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cosmolinguistI had a lot to do today: a kinda tricky day at work, walking Teddy, making dinner, visiting a friend, and I wanted to go to the gym.
And I did all of it! And some chores like moving heavy things around, finalizing the grocery delivery that'll come tomorrow, and doing laundry.
Feels good.
diffrentcoloursToday has been a bit of a weird day. Me and cosmolinguist got up at 6am, were out of the house for 6:45am and at the hospital by 7am. The Elective Surgery Unit wasn't "properly" open, so we got let into the reception area and just wandered around until we found some people who told us where to go sit down. By 8am I was on the ward, I'd been briefed on what was happening, and E knew when to come back and collect me. He went and caught the bus home and had a nap, having done the most important job of getting me to the hospital on time. I was visited by the anaesthetist and the surgeon, both of whom were confident in the procedure.
The apprehension of mortality which had ruined my Friday Yoga had pretty much dissolved by this point and I was determined to just get through it. I was second in the queue of six patients, so I got changed straight away into incredibly snug paper pants, and two surgical gowns - one worn with the flap at the back like usual, and a second opening at the front like a dressing gown over the top to protect my modesty as I walked to the operating theatre, literally at the end of the ward. With 6 patients in a ward designed for 24, CO2 levels were low so I didn't have to mask. I dozed for about an hour and a half, using my rucksack and hoodie as a makeshift pillow. By this point, around 9:30am, I was feeling OK, just exhausted. I think I was too tired to be worried.
I had to sit around outside the theatre for a bit, and get fitted with a cannula by an anaesthetist who was rather brusque. Fortunately such things bother me less than others, and he might have been kinder if I'd made more of a fuss beforehand. The nurse weighed me and said I don't look as heavy as I am, and I bit my tongue rather than go on a rant about the BMI bullshit which has denied me this surgery for years. I got asked what I did so I started talking about apprenticeships and how they're useful for people for whom academic paths don't work out - and how many people with dyslexia or other support needs we find once they've been pushed out of traditional schools, because testing for functional skills is mandatory in an apprenticeship. Turns out I'm still pretty passionate about that, even though it's far removed from what my job actually entails.
I went into the theatre, got settled on the table, started breathing in gas while they injected the general anaesthetic... and woke up in recovery, at about 11:30. ( Vague medical details below )
One of the ward nurses brought me tea and toast which was gratefully received and scoffed. I dozed for a bit, but the guy in the bed next to me, who'd had his inguinal hernia surgery (a complication from a hip replacement) before me, was waiting for his wife and bored and chatty. So I talked with him quite a lot, he's in his late 70s / early 80s, retired from doing computer stuff back in the 1970s. We talked about the changing face of technology over the decades, such as how a modern $1 embedded system can emulate an original Mac Classic. He had military tech experience so I talked about some of my programming jobs in the 90s on classified projects, and also about ISO26262 and MISRA, both standards in functional safety which came about from real-world errors such as the fighter plane which flips upside down if it crosses the equator on autopilot. We talked about dogs and horses (he keeps some where he lives in Altrincham). Lovely conversation but utterly knackering when I was a couple of hours behind him on the recovery from anaesthetic.
Just after his wife arrived to collect him, E arrived to collect me. He helped me get changed out of my tiny paper pants and gown, into the clothes I'd arrived in. By that time I'd had my last set of obs and the water had worked its way through my system so I had a successful wee. So the nurse brought over discharge paperwork, went through some of the details with me: no shower or bath today, no baths for a couple of weeks, no driving for at least 48 hours and until I can safely do an emergency stop without pain; no lifting more than 5-8kg for 4-6 weeks. Then we headed out and grabbed a taxi, getting home around 3:30pm, about 9 hours out of the house.
I've spent the afternoon chilling out on the sofa, drinking 2 litres of apple squash and just starting to feel rehydrated. I was too tired to play games or watch much of anything, until I had a little nap while E was out walking the neighbour's dog. E let me sit at his end of the sofa so I could stretch my legs out, and V lent me their weighted capybara plushy which was comforting. This evening we watched Team GB vs USA in the World Baseball Classic, which was an interesting game for the first 4 innings until the Americans woke up and walked all over the Brits. I'm still feeling tired and woozy - clearly too tired to write a concise DW entry, so well done if you've persevered this far. I'm glad the surgery is over; I hope the recovery is mild because I've got a lot of work to get done by the end of next week! I'm not looking forward to going weeks without any gym though...
cosmolinguistThis will be short because I need to go to bed, but I wanted to say -- particularly for our mutual friends here -- that D had his operation today; it all went just as planned (in his family group chat, his mum his back-on-the-ward selfie looked a bit woozy, and yes, but also he looked just like that before the op because he had to be there at 7 this morning!) and smoothly. He's home, tired and sore but able to watch TV, play video games, eat dinner, watch baseball with me. It's been a nice evening.
( Boring )
I didn't get as much done today as I might have hoped, but I did a good job of prioritizing what needed to happen today vs. what can wait until tomorrow. Really hoping I get better sleep tonight; it's been kinda shitty for a couple weeks and that takes its toll on everything else; I've had a low-grade headache most of the day and I think it's largely the broken sleep and weird dreams.
wildeabandonhafniadiffrentcolours( Talk of health and exercise, mention of death )
This afternoon, me, E & V went to the garden centre in Cheadle for lunch and shopping. I'm not great at gardening and I made a few suggestions which turned out to be unhelpful, which was a bit of a downer. Still, I found a nice white clematis to climb up the plastic skeleton in the garden, and ham, egg and chips for lunch helped perk me up a bit. We ended up getting a buttload of plants to populate the garden - a mixture of flowers, herbs and ferns. And V & E swung by B&M on the way home to get some dirt and decorations to go with it, while I waited in the car.
After getting home, me and E took Teddy for a nice long walk, then I ordered fancy burgers for dinner - if I'm going nil-by-mouth I might as well have a big meal beforehand. Now it's time to pack, and get ready for a very early start - I'm due in hospital at 7:15am!
cosmolinguistThis afternoon, I watched the Nicaragua vs Dominicana in the World Baseball Classic.
It's so loud. I love it. I kept looking up because I heard the kind of crowd noise that my white ass expected to mean someone had just hit a home run or something, and instead it's, like, a check swing or what's almost certainly going to be an infield out or whatever.
Tonight, D and I are watching Japan vs. Korea, in the Tokyodome so I'm hearing more chants and drums and clapping than I've ever heard, even at West Indies cricket matches.
I love it, gotta soak this up as much as I can.
cosmolinguistAfter two days of utter misery at work, I was amazed that I actually got to finish on time -- I had not been expecting to!
The unstoppable force of my executive dysfunction met the immovable object of a deadline to respond to the Government's call for evidence on Developing the automated vehicles regulatory framework.
Ugh. I am so disgusted by the whole concept of self-driving cars that it was...well, not the only reason it's difficult to write about, but it was definitely one of them.
In other car-related news, I'm always delighted to read that other people are noticing the same things I am: not only are car headlights too damn bright, but cars are too damn big.
...while bigger cars may be safer for their occupants, critics insist they are considerably less safe for other road users. "Whether you're in another car [or] a pedestrian, you're more likely to be seriously injured if there's a collision with one of these vehicles," argues Tim Dexter, vehicles policy manager at T&E. He is also concerned about the implications for cyclists.
Research carried out in 2023 by Belgium's Vias Institute, which aims to improve road safety, suggested that a 10cm (3.9in) increase in the height of a car bonnet could increase the risk of vulnerable road users being killed in a collision by 27%. T&E also highlights concerns that high bonnets can create blind spots.
This is also something I've read about in the U.S., thanks to Victoria Scott:
If, in the span of one year, 18 fully-loaded Boeing 747s crashed with no survivors, we’d reappraise airspace. We’d question how we build airplanes and how we train pilots. We would recognize this as a failure of the system, not as individual mistakes of 18 pilots. Our roads should be no different.
The good news is that we have sensible solutions in plain sight: lower speed limits, redesign intersections, build roads that prioritize pedestrians and cars equally, and most importantly, reward automakers for building smaller vehicles with better visibility. The bad news is these require some sacrifice from drivers. Safer roads have lower speed limits—likely enforced by ticketing in one form or another. These roads also require more concentration to drive on. SUVs and pickups would need to revert back to 90s sizing, and all of our cars would need to shrink. These are all a hard sell in America, admittedly, but until they happen, we keep losing lives needlessly.
I genuinely love cars, and I’ve owned some big trucks. I understand the appeal of high speeds and lifted rigs, and I’m loath to give them up. But even I can’t accept a future wherein 7,500 are killed each year, especially when the solutions are so tangible and the rewards so massive. I’d accept small sacrifices if thousands more could live decades longer. I hope the rest of America agrees.
cosmolinguistI listened to the Twins game against Puerto Rico this evening, which was happening while I was making dinner and at the gym.
I figured my Twinkies would get hammered; PR has lots of good players. But two of the best, Francisco Lindor and Carlos Correa, couldn't make the team for insurance reasons. Made me laugh that the lead-off hitter is another Minnesota Twin, Willi Castro. (Apparently he's not as good any more but I still have such a soft spot for him! There were other former Twins on this team too, Eddie Rosario is another that got mentioned fondly by the Twins radio guys, Kris and Dan.
The Twins actually won! 6-3. Good start by Zebby (phew), good game by Alan Roden (who I keep forgetting about; one of the many players they got in the fire sale last trade-deadline).
cosmolinguistI am not surprised at all that someone is gonna try to primary Klobuchar. I'm only mildly surprised it's someone I know online because he's on the same fedi instance as me. I just know him as the Cookie Mom and now he's doing a new thing!
He's campaigning on abolishing the Department of Homeland Security, bringing our neighbors home, and not taking the support of the DFL base for granted.
hafniacosmolinguistHey guess which fuckwit totally spaced on agreeing to a meeting in London this afternoon!
Entirely self-imposed stress. Some combination of agreeing to a thing in March a few weeks ago when that felt very far away, and having last week off.
Starting work this morning after my week off, I settle down to go through my million emails and spot that one of them says"hey Erik I'll be there at 12.54"; "there" is London Bridge and the "today" is unspoken!
Luckily I was, barely, able to get a train there in time (glad it wasn't a morning meeting!), with D kindly getting up early to give me a lift to the station that's most useful: there's trains every 20 minutes to London but now I'm effectively on the 10.15 train when it would have been the 10.55 without his help. Makes a big difference when I would've been getting into Euston about the time I want to be at London Bridge...
I spent the first hour on the train triaging emails (and Teams messages). I'm a little frazzled now so I might give myself the gift of just staring out the window a bit now that we're leaving Rugby (about halfway through my train journey).
cosmolinguistCould not be more perfect after my last post. Maybe I should do this every week...
2. What made you sad?
Remembering random things from my childhood that involved my grandparents looking after my brother and I, and being the only person who's still around to remember those things.
3. What made you angry?
The U.S. and Israel making the lives of people in Gaza as well as Iran harder.
4. What are you looking forward to in the next week?
In a way, I'm looking forward to D having a medical thing done next Sunday, even if it'll mean some discomfort and disruption for the next couple months. Because it's been going on for years and could've been sorted ages ago. But now it finally will be.
5. What are you not looking forward to?
Going back to work after a week off that felt more like three days off.
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fandomtrumpshate this year. So, er. diffrentcoloursToday I missed going to the gym because I had a morning hospital appointment. Next Sunday, I'm having surgery on my umbilical hernia, so today I was having bloods taken, being swabbed for MRSA, and having a pre-operative interview to discuss the procedure. This has taken literal years since I was diagnosed with the hernia in 2022 and dismissed for being fat in 2023 so I'm happy it's finally going ahead.
Other than that we didn't have many plans for the day. I finished playing through Control again, in time for the sequel to come out soon. Then I went upstairs and spent a couple of hours blitzing ADHD paperwork. I got so caught up in this that I forgot to come down for dinner and was exhausted by the time I did. We tuned into a Nunkie MR James stream, but I promptly fell asleep!
After that I made myself a snack and watched this week's Starfleet Academy, which was lovely. It has made me simultaneously curious about and terrified of reading / seeing Our Town.
Also, I noticed that iPlayer has the Derek Jacobi teleplay of Breaking the Code, the biographical play about Alan Turing. It's a much better portrayal of Turing (at least according to the biographies I've read) than the terrible "The Imitation Game". Me and cosmolinguist saw it on stage last October, which was a competent enough production.
cosmolinguistThanks to otter for sharing this video the other day: Emotional Neglect: Healing from the Hidden Trauma of What Didn't Happen
I got around to watching it and it hit me so hard I needed to write this huge long thing about it. It's mostly transcript of the parts of the video that I wanted to make a note of, because it's not very accessible to me otherwise. But my thoughts are sprinkled around the block quotes of course.
( Emotions Draw Our Attention to What Matters to Us )
( Shame, and Phobia of Inner Experiences )
( Unconscious Self-Abandonment )
( Using Emotions to Connect Your Inner World to the Outer World )
cosmolinguistI started getting a migraine halfway through lift club this morning.
I ignored it of course -- just the aura, at that point -- knowing that I'd have a while before it got, y'know, debilitating.
I enjoyed the rest of the exercises. I did nearly fall both at the beginning and the end of the escalator I took to get from the tram to the train, oops. But also I got home fine, via B&M for medicinal snacks -- mostly sugar, which I often crave during migraines, but also one particular 59p instant ramen thing that I suddenly needed, and enjoyed very much for my lunch.
It was that rare rough day for the whole house: D's IBS was playing up and he had to make his brain work on paperwork so much this afternoon that when he finally emerged I wondered if migraines were contagious (luckily he perked up a little after eating something). V slept through all their alarms and so has been off-kilter all day. I slept for four hours this afternoon and after that reached the point where I felt okay unless I tried to move or even think too hard.
Then we watched a Starfleet Academy episode and as soon as Sam mentioned Our Town I was like ...you come to me, on the day of my migraine, and now I'm gonna have to cry? (Crying is fine but a physically unenjoyable experience for me at the best of times. Which, we've established, today is not.) (I got a tear in my eye, but even that was only at the very end.)
Like I've said here, Our Town is largely responsible for why I write almost every day here. "I can't look at everything hard enough" fucking haunts me (of course we heard that line in the episode), and it's important to me to look at things as hard as I can while they are happening.
tl;dr: People are actually bad at predicting how much they'll enjoy reading back what they've written about their lives! Writing about the ordinary experiences of your life can be even more cheering to you when you go back and read them than the extraordinary ones.
A nice reminder on an excessively ordinary day.
cosmolinguistI slept like ass again, but if I'm gonna wake up at 6am it was nice to wake up to good news: the obvious bigots of Reform didn't win, and the more normie bigots of Labour didn't win either -- the Greens won!
I don't really care what this means for Labour or Keir Starmer -- it has never in my 20 years of living here made much tangible difference who the Prime Minister is -- I'm just glad to have an MP who might not be totally useless because I've had enough of that the last couple years! We've had a functionally useless MP in Gorton and Denton since Gwynne lost the Labour whip and his ministerial post but kept voting along with Labour anyway. Worst of both worlds: he couldn't really advocate for us any more but still voted like he would've before. Not that he was much use as public health minister: my hopes were high when he first got the position, especially as he was open about his Long Covid (which I think ended up being why he had to resign on health grounds), but he was a real disappointment to people I know who have ME or LC who'd also expected him to help, and he wasn't interested in advocating for clean air in public places or anything that would help with the ongoing pandemic, and my attempt to explain to him the public health implications of transphobia-as-policy (like the totally-predictable spike in teen suicides) didn't get anywhere either.
And more widely, of course, this is making some people feel more hopeful than we have in a long time. My queer and community-defense group chats were full of relief, congratulations to the volunteers we know who knocked on doors and did other thankless work for this (in the rain! even for Manchester it's been rainy lately), and a little bit of giddy meme-making.
There's all kinds of speculation now on what this means for the upcoming local elections in England (and devolved government elections in both Wales and Scotland, but they get to have nationalistic parties to vote for there too), as well as for Labour and Reform and so on.
But for now, there's a lot of hope in a lot of people who didn't have much (I caught a link to this video and watched it before I realized it's Owen Jones, heh), and that is a great gift.
hafniahafniatimeasmymeasure
