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"dust in the wind" my entire ass

Got my orthotics today. My foot still hurts. This is taking too long to sort itself out and I wish to register a complaint.

***

Lord Brock has figured out what time steroid dosing happens and has started reminding me about it because he knows he'll get treats immediately after. He still hates getting medicated, but he hates it so much less than the gabapentin (I think it tasted worse) that he will almost barely tolerate it and then happily snarffle up the treats once the dosing part is done with.

***

Roof repairs unlocked. Dude also does the kind of work needed for the stairs so he's going to give me a quote for that as well. AND he thinks he can work with his plumber to drop the sump pump into the floor properly so it takes up less space and won't leave an open water feature in the room. He send me some links with examples of what he wants to do, and honestly it would be a huge improvement.

***

Project raccoon did NOT go as originally planned. Original contractor had said that the stairs would just flip up so I could clean underneath them. No, not so much.

The problem is that the wooden stairs are basically a triangle set in a sunken concrete hole. The back/top of the stairs is supported by a piece of wood in the shape of a T. To get under them you have to pull the whole thing towards the interior door to make room behind the triangle to flip it up on it's back. Only the T isn't solid enough, when I tried it the bottom of the wood stayed in the same spot while the top cracked and splintered. I was able to climb to the top and kind of kick the T forward but not far enough to make room to flip it. So I could stand there and hold the stairs up, because they're not heavy, but I couldn't get under it at the same time.

Yesterday and today daughter came over to work on the yard, and this afternoon the ex-housemate & their wife dropped by to pick up some government forms that had been delivered to the house. So the four of us picked up the stairs bodily and moved them out of the staircase. The ex-housemate has anosmia, so they volunteered to shovel up the very very decayed raccoon. Garbage day isn't for another two weeks so we just dumped him out by the railroad tracks and covered him with dirt. And then shovelled up the accumulated mud and vermin that had collected under the stairs and dropped it in the same spot.

It was so gross, y'all. So gross. But it's out of my basement doorway now and it's in a spot where it will be unlikely to bother anybody except the occasional passing coyote.

The daughter and I spent the next three hours digging the drainage pit. I found the sand layer I was hoping for, and then underneath that (about four feet down) is a layer of a broken shist which I think will work even better. We have probably about 80% of the trench dug out - one more day should be enough to finish if off. Then I'll line it with cinderblocks and start filling it in with rocks. The trench is probably four times as big as I'll need to be in any normal year, but since 100-year storms are coming every 10 years now (and probably every 2 by the time I ever leave this house) it seems like a good investment of labour.

Entertainment was provided by a juvenile robin that realized all that turned earth was a worm goldmine and got increasingly braver about getting close enough to us to grab them as the day progressed.

Then we ate our own weight in pizza.

Needless to say, every part of me hurts after two days of digging, so I'm taking tomorrow off doing any more building/fixing things. Chores only. And I might check with the local massage clinic to see if they have a free spot because I know I'm going to feel like somebody worked me over with my own shovel.

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a danger of having multiple supplements in liquid drop form

I put what I thought was 6 drops of Vitamin D on my spoon, put it in my mouth and started swallowing it. The taste was unexpected; strong and sweet instead of mild and oily. Realizing it was iodine drops instead of Vitamin D, I spit out as much as possible into the sink. I don't want to overdose on iodine. Per that article, 6 drops would still have been under the recommended upper limit, but it would have been half-way there.

I don't take either of those supplements on a frequent or regular basis; I also take chewable children's multivitamins. Both bottles are quite old; I suspect the D may have lost potency so I'm less worried about taking more of it. But iodine is a mineral which I imagine is less likely to lose potency, and its dosage is a single drop per day to get 100% of the recommended amount.

Most people don't need to supplement with iodine, but I had read that vegans often have low levels of it.

Entry tags:

language,
whimsy

Something fishy!

Today for work, I saw someone spell fisticuffs as "fisty cuffs" and a) that is adorable and b) it also makes me realize what a strange word fisticuffs is!

So naturally I looked it up.

c. 1600, fisty cuffes, from fist (n.) + cuff (n.) "a blow", with the form perhaps in imitation of handiwork.

Well! That's such a boring etymology, but... nice to see the spelling returned to something more like the original!

I said this on fedi and a friend's response has been delighting me ever since:

I always misread it as fishticuffs, so always had an image in my head of some kind of betta fish boxing, complete with gloves over fins

That made me giggle. They're an artist so I asked if they would draw this some time. I am wondering how a fish gets boxing gloves on its fins...

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They say I got brains

My ex-husband knows and thinks and cares so much about Brian Wilson that I feel like I shared a polycule with the man.

Wandering around the house tonight, doing the last chores of the evening while the Doof is finishing up, I hear "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" and I still know all the words, still remember the pained 20somethings Andrew and I were when we met and he introduced me to this weird lonely musician and all his feelings which were also our weird lonely feelings.

There was always something terribly melancholy for me in Brian Wilson's music -- there's a demo of "Still I Dream of It" that used to make me so sad that just thinking about the song made me cry uncontrollably -- and all the more once I left my marriage and never really listened to the Beach Boys any more. And the odd time I hear them, on the radio or like now, I'm always a little thrown by how weird the commercially-released songs sound, without all the unreleased versions layered over them in my mind because those were more common in my marital home (like I said: Not a parasocial relationship for me, but a parasocial metamour).

D made sure I heard the news, and I texted Andrew once I did. I just couldn't let such a thing go by without saying I was thinking of him.

I think both Brian Wilson and Andrew eventually "found the thing they can put their heart and soul in to," as the song goes, and I'm really glad for that.

Entry tags:

disability,
work

This morning has been too much

I didn't write here yesterday, but what I said on fedi last night was 'Tomorrow is going to be an absolutely disgusting day at work: stressful meetings, grim topics to dwell on..."

The stressful meetings weren't as bad as I expected. Though they were tiring. Lots to think about.

Then some other stuff happened that inspired a household conversation about logistics. All fine, very glad we can do the things we can do. But, more to think about.

Then I got a letter inviting me to my first in-person PIP (UK welfare benefits for disabled people) assessment in a decade.

It's next week, on the day of an important work thing.

At 9 in the morning.

In a part of the city I don't know at all. I don't want D to drive me but I'll have to do a practice run myself if I want to get the bus there. They always pick weird buildings that look like all the other buildings, or some industrial park miles from anywhere, or something inaccessible.

Anyway, back to work: I now have to spend the afternoon paying close attention to the Government's spending review, which is bound to make me angry and frustrated.

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soap and towels in olden day public restrooms

I have a memory from the 1980s of a certain semi-public restroom (like in restaurants, but this was a building with a big meeting room where one of my aunt's clubs had meetings and events) in Germany. The building itself was probably built in the preceding decades.

The soap dispenser was metal with a small crank-handle that you would turn. Inside must have been a block of bar soap. Turning the crank would grate off flakes of soap into your other waiting hand. I think the soap was pink.

The hand towel was a long length of fabric which presumably was rolled up at the top and bottom inside the device it was dispensed from. You would only see a section of the fabric at a time. To get a fresh part of the towel you would either pull on the fabric, or perhaps turn a knob on the side; I don't recall exactly. This would cause the fabric to unroll from the top and get rolled up into the bottom of the unit.

The towel was mostly white like the one in this photo, but I think it had colored stripes on both vertical edges instead of in the center.

This video shows the inside of a similar device:
Continuous Cloth Roll Towel Machine

The soap device was like this one:
GRUNELLA® -Seifenmühle
Soap for cranking

That wasn't the only restroom I encountered those devices in; they were common back then in many places. Similar devices can still be bought nowadays, and for your own bathroom too, from what I see.

Entry tags:

trans

Odds and ends about my voice (part 1 of a series apparently)

The other day I overhead D telling someone that I now naturally have the voice that I put on for my character in our D&D game a couple of years ago.

I was an orc barbarian, heh.

I was delighted to hear this because I hadn't consciously been doing a voice for Bulrik (I went through dozens of orc names I hated in one of the online name generators before finding one I could live with at all, only much later realizing it's most of the name I chose for my self!) and I didn't know that's what I sound like all the time now! How delightful.

I haven't done any conscious voice training at all, just let the testosterone do its work. And I didn't record my voice at any point with the intent of tracking the change, which I guess is a norm in some online cultures. Both of these choices have been conscious decisions made to protect my mental health and I feel really good about that, but it does mean my boundless self-absorption has nothing to work with here! So it's nice to have some external observation.

The other stuff I've been meaning to write about is gonna have to wait; I'm too tired now apparently.

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I do like being a gay uncle.

I went to the park with haggis and her kid this morning.

There was one point where I was pushing said kid on the swings (a lot of the morning was haggis, D and I doing as we were directed and I'd been specifically told to push her at this point) next to a nice young man doing the same with his own toddler.

He said hello by asking me "How old is she?" to which I of course panicked because I'm not sure these days. "...Four??" I said eventually. haggis came over and saved me from more of this peril by making normal parent conversation herself.

Then the guy said "Is she the only one you guys have?" and my thoughts hadn't gotten any further than what, here with us today?

haggis said the kid is hers, and her husband's but I'm not her husband, and meanwhile I was like oh shit he thinks I'm the husband! or the new dad! Oh no! So I joked about being a gay uncle.

I don't think I've ever been mistaken for a husband before! I probably would've thought it was fun, if I wasn't too confused at the time to know that it was happening...

Entry tags:

intimacies

Last month I met someone whose visa has just been approved and who started T today.

What a good day.

I was excited to meet another trans immigrant... so much that I immediately behaved as if there was a kind of intimacy between us that does not in fact exist: I teased him about how he only had a few hours left until he started being stinky...and then as we were leaving he asked me "wait, so about that smell thing, was that serious, because I've been wondering...."

oh no!

But! It worked out okay: I saw him again a fortnight later, and he made a point of telling me I was right about the stinkiness. Which made me smile but also gave me a chance to apologize for saying something that could be so easily misconstrued. I tried to explain about the false sense of intimacy I immediately felt when

He said it was fine, it was funny. To be understood as I'd intended was a relief!

He told me that the person standing next to him, an acquaintance of mine, someone he had been draped over all evening, has been counting his facial hairs.

As of that day there were eight of them.

It was so heartwarming and delightful to see early transition so intimately documented like that. Especially for a masc person; the loving detail is something I'm so much more used to seeing from trans fems.

Entry tags:

nothing matters but the weekend from a Tuesday point of view

Steroids are fucking magic, yo. They have returned my cat to his normal bitchy emotionally needy self. They have also taken most of the stabbing out of my foot so I can walk without limping, at least while I'm moving around the house. I cheated a bit and put some of the foot cream on my arm because I officially overdid it with the shovelling, and as a result I can now lift a water glass without wincing.

What a country.

Upper third of my yard is now graded and seeded. My daughter came over and helped. She's not getting a lot of hours at work so she has an open invitation to come over and help me move dirt from one place to another whenever she wants to make a few bucks and be given beer and dinner. It works out well for both of us.

Basement guys came back today - they said they figured they had about three hours of work to finish. More swearing in Polish ensued. In the end they were in my basement for eight hours, but they got it all done. They had to build entirely new frames to hang the doors from and there was at least one hardware store trip to replace borked parts in the storm door and BOY HOWDY did they have something to say about that, but everything is now perfect and the basement apartment has functional doors that work and close and lock and everything.

Next step: I got somebody to come over and have a look at finishing the wood work. This consists of:
1. The stairs from the kitchen door to the backyard. Currently about a three foot drop, which I have been climbing up and down but that's not a perfect long term solution. (Especially in winter.)
2. The stairs from the basement apartment into the yard, are flimsy, wobbly, and don't have any hand rails so they are definitely not code. They are also resting on a base of wooden slats that just randomly shift if you put your weight in the wrong spot. I have no fucking idea what Original Contractor was even thinking. They need to be replaced with something that will pass a city inspection and that also will not kill you when you try to use them.
3. I want to put some kind of a sound-proof bench over the sump pump, because that fucker is loud. Also I figure an exposed ginormous battery is possibly a safety hazard of some kind. So the guy who looked at it said they can build something that acts as a solid bench but you can flip the top up if it needs maintenance, which sounds perfect.
4. My original blueprints include a deck on the kitchen roof. That would be really nice if I can swing it, but we'll see how much this all costs. Mainly it would be an additional place for me to grow herbs and stuff so it's in the "nice to have" pile.

( CUT FOR GROSS, SERIOUSLY YOU WERE WARNED )

Every time I see my doctor she asks me how the Not Drinking is going and every single time I'm all, FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK.

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Wonders never cease

Every afternoon this week, I reach a point in the afternoon where I stumble away from my work computer and end up in the kitchen, and there on the countertop I see a handful (or more!) of strawberries, which V has harvested and washed.

And I try to only eat half (which was easier today because they ended up telling me they'd already eaten half of what they'd picked, and they'd finished off the blueberries in the fridge along with it; basically that was their lunch), and it's just the thing I need to get through the rest of the day.

Strawberry season is the best season. And I'm so grateful that don't even have to pick them myself!

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Sinners

I didn't think I was going to get to see Sinners before it left theaters, but D has found like one showing an evening this week so he and I went today! Sadly V wasn't feeling up to coming along, but otherwise it was great.

I enjoyed the hell out of the movie, if not as much as I would have at like 16 when I was obsessed with that music.

All the performances were so good, and I loved the soundtrack and it was just a joy to watch.

I told V that if they were up to it I'd happily go see it again with them tomorrow. I so badly want to Check on some things. (Also I saw it with no audio description so I'm certain I missed a ton of what's actually on the screen.)

Sleep band

As someone who, 99% of the time, has to listen to something (usually a familiar audiobook or podcast) to fall asleep, I am finally trying one of these Bluetooth sleep headband things that always get advertised to me.

My needs (or expectations) are not great here. Back in the days of rigid Walkman headphones with scratchy foam over the earphones I would fall asleep lying on my side with them digging in to my head.

But even so, this has been a success the last few nights. If a little warm for my hot head.

It's funny: it's clearly meant to be an eye mask too, but I can't stand not being able to see at least a little light when I open my eyes, so I actively dislike this. I'll wear it at an awkward angle, I don't mind! I hate the dark so much.

Unexpected benefit of this contraption is I can continue my habit of listening to a podcast (to get my hit of extrovert energy) while I'm getting dressed in the morning, without disturbing my sleeping boyfriend still in bed. (I know this would be true of any Bluetooth headset but I'm not used to them, plus the fabric fits the soft and cozy gentle start to the day that I'm always aiming for.)

My bedroom is even close enough to the bathroom that I can leave my phone next to my bed, go brush my teeth, and no interruption in me hearing strangers chat about baseball or whatever.

Entry tags:

one must imagine Sisyphus happy

Workmen arrived at 9:00 this morning to install three (3) doors and finish off the framing of one (1) window. Ostensibly less than a day of work for two people.

Lords, ladies, and gentlethems, it is now 9:30 PM and they just left and only one door and the window are finished. Original Contractor did something funky with the framing of the doorways and nothing is squared properly and so they have to buy some more materials and come back later in the week to finish fixing it.

There was shouting. In Polish I think. They are very clearly not impressed with Original Contractor.

Any vindication I might have felt that Original Contractor was in fact just making it up as he went along is somewhat overshadowed that I have to pay tradie's rates for a second day of work.

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Exercise victories

Can't tell if my biggest exercise achievement this evening is

1) the (new, temporary) instructor saying "that's the strongest plank ever!" about mine (plank is usually a weakness, all I normally hear is "Erik get your hips up!")
or
2) me absolutely booking it out of there the second our cooldown finished, knowing I only had a chance to make the bus if I hustled -- effectively addring ten minutes of cardio on top of the hour-long circuits session! -- and getting to the stop just as the bus did.

I was so wrecked by the time I got home though. Especially because the bus driver didn't let me off at the stop I wanted (I guess I stood up too late and despite getting to the front of the bus just after another person exited the bus and the doors were still open, he insisted on ignoring me!).

I was so tired that, when I went to eat the lovely dinner that my lovely boyfriend had made for us while I was out, I had to consciously think it's time to open my mouth, muscles! once my hand had brought the spoon full of chili and rice to my lips.

Entry tags:

BIRTH! SCHOOL! WORK! DEATH!

CAT!

Lord Brock is now on prednisone. (I remember the name because it's the same steroid my sister was treated with when doctors first diagnosed her auto-immune disorder.) Two days later he was eating his weight in chicken and four days later he is following me around the house and yelling at me like nothing happened. Complete turn-around. Fingers crossed this is the magic bullet.

HOUSE!

Inching along. Work on getting the walls and doors fixed was delayed by days of rain, but dude promised he'd be here first thing tomorrow morning. Haven't heard from roof guy, probably for the same reasons. I have started calling around for quotes to get the stairs built from the kitchen.

ME!

I have shit feet. They hurt pretty much all the time, but lately they've been extra special painful. So off I hobbled to a podiatrist, who immediately told me I have plantar fasciitis. This is a Latin phrase that roughly translates to "shit feet".

I can't even blame age for this one.

He gave me stretches, a prescription that has to be compounded, and an order to stay off my feet. So far I have managed one of those three things. Eventually I will manage to find a compounding pharmacy in this city that is open more than two hours a week, but not walking is going to be harder.

Hopefully my insurance will pay for orthotics. But I draw a hard line at Birkenstocks.

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Milestones of a sort

I did my split squats today and didn't hate them!

Split squats always get a groan when our trainer tells us to do them, no one likes them, but I've found them a particular trial during ankle recovery. They've so good for me that lunges (which are similar) were a formal part of my physiotherapy. But that also meant they were hard, no fun, and not terribly rewarding!

I've always been fortunate that my recovery hasn't featured a lot of pain, but that almost made it more difficult to monitor, and cope with, the intense weakness in that ankle (and the knock-on effects, like my already-atrocious balance somehow got (and remains) even worse?!).

Feeling okay until my leg just didn't hold me up properly can be unsettling!

I've patiently stuck with it, doing regular bodyweight lunges in circuits when other people are doing walking lunges with the biggest dumbbells available to us there (not very big, but still!) and having to tuck myself into the squat cage for split squats at lift club so I could hang on to the bars to keep my balance.

And now I can do (very slow, increasingly wobbly) walking lunges, and I can do split squats without hanging on to anything -- except a little kettlebell! And I might have to go up to the second-smallest size of kettlebell next time actually, I was thinking today.

It's nice to feel like I'm at about the level where I would have been starting if I hadn't broken my ankle almost immediately into taking up exercise as a hobby. I mean yes it'd be nice if it hadn't taken me a year and a half to get that far, but as with so many of the other changes in my body in the past year and a half, I try not to get caught up in what-ifs and wistful regret, and I think I am doing okay at that.