who only by moving can balance

Three things from vass for me to write about. You are welcome to ask me to give you three things you may or may not know or care about to write about, but I do not guarantee to give you prompts in a timely fashion.

Shells: my mother's favourite, of the ones that show up on the beach down in Cornwall, are the blue-rayed limpet, generally very small and very delicate, with bright blue, almost metallic stripes. It turns out these are an example of structural colour (Nature paper).

Also very common down around those parts are banded snails, of which I am extremely fond. What I hadn't realised until just now is that they mostly don't eat living foliage, apparently? So hurrah also for that.

My other principal association with shells, at the moment, is the rescue chickens kept by a couple who live just around the corner from the allotment. They're free-range in the back garden, and there's unsurprisingly a lot more variability in size, colour, and shell thickness than one tends to find in supermarkets. In general, from these hens, lighter shells are thinner. I'm gradually getting the hang of how gentle to be with them when breaking them.

Online public access catalogues: honestly my main and immediate feeling on this topic is ongoing shakes-fist-at-clouds about the University of Cambridge's redesign of its online catalogue, which has made a lot of people very angry and been widely considered a bad idea.

The one I've most recently used in anger is the NHM's data portal; I was hoping they'd have some more detail on some rocks I've been working on, but alas they do not. (Specifically, I've been working with the powders, and I'm interested in the petrography of whole rock samples -- that is, which minerals were present prior to crushing, and in roughly what proportions.)

I do also use the catalogue for my local library, intermittently, but probably the one that's annoyed me least recently is the BL's.

So: I use them a fair bit, for a variety of materials, and am generally in favour. My opinions on architecture and interface are more towards the "I know what I hate when I see it" end of the spectrum than the "informed opinion" one.

Bleach: needs keeping in the fridge in a dark-coloured bottle if you want to use it as a reagent, clearly labelled with the date it was opened, because good grief does that stuff like reacting with The Air.

Bleach isn't, thankfully, one of the chemicals I'm convinced is Nasty and also Dangerous. I am pretty relaxed about using it; I do wear gloves when I'm doing A's hair, but that's about the extent of my concern. A's hair is in fact where I most frequently use it these days: it's more relevant to organic chemistry than the stuff I'm doing currently, on the whole, and I've definitely not used it in anger at work since before I started the PhD.

(It also goes down the loo once a week: we are a household of autistics, so A does bedtime things first, and I use the bathroom last; on Sunday nights the loo gets bleached. And then in the mornings A uses the bathroom first - again - which means that I don't have to think about it any further, for which I am particularly grateful because The Next Step involves The Toilet Brush, which is Nasty and also Dangerous. All I gotta do is leave the bleach bottle on the closed lid of the toilet, this being a habit I acquired from A, and then by the time I stagger out of bed on Monday morning it has vanished again as if 'twere never there.)

... which I am stealing because I suspect synecdochic will not be managing it this week even though as it turns out rah is around (but I am keeping this open in case you'd rather play here, or you'd like to do so in both places, or whatever <3). Please do feel free to signalboost, and please know that you are welcome & encouraged to participate even if you're not a regular around here. <3

Mondays, every week, let's celebrate ourselves, to start the week right. Tell me what you're proud of. Tell me what you accomplished last week, something -- at least one thing -- that you can turn around and point at and say: I did this. Me. It was tough, but I did it, and I did it well, and I am proud of it, and it makes me feel good to see what I accomplished. Could be anything -- something you made, something you did, something you got through. Just take a minute and celebrate yourself. Either here, or in your journal, but somewhere.

(And if you feel uncomfortable doing this in public, I've set this entry to screen any anonymous comments, so if you want privacy, comment anonymously and I won't unscreen it. Also: yes, by all means, cheer each other on when you see something you want to give props to!)

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. :-)