shadows of echoes of memories of songs

Further to the previous post... I took photos of all the cables and adaptors that were hanging around. I know what some of them are, and can guess at others, but some are a complete mystery. See the full horror on Flickr and feel free to tag, annotate or comment!

The VCR, TVBox and monitor are at the beginning, for those who were asking about those specifically.

addedentry has just bought a coax-to-coax with "standard aerial connectors". It doesn't seem to do the right thing. :-/ Sound is coming out of the video! I think we may have lift-off! :-)

Saw the doctor and he was slightly more helpful than they usually are. He agreed that while stress is probably making things worse, being uncomfortable and in pain tends to make people stressed, so let's try to fix the problem or at least the symptoms.

Booked in for blood tests next week, but in the meantime he wants me to cut the following things out of my diet for two weeks: ( foods, gushy and otherwise )

Anyway, at least it's something concrete to try, which is better than sitting on my arse feeling sorry for myself. We'll see what happens.

I urge my friends list to take a look at the first two pages of Old Silver-Grizzle the Badger by E. T. Seton, because I suspect that many of you will be as delighted by the idea of a dirigible badger as I was. A small cheering thing.

The rest of the book is lovely, but mostly nothing to do with badgers, dirigible or otherwise.

(Thank you all for your kind & helpful comments on my previous post. You are all Better Than Badgers.)

I feel like I'm retreating further and further into some kind of shell.

The weekend was horrible, not least because I spent most of it doubled up with stomach pain. Had about 3 hours' sleep last night, agonised about whether to go into work this morning (illness is unlikely to be anything infectious and I'll be in just as much pain if I stay home and do nothing, possibly worse because I won't have things to take my mind off it), eventually decided that if I dragged myself in for the (mildly important) meeting at 9am I could always go home afterwards.

The first thing my office-mate said when I got in was "Good weekend?" ("Not really, but at least it's over now.") I know you're not supposed to tell the truth in response to that sort of question, it's nothing to do with information-gathering, but I'm generally too shattered to think of convincing lies. I suppose I ought to get into the habit of giving a non-committal "Yeah, not bad" no matter what.

Meeting was productive, but the boss thinks that the reason I'm ill is "stress" and thinks I "may be in the wrong sort of job". Yes, I am stressed; being in discomfort and pain a lot of the time tends to make most people less-than-relaxed, I would have thought. But now I'm worrying about getting fired for being ill as well. (Yes, I know they can't fire you for being ill, but in straitened circumstances they're less likely to make an effort to keep the flaky sickly people, & the effect is the same.) The boss probably sees more of my emotional angst than a lot of people, but that's only because I've trusted him enough to talk to him; we seem to get on well most of the time, I've come to see him as a friend as well as a colleague (though I'm wary of using the word because it suggests some kind of reciprocality & it seems presumptuous to assume that). Now I feel like I shouldn't have given that trust so readily, and I worry that it'll just end up being used against me.

When I get up in the morning, I don't want to go to work. (I always do, though, because I know what happens if that starts seeming like an option instead of a necessity.) When it gets to the end of the day, I don't want to go home. (See above.) I am so deeply and bone-wearily tired that the effort of context-switching is just too much. If you gave me a reasonably comfortable place to sit and a simple task that would take 10 years to complete, I would probably just sit there and complete it.

It's getting harder and harder to talk to anybody about anything (online or offline). I feel like I'm watching the conversations from the other side of a pane of glass. There are a handful of conversations which I can have on autopilot, mostly set-piece rants or hilarious catchphrase-trading.

I feel as though I still have something to say but no way to say it.

I'll take a quiet life. Retreating into my shell.

On Sunday I will be running the Oxford Town & Gown 10K, again. This lunchtime we did a trial run of the different-but-still-a-bit-silly route round town, minus about a quarter of a kilometre because we wanted to end up back at work, and managed it in 55 minutes without trying particularly hard and while fighting our way round the zombie hordes tourists. ( rambling about running )

Some of you kind people sponsored me on paper at the weekend; if anybody else feels moved to motivate me and help the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, I have made my first ever justgiving.com page and will be trying to convince the people who organise the sponsorship from their seekrit volcano lair house in Witney that the internets is a viable alternative to pen and paper. (If this doesn't work, the charity will still get the money, but I might be saved from acquiring the mrs joyful prize for rafia work commemorative spoon for getting lots of sponsorship.)

Just to be clear, there is absolutely no obligation to sponsor me. Really. I will not think any the less of you if you don't (though of course I will be grateful if you do!). There is even less obligation to come and wave from the sidelines, since I will probably be going huff-huff-huff like a badger with a bellows, and may not even see you. :-} Also, I know lots of you sponsored me for the Red Nose Run not long ago, & I have been shamefully remiss in not emailing everybody to thank them -- so a belated thank you to all of you now! (I should also have linked to the photos of running/silliness and photos of colleges from the event, too.) I won't be dressed up for the Town & Gown, I'm afraid; but maybe one day I will walk a charity race in the boots I wore on Saturday night, though it may take as long as it took the guy in the diving suit to run a marathon.

Now to go and bathe my slightly-achey legs, assuming the man-who-does managed to fix the hot water...

addedentry and I had a party, and it was great! It was lovely to see all the people who were there, & we were sad not to see the people who couldn't make it. I'm not going to try to list you all, or list all the lovely presents we got (though I hope I thanked everybody at the time!) but fivemack gets a special vote of thanks for bringing us lots of fab wedding photos and making fried breakfast for seven people (without the aid of forks) on Sunday morning. :-)

I would also like to apologise to khalinche and timeplease for failing to wake up in time to say goodbye (but I hope they slept well on our sofabed), and to juggzy for failing to be awake when she returned to fetch some things she'd left here (but I hope she found everything in the end without too much trauma). I am not very good at mornings, sorry.

I was pleased with the way this year's cake decoration turned out, though I'm afraid the actual cake was a bit on the 'meh' side -- too dry, not enough jam.

Late on Saturday night my ridiculous 15" boots got an impromptu airing, so that I could prove that they existed (that's the first time I've taken them out of the box since moving to Oxford -- I had to cut the packing-tape to get them out). If anybody took a decent photo of them I'd love to see it: a flickr link would allow me to prove the existence of the boots without risking breaking my legs. :-} On the other hand a flickr link would not have given me the rather fun experience of being nearly as tall as htfb.

I hope "a good time was had by all", but I can only really speak for myself; I spent most of last week feeling fairly fail-ish and not at all partyish but was much cheered by conversation and silliness and singing and cake and port, so thank you again to all our guests for making an old-ish woman very happy. :-)

[More posts to follow on Oxbridge limericks, singing, decluttering, and running... watch this space, tonight is LJ-catchup night!]

This year's birthday party: our house, Oxford, Saturday 9 May. I can't do better than repeat my own invitation from last year steal addedentry's invitation from this year, including his subject line (oh okay, I will also add some colour):

When: Tea/cake/faff from 3pm, proper party from party o'clock. [Last year we wrapped up at 2am.]
Where: HERE. If you don't have our address and/or you want directions, email/comment.
RSVP: would be helpful so we know vaguely how many people we're expecting.
Partners/children/friends: welcome, unless they are likely to start arguments or try to molest my badgers.
Pets: just not practical, sorry. Unless you have some very very tiny kittens.
Drinks: there will be some (including weird shit from the depths of the booze-cabinet), but more is always welcome! :-)
Eats: there will be nibbles and (if I have time to bake it) cake, and there are various vendors of munchies within spitting distance.
Spitting: not allowed, especially at our local munchies-vendors.
Smoking: also not allowed! Not even on the balcony (my birthday, my rules).
Badgers: positively encouraged (they don't count as pets).

Any other questions that we've failed to pre-empt, please ask!

Recent spam:

My name is Frank M. Ahearn, I am a privacy expert who teaches people how to disappear, and my partner Eileen C. Horan is a skip tracer who locates people. If you ever need experts for a project about people disappearing, pseudocide, missing persons, social engineering, finding people and other related topics please do not hesitate to contact us.

I can't imagine how they got together.

Tomorrow (Friday) is Red Nose Day, which means it's the day of the Record-breaking Red Nose Day Run. (We're probably not actually breaking any records, largely because as far as we know nobody's ever set any relevant ones, but alliteration totally beats facts, every time.) Lots of you lovely people have sponsored me (if you haven't and still want to, there's still time!) and a couple of you have even written a press release for me. You're all awesome! Now all I have to do is keep my little badger legs moving for a couple of hours...

So, the route has been revised and refined and generally buggered-about-with, and now looks like this. It's 8.7 miles (or, in metric, really quite a lot of kilometres) and takes us past every single one of the Colleges (and PPHs) of Oxford University. We are very, very glad that this no longer includes Templeton.

I mentioned that we were hoping to be able to let people track our progress LIVE! on teh intarwebs. If all goes well, you should be able to see our little red line scrawling its way around a map on this page here:

• http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runmap/

from about 10am tomorrow. (Any weird locations you can see on the map before then are probably just test data.)

If you're in Oxford tomorrow morning, look out for us! Wave something red at us! Say hello! We'll be the ones wearing lots of red and moving slightly faster than walking pace. Unless you're watching on the web, in which case, we'll be a small red line. :o)

This was received by webmaster (presumably intended for the department that actually does a creative writing course):

I was thinking about doing your creative writing course but can't afford the fees.

However I should be grateful if you could let me know the origin of the word "writerly". When I was at school you took an adjective and added 'ly' to make an adverb. Writer though is a noun.

Have the rules changed?

Well, obviously I was delighted; it's not often my Eng. Lit. background actually becomes directly relevant in answering the enquiries which webmaster receives. So I had a lovely response prepared about how critical theoreticians probably didn't feel themselves bound by the rules one learns at school, and that while you may regard lisible and scriptible as risible neologisms, "readerly" and "writerly" seem entirely reasonable translations of them, and that in any case Barthes was sadly unavailable to debate the point, having ended his discourse of the Death of the Author with uncharacteristically unstructuralist closure by falling fatally under a laundry van in early 1980. But sadly, a) I was discouraged from sending it, and b) on closer inspection it turned out that they were actually using "writerly" in the context of "writerly support", ie "support from writers", so I'm afraid morally I may be forced to side with the pompous have-your-sayer who can't tell the difference between a Creative Writing department and a Computing department.

Anyway, I forwarded the email to the right people.