withagreatlove | Reading

1. What was the reason you began a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account (or both)?
I started LiveJournal in 2002 when a new friend (soon girlfriend) heard me saying that I wanted to write more and suggested LiveJournal. "What's LiveJournal?" I said, and she gave me an invite code, and here I am.

I moved to DW in 2011, I can't remember which exact thing made me do it but it was after Strikethrough, before things got very Russian but I think they were getting pretty Russian.

2. How many DW or LJ communities do you subscribe to?
Five.

3. Do you have a favorite community or one you check out often to see what's new?
I mean, they're all on my reading page. Most are pretty quiet; one I made for covid-cautious people and don't use much myself any more either (its name is a pun based on "herd immunity," that's how old it is...). The best are thisfinecrew, for U.S. political actions people can taken (often online or relatively low-spoons) and thissterlingcrew, the British version of the same thing. Very useful communities to have In These Times.

4. How did you pick your user name?
This one was picked by D and another friend (I now cannot remember who) independently when I was looking for a new one.

5. If you could change your user name, would you?
It's clearly from a very specific time in my life, when I was using the name Cosmo and studying linguistics.

As for changing it, I mean, I could. I have. My LJ went through a couple of names too. I almost never re-use user names either; I just use whatever sounds like a good idea at the time. I can barely remember what it was before, and would probably prefer that one now. I did make a concerted effort to get away from puns, things based on my real-life first name, or both; no wonder this is what my friends suggested for me, this is my Brand.

While I'm here, another point I've been meaning to make under this tag for a bit but haven't gotten around to: having been writing about my life for half of it now, I find myself wishing there was a way for tags to become, like, dormant or something. There are lots of tags that I want to keep having but am not going to add new entries to, so I wish I didn't always have to look at them in the list or when I'm choosing tags.

kaberett

Migraine World Summit is finished for the year and they chose an extremely good closing keynote about which I am cheerful and bouncy. (Messoud Ashina, CGRP, PACAP & beyond, say if you would like me to try to write more about this).
Got to spend time with The Child! Was summoned Upstairs to Rest and Read Books for a bit. Some really really excellent self-management and regulation in there around Lots Of Feelings.
BRONZE AGE LOOM.
Good therapy session.
There is now a box of veg cassoulet (+ suspicious protein chunks) in the freezer to be Future Food, and another two portions on the hob for dinner tomorrow.
I know I keep mentioning the Bedtime Ritual of Lebkuchen and Milk but this is because it is very good and very soothing, okay.
My watch continues a viable approach to biofeedback (so all I need now is to remember to actually do it...)

pensnest

The sky was beautifully blue on Sunday, a helpful incentive to get me out in the garden. I unstrangled the blackcurrant bushes from the netting I had put very badly over them, then dug out a bunch of weeds, rediscovered the tentatively emerging rhubarbs, and planted a rhubarb root that I was given recently. Good job, plenty more to do.

( lots more rambling about garden, dancing, and stuff )

Costume night at rehearsal this evening. I have accumulated a number of witchy outfit-adjacent items, it will be a matter of figuring out how they fit together. But at least I won't have to go on stage naked, even though that would probably be more authentic than anything else.

kaberett

I left so many things out of the zoo post on Saturday (that I have still not gone back to add in) but the one I am telling you about today (aside from the dwarf mongeese, which I mention only in passing) is Snake, But What If Unicorn:

( Read more... )

This Creature is Gonyosoma boulengeri, the rhinoceros ratsnake. The accompanying distractions included, gloriously,

The function of their majestic nose-points is unknown as we still have a lot to learn about these beautiful animals.

watersword

Oh my GOD can it be spring yet, I am SO TIRED OF WINTER. There is a tiny tiny tiny pink nubbin of rhubarb in the garden. No asparagus yet. I cannot wait to get the dopamine hit of seeing my summer clothes for the first time in months.

The NT's production of The Importance of Being Earnest is of course a delight (Sharon D. Clarke deserves a knighthood and Ncuti Gatwa wears clothes, and few clothes, to perfection); velveteenrabbi and D's Pesach class is as excellent as one might expect; somewhere on this desk is an embroidery needle and I am convinced the gherkin is going to stab herself with it. Wednesday is actually largely unscheduled and I need only survive the conference Thursday, which requires me to leave the house at godawful o'clock.

I am looking forward to the three-hour train ride and the Dessa concert so much. And then I get a weekend in my favorite city! I have been promised brunch and a museum and rainbow cookies and bagels. (Promised by myself and I intend to follow through in every particular.)

kaberett

Allotment salad!
Got Things Into The Ground (as well as out of it); I am as ever running massively behind but the weather was lovely and touching soil remains very good.
It was warm enough to have the back door open for a bit.
I am really, really enjoying the self-indulgent Very Expensive Lebkuchen I got from SousChef in the January sale. They make an excellent supper.
Bloods taken today do include a full blood count; alas no ferritin (that's scheduled for... May? April?) but I do get a sneaky extra update on how my estimated haemoglobin is doing.
libgourou continues to Work. I remain very pleased about this.

cosmolinguist

I thought I was doing okay on the weekend, but now that I'm back at work things are really rough on my brain.

Work is intensely demanding. My dreams were violent and graphic last night and I woke up wanting to do nothing more than call in sick but the work-placement person I'm responsible for started today and I had to be there to talk to her and try to find things to do despite having no idea what the rest of my team is doing and being in maybe the worst possible position to find tasks for a bright graduate who'll be here two days a week for a few months. I had two meetings in a row this afternoon with different parts of the org I work with that were properly existential: we stumbled over questions like "who's responsible for drafting the Scottish guidance on active travel?" or "what exactly do we want local authorities to do regarding the built environment?" This would be so unfair for a new person who feels like she's jumping in at the deep end just being in a meeting about what we're doing on one Government consultation.

I only realised today that I'd kinda conflated two different TfL invites and now the thing I'm going to London for tomorrow, I dint even want to and it doesn't seem worth it. I've got a train ticket I hate to waste, but bleh. Bleh!

Counseling is right after work on a Tuesday, so I managed to squeeze in a quick Teddy walk in the glorious sunshine (the weather has been amazing today, that's today's one saving grace) and then absolutely exhausted myself trying to explain my week. She's not available at rhe usual time next week but I won't be the week after, and the week after that she won't be, so I took the unusual step of fitting in an appointment at a different time next week; usually if my normal one doesn't work I just skip it, but it feels like I need more at this point.

kaberett

Reading. I continue to work my way through the She's A Beast archives, to a degree that is not necessarily ... uh ... optimal, in terms of all the other things I want to do...

I slowed down on LIFTOFF, on account of resuming reading from the start with A, and then this evening I tripped and fell and am. More. of the way through it. again.

Finished What Is Queer Food? by John Birdsall. Ultimately the argument is that the queerness is a function of community -- the role that food plays in eating together -- though he also tries at various points for "enjoying food is queer" (among other things), which I do not think I am the target audience for. (Having said which I am now wondering what it would take to convince me of that line of reasoning, and Ideas Are Stirring. Hmm.) Overall a mixture of anecdotes from culinary history and fiction to fill in events that went unrecorded; he does hold space for people to be complex and flawed, and I appreciated the history that was actually history, but -- alas, this did not really work for me.

Writing. Words. Continue. To be. Eked out.

Watching. The 2026 Migraine World Summit is ongoing and eating a lot of my time and brain; thus far nothing has made me actually vibrate with fury and I've had a couple of useful joining-the-dots moments, so mustn't grumble there, really. And I have finally watched the talks from last year's Day 2 that I missed due to time changes, and have started transferring my digital notes from last year into my notebook...

Playing. Inkulinati: we continue Not Dead Yet in the Exploders run on Master difficulty.

The Ridiculous Colours Game.

Sudoku... appears to have let go of my brain for now?

Cooking. This evening I have been attempting to remember how to make Spätzle, and got there eventually (part of the difficulty being that this is the first time I've made them since acquiring a dedicated Spätzlebrett, and I needed to reestablish correct consistency of the dough...)

Eating. This morning we engaged in a Weekend Morning Ritual of going down to the local fancy bakery and getting brunch from them. We also got Treats for Afternoon Tea; I am delighted that they'll supply me with cardamom buns that I don't have to actually make myself.

I have also been Craving Brownies, but not enough to actually make them myself (and also The Oven Is Broken), and consequently have eaten them courtesy of both Wagamama (ritual Thursday night takeaway) and London Zoo (Saturday afternoon tea).

Exploring. London Zoo! Saw creatures! Maybe I will even go back and edit in more details about the creatures! Creatures: good.

Several bimbles around local front gardens (etc) to enjoy Spring Flowers.

Growing. Harvested (and consumed!) more salad. Transplanted some garlic. Wrangled some more weeding. Have yet to sow any more things but really want to have Actual Plants this growing season so, uh, maybe that can be a priority for Breaks From Migraine World Summit, not that that's worked so far...

Observing. THE BAT.

And then for brunch this morning we took our breakfast slightly further than usual to a different park bench, this one surrounded by daffodils, and then additionally wandered a little way down the New River (neither new, nor a river) to see if the coots were doing things yet (which I have also been checking every time I go to the pharmacy to pick up meds). The coots aren't, BUT there were TEN EGYPTIAN GOSLINGS peeping about the place!!! At least one of whom was Extremely keen on coming All the way down the bank and plapping along the edge of the bricks, presumably because they were warm and felt nice on feet? Certainly two very gentle attempts to chase it back towards its parents got them contemplating hissing at me, and only persuaded it to maybe do the thing for about thirty seconds at most, so I gave up on that and just stood back and watched them for a bit, and then was very relieved that the foolhardy baby did upon parents Alarm Calling (as best we can tell about A Passing Dog) go FWEEP FWEEP FWEEP all the way back up and into the bundle of its siblings. An unexpected and very welcome delight.

lethargic_man

The first printer in England, William Caxton, wrote people bringing him manuscripts to print, and how he would modernise the English in them, replacing "thridde" for instance with "third"; but also that he would turn away manuscripts in Old English, because he could not understand them at all.

Musing about this, I wondered if there was a time when knowledge of Old English was lost, and subsequently painstakingly recovered, or was Caxton's problem simply that he relied on his own abilities, and didn't call in scholarly experts? So I did what one does under such circumstances and asked ChatGPT.

Turns out that when thinking of, for example, the twelfth-century mini-Renaissance, I had forgotten to take into account that English was at that time the despised language of a conquered people, and all official business took place in Latin and French. Old English was not studied at all, and all knowledge of it had lapsed. What is interesting, though, is why scholars later went to the considerable effort (considering Old English's highly complex grammar and many words which had dropped out by the Early Modern English period) of deciphering the language.

It was during the English Reformation, and scholars wanted to prove that the early English Church had traditions independent of Rome, which is why they began studying Anglo-Saxon texts.

Early scholars included the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, the antiquarian historian William Camden, and Elizabeth Elstob, who wrote one of the first grammars of Old English in 1715, and came from my old stomping grounds in Newcastle upon Tyne.

cosmolinguist

I read something that seems particularly relevant on Long Covid Awareness Day, a day which as an online pal who has LC says says,

We are combatting willful ignorance. People actively do not want to know about Long Covid, and the long-term health consequences of Covid infections. They do not want to see us.

The thing I read is about "AI" as currently understood, and grief. And I'm glad it connects both of these things to covid.

Generative AI emerged during a global pandemic -- a global trauma of mass death (1.2 million people in the US died of COVID, and about 7 million globally -- these are, no doubt, figures that undercount how many actually died of the disease, let alone those like my son who died during that time period of other causes -- overdoses, suicide, murder, and deaths related and unrelated to the pandemic).

Mass trauma, mass death and, as such, mass grieving. But it was, at the time and still to this day, a grief interrupted, a grief buried, a grief denied, a grief unobserved. We were often not able to bury our dead, not able to hold funerals, not able to have wakes, not able to observe the rituals of death, not able to gather, to bring food, to hold and comfort one another.

And when we were told the pandemic was over -- it hasn't really ended; the World Health Organization says there were around 150,000 cases of COVID reported in the last month -- we didn't deal with our trauma. We didn't deal with our grief. We were supposed to bury our feelings; we were supposed to forget. It was back-to-school, back to work, back to "normal."

There was, in fact, a massive demonstration of grief – an outpouring of grieving in public – during COVID; and that was the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests that occurred in cities throughout the country particularly after the murder of George Floyd. This grief was not private or hidden; it was collective. This grief was not just personal, expressed by those impacted directly by racism and police violence; it demanded from protestors and onlookers, empathy, solidarity. This grief was expressive – even as we are always told with protest, as with grief, that that is not the “good way” to say it. The grief of Floyd’s death – and all the deaths – was not sufficient. It was not simply a marker or memorial of death; but it was an act of life, an act of repair. It was a demonstration of love and loss and fury; it was a commitment to the future.

cosmolinguist

I had this tab open before, but I've only gotten around to reading it properly now that it seems to echo that emotional literacy thing.

It's the arousal-valence model.

By identifying your current level of arousal and valence, you can start to build awareness of your bodily sensations and the connection between those sensations and your emotions.

It looks like a good next step for me in "what to do next," like it's all well and good understanding that I'm bad at identifying and acknowledging my emotions, but now what can I do to make this less of a problem for me.

kaberett

highlights included:

the lion ROARING
glasswing (Greta oto) pupae: tiny, bright leaf green, with sparkly metallic bits (gold and silver)
the rhinoceros ratsnake (Gonyosoma boulengeri): has a NOSE. why is its NOSE pointy? no(se) idea!
turquoise gecko (Lygodactylus williamsi)

otherwise everything is still Migraine World Summit (though I have once again learned a useful thing today! neck pain can be a prodrome symptom!) and Special Interest.

lethargic_man

I went to Sheer Hell the other day. But it's not what you might expect.

On a map from around 1850, to the southwest of the then village of Tempelhof (now deeply embedded in Berlin), one sees a pond labelled „die blanke Hölle“, or sheer Hell.

( View piccy )

Wondering what could lie behind that name, I asked ChatGPT (though as it turned out, I could have just gone to Wikipedia).

Turns out the pond was originally called Hel-Pfuhl or Hels-Pfuhl, referring to the Germanic goddess of the underworld.

According to legend, the pond formed an entrance to the underworld, the realm of the dead. On its wooded shores stood an altar of Hel, which a priest tended to. Twice a year Hel sent a black bull to the priest to plough the fields. The priest's successor, though, a Christian monk, ceased the offerings to Hel. The following spring, when the bull appeared, it did not plough the fields but devoured the monk.

Until the twentieth century the rumour remained in the unsettled and rugged area that the lake would claim victims every year. These rumours had a grain of truth to them, as several people did indeed drown in the apparently harmless waters.

To my surprise, given that the majority of fishponds on the map (frequently labelled Karpfen Pf[uhl] as you can see here) no longer exist, it turns out that „die blanke Hölle“ not only does still exist, but I've even been there! It's now called „Blanke Helle“ on Google Maps, reverting to the older vowel in the name, and is in the middle of Alboinplatz.^* (There's no reference to its name at the actual site, though.)

( View piccy )

The reason it still exists is probably due to its geology. It is, I learned, a kettle hole (Toteisloch). Apparently, when bits of glacier break off, they are called dead ice. As the glacier flows past, dead ice can get surrounded with and eventually covered in sediment. This happened here during the Ice Ages, but when the ice subsequently melted, the ground over it subsided, leaving a pit which got filled with rainwater to form the pond.

Commemorating the legend concerning the site, sculptor Paul Mersmann the Elder was commissioned in 1931 to create a monument depicting the bull. By the time it was finished in 1934, the Nazis were in power; they didn't like it and threatened to tear it down. The dislike, however, was mutual: according to the sculptor's son there is, inside the bull, a capsule denouncing Hitler signed by various artists and sculptors.

( View piccy )

* Hardcore Tolkien fans may recognise the name of the king of the Lombards who brought them to (i.e. conquered) Lombardy, and a cognate of Old English Ælfwine (the English sailor who learned the stories that later became The Silmarillion on sailing to Tol Eressëa in The Book of Lost Tales), or in modern English, Alvin,^† meaning "elf-friend", and therefore a reincarnation (?) of Elendil in the sadly abortive work The Lost Road.

† Has anyone reading this ever come across that name other than in the name of Alvin Stardust?

cosmolinguist

Thanks everyone for the kind comments.

Surprisingly, I slept fine -- well, I was surprised anyway. I don't remember any of my dreams.

I am very amused that two of the smartest people I know (one of whom is a psychotherapist!) told me to play Tetris.

There are studies on this, often in particular groups of people who might acquire PTSD like healthcare workers or combat veterans.

I'm good at games like that and I love them. I have not literal Tetris but a similar simple colorful block-positioning game on my phone, which I play all the time anyway -- usually as something to keep me busy enough to be able to listen to a podcast or sometimes to watch something on TV, or sometimes to tire my eyes out enough to let me go to sleep.

But now I can tell myself it's medicinal!

I had a nice day: walking to and from angelofthenorth's this morning to help unload the van into her flat, enjoying the nice springlike weather for a change, and by the time I was home and showered it was almost time for said psychotherapist and her wife to visit, which is lovely as they are friends I rarely/never get to see, who were just nearby for the afternoon. I made dinner for us -- curry with sauce from a jar and added peppers and leftover chicken the others had last night. We're all pretty floppy, after those two had to take on tasks that were meant to be done yesterday by the two of us who were in Wales so much longer than we planned to be. But in a nice cozy way. No plans at all tomorrow, which I'm very much looking forward to.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

rmc28

I hadn't been on the ice since last Saturday (Huskies and Women's Blues practices were all Varsity squads only, and Kodiaks practice got cancelled by the rink) but I made it to and through Warbirds practice tonight. It was so worth it. I also got my Varsity notebook from Women's Blues: every team member gets a notebook, and everyone writes a note in every teammate's notebook, and we read them before Varsity to inspire us. Mine was very sweet and I love the team very much for making me welcome.

I need to leave the house in 7.5 hours to get back to the rink for Varsity. I'm playing in alumni game 1, getting cleaned up during alumni game 2, and spending the rest of the day in the scorekeepers box with a rotating cast of some of my favourite people. The three non-alumni games will be livestreamed

14:00 Mixed 2nds (Huskies v Vikings B)
17:00 Women's Blues
20:00 Men's Blues

I also had a little art session this evening before going to the rink, making signs for my Huskies teammates. The sign in Irish may well only be understood by the teammate who got me back into learning Irish this year - our class covered "how to cheer on your sports team" a couple weeks ago and I made careful notes - or maybe it will cause any lurking Gaeilgeoirí in the rink to make themselves known.

I think I'm wound down enough to sleep now.

cosmolinguist

The plan for today was to leave early, drive the four hours back to Manchester, and unload the van at angelofthenorth's flat.

I planned to be home by mid-afternoon. I was planning to make dinner, and I hoped to be back soon enough and with enough energy left over to walk Teddy at the usual kind of time, 4 or 5 in the afternoon.

We checked out of the hotel at 8, went for breakfast at the Starbucks in the Travelodge parking lot, and got on the road maybe half an hour later.

We'd just gotten out of town and on an A road/highway, I was just thinking about texting a quick "on our way!" for V and D to wake up to, but before I could fish my phone out of the pocket trapped by the seatbelt, ( details of car crash which sound scary so please be assured no one was injured! )

( And my pitch-black humor about the situation. )

The van was being driven by a friend of angelofthenorth's who has rented lots of vans, used to drive one for Argos, and was a very careful driver. He is a retired cop, so when we made it to a nearby lay-by/rest area, he called the rental company to report the accident, he described it very calmly and precisely, in slightly more technical terms than the lady on the other end was expecting. He said he hadn't been in an accident himself since 1990something, but all his skills were clearly intact from the many other incidents he'd called in like this.

The van wasn't badly damaged but wasn't safe to drive without the passenger side (he called it near side) mirror, and indicator/blinkers on that side too. (The mirror hadn't actually exploded, but all these things were hanging by the wires from the damaged housing.) So we had to call AA too, and wait for them to be able to send something big enough to haul a loaded Peugeot Boxer van.

The accident happened a couple minutes before 9am. After we were told "before 12.20," 11.40, 11.45 and 12.45, a nice man with a big yellow AA truck pulled ahead of us at 12.50, eliciting such cheers from the other two (who of course recognized it more quickly than I could) that I jumped a little.

We had to wait in the lay-by not far from where we'd set off, for a length of time that should've gotten us basically back to Manchester (minus stops to pee/get lunch/etc.). We were waiting there so long that angelofthenorth's blood sugar was a worry, but luckily it remained okay.

The AA man was efficient and kind, and it was a little bit exciting to get to ride in the back of his truck, which had such high steps that it reminded me of getting into tractors. He got us to the body shop he was told to take us to, we were told they would have arranged to swap our van for another one, but when we got there it was closed.

There was time pressure here too because we were also coming up on, and then quickly past, the time this poor guy was supposed to finish his shift, and his commitment to not abandoning us and our burdened van on a street somewhere in Swansea was coming up against not only the end of his shift and the beginning of his weekend, but the end of the time he'd be safe to drive -- he woke up at 4.30 this morning and I bet that seemed like a very long time ago as he was stuck with us while a surprisingly large number of telephone conversations were needed.

The looming fact that it was Friday suddenly loomed into relevance. The AA driver talked a lot about places closing early on a Friday, and already mid-afternoon I was seeing queues of traffic in Swansea as he drove us around. I hadn't expected we'd have to deal with Friday rush hour traffic of course!

Way too many frustrations, shenanigans and phone calls ensued. I'll spare you the grumbling and details but we by 2.45 we had the chance to use a toilet, by 3 we had access to a new van, by 3.30 we had swapped everything from the broken one to the new one (which while not ideal left me a little reassured by exactly what and how difficult it'd be to get it all into angelofthenorth's flat: before this, it'd been difficult for me to mentally separate what actually went in the van from the much greater amount of work I'd ended up doing in the sliding tile puzzle of moving things out of but then back into the storage containers).

Finally, we could set off.

It was 3.45.

Manchester was still four hours away.

I'd been hoping to be home by that point, showered, maybe had time for a little rest before I thought about walking Teddy.

At this point, the three of us determined that the best thing to do would be just to get home tonight, and unload the van early in the morning before it was due to be returned at noon.

It took longer than four hours, because we stopped for much-needed food in Abergavenny around 5, and maybe because this new van was limited to only going 60mph so we didn't benefit from the motorway/freeway driving as much as we might have.

I got home about 9.15pm, after an otherwise-uneventful trip back. angelofthenorth texted the group chat saying that a 9am start is planned for tomorrow morning, and then also saying "I feel like Erik should have a "please look after this goblin" sign round his neck."

I was very well looked after: helped to find food, to tidy stuff away that I literally just dropped when I opened the front door, hugged, and shooed off to a shower and bed.

I've never been so happy to be in my own house, hugged by my humans, and now in bed.

kaberett

In apparent celebration of Migraine World Summit, I have spent this evening having an unscheduled migraine attack for no obvious reason. I disapprove. (Because I've been doing a lot of audiovisual processing, captions notwithstanding? Because I had my screen much brighter than usual for a while playing a colours game?* Because oven't?)

Nonetheless I have watched and made digital notes on all of 2026 Day 2, watched and made digital notes on 3/4 talks from 2025 Day 2 (which I missed at the time), and made physical notes for 2025 Day 1 and 1/4 of Day 2. I am... sort of catching up.

I am really enjoying my pens. I also find myself with the problem of wanting lots of different notebooks and, also, to keep everything in One Single Solitary Notebook, For Convenience...

* NB I am a rocks nerd. My colour discrimination is ludicrously good. I am sorry that that link is weird and competitive about my ridiculous score, but not sorry enough to provide you with the bare link.

kaberett

I currently have a bit of a special interest happening, right. So I spent a bit of today's therapy session talking about it, as one does, and then meandered around to one of my current Big Topics[1], and made it all the way through to the wrapping-up stage of proceedings!

... when My Favourite Metaphor About Therapy abruptly suggested itself to me and I had. A Moment.

Which is how I found myself explaining that, in a thematically appropriate coincidence, said favourite metaphor is "emotional heavy lifting, with trained spotter".

To which came the response: "... can I. borrow that."

And thus: A Good Grade In Therapy.

[1] social anxiety. it's the social anxiety.

cosmolinguist

I am sure there was toothpaste in my washkit the last time I traveled... But there is not now.

Apart from this and lack of snacks (why didn't I think to bring snacks, ha), I am doing alright. I slept decently last night, and slept a lot more this afternoon, once the van was as loaded as it was going to get.

I feel for angelofthenorth, who basically has the same level of difficulty extracting the things she wants from the two big storage containers that I would've had if Andrew had decanted all of our house into similar, since that's more or less what has happened here.

Everything has been a sliding-tile-puzzle of needing to move things to get to other things, and all the tiles are heavy, and you also have to think about whether they're packed in a structurally sound condition and whether they can get wet.

We have been remarkably successful at furniture, but also some things have just been too difficult to unearth, particularly in the worst weather possible for this: rain and heavy wind. She has dealt with it all very well, being very practical about what can be replaced via Manchester's charity shops or Ikea.

All of this is such an emotionally exhausting undertaking. I'm glad I can at least handle some of the physical burdens for her.

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withagreatlove

January 2015

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Page generated Mar. 20th, 2026 01:42 pm

WITH A GREAT LOVE

blogging with hearth & soul

Reading

Friday Five

some good things

knowing, slowing, growing things

pointy animals

(no subject)

some good things

Bleh

vital functions

Why Old English was first deciphered

Long Covid and other kinds of awareness

Arousal-valence

zoo!

Of how I went to Sheer Hell, via Lombardy and Tol Eressëa

going to the tetris dispensary, need anything?

Performing some traffic maintenance today

Hockey hockey hockey

Between two artics

miscellany

A good grade in therapy, something that--

Extraction team

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January 2015

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