the still point of the turning world

Last week was all choir all the time (concert went well, but the Concerts Without A Funny Turn card goes back down to zero, annoyingly) and then I went straight into a weekend of Extreme Socialising because shreena and quizcustodet came up for a visit. Friday night I went out with shreena and A for dinner, delicious food at a Vietnamese restaurant (the marmite-and-peanut-butter-coated cauliflower was especially good!).

Saturday was my birthday treat; the Lego Discovery Centre only lets you in if you have children with you, so shreena and quizcustodet donated me their children and bought me a ticket to go with them *g*. I really enjoyed it; there's a mix of rides (and a big soft-play area) and a little 3D film and also a big open area where you can, you know, play with Lego. There were stations for building specific models, stations that were just buckets of Lego for you to play with, a tiny zipline where you could build little machines and see if they could make it the whole way along, a car-building area with test track, etc etc. I spent probably half an hour or so building a tiny house (with contributions from shreena and their older son J), which was extremely soothing.

And then on Sunday we went to ( Cadbury World )

All-in-all a pretty good weekend, but an inevitably exhausting one. I am now attempting to live a deeply regulated life to try and get back to normal and untrash my sleep cycle, etc etc, so we'll see how that goes...

Today was a very exciting landmark: I went to the TIP. Miss H agreed to take me, because she is a wonderful person. We are now I think fourteen months into our bin strike, and while various people have very kindly taken my recycling for me during that period, my usual volunteer has been busy lately and I've accumulated rather a lot (mostly cardboard - the packaging for the new IKEA bookcase was particularly bulky) since mid-November. I also keep a box of "things to take to the tip" that aren't the standard recycling - electrical cables, lightbulbs, hard plastic, etc, which are a bit unfair to dump on other people, so that was a year or more of accumulation. My spare room is so nice now!!

One of my university friends used to celebrate "Bins Clear Eve", which was the day before the first rubbish collection after New Year, and it feels rather like that.

Otherwise there seems to be rather a lot of terrible things happening to my acquaintances; in the last week, deaths include one friend's brother, a second friend's stepmother, and the very unexpected death of an distant internet acquaintance. Also a swimming friend has had a bad prognosis for a while but now sounds to be likely in his last few weeks. I would like it if someone I know had a sudden and unexpected nice thing happen next week, please.

I keep trying to play computer games and then getting bored and wandering off. On the other hand, I have read a lot of books (most of them very frivolous). Partly it may be because it's so much nicer in bed than anywhere else, what with the cold spells so far this year. I did manage twenty minutes of Dave the Diver today; isis, I don't know if you ever did play it after you recced it to me, but so far it's both quite fun and making me feeling very concerned that he's being exploited by his "friend" Cobra *g* (the set-up is that he's on holiday when his friend calls him up with promises of fancy sushi that turn out to be an "opportunity" for him to spend his days diving for fish to turn into sushi and nights serving the sushi to customers... his "profits" go into repairing the bar, which appears to be co-owned by Cobra and the sushi chef). However, I am only one day in, so it could all change.

This has been a fantastically expensive month so far. Aside from purely frivolous expenditures (my 99p ebook habit does add up!! but not all that quickly) I renewed my passport on Thursday (they already sent me two emails to tell me to send the old one in! cool your beans, people, it was less than 24 hours! I posted it on Friday anyway!) and then bought a bunch of clothes today - hopefully replacements for things which are getting rather tatty. I wanted to get a hoodie from the Florence gig but I couldn't try it on and I wasn't sure it would fit, and £85 was too much to gamble on! So now I have ordered a less cool one from M&S but on the other hand it wasn't nearly as expensive. And if it's too small, I can return it.

Oh, but what is nice: I've been given the keys to my new garage! I should go and check I can actually open it (after first looking up the deeds to check which one it is, now I can't identify it by the combination of hardware around the lock...) before I get swept up in next week's choir-all-the-time and next weekend's exciting visit from shreena and quizcustodet. Today would have been a good time to do it, since it's actually not raining for once, but, well.

I had a birthday! It was low key (Mum is still not up for even small adventures) but involved a lot of eating. I had lunch with Dad, and then dinner with S before choir although I was still so full I managed half a starter and a bit of her dessert. Then choir, and we had some cookies in the break. Tomorrow I have post-swimming coffee and cake before work and then office snacks (three flavours of interesting cheese crackers! I thought that was more fun than cake).

Nearly everyone gave me vouchers as per my request and I have so many Steam vouchers now. That will be fun for when my wishlist items go on good sales! Also my dad gave me a scented candle but that was more of a "please get rid of this thing I don't want" than a present as such :D It appears to be a branded corporate gift from his old work, but it smells OK and my candle order has been "on its way" from the parcel facility less than twenty miles away for ten days now, so I'll take it.

Choir was also interesting because it was the first rehearsal of the second conductor candidate we're auditioning. So far I like him - probably better than the first one, although he was OK - but we'll see how it goes. I had demanded that S make sure I was sung happy birthday (before we realised it was the new guy's first night!) but she managed to make it happen anyway. Deeply mortifying in the moment, but also I really wanted it to happen! It was the 22nd anniversary of S and I joining the chorus (no prizes for guessing why I can remember exactly what date it was...) and we've been friends ever since.

176 books read in 2025 - just under the long-term average (182) but my highest since 2020.

( stats ) ( awards )

My book of the year

A tough one! I'm not sure anything really stands out. But I think I've spent more time thinking about Augustine the African than the others, so maybe that.

So far since I arrived here I have watched David Attenborough's new Wild London special, the first two episodes of Wandavision (cor, that's a weird one), and forty-five minutes of The Two Towers. Gimli is really very comic-relief in this one, which I'm not loving. It's more noticeable having recently read the books!

I also woke up at 03:18 yesterday morning and didn't manage more than a few minutes of dozing thereafter, so had a fairly miserable day; beaten, however, by my swimming buddy (who lives around the corner and has been kindly giving me a lift to and from swimming while I'm staying with Mum), whose brother was just diagnosed with CJD, of all things. Apparently there's one or two people diagnosed per million each year, but talk about appalling luck.

Anyway last night I got rather more sleep, so have felt much more at peace with the world today and even accomplished some useful work tasks. I'll need all the available brain for choir tonight, though, this piece seems to be taking a lot of work somehow even though it's Haydn and not exactly difficult.

I have read zero books, but I have made some progress on booklogging, so it's not all bad.

Today I discovered that it is possible to add Too Many new games on Steam! It actually locked me out and I had to wait an hour before I could add the final items from the Humble Bundle I was working on. It did take fifty games in 25 minutes to hit the rate limit, though, which doesn't seem too unreasonable. I think I have now added every game I bought via Humble Bundle to my Steam account, which is a nice (small) milestone.

My cleaner came today for the first time since before Christmas, and my house is so pretty now! Also once she was gone I could start the laundry going again (I try to have all the laundry dry and away before she arrives, so she can e.g. vacuum the floor instead of having to work around the drying racks). I've hung three loads already, there's a hoodie in now and a second to go in when it's done, and the only things left that need washing are the half of the bedding that will need a drying rack. That will have to wait until the weekend. I would say "then I'll be all up to date!" but then I'll be at Mum's and will need to catch up again once I return from there! Still, I'm closer than I was.

There have been workpeople outside my window all day dismantling the next block of garages for replacement, which includes mine; I'm quite excited by this, since at the end of it I will hopefully have a garage with a door that I can open! and close! all by myself! without crowbars and ropes and enough equipment that I could really use three hands. Not that I have much to keep in it; the only thing in there before was my bike. Still, it would be nice to get that out of the spare room again.

The snow did indeed all melt on Tuesday, but this evening we're under Storm Goretti, and it's been coming down good and proper - huge wet flakes, a couple of centimetres in the last hour or so already. We don't seem to have much of the high winds or anything, though; it's been quite peaceful (well, except for Miss H's family, who were driving back from Worcester and are stuck on a road behind some lorries).

Currently in limbo as to whether I'll be in the office tomorrow or not; the forecast thinks it'll keep snowing for a couple of hours but then move towards sleet, and this stuff is so wet it won't take much to melt it. I'll have to see what it looks like in the morning. I've packed everything ready, regardless - although actually I didn't really need to, because the swimming pool has pre-emptively cancelled the morning swim, so I don't need most of it anyway...

The washing machine is behaving itself again. The repairman has broken his ankle and couldn't come and look at it, but suggested something to check; we tried it without any result but then did some laundry to see whether it would cooperate or not, and so far so good! I did four loads yesterday, so the pile is looking much more reasonable.

Life is incredibly quiet and mundane and some day I will finish the November booklog, but mostly things are just... restful, right now. A good way to start the year.

I have a bunch of game codes going spare for anyone who wants them! We don't have to be mutuals or anything, and feel free to pass them along to other friends etc. Please take them! Some of these games are great, but I can't play two copies.
( list of games )

Christmas was good but also SO MUCH. By the end of Boxing Day lunch I was trying to work out how much longer I had to stay in company, but I ended up in my mother's living room where she was silently playing a game on her new tablet and my sister's fiance was silently playing a game on his phone, and I just sat there silently reading on my phone for an hour and felt much better.

Family updates:

• my sister is engaged! this came as a surprise to me and the brother who doesn't live near her, although mostly because we thought they were already engaged (there have been casual discussions about weddings going back some years)
• my sister's endometriosis op in the autumn revealed that she does not in fact have endometriosis, but she did have a nasty tumour-y thing which was not cancer but apparently also not not cancer and now she is down one ovary and fallopian tube, which is particularly upsetting for her because all of this was part of the fertility investigations they've been working on
• my middle nephew is dating a boy! He is definitely the least surprising candidate for this out of my niblings. Apparently he is not presently interested in labels, only in dating the person he likes, which seems perfectly reasonable to me, particularly since he's fourteen

Apparently I made a good decision to leave when I did on Christmas Day since several family members were already pretty drunk, and it sounds like it got significantly worse after I left! Not in a bad way - my family are generally very well-behaved drunks, they just enjoy themselves - but at least one person apparently needed considerable help to get upstairs to bed. Mum said "they were singing all sorts of things to Dad's guitar! Oasis and Simon & Garfunkel and lots of things!"; I said that sounded nice and she said "IT WASN'T" (I gather they were fairly raucous...)

Both my parents stayed home from the Boxing Day walk this year, which meant that for the first time in years I was not solely responsible for the cooking, and was surprisingly stressful (Dad: "Oh yes we can cook all six of those things in the last half hour before lunch!" Me, silently: YOU CAN FIT A MAXIMUM OF TWO THINGS INTO THE OVEN, AND I DON'T BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACCESS TO TIME TRAVEL). However my mildly panicked promptings did cause enough things to happen early that it wasn't a disaster (three or four things were cooked while we were eating and brought up as additional items, but that's fine). They didn't want to cook things early and let them get cold waiting around, which is very reasonable, but also if you are trying to cook:

• three trays of sausage rolls (vegetarian spanakopita; sage and onion; cheese; chorizo; black pudding; "Chinese takeaway" (with five-spice, hoisin and soy sauces); homemade by my sister's fiance and apparently all very delicious - obviously I only had the spanakopita ones)
• two trays of cheese potatoes
• two sticks of garlic bread
• a tray of pigs in blankets
• three small trays of brie and cranberry parcels
• a pack of chicken goujons
• a small tray of beef and stuffing Yorkshire puddings(?!?)
• a Greek omelette / fritatta thing

you cannot in fact do them all at once even if you have a four-oven Aga. Something is going to be lukewarm and this is simply a fact of reality. Particularly since the temperature starts dropping when you keep opening and closing the door, cooking lots of frozen items in it, etc etc, so the cooking times on the packaging become more and more distant from reality (the 17-minute brie and cranberry parcels had I think 35 minutes in the end and were only barely beginning to brown then).

Mum was pretty down about food things because - well, ok, she has pretty much spent six months during her chemo eating the exact same meals every day at the exact same times, which has been working for her, but means she does not yet have any real idea how to calculate the appropriate medication for meals with different food in them, or how to arrange them around eating at different times, or how to schedule everything so that she can still eat her before-bed weetabix to prevent any overnight hypos. I'm fairly sure this is a one-time problem, because by next year she'll have varied her diet and activity sufficiently to be able to work it out better. But right now she's feeling very confronted by how not-"normal" her life is, and it's been no fun for her.

But everyone had enough to eat and there were left-overs, so it was a success. Then I came home and did nothing and talked to no one and hopefully tomorrow I will have energy to start on my to-do list backlog.

Today I mostly Power Automated. Or attempted to. I had to call in the expert several times, and at least one of them he was like "yeah I don't know why it's not working either", which was at least validating. My first flow is now sending emails, although I still need to tweak it a bit.

Also: honestly what sort of bullshit is it that you can't get Microsoft Forms to send an email to the person who filled out the form with their details in! That's been, like, basic form functionality for at least fifteen years, and it's all very well saying "oh well you can do it with Power Automate", but that is much more complicated than ticking a "send submissions to user" box and requires access to a whole separate system plus someone to set up all the permissions for you to use whatever Outlook mailbox, etc etc etc...

Anyway. I have three? four? forms that my boss wants me to have up and running before Christmas. Now I've got all the accesses and permissions configured that should hopefully be possible, which is good because I did promise...

On the home front, I have now ordered all the remaining Christmas presents I can do before Christmas Day itself (why do so few places allow you to buy gift-cards to ship on a particular date!), wrapped all the physical things I already have, sorted out the last grocery delivery before Christmas so I won't accidentally starve, and checked in with my siblings to discover that other people have been working on the stocking presents for my parents, and what isn't bought is at least planned.

I built a beautiful tracking spreadsheet that shows what each parent is getting, calculates how much each of us has spent, and checks that against the notional budget for hopefully easier working out who owes what to whom once we're done. And so far no one has got super mad at me for being "bossy" or declared refusal to participate, which is unfortunately what tends to happens. I'm trying to back off now while we're still OK!

Now off to choir!