shadows of echoes of memories of songs

38 weeks yesterday; Friday was my last day at work. ( finishing work, parental visits, garden, house, and how I'm doing generally... long rambly diary entry )

This is not the thing I was going to post about today, but just for the record, I have had a productive day. I'm writing this down because it feels like I haven't had very many of those for a Very Long Time. Today I have:

* got lots of work done, including a) making inroads on some very boring documentation that I've been procrastinating about, and b) writing a perl script that I've been meaning to write for about 3 years (to do a tedious bit of testing/admin that I have to keep doing badly by hand, so now a) I can do it better and b) I can let someone else do it)

* been to an Oxford Cycle Workshop seminar about safe cycling (which was jolly good, and I wish it was compulsory for anybody who's planning to ride a bike on the roads, & I may write about that separately too)

( done some other smallish admin/household things )

This burst of energy coincides with ACTUAL MOVEMENT INSIDE from the little alien baby (sorry but it still does look like an alien to me on the scans). Yes, it appears that what I need to stop me procrastinating about stuff is for someone to kick me from the inside.

Today my mum took me and addedentry to a garden centre and bought us an apple tree (a Worcester Pearmain), as well as some other smaller tasty plants (tomatoes, peppers, and blueberry bushes). Digging a hole big enough for even such a tiny tree takes a surprising amount of time and effort. We also planted the hazel sapling from my parents' garden; meanwhile, the hawthorn saplings cleanskies gave us are flourishing. We are literally putting down roots here.

The eventual plan for the garden is that everything should be edible; the main exceptions at the moment are the daffodils, crocuses, and rather lurid primulas which we planted hastily to stop the garden looking quite so much like a post-apocalyptic wasteland (it worked!), though our definition of 'edible' includes anything Richard Mabey thinks you can eat, which allows quite a lot of leeway.

The best thing about the garden, though, is that we have a BADGER! OK, we've only actually seen it in next door's garden, not ours (we've seen a fox and a hedgehog in ours, though) but given the mess it's made of theirs I'm quite happy with that. I tried to get a photo but you can only really tell it's a badger if you already know. But, really, an ACTUAL LIVE BADGER!

We've definitely made more progress with the garden than with the house; while the garden's growing, the house is falling down. OK, that's a slight exaggeration: it's suffering from a small amount of subsidence, which has caused cracks to appear all over the place. The buildings insurance people think this is a) probably due to defective drains (as opposed to, say, tunnelling badgers), and b) probably not covered by our insurance because we were sort of warned that it was a possibility in the survey. It has taken them weeks and weeks to do anything, and we're still waiting for the results of the investigation of the drains. I was horribly worried about it at first, and it certainly added to the general hiding-under-a-rock stress; but you can't sustain that level of worry for this long, and the house hasn't actually fallen down, so now I am just wishing they would hurry up and tell us how much it will cost.

The subsidence does mean that pretty much everything else to do with the inside of the house is suffering from planning blight, though; realistically, we weren't going to have redecorated everything by now (my parents still haven't redecorated everything in their house, and they've lived there for 24 years now), but we were hoping to get started on sorting out the kitchen. We still don't have an oven, but it's not a big deal. Maybe we don't need an oven after all (at least two people now have said we should get a Remoska instead). It would feel slightly odd making a deliberate choice not to have an oven, to get the kitchen refitted without leaving room for one; but probably no odder than it would feel to a lot of people not to have a TV.

On the other hand, not having a TV doesn't really mean it's impossible to watch TV; it's just impossible to watch it live. We watched the whole first series of Glee (if you don't know what Glee is -- and given that I don't often watch TV, I don't take it for granted that everybody knows about every TV show -- then the Wikipedia entry will explain with no spoilers above the fold) suffering the indignity of being a week behind the rest of the UK because 4OD didn't release the episodes until they'd shown the repeat. Episodes! Repeats! Things I hadn't thought about at all since I last watched TV regularly, back in the late 1990s. I tried to persuade addedentry to do the bittorrent thing so we could get the next episodes quicker, but he wouldn't, and I don't know how (honestly! I've just never done it). We also watched the first episode of the new Dr Who (it is probably internet heresy to say that I don't really get Dr Who, but, well) despite nearly being put off by the utterly rubbish bit with the food at the beginning.

There's lots of other things I want to write about but I don't really know where to start, and more and more I feel as though LiveJournal isn't really the place to write about them, because I feel like I don't know anybody here very well any more. I don't have real conversations with very many people any more at all, and that's my fault for not being good at keeping up friendships, but it still feels like I've retreated into a dark empty room somehow and I don't quite know how to come back to the party, because everything is elsewhere, and I'm not totally sure that it wouldn't be better just to slip away home in the dark without another word.

You may have noticed that the attempt to post something every day has gone the same way as pretty much everything else this month, viz., the way of EPIC FAIL.

Work continues mostly stressful and unhappy for reasons which are mostly completely outwith my control; the weather has gone all drizzly and miserable; choir has become less of a respite from work-style stress because of personality clashes; I keep getting bitten by nasty insects; and now the boiler has just packed in, leaking all over the kitchen floor (thankfully before we started getting a new kitchen fitted).

þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg.

To try to offset the fail, a short list of positive things:

* the Installation of the new Vice-Chancellor yesterday was interesting, and a good chance to swan (jackdaw?) around in a borrowed gown
* I have pulled up about a million miles of deeply-embedded nettle roots from something that may one day be a flower-bed in our garden
* Warneford Meadow Apple Day one weekend, and Wolvercote Community Orchard's Apple Day the next, have together allowed us to sample a lot of tasty apples and local produce (it is amusing that "produce" nearly always means jam and cake rather than, say, soup, or bread).
* We have discovered that Tesco on Cowley Road do an incredible range of interesting Polish and Jamaican foods. Salt fish! Apple mint juice! Weird biscuity things! Tasty snack! (addedentry vetoed the gigantic jar of sauerkraut, sadly.)
* It is lovely having a piano in the house and being able to play it while knowing that there is nobody behind the adjoining wall who might be tutting and objecting to the noise (I am competent enough that it's mostly fairly tuneful noise, but the music might not be to everybody's taste).
* Friends and kittens are a great comfort.

Today I have: managed to book Glasto tickets for me and my mum and EIGHT other people despite EPIC FAIL on the part of seetickets (amazingly there are STILL TICKETS LEFT after several HOURS); tidied the house (a bit); sorted out some stuff to go to charity shops; filed all the boring admin BORING BORING BORING; helped Owen pair A MILLION AND ONE socks (he is very good at pairing my infinite supply of black socks, but we still ended up with about 7 really-definitely-odd ones); played piano (probably pissing off the new neighbours with incompetently-played Rachmaninov preludes); listened to Owen's piano practice (recognisable tunes with BOTH HANDS AT ONCE! did I learn that fast? I wish I could remember); identified all the tasks that we need to do for planning our w*dd*ng (and even made some Decisions, amazingly); made tasty roast chicken (I say 'made', but really, all you do is shove half a lemon up its arse and put it in the oven for an hour and a half, and the 'tasty' owed more to evolution than to the lemon) and tastier plum tart (which I actually did make); and replied to a couple of emails (though the backlog is still doomful).

Today I have not: done the work I was going to do this weekend; got any further with any of the on-the-go knitting projects; written up the EIGHT PAGES OF RANT triggered by the mini-conference I went to on Thursday; read any more of Ulysses.

SO UNBELIEVABLY TIRED. But how am I supposed to do all the things I want to do if I have to sleep as well? Yes, yes, I know.

( Things I have done this evening )

Yes, hello, I have been hiding under a rock for a while. In lieu of tedious diaryism, here are some things I have done for the first time in the last couple of weeks:

Installed Ubuntu. What feels like several hundred times, though I've actually only done two installs, and the rest has been booting live CDs/DVDs, and CD images in virtual machines, testing boot times. ... I have now been in the new job for two and a half weeks, and I've got so little done, and my colleagues are all cool and interesting and frighteningly clever, and I sometimes feel like they must have hired me out of pity.

Walked to the top of Boar's Hill to see the dreaming spires. Okay, we only walked from Wootton, but still. And you can't see the spires unless you're nine feet tall and have a telephoto lens the length of a telegraph pole. I am five foot one and a bit and have a point-and-click Canon Ixus, and got a photo of my feet, though that was deliberate. There is a thing you can stand on, which you're not meant to stand on. I will post photos. ("The photos are in the next post" is the LJ equivalent of "The cheque's in the post".) We saw llamas mating on the way back down the hill. I won't post photos of that, don't worry.

Tried to fix my grandad's hair... in Second Life. He's inspired by the whole idea, and currently determined to build a virtual Switzerland, and to recreate the voyage of the Titanic. We had trouble getting the "dignified" look he wanted for his hair. He turned 80 last year.

Bought a computer on eBay. It doesn't have a hard drive. I may have to buy another one. Or a hard drive. Or both. I'm hedging my bets.

Executive summary in pictures: [Ubuntu | Standing on maps | Scary llama ]

So we spent Thursday and Friday getting acronym safely installed in his really quite excellent flat on the cool side of town, which gave me another chance to play White Van Jan. This one wasn't quite as much fun as last time, as the gears on the van seemed to be somewhat suboptimally arranged (for "suboptimally arranged" read "cocking awkward"), in a way that all too often left me unsure about whether I was moving into first or third, or second or fourth. I'd like to be able to say that "hilarious consequences ensued", but in fact the main consequences were stalling at a couple of junctions, mild panic at Mitcham's Corner when several seconds of stick-waggling failed to locate first gear at all, and a hell of a lot of swearing. The van shenanigans also involved some frankly hilarious reversing manoeuvres, but thanks to helpful friends and neighbours I managed to avoid damaging Practical's property or anybody's houses/bins/cats/etc.

A big thumbs-up for Practical, by the way, if anybody's after van-hire recommendations; they were reasonably-priced, and very friendly and helpful. They were also unsurprised but amused when I told them I'd been recommended to them by cam.misc. ("So where did you hear about us? No, wait, it's the internet. Everybody always gets our name off the internet.")

I was certainly very glad of their laid-back attitude when we were over half an hour late returning the van. This was largely due to my own mis-estimation of times and distances: I cycled from Greenwich House to Cowley Road in 20 minutes on Thursday after work, and I can cycle from home to work in 20 minutes in the morning, so I couldn't quite believe that it could take an hour to drive from home to Cowley Road, but it did, more or less. Being this late meant that addedentry and I didn't have time to pick bikes up in the van, so we ended up walking from Cowley Road; it's always strange being a foot-traveller in a place which is built for four-wheeled access, but it was a beautiful day for a walk, so we strolled along in the sunshine and picked handfuls of blackberries from a hedge that was heavy with fruit.

In retrospect we might have been better not trying to avoid the Milton Road roadworks with a "short cut" through the Science Park, though it was quite an entertaining detour. In the end, fearful of going round in a fruitless (no blackberries here) loop, I gave up and asked a friendly passing cyclist (not knowing that another friendly passing cyclist in the shape of beckyc would pass us a minute later!) who directed us through his company's car-park and through a hole in the hedge. We crossed the old overgrown railway track and emerged into an Arbury cul-de-sac just in time to catch the ice-cream van whose bells we'd heard from the car-park.

Later we had to stop and ask another friendly cyclist (this time ewx for directions from Armitage Way to the other side of the Arbury. (I'd have probably packed a map if I'd realised it was going to turn into such an expedition, but we were never lost, just not really sure of the best route from A to B.) It was growing dark by the time we eventually made it home with our bikes; it gets dark so quickly at this time of year, from low-hanging sunshine to blue-black gloom in barely 20 minutes.

On Sunday we had another chance to discover new roads as we cycled over to acronym's for afternoon tea. I've never had occasion to cut across the common from Coldham's Lane to Newmarket Road before, but it reminded me so strongly of Marston Rec that for a moment in my mind it was 1997 again and I was back in Oxford. There were heaps of brambles along the Rec, too, and we'd see people gathering the berries in tupperwares, and when I'd cycle home in the small hours of the morning the grass would be slightly frosted and the cows would be dark sleepy mountains looming out of the mist, coming out of nowhere like the nine years (nine years!) between now and then. I've talked about this before, I know; it's just one of the many well-worn roads through my mind, and sometimes when my feet are sleepy they fall back on the paths they know.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I thought Peterhouse choir dinner would be a mostly-pleasant but slightly awkward affair in which I made polite conversation with Fellows and tried not to feel left out while the students talked of supervisions and exams. I did not expect to end up draping myself around a young don in an attempt to distract him from the fact that I was trying to steal his cigar. I blame the port. It's always the port that's to blame, really, though in this case the previous champagne, white wine, red wine, and dessert wine may have contributed...

I staggered home at some unimaginable time in the morning, not really having realised quite how late it had gotten, and I am lucky that addedentry was more amused by my sorry state than cross with me for not giving him any good idea of when I'd be back. I am even luckier that he looked after me and helped me to (eventually) get to bed despite (apparently) much resistance on my part.

Saturday morning was completely wiped out in feeling miserable, alternately sorry for myself and cross with myself, determined to get well enough to go out but unable to walk more than three steps without feeling queasy... but we finally made it to taimatsu's picnic at about 5pm, having (I now realised) missed several nice people but being in time to see lots of other nice people. There was enough food to feed an army, and lots of folky singing, and general lazing around in the sunshine.

Sunday was the last Evensong of the year, and we went out on a high note (metaphorically at least), with a robust reprise of Stainer's I Saw The Lord (which we'd done last term) and a moving a capella rendition of the lovely "Christ be with me, Christ within me" bit in the middle of Patrick's Breastplate ("I bind unto myself today..."), which, incidentally, is the BEST HYMN EVER.

I also took the opportunity on Sunday to apologise to everybody for anything I might have said or done on Friday, and got an awkward blushing grin from the senior organ scholar (I only hugged him, honest, but he probably thinks I'm a scary predatory older woman -- sometimes I forget that I'm seven years older than the oldest of these people) and a chuckle and a general-purpose drinks invitation from the nice young don (who's very Peterhouse, so I really don't think there's any danger of us confusing each other there).

The moral of the story? When life gives you port, drink port.

A surprisingly productive weekend, on the whole. ( Oxfam, MOT, piano, tidying, mowing, bindweed, walking, flowers, charity shops, Doctor Who, librarians... )

( ...rain, classic cars, hardboard, cake, exploding brains, DVDs, and books at bedtime. Phew. )