who only by moving can balance

Last time I talked (in the main post) about weighing and digestion (and in comments about HF handling protocols), and left matters at "so now it gets to sit and stew in its own juices for 48 hours".

Which means that I return to twelve very small pressure cookers of rock soup, not to be confused with stone soup.

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Some of you have specifically mentioned being interested in seeing other people's responses to this week's thefridayfive, and I'm sitting around nervously watching the mass spec run without the concentration to do anything more useful, so here you go.

Content note: this week's theme is grocery shopping and meal planning. My answers therefore involve mention of sensory issues with food, dietary restrictions, and disordered eating.

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Of course, what these questions don't touch on is HAVE I MENTIONED I HAVE AN ALLOTMENT. :D I make choices about what to grow (and where) for convenience; for example, I don't like buying cut herbs because (i) I feel vaguely guilty and (ii) they're never the right quantities, but I do like fresh herbs, so in pots on the verandah I've got mint, parsley, rosemary, sage, chives, and bay. I'm on the verge of buying seeds for two kinds of basil; an honourable mention to the ancestral wild garlic, that springeth green. I also had tomatoes on the patio (... I still haven't decided what to call it; "decking" seems awfully USois, somehow, and isn't quite in my active vocabulary) this summer, which was convenient and enjoyable enough that I'm likely to do it again. (I might also try cucumbers on the patio, depending on how the weather goes and whether I actually buy a greenhouse.)

At the allotment I'm prioritising things it's ridiculously expensive to buy (poppy seed! caraway seed! hopefully, if I get my act together, asparagus! bay leaves! soft fruit! hopefully some saffron, thanks to ewt!), things that come in entirely the wrong amounts always and are awkward to store (spinach!), things I always wince over the cost of and can rarely be persuaded to indulge myself on (fennel! purple sprouting broccoli! pak choi! shallots! interesting salad leaves! hopefully passionfruit!), things that are Brightly Coloured (this season I'm going to be experimenting with Painted Mountain sweetcorn, rainbow quinoa and purple chillis, among others), things it's otherwise tricksy to find (root parsley! :D), and things that are Just Better when they're really ludicrously fresh (hiiiii peas). I'd already been trying to eat seasonally; I'm looking forward to spending more time paying attention to plants, and trying to remind myself that I'm not going to be starting everything off hideously too late even if I am only getting back from Belfast at the end of February.

This is of course my first year with the allotment so I don't... entirely have a sense of how my shopping patterns will actually be affected, but I Am Excited To Find Out: I've already been enjoying working with the rhubarb and beetroot neighbours have desperately fobbed off on me, and with the things I've managed to get going already. So, you know, if compatible with your diet, should you visit me over the summer there's a very high chance that you'll be fed Things What I Grew (That Aren't The Sourdough), and should I visit you you might get brought A Tribute...

please entertain me! with An Interesting Fact or a story or questions! I might not get to most of them interaction-wise until tomorrow, but I will appreciate them.

(If you have sent me an e-mail recently in which you e.g. ask me how I am, the reason I haven't replied is that my brain shorted out on the idea of giving you a proper answer At That Point, so now I need to get up the activation energy to get moving again. Probably tomorrow. I like and appreciate you and appreciate the e-mails and they are in no sense unwanted or an imposition, just, you know, brains. <3)

[Content notes: see title; minor surgery]

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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.

Two irritations, first of all: ( Read more... )

Better things:

1. Vienna Teng. Still on a kick. Lots of Antebellum (title) and Recessional (I want to search for her in the offhand remarks; who are you, a stranger in the shell of a lover? dark curtains drawn by the passage of time...) at the moment. (Also quietly but consistently, Blue Caravan: my true love is a man that I haven't seen in years/he said go where you have to, for I belong to you/until my dying day; so like a fool blue caravan/I believed him and I walked away...)
   
2. I got my act together to phone Student Finance England back. I mostly didn't explode in a shower of anxiety, though I did end up slightly snappishly saying "if you're going to use my name all the time, call me Alex", but I think that given that she was, well, using it every other sentence; and I had introduced myself as Alex at the beginning of the call... I did also end up interrupting some, but that was because she was reading off a hideously unclear script that wasn't really relevant. Apparently they really do want me to send them duplicate copies of the letters detailing my endometriosis that they already have, because sending them the exact same copies will mean that I've still got the incurable condition I had at undergrad that I might otherwise have got better from...? Anyway, this is turning into a rant, but the point is, I Did The Thing.
   
3. I continue to enjoy the Toby Daye books.
   
4. Guiltknitting is on the home stretch - last block of colour, final bit of beading, then finishing.
   
5. I have in the oven more of the puttanesca pasta bake, which is brilliant because it means that I am sorted for meals for the rest of the mass spec run.
   
6. Supervisor and lab manager concurred it wasn't my fault that the mass spec was playing up (and with any luck it'll behave itself over night so I can start getting data tomorrow).
   
7. I have successfully bought the tupperware my supervisor instructed me to, and additionally replenished our stocks of Sainsbury's Basics Italian Hard Cheese and Osem parev chicken-style stock powder.
   
8. I have a microwaveable waterproof soup pot thing that has a steam release vent. Realisation of the morning: I can prep hot chocolate in it and microwave it once I'm at work. WINNING HERE.
   
9. I tricked myself into rendering the kitchen semi-habitable while dinner was cooking, hurrah, including some long-overdue breadpet-management. (On the downside my hands are still recovering from some insect bites - even with antihistamines in my system I react quite impressively - and are consequently Not Best Pleased with me for the washing-up. No, I can't wear gloves, they're almost all latex and I refuse to use disposables.)
   
10. ... yeah, actually, I'm really pleased with myself about work stuff - productive conversation with my supervisor in which I requested a meeting to discuss two different areas of the literature in addition to talking about conference wossnames and my 21-month assessment. Maybe if I'm feeling really enthusiastic I'll have an outline of the talk to bring with to said meeting. It is really nice feeling semi-competent.

(oh, oh let me be your Augustine)

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.

... 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 think the reason there's an entire societal mess around "I am sorry" ("I recognise that I have done you a wrong and accept culpability" versus "wow, this situation is absolute shite and I wish to express commiserations") is in part because "I regret" has become old-fashioned/lawyerspeak. Thoughts? Not an exact mapping, but I think there is something there.