kittydesade | Reading

Reading. Finished my first pass through LIFTOFF by Casey Johnston! Will continue to use it as a reference work (tomorrow starts my third and final week of Phase 1 -- bodyweight practice of compound movements -- before I move on to doing things with Actual Weights...). I should probably note for the record that I have edited it as I've gone through to fix a fair few typos.

More She's A Beast archives (just reached February 2023!).

Tiiiiiny bit of a start on my Wicked Problems (Max Gladstone) reread, in a general spirit of wanting to have any idea at all of what's going on in Dead Hand Rule.

Writing. The document! is over! 9000!!! despite the fact that I've deleted a bunch of bits of variation-on-a-theme as I home in on what it is I actually want to say! I have gone "that will do" about my first draft of the introduction (it definitely needs ... more ... tweaking, but I think all the pieces are now there) and have moved on to the introduction to part the first, working title "What is pain?" I'm very close to having that Good Enough For Now, I think, whereupon... a chapter?!

Watching. 2026 Migraine World Summit. So much Migraine World Summit. BUT I managed to catch everything this year, and now I am working on condensing and transcribing my digital notes into my notebook. More to follow, possibly.

Listening. I caught up to where A had got to with Hidden Almanac (which I had theoretically heard all of but in practice was asleep for... some... of)! We had a long drive! We are now most of the way through 2014, I have learned about Pastor Drom's side hustle, and there is a crow named George.

Playing. Bit more Inkulinati? Tiny bit more Inkulinati.

Eating. Mooooore allotment lamb's lettuce. AND a bunch of TREETS from the local FANCY BAKERY, incl. double chocolate brownie (not quite dark and chocolatey enough for my tastes; too dark for A); bread pudding; and a rhubarb and ginger teacake.

This week I am also experimenting with lentil cakes (like rice cakes, but lentil) and Dr Karg's Pumpkin Seed Protein Thins. I find the former perplexing, in that they taste kind of like crispy seaweed snacks while also being completely the wrong shape and texture, and am much more into the latter (even eaten dry!) than I expected. A considers them alarming cardboard; I think I think they are enough like Ryvita, of which I am fond, to be of at least some interest? Might... get more of these. (Could in theory reverse engineer them but that sounds like a lot of effort.)

Exploring. Had another couple of Extremely Satisfactory errand-bimbles discovering People's Front Gardens.

Making & mending. I have FROGGED the experimental continental knitted portion of A's second glove (tension was bad; have decided I want these gloves Done more than I want to do enough continental knitting to get the tension right) and resumed; I have done A Little More Cuff.

Growing. Aubergines finally! belatedly! sown! Oca into the ground. Broad beans finally coming up. More garlic transplanted.

Observing. THE COOTS! HAVE! EGGS!

kaberett

Today was A Travel Day; yesterday, in preparation for same, I Ran Errands, including "acquiring Tiny Cake" and "visiting the pharmacy".

On the way from those two jobs to the next couple, I passed Several Good Things.

One was a new-to-me flavour of completely ridiculous daffodil:

a double daffodil, with white petals and inner trumpet, protruding past a much shorter orange outer trumpet

It's a double not in the sense of having a confusing froth of intermingled trumpets (as of Double Fashion or Double Camparnelle, both of which exist locally), but in the sense of having two nested trumpets, one shorter and orange, from which the longer white one protrudes. I have never! previously! seen a thing like this! I am really enjoying my current streak of encountering varieties of daffodil that make me go "what the fuck???"

Shortly thereafter I checked over my shoulder while crossing a tiny bridge and was startled and delighted to see A COOT UPON THE NEST that, last I passed it, was clearly still derelict. Obviously I went back and Gazed Upon It for Some Time and was eventually rewarded by it STANDING UP to reveal SEVEN??? (possibly) EGGS!!!

And the Egyptian goslings were peeping about the place when I subsequently passed them on my way back up the hill. A+ errands would run again.

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...)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

kaberett

Via divers alarums and excursions we have established that the oven seems to trip All The Electrics... when it hits A Certain Temperature. ( Read more... )

But. BUT. Today I SAW THE BAT for the first time this year (having been doing a questionable job of actually managing to watch for it at bat o'clock over the last several weeks); and my Special Interest In Moving My Body went surprisingly well; and A curled up on the sofa and did some more Reading About Special Interest with me; and I am actually doing alright.

schneefink

My mom is currently doing a no-smartphone-challenge with her students, and I decided to do the light version and set myself a goal of 1.5 hours of smartphone time per day (normal phone calls don't count.) I did well the first few days but then failed the last three, and right now I'm realizing the limit means I can't use my phone to listen to streams while doing the dishes. Boo.

Other effects: I read books on my e-book-reader on my commute instead of fics on my phone. And I really wish my radio wasn't broken but it hasn't reached the necessary annoyance level yet to get it fixed.

I'm not behind on my study plan for my next exam yet! (The upcoming exam is mostly VAT so both important and relevant and hard.) We'll see how long it lasts, but I'm in week 3 and that's pretty good especially for my standards. And that's despite me being sick one weekend and having a bad cold the next.

I told myself I'd combine it with finally starting the Hades 2 1.0 playthrough I've been planning for months, and for the first two weeks I actually managed to stick to my "one run per study session" rule but, uh, not anymore. Ahem. Good news, still having a lot of fun playing Hades 2. And thanks to playing over 130 hours in Early Access I'm so much better than when I started my first playthrough.
(I started now because the plan was DD would start the week after and then we can talk about it, but she had a schedule change and still hasn't started so that didn't work out either ^^)

But since I started playing Hades 2 I mostly stopped playing Vampire Survivors - not completely, I have done a few more runs to get some of the very last unlocks/secrets, but mostly. So have the remaining notes for now, directly continuing from last time.

( More Vampire Survivors: more bats, still no vampires. )

I should stop procrastinating and do the dishes.

kaberett

Back at the beginning of January beadsbuttonslace wrote up some reflections on this book, which interested me enough that I put in a hold on my library's only digital copy, which was an audiobook, and then I managed to listen to it in under a week, and now I am subscribed to Johnston's newsletter (and reading its archives) and also trying to work out whether I want to buy a physical copy or a digital copy for my own library.

Which is to say: I liked it. A lot.

( Read more... )

And some final notes:

it was only earlier today that I realised that an article that did the rounds a little while ago, The new MacBook keyboard is ruining my life... is BY THIS SAME PERSON
at least two of you will be delighted to know that in the Epilogue, she ( spoilers... )

longmagpieroads

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Warhead On Legs

What Goes Around Comes Around

vital functions

happy equinox, etc

some good things

pointy animals

some good things

vital functions

zoo!

Performing some traffic maintenance today

miscellany

A good grade in therapy, something that--

apparently we also need a new oven

Challenges and achievements in and out of games

[books, movement] A Physical Education, Casey Johnston

3 things make a post.

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December 2023

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