jack

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.

mtbc

Our weekends typically involve a Saturday of errands, today's were car-based: returns and purchases at IKEA, deposits and withdrawals at the container we still rent (plus first carrying stuff down to the car), also stops at Asda, Matthew's, Primark, Boots. We came away from Asda with plenty of must-sell-today discount fish and meat, R. cooked us some for our evening meal. The stop at Matthew's was because we wanted some Southeast Asian rice, they have the more Eastern products; our local Foodasia has plenty of other rice but is rather more South Asian. Basically, our neighborhood is much more South Asian, the East Asian stuff is over on the other side of the city. Among all this, we were lucky with the soccer: we passed near a stadium but not when everybody was entering or leaving.

Our Sunday can be varied: we may go out somewhere more pleasant, like the beach (cold though they are here) or the park, where L. our dog can run around. I may have something else going on that day, like seeing family in Dundee. Tomorrow, I hope is like last weekend: I will stay home and catch up on all manner of non-work things. Though, some Sundays when I'm home, I am just tired and don't do much. I plan to at least get to open and file pending mail, file this year's FBAR with FinCEN, etc. That doesn't sound like much but, beyond work and necessary chores, it seems that it's difficult for me to have the energy to do much else. R. is very understanding of how we both have difficulty making time to get done all we feel we should or want. Like that stuff in the container, we need to do a proper sorting: we won't soon plausibly afford to live anywhere we can store it all.

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.

fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2026-03-14-eggs.html

A few weeks ago I was enjoying a couple of boiled eggs

(in the shell, with plenty of salt and pepper, and buttery fingers of toast to dunk into the runny yolk)

and pondering how fiddly it is to cut off one end of the shell after boiling compared to eating a poached egg. And I was annoyed because (I thought) I didn't know how to poach eggs.

( Read more... )

andrewducker

The first time Gideon fell asleep in front of the toilet we moved him to a comfy chair. From where he woke up still feeling sick and Jane found him lying on the floor with a bucket he'd found and relocated him back to the toilet, where he then fell asleep again.

I missed all of this because I had passed out in bed feeling rubbish. I did wake up to various noises, but each time I did I tried to open my eyelids, failed, and fell back to sleep again. Thankfully Jane isn't feeling as bad as me, and Sophia was off having a play date at the other end of the street.

So far nobody has actually thrown up. Fingers crossed that continues.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

andrewducker

1. This 18-year-old Afghan girl had offers from York and Reading - thanks to Shabana Mahmood, she will now never escape the Taliban: (tags:Afghanistan women UK migration asylum education OhForFucksSake )
2. AI toys for children misread emotions and respond inappropriately: (tags:toys children ai )
3. PEGI to give 16 age rating to games with loot boxes (amongst several other changes): (tags:gambling children games )
4. Have two people being *ridiculously* good at a Dance Pad game: Streamed live at: https://www.twitch.tv/tomatoniumWorld 1st PG on Sarabande CoopP1: ElijahTSP2: Tomatonium

(tags:games dancing video viamybrothermike )
5. New NHS England Review Excluded 97% Of All Trans Studies To Say Care Doesn't Work: (tags:LGBT bigotry healthcare OhForFucksSake transgender )
6. Tracing the lobbying behind age verification laws: (tags:age surveillance USA law politics )

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.

conuly

So, yesterday I go to catch the bus to get to work. As I'm waiting, the bus disappears off the app and then actually disappears, it never shows. So I say "Okay, I'll catch the other bus route. Sure, I've never taken this before, but it's a short walk and it's only a little drizzly out, how bad can it be?"

Welp, I stepped off the bus, the heavens opened up, I got totally drenched. I also got turned around, twice. What ought to have been an 8 minute walk was closer to 20, and the whole way I said "It's okay, I'll get there, go to the laundry room, strip naked, and spend half an hour drying my clothes. Nobody can fault me for this!"

I show up, and the first thing that L says to me when she answers the door is "The dryer is gone".

I'm not proud, but I cursed her out. And then apologized. And then cursed some more.

I found the ironing board but no iron, so I ended up spending half an hour using a hair dryer on my socks just to get them slightly less drenched.

rachelmanija

A French children's book in translation from 1961, in which five children are trapped in a cottage by a landslide.

14-year-old Laurent's family is concerned that he spends all his time reading and doing chemistry experiments, and isn't engaging with other people. So they dispatch him to stay with his younger brother and sister in a cottage only occupied by a 14-year-old girl and her younger brother, who are alone because her mother is having surgery. The idea is that Laurent will have to take care of the other kids, and this will make him come out of his shell more. His parents do leave him the out of being able to pack up his siblings and return to Paris if he really hates it.

I am honestly not sure if it was even vaguely normal in 60s France for five kids ages 14-5 to stay alone in a remote mountain cottage for ten days, or if this was just a literary convention. Anyway, Laurent unsurprisingly hates it and packs up his siblings to leave. But while they're on the train platform with the other kids, he has a change of heart and they all head back to the cottage. But they stop in the cottage of a family friend, who is out at the time.

It gets buried in a landslide! They're all trapped in pitch darkness! In an only vaguely familiar house! They can't use the stove because it already nearly suffocated them with carbon monoxide! Their only air is from a narrow shaft leading to a giant canyon! There's very little food! No one knows they're in trouble because one of the kids wrote ten postcards dated for every day of the vacation, then arranged with the post office to send one per day!

The kids having to do everything in total darkness for most of the book is a really cool twist on this sort of "trapped in a space" book. (One of my favorite moments is when enough dirt slides away that some light gets in, and they see that they've been half-starved in pitch darkness with two huge hams and a lantern hanging from the ceiling.) It has some cozy elements - they're trapped with goats, which they can milk but which also get into everything and poop everywhere, and one goat gives birth to twin kids - but gets desperate quickly when Laurent gets an infected cut and the main milking goat drowns in a flooded cellar. But it all ends up okay when they first signal with Morse code in a mirror (in a nice touch of realism, it takes a long time for anyone to figure out the message as the kids get some of the letters wrong, including signaling OSO instead of SOS) and then make and set off gunpowder!

Not an enduring classic, but an entertaining read.

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

These questions were suggested by

spiralsheep.

1. Have you ever watched illusion magic? Close-up, or in a stage show, or on television? Did it work for you?

2. Have you ever wished on a star, or a lucky cat, or a coin in a wishing well? Did it work in some way?

3. Have you ever cast a spell, made a love charm, or tried a curse? Did it work in some way?

4. Are there any other traditional superstitions you pay attention to? Do they work in some way?

5. Would you want major magical powers like in a fantasy story? Which powers, and how would you use them?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

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.

selenak

( Paradise 2.05 )

( Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1.10 )

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Munich

andrewducker

Poll #34358

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

View Respondents

What's the soonest you can tell a new partner you love them?

View Answers

First date
2 (6.9%)

First few days
1 (3.4%)

First week
1 (3.4%)

First two weeks
2 (6.9%)

First month
4 (13.8%)

First two months
3 (10.3%)

First six months
5 (17.2%)

First year
2 (6.9%)

Longer than a year
0 (0.0%)

THEY MUST NEVER KNOW
1 (3.4%)

I don't do "Love"
1 (3.4%)

SEWIWEIC
7 (24.1%)

What's the longest you'd wait for a partner to declare love before giving up on them?

View Answers

First date
0 (0.0%)

First few days
0 (0.0%)

First week
0 (0.0%)

First two weeks
0 (0.0%)

First month
0 (0.0%)

First two months
4 (13.3%)

First six months
5 (16.7%)

First year
6 (20.0%)

Longer than a year
2 (6.7%)

I WILL WAIT FOREVER
3 (10.0%)

I don't do "Love"
1 (3.3%)

SEWIWEIC
9 (30.0%)

Triggered by a couple of things recently where people were shocked that people would tell them that they were in love within the first few months.

And my general view is that if you aren't incredibly excited to spend loads of time with me and wander around holding hands while grinning a lot within the first few weeks of dating then we are probably not compatible.

conuly

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

*******

Link

conuly

Jenn related everybody's lack of sleep, ending with a hopeful "So, you're not working tonight, right?"

Ah, no, I am working, and under no circumstances will I call out on the grounds that my dog is crazy.

Other than dementia, which she shows no signs of (the dog, not my sister... I mean, not her either, but that's not what I'm talking about), what could cause this sudden barking spree in an otherwise pretty quiet doggie?

****************

( Read more... )

Reading

going to the tetris dispensary, need anything?

Weekend catchup

Performing some traffic maintenance today

poached eggs

Photo cross-post

Interesting Links for 14-03-2026

Hockey hockey hockey

Between two artics

miscellany

Interesting Links for 13-03-2026

A good grade in therapy, something that--

OMG

Landslide, by Veronique Day

The Friday Five for 13 March 2026: Magical Questions

Extraction team

Beware of mailmen and self build bombs

Interesting Links for 12-03-2026

I need to know when it's okay to tell your partner you love them

Separation by W. S. Merwin

Apparently Moonpie had a rough night last night and wouldn't stop barking