who only by moving can balance

... or more specifically, for reasons which this margin is too small to contain, got me to buy myself a dinosaur chocolate mould/ice-cube tray, and made me dinosaur chocolates with ludicrous ganache. And then there was ganache and a paintbrush over, and so I have spent this evening tentatively experimenting with, you got it, making dinosaur chocolates.

My housemate appears to find it both entertaining and charming, however, that I am the kind of person who will exclaim NEVER AGAIN WILL I BE FORCED TO RELY ON MAINSTREAM CHOCOLATIERS FOR CHOCOLATE DINOSAURS like it's, er, completely normal.

{and you have done your best to medicate and regulate/the dark clouds forming in my brain...}

( Ten good things! )

1. I had a lovely leisurely breakfast with my mother this morning, sat watching the birds on the feeders and the patio. Zitronenwasser and croissant and conversation and restful watching of tiny terrifying dinosaurs.

( Read more... )

1. I woke up surprisingly easily, especially given how late I got to bed, which is always pleasantly astonishing when it manages to happen.

2. Some of the post waiting for me at work was more rocks! I was delighted, and expressed this delight to a colleague in the lift, and everyone else in the lift just looked... baffled. Which to be honest I found a little surprising given where I work, but mostly? Mostly it was amusing, and also I have lots more rocks. Plenty enough to keep me going until the new year!

3. I got heaps of labwork done today, including lots more tidying up than I normally manage, including making some sensible judgment calls

4. As I was leaving, having tidied up, the skies opened, and it was brilliant - I walked down the middle of the almost-entirely-empty pavement on Exhibition Road in the warm rain with my clothes rapidly getting plastered to me, and oh, it was glorious.

5. I finally settled in with Scalzi's new novel Lock In today, and to my surprise I am genuinely enjoying it. (Why surprise? Because much as I like the guy I didn't expect him to do it well, and so far he is. Also, I'm a fifth of the way through and the protag's gender hasn't been mentioned yet, which is pretty much the reading experience I want.)

6. I got home to find warm couscous left on the table for me, because I have the best housemate <333

7. ... and for afters there is leftover strawberry trifle in the fridge, brought me yesterday by sebastienne and my useless ex when they rocked up to feed me lunch, badger me into wearing clothes, and drag me to a film festival & concert (which was pretty great once the first short was over; Did Not Like). But srsly though, a. CN Lester wrote a song for you and then made a music video, and (b) I got to curl up in a big comfy chair and watch an entire hour of people talking mostly in German about queer & trans stuff, and -- that's not something my inherited language does, we're rural Austrian Catholics, I got to listen to people speaking about queers in German, which was a kind of homecoming even though it was the wrong flavour. (By which I mean: the Berlin accent is not the accent of the stories and the prayers and the songs of my childhood, but nonetheless it is German and therefore soothing.)

8. My counsellor got in touch yesterday about arranging a session with an apology for having dropped off the face of the Earth (bereavement), which saved me doing the reaching out and means we are Working On A Date probably sometime next week.

9. An Elementary fic showed up in my head while I was finishing up the washing up at work; specifically, a story that begins "The first time Joan surprised Sherlock..." with reference to some dialogue from (very!) early season 1, though I suspect I am going to have to wait for the beginning of season 3 to make sense of where it's trying to end up.

10. I really am surrounded by fantastic people, and I am so, so glad of all of you <3 (And I am aided in appreciating this by the bit where I seem to be starting to pull back out of the brainwrong I've been in for the past little bit: hurrah discontinuing the anti-histamine!)

1. A tiny quilt arrived from jelazakazone! It is gorgeous! It is lava! I squeaked and flapped with delight in the lift and have been showing it to anyone who'll stay still long enough!

2. ... also in my work post! A book from my largest smallcousin! I have been sending her care packages, frequently including books and occasionally painkillers, so she got the collected works of Arthur C Clarke delivered to me because she is apparently appalled that I've read barely any of his stuff.

3. Yesterday in e-mail! My poster abstract for a conference this autumn has been accepted, with the slightly baffling additional bit of

At the moment, your contribution is high on the reserve list of oral presentations, but is not yet scheduled for a talk and currently we are only able to offer you a poster contribution. We anticipate that there may well be some contributors who withdraw, in which case a slot may open up. We will let you know as soon as an opportunity occurs to move you into the talk schedule.

... opinion among those I've polled is divided on whether this is a bizarre courtesy measure or something they actually mean.

4. Interactions with housemate continue just routinely absolutely fab. <3

5. Have heard from a friend in a way that suggests that (1) he doesn't hate me and (2) the reason he dropped off the face of the earth around March is not another major depressive episode but instead that he has been arranging to move in with his girlfriend.

6. ... I just became the trans rep for Imperial's staff LGBT network. Accidentally. This is probably good, in that I will be able to be useful, but also a bit facepalmy.

7. I voted on some action to be taken by my institutional branch of my union, for the first time, which feels like being a very particular kind of grown-up.

8. It was spitting this morning - raining gently enough that it was quite pleasant to be out in in t-shirt, but hard enough that the normal congregatory points for smokers on my way into work were mercifully mostly clear. And the rain'll be good for the garden - the hebe was starting to look a bit sad but I hadn't quite got my act together to water it.

9. There's another really enthusiastically happy hebe on my way into work - currently lots of big purple floral spikes, and behind it a tree with graduated pink-to-white floral spikes that I don't understand at all but suspect is another NZ species given how that one's planted up more generally; I should take photos and get my mother to identify it, I suspect...

10. Yesterday was extremely wobbly, but I was sensible and took care of myself and today I am managing to leave not only my room but also the house again, HURRAH.

1. TOL & TOG were just round the corner from home tonight for a show, so via Shenanigans involving me forgetting that Hammersmith isn't actually a single station they stood around in the sun with me for a bit before they vanished in to show (which twitter suggests was as good as I'd expect from Penn & Teller) and I got hugs and sunshine and stern looks about eating enough and bullshit about science and a brief discussion about the point of painting, and having left the lab it was fairly easy to pick up dinner on the way back in. (And on the way out I stopped off at one of my ridiculous corner shops and acquired stacks and stacks of emergency chocolate.) (And while on the topic of polymer chemistry and feeling vaguely contrite about the extent to which these people look after me, sebastienne talked sense at me and I continue to feel better.)

2. We are tonight providing accommodation, as we occasionally do, for waifs & strays with appointments at Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic. Because, fundamentally, we're a trans-positive household a fifteen-minute walk from same, most of which involves walking through a rather nice cemetery, and consequently this is a concrete thing we can do that is helpful.

3. My supervisor appears to continue genuinely pleased with my labwork: we're trying a different introduction system with the mass spec this time around and the ion beam is stable and as of 11.30pm, every single data point from the past two days is usable (where with the introduction system I had been using, I was getting maaaaybe 50% usable data). Or, to put it another way, my chemistry has been fine and my tuning the machine up has been fine (she's popped in to check a couple of times while I was elsewhere, which I know about because she's told me after the fact that she had a play around and didn't change anything because it was spot on) (though I should really have retuned before putting tonight's overnight run on but if I had I'd've ended up locked into the building and that is no-one's idea of fun, and in any case the machine is pretty much rock-solid -- I've lost a tiny bit of sensitivity but nothing that should be a problem, and I'll tweak it back up when I get in tomorrow), it's just the ways in which these are fundamentally finicky beasts that are not actually under my control. Also, supervisor tends to rise early, so me leaving work at midnight means that when she gets in at 7am she can swing by the basement, have a quick poke, and make sure everything's where it should be, and set another thing going if necessary; and then by the time I rock up around 10am it's ready for me to have a poke again.

( lots! )

Item the first: I turned Rilke's Briefe an einen jungen Dichter into an ebook. Here's the epub; if you'd like other formats let me know, because I can trivially do conversions (with calibre) and upload. (There's a free translation into English as HTML; if you want that ebooked too, get the translator's permission and let me know and I can do that for you.) A favour request: Rilke's letters aren't up on Gutenberg, hence making the conversion myself. I'd offer my ebook to them but, er, they appear to require signing up to a forum to go "here I made you a thing", and I absolutely cannot face that, so if any of you are already involved with them, I'd appreciate it if you'd pass this on? (And, you know, if they wanted to compile it into a volume with the rest of his letters, that'd be nice too, but I'm not going to bother doing that til I've decided whether I get enough value out of this set for it to be worth it.)

Item the second: I've taken a small pile of not-terribly-good photos of entertaining/otherwise pleasing bits and bobs in my area. (I am... getting used to my point-and-shoot. The last one I owned took 35mm film, didn't have any ability to zoom, and I haven't used it in, er, A Very Long Time.) ( Seven photos below the cut. )

Some of the ways in which I modify my behaviour, consciously or unconsciously, when around allistic folk:

• I try to suppress stimming (flapping and rocking are most common for me)
  
• I try to make people at least feel like I'm making eye contact (not an issue when they're talking because I'm lip-reading; more of an issue when I'm talking)
  
• I reflect body language, accent and mode of communication (e.g. ask/offer)
  
• I check in regularly about whether I am talking too much or too loudly, or being boring
  
• I pay a great deal of conscious attention to reciprocity (if someone asks me how I am, and I reply in detail, then my assumption is that obviously this indicates interest and is an invitation to them to respond in kind; apparently that is not actually how allistic people work???)
  
• I put effort into making sure I'm providing enough context/explanation, and making explicit trains of thought that produce apparent jumps in conversational topic
  
• I have to think really quite hard about humour, and making humour identifiable

Probably more stuff, but that's what I've come up with over the course of this evening in conversation with t'housemate.

Yesterday I woke up at around 6; by 6.15 had started to worry that I was this awake without my alarm having gone off and checked the time; and at 6.20 decided I wasn't getting back to sleep and might as well go into work. So I did, and I got a lot done, and oh but it is light at six, and the air was crisp and lovely as I made my (grouchy, limping) way up Exhibition Road; I was in lab by 7.30, whereupon I started the process of drying beakers, weighing out rock powder, and faffing about with HF. That I was quite so underslept and quite so ill goes a long way towards explaining why I had a Minor Incident (but no exposure; deets in a locked post). But! I got more Science Progress done than I'd even been hoping to manage, which puts me in a really good position for next week; and then I printed off and posted some documents for alexseanchai; and then in sunshine and relief I made my way home and ate apple cake my housemate had Produced (as if by magic!) while packing.

And then I got myself onto a train - in, still, the sunshine; you might be spotting a theme here - towards the dwelling of Those Two People; and upon arrival I took the gentle wander up the hill and smiled with delight about all the cherry blossom, and also about the fact that everything is getting ready for Holy Week: the forsythia and catkins are all exactly as they should be.

Upon arrival I was greeted by That Fucking Cat. I was, in fact, accosted at the top of the stairs, and required to scritch her. Including her belly. (She does this utterly bizarre thing of rolling over onto her back, looking appealingly at you until you scritch her belly, and then closing her eyes in bliss and not attacking your hand at all. The closest she comes is very gently bracing a back paw against your forearm, claws carefully and delicately sheathed. It is bizarre.) That One Lady ended up glancing over from the sofa to see why I was taking so long to actually make it into the house proper and say a proper hello, and then burst out laughing.

( Obligatory image of the terrible animal. )

( Read more... )

It's amazing how productive I can be when I'm avoiding sewing and hoovering.