who only by moving can balance

Unfamiliar but meticulously planned route (mostly on tube) to friend's house in Peckham earlier: actual panic including some capslocky flailing text messages.

Improvisational night buses back: not a problem.

Which, as best as I can tell, is because (1) nobody was expecting me/waiting for me, and (2) it was travelling homeward so the journey got progressively easier. Anyway, the upshot is that it took me 90 minutes to get home (via three buses), of which half an hour was walking; I could probably have shaved some extra time off by taking a route I was less familiar with but hey, whatever, I got a lot of code written on the buses and successfully made it home, so.

Ten good things:
1. Awesome ex-housemate C's birthday not-a-party; pizza + cake + a bafflingly preposterous film.
2. ... I made a cake while simultaneously making dinner and reducing the washing-up pile to tractable size...
3. ... and just about squeaked it all into the available time after getting back from work, where I sorted out cleaning up the mass spec.
4. Lots more of the ridiculous script! Really I should not be at ~200 lines to plot some bloody graphs I think, and on the other hand I'm doing rather better error handling and abstracting lots etc etc etc. (Well, relative to an early incarnation. It's still preeeeeetty specific to my particular data and how I've piled it up.)
5. I am continuing to derive more satisfaction than is perhaps reasonable from the silly computer game I'm being ridiculously completionist about.
6. I am having a lot of thoughts and feelings about being-imperfect-in-public, and what it means that I am proud of putting up shoddy code and poem drafts and such, and maybe there will be a longer post on this.
7. Housemate (who is a pretty integral part of my support system at this stage) has told me about a couple of medium-duration trips away from home she'll be taking in the next few weeks. I continue not freaking out despite the relevant trauma (like, it isn't even sitting up and sniffing). This continues incredibly validating.
8. Having articulated that I have spent the past couple of months pretty continuously low-grade triggered, I am much calmer and much more together and much more relaxed and it is awesome. It is so, so nice. It is so nice.
9. ... Korra 4x04 went some way towards redeeming the terrible politics of the first three seasons??? Decidedly partial, but!
10. Sleep-tracking app appears to be having the effect of encouraging me to consciously work on catching up on sleep (and to be more aware of what I do need to average). I'm currently averaging ~8hrs/night; I really do need to get it up to 9, and while that clearly isn't going to be happening tonight it's very nice to have the information. The downside is that when I'm getting ~enough sleep I get much more vivid and memorable (and often unpleasant) dreams than when I'm in continuous major sleep dep, but hey.

Oh! And I washed my hair, and Ancillary Sword is more and more appealing the more I sit with it, so I suspect I will be going back to it for a slow-and-steady reread sometime soonish.. General Please.

Things are not in fact all doom and gloom - I think I'm depressed at the moment, but that weird pseudodepression minus anhedonia I get and never really spot in good time because what even - so here is a list of the things I am enjoying.

1. Hel came over for dinner last night! Housemate is out on Wednesday nights; I'm terrible at leaving work and making there be eveningfood if I don't have someone to feed; so Hel and I are doing this thing where they do me the favour that is coming round and being fed and letting me show them Korra season 1 (currently; next up: Elementary iHope!).
   
2. That One Lady made me a necklace and it is lovely. :-)
   
3. And she has agreed to accompany me to the London WtNV recording! Which I was basically only interested in doing if it was a thing she wanted to do and was willing to spend the evening with me (audiovisual processing is hard, I'm way behind on WtNV since the episode last year with the computer that broke my brain in audio processing ways, etc).
   
4. Good conversation with supervisor yesterday, which actually breaks down into twothree parts. The first is that I had a potentially stressful meeting with my supervisor and didn't have my anxiety pre-meeting exceed baseline for possibly the first time ever in my history of having project supervisors; the second is that she has usefully strategised on ways to help me get my head round some of the issues with writing; and the third is that there is a particular thing that's been jumping up and down going PAY ATTENTION TO ME for the past week or so, and we have agreed that if in my first of these writing exercises I can convince her that following this line of investigation is worth doing, I get to give her a list of samples and she'll acquire them for me. :D
   
5. the boything got me a new enormous teal towel to go with the existing enormous teal towel, so now I can offer guests an actually clean towel that isn't a small :-)
   
6. I am ludicrously smug about the fact that That One Gent liked some of my vim set-up (configured while at OSBridge) enough that he's nicked it.
   
7. Aloe drink! Aloe drink with rosewater and takmuria. Food that is texturesssss.
   
8. Counselling session on Friday (assuming counsellor doesn't have to cancel. I will actually have a tantrum if they do.)
   
9. Oh, right, another point from the supervisor meeting -- several months ago I went "BUGGRE ALLE THIS FOR A LARK" and redeployed some lab equipment in a way that was more useful and massively reduced my frustration levels (and plastic waste!). I told supervisor I'd done it (rather than asking permission) at the time; last week she had cause to be doing chemistry with the MSci student in such a way that she encountered this change I had made in, as it were, the field. "THAT IS SO MUCH BETTER," she said, relief and gratitude all over. :D
   
10. The internet is still full of photographs of tiny turtles going "WHY AM I ON TOP OF STRAWBERRY WHAT DO D:"
    

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! )

One for me, one for batrachian.

Absolutely wonderful weekend with the polymer to cap off a surprisingly frenetic first week in which very little actually got done; I managed to get my Housing Benefit application in then hare off across town for dinner + gig with people, then home to curl up and go to sleep on the boything, and then... the weekend was just lovely. (Huh. Apparently I consider the boything's place home now, in some senses. That's nice.) And now I'm curled up in my own bed in a different home - my parental home - having drunk wine (NZ GrooVee, not that I expect that to mean anything to anyone else, but it is special to us) and played Scrabble and done work and got another kilo of redcurrants in and - tomorrow morning I will have to get an early-ish train in order to get back to London in time for me 11am meeting, and nonetheless: yes. Families, lost and found and chosen.

Most of my DW presence this week has been over at poetree, where I've written a series of posts loosely grouped around the theme of change: on loss; on bodies; on motion; on communication; and on hope.

One way and another, I am feeling very much part of a whole, and very much connected - between chosen family and my clan-of-origin and liv's insight and advice and generosity when it comes to my feelings about how I'm about to start teaching and - just yes, really. Yes.

Korra starts on the 13th! That's less than two weeks away! Elementary starts on the 26th! By which time I will hopefully have moved house, my very word!

Blanket fort! Squee!! Entirely too many exclamation marks!!!

What are you excited about!

(Please no spoilers. Anything not in the Korra 2 trailer counts as a spoiler for me. But I don't really care about anything except those two shows. Well, that's a lie, I do care about some things, but not in ways that are likely to be an issue for spoilers in comments.)

well, it's an excuse to play around with image editing, right? be warned that I Don't Really Icons ;)

Total Icon Count: 10

Teasers:

( Icons Here! )