimes in parks or visiting another gallery in the Natural History Museum.

At 25 (ii): I live in my home town, and here I can afford to share a house - rather than a flat - with friends. We're on a bus route or two, and I'm within easy pushing distance of my mum and the Various Other People I want to see regularly. The best bit? I get to do whatever I damn well like with the garden, within reason, so we've got herbs and bulbs in tubs, and a bay tree, and roses and wisteria up the back wall.

I drove:

Now: Nope: I'm officially Too Crippy To Drive, in ways that are highly unlikely to change, and positively-imagined futures don't erase that. This doesn't mean I'm upset about it, or the prospect of not being able to drive; it just means that my life's rather better when I'm not desperately hoping for the impossible or, at the least, improbable.

At 25: See above.

I was in a relationship with:

Now: Some Boys and a Girl and some extremely intense, close friendships built around poetry and music, and a few other ill-defined things, and it's lovely.

At 25: I've got no idea, but I'm looking forward to finding out. :-)

I feared:

Now: A depressive relapse. Not doing well enough this year to take up the PhD place I've been offered (which is not necessarily a sensible thing to fear; see scenario (ii), which is plausible and lovely, just different!). Everyone I love or care for dying. Being shouted at. Hurting people. Coming out. Moving somewhere more than a phonecall and fifteen minutes from my mum. London buses.

At 25 (i): Hurting people. Another depressive relapse. Breaking the mass spec. Hydrofluoric acid. Presenting at conferences. Disappointing Julie. Not doing enough activism. Being authentically myself in an academic setting.

At 25 (ii): Hurting people and another depressive relapse; they don't quite go without saying. Navigating meetings with Equalities ministers. Getting things hurtfully wrong. Not being able to help as much as I want to.

I worked at:

Now: My final year of a degree in Earth Sciences, specialising in volcanology. My student union's LGBT+ campaign. Lashings. VagPag. (Dreamwidth.)

At 25 (i): The second year of my PhD in isotope geochemistry, spending endless hours in the clean lab in the basement running columns, and even more time doing the three a.m. I'm-the-only-person-in-the-building dance around the mass spectrometer. My university's LGBT+ campaign. Lashings. The Big Sibling Project. Dreamwidth. VagPag.

At 25 (ii): The Big Sibling Project, including organising regular workshops. Lashings. National campaigning for trans* equality. Collecting a book of my essays for publication, self-pub or zine or maybe traditional publishing houses. Counselling - I'm beginning to be let loose on actual clients, which is daunting and exhilarating. Dreamwidth. Copy-editing, to bring in a bit extra. VagPag.

I wanted to be:

Now: Trustworthy. Safe. Welcoming. Brave.

At 25: Probably still the above, but I'll defer to my future self on that one. :-)