who only by moving can balance

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Subject: Refusing the digital world of late capitalism

[...] [Book] surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support.

[...]

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1. Staying up until 3am finishing T. Kingfisher's The Wonder Engine was not the best idea I've ever had, but -- I have an e-reader that facilitates late-night reading-under-the-covers (being both book and torch!), and I did go back to sleep after breakfast, and I enjoyed the book a very great deal, so on the whole I think that's a win.
   
2. Text message from my GP surgery: the paperwork A dropped off with them for me has been completed and is available for collection, at no charge, so that's in my future. (Or more probably in A's future.)
   
3. I have completed all the fiddly bits of a tedious tech-repair job, that was made substantially more difficult by failing to register a step in the instructions for part replacement #1, necessitating part replacement #2, but all I gotta do now is get the screen to stick down properly (currently it's face-down with a pile of books on top of it) and I'll be done and can reclaim the coffee table for ART. (If the pile-of-books doesn't work I'll grumble and use the extra dedicated adhesive I have.)
   
4. We cleaned the fridge (everything out, including the shelves, and washed; almost everything back in, rather better organised).
   
5. For bonus points, we had a communication mismatch at the beginning, and I retreated to a different room to hyperventilate and read a book for 15 minutes, and when I returned... A had calmly and relatively cheerfully carried on Getting Stuff Done without panicking in turn and I was able to slot in and be helpful, and I only cried a very little bit during the debrief.
   
6. ( Food. )
   
   
7. Having Dealt With the tech repair, and also (in company) The Fridge, and consumed food, I took a deep breath and begged A's indulgence because, uh, we're at a stage in the *gestures* everything where I had no idea where my house keys were, and I'd checked all the obvious places inside the house with no luck, so I got A to take me out to the car to soothe me about whether I'd left them there, which I was increasingly anxious about. No joy from looking in all the obvious sensible places -- but then A opened one of the back doors and did a three-second tidy and they Materialised! So that's one more thing off the agitation stack.
   
8. Work is going Interestingly. Still no idea what to make of the Bizarre Graph, but it's percolating.
   
9. I've got my act most-of-the-way-to-together to buy myself a new pillow. I've had the current memory-foam-hybrid for getting on for five years, if I recollect rightly; it started out great but it's showing its age and actually if I'm waking up sore and struggling (more than usual) to get to sleep, it is very definitely worth getting a replacement. I've a shortlist; actually making a decision probably happens tomorrow night, now, because I want to talk it over with A (in case he wants in on the order, all else aside) and, well, The Fridge.
   
10. This preposterous mug, linked to me by a friend. It is emblazoned with the first line of Catullus 16 (NSFW text). Claims the description: "Translates to 'I love you'". I have been enjoying it all evening.
    

1. It is so so lovely to have consistent access to pear juice.
   
2. Adam cooked us breakfast this morning: half a punnet of mushrooms that needed et, scrambled eggs, toasted sourdough. I struggle with mornings, and having breakfast Appear makes me feel very loved.
   
3. We played a game of Scrabble; Adam trounced me, to my delight, in that I finished at 353 (which is about normal for me) and he wound up at 558. I am very much enjoying being indulged to the tune of this game, and playing collaboratively, and and and.
   
4. Relatedly: I am fond both of the Travel Scrabble set I liberated from the iron bookcase under the piano in the mouldering ancestral pile, and the Scrabble dictionary WITH BRIEF DEFINITIONS I found in TK Maxx a few years ago, having previously had no idea any such thing existed.
   
5. On the topic of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, my supervisor e-mailed back with surprising haste the other evening, in terms that I will affectionately summarise as "lol sucks to be you" -- because yeah, this data is interesting enough I really do need to go digging.
   
6. GEOROC and GeoREM do, however, make my life vastly easier, even if they are still (some of them, at least) frame-based web design the age of which does not bear thinking about.
   
7. My e-reader is a marvellous thing. I keep forgetting, but I've found a place for it to live in my small bag that Goes Everywhere.
   
8. Blue stripy pyjamas also slipper socks. (I am wearing them. They are warm and soft and I am cosy.)
   
9. Raclette! And French that is nowhere near fluent or easy, but is sufficient for me to communicate about important basics.
   
10. I continue to be mildly surprised by this, but: I enjoy telling anecdotes, I enjoy amusing people, I enjoy this being a skill I apparently have in at least some contexts. I have had several opportunity to in the past few days, and have been basking a little.

1. post title: how our nibling Thoughtfully described us once we had finished flinging them & their sibling around and generally encouraging them to shriek happily, and had retreated to the sofa and gone in a pile. I am Charmed.
   
2. POST POST POST. Two items this morning: my medical notes from Belfast, which I get to copy & send off to the DWP (along with a copy of the UN CRPD report, with relevant paragraphs about which of my human rights are being violated highlighted), and a new-to-me phone, because, er, the old one was gradually disintegrating, as... is my habit. I gave in to Our Googly Overlords and thereby copied a bunch of stuff (including my SCREEN LAYOUT) over with Minimal Faff and... it was pretty great. It works! It's responsive! It's great.
   
3. Adventures in hair: I tried a variation on the bog mummy -- not French braiding the top plait, just doing a simple braid -- and this too seems to work well.
   
4. I have excellent pyjamas. I found a very soft very stripy blue shirt in a charity shop for really not much at all, the other week, and on the one hand it in no way actually matches the (very blue, very stripy) pyjama bottoms I already owned, and on the other it goes really well with them and they are Soft and make me Happy. It's not actually the nightshirt of my dreams (which seems weirdly hard to track down currently, despite the fact that M&S were making them a few years back now, as evidenced by me_and owning one that I keep threatening to nick).
   
5. Other things that are, in a similar Soft and Comfortable vein, Super Heckin' Great: my slipper sooooocks.
   
6. My data from this mass spec session is Entirely Satisfactory. I've worked out useful filtering criteria, most of the uncertainties are eminently plausible, I've started plotting figures. Lots of things to think about & notes being taken & I am Enjoying this.
   
7. My bookchair is comfortably up to the job of A Large Hardback, which I need to work on remembering because goodness it makes reading dead trees so much more pleasant & possible to do hands-free. (I can BRUSH MY HAIR while READING a PAPER BOOK; it's great.)
   
8. We had some of A's family visiting, which provided useful impetus to Tidy Up A Bit.
   
9. Indulgent supper: warm milk with vanilla & nutmeg, and a slice of buttered toast. I am feeling very contented.
   
10. Actually, yes, that: I am feeling, currently, secure and contented and happy, and profoundly aware of & grateful for all of the ways in which my life is comfortable. I've burrowed myself out a small space of comfortable existence, and it's very soothing.

1. The NEW WHEELS have arrived. I don't get to mount them yet because I've had to order new torque receivers -- the ones that came with were for a rigid chair, rather than a folding one -- but I've done that, for the princely sum of about thirty quid, and they should be with me Soon. (In that I paid on Tuesday morning and it's 5-10 working days until they're due to show up with my dealership and then they'll need to be posted out to me, but sooooooon and for much less money than I was expecting.)
   
2. I made it to the supermarket this evening late enough on in proceedings that there were British raspberries marked down to 45p a punnet. I was very restrained and bought only three, but have been gradually eating some over the course of the afternoon. (Also acquired at bargain prices: leeks and celeriac, to go with the tiny carrots and the pre-existing potatoes. Tomorrow dinner will be mash & veg sausages & veg, I think.)
   
3. Every now and again I think "wait, I wrote a poem about this", and go back through my poetry tag, and go "huh, I... really like this??? I really like this" about a lot of stuff. There are fragments of poem in cometary orbits, over the last year, that might yet coalesce, that've condensed mostly between the hours of midnight and one o'clock. (Scared. Scarred. This line/that draws me out/or hems me round/defines me...; a word that means at once too much and not enough -- to be superfluous; Put pen to page and --/go. An arrow from a bow/or light across the wave; Perspective narrows to a point./A knife. You are the lens through which/I magnify my life.)
   
4. YOGHURT. Most successful yoghurt yet, I think! Not entirely sure what I did differently but "much fresher milk" probably helped. (I've been ruminating -- thank you -- about The Environmental Impact Of Dairy, and had been wondering how much "British dairy consumed in Britain" had in common with The General US-centric Discourse About How Bad Dairy Is, and then highlyeccentric linked to a BVA blog post about net zero carbon emissions that I still need to read in detail. I'm still thinking about it! It's interesting data to have.)
   
5. On which topic, Waitrose No.1 cave-aged goats' cheese is a Hard Yes from here, or at least, is as far as treats and when-reduced go.
   
6. I am mildly gratified that every time so far I've gone looking up reference pictures of the plants I'm colouring in, they've been rather closer to the brighter shades I'm getting than the darker ones in the example illustrations.
   
7. Today's Primary Job was dragging myself down to the pharmacy, to say "um, you appear to have only given me half the meds I was prescribed, I don't have an IOU, what... gives...?" a fortnight on from picking up the first half, and it was actually trivially sortable, and now I have an extra carrier bag of medication, and it is Good.
   
8. I've signed up to volunteer with Labour, locally, between now and the general. I am properly pleased that their sign-up form is doing the obvious sensible thing of "here's the primary things we need volunteers for, here's a long list of subsidiary things, select all that apply to you" with reasonable breakdowns, go them.
   
9. Adventures in composting: the filament used with the 3d printer A has access to is PLA, polylactic acid, which is biodegradable. I've been putting filament ends and failed prints into the bin, and have now completed enough of a cycle to establish that single filament sections and even some fairly chunky failed prints will disappear entirely in a single cycle; larger failed prints that I didn't manage to break down manually in advance remain recognisable but are rendered sufficiently fragile that it's trivial to break them into small pieces and chuck them back in at the top. This is very cheering.
   
10. A miscellany: feeling okay about letting go of some broken things I'd been hanging on to out of a sense of guilt and a fear that they might come in useful; lots of social plans for this weekend; poking around shops this evening and thereby acquiring some small gifts for friends and some high-percentage-cotton socks for me; bread prepped to be baked for breakfast; A brought me a traditional post-therapy roti gift; grocery deliveries are amazing; horn practice; plants.