I'm rather annoyed because the vegetarian roast I wanted for Christmas Day has been discontinued. If I'd known they were going to discontinue it, I'd have stocked up... but I've actually been trying to stock up on it for months now. Just couldn't find it in any real-life wholefood shops, and I'm rather leery of online ones. (Principally because a lot of them don't have their online ordering system linked to their stock information, so you can order something and then find it'll be out of stock for the next 2 months). So I'm going to have to find something else to eat, and the other seitan roast I know of is 20% fat for no apparent reason. I might have to... make one. (Possibly more effort than I can be bothered with considering we're already going to be cooking a lump of meat and as many different types of vegetable as possible).

The rest of this post is almost exactly a copy-and-paste of my post from last year. Yay, livejournal tags!

Poll #1496033 The 2009 Christmas card Poll-thing
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 7

Do you want a Christmas* card from me this year?

The following partners, children, housemates and pets should be acknowledged on the card:

My address is:

*Most of this year's cards say "A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year". But they are super-awesome and have a beautiful wolf on them. One that I have actually met in real life :)

I like getting cards at least as much as I enjoy sending them. But I don't care about reciprocity - if you can't afford to or don't have the spoons to send a card, then I'm happy to send you one without you needing to feel guilty about not sending me one.

Tags: christmas, wolfy
Current Mood: annoyed (about Yagga being discontinued)

When I'm depressed, one of my main symptoms is nightmares. All of the anxious thoughts in my subconscious manifest themselves in my sleep, and I have horrible dreams that make me incredibly panicky. ( Read more... )

Tags: mental health, triggery stuff
Current Mood: confused

Current state of the h-l: Much the same. Don't have period pain any more, thank $deity, and my gallbladder is behaving itself perfectly well as long as I behave myself perfectly well. (I can eat food with fat in, but not food with very high amounts of fat in or several fatty items in the same 24 hour period. *shrug*. This restriction never bothers me overly much - as long as I can still eat Chinese food with boiled rice, lots of vegetables and juice, I'm fine. I only get annoyed when I can't eat Chinese!). However my chronic fatigue thing is bloody awful. Tired all the time, can't get to sleep at a sensible hour, wake up feeling like I haven't slept at all. Still decidedly snotty. And my knees hurt.

Today I decided to try something a bit different. On the basis that my knees hurt like hell even if all I do is sit around in the house, I decided to give them some gentle exercise by cycling into town instead of getting the bus. Even though it was dark and raining (pitch black at 4pm! Gods, I hate December), I feel distinctly happier. Cycling really is the only exercise I've ever found that gives me an endorphin buzz and it's a useful means of transport as well, wow! And my legs certainly don't hurt any more than they did, and *may* even be slightly better. Please keep prodding me to cycle even when the weather is crap because it does actually make a difference to my moods.

Tomorrow I am going to BU with a "random" person. She is a friend from college who was bemoaning the lack of queer events that are friendly to bisexuals (or to lesbians who sometimes date men). So please be nice to her if you're there, because she wants some more friends.

Still stressed about Christmas. A bit less stressed than I was. Yay.

Tags: my weird medical stuff, queer, tricycles
Current Mood: okay

I still have the sinus infection, period pain and achy joints. But now I am also having a gallbladder attack featuring so much pain that if I didn't know what it was, I'd have gone straight to the hospital. (I did actually collapse in a heap on the floor when I was trying to go to see my counsellor, stupid me for even trying). As it is, I don't seem to have a fever anymore, so it's not a gallbladder infection, so there's no actual need for me to see a doctor. Probably it's just whining about hormonal changes (apparently gallbladders are sensitive to oestrogen) and the fact I couldn't take my ursodeoxycholic acid for a few days. I just need to keep lying here in bed and taking lots and lots of lovely drugs.

But talk about one's body completely falling apart all at once!

Also I had an absolutely HORRIBLE nightmare this morning after Richard went to work and had to phone him to make sure he wasn't dead, even though I did know it was "only a dream" that ( Probably triggery for some )

So yeah, if anyone wants me, I'll be in a cave, under the covers of my bed, going "eurgh" :/

Tags: my evil gall bladder, my weird medical stuff
Current Mood: exanimate

Wondering why I said to Richard, with all wild optimism, "If I'm better this weekend we should tidy the house" when LEGO Rock Band is out tomorrow. We'll be wanting to spend the whole weekend in front of the Xbox. Hmm.

Tags: house, video games, wuzzie, yes i'm a geek
Current Mood: amused

I'm currently feeling very sorry for myself. I've been in bed for several days too ill to do anything except reading trashy novels. Ugh. The following has all been wrong:

• Back and legs hurting too much to get up.


• Possible sinus infection - certainly lots of impacted snot and pain all round my sinuses. Dizziness and headache.


• Food poisoning or stomach bug, not sure which. Something with lots of unpleasant TMI, anyway. And a fever.


• Medication withdrawal effects - due to inability to keep meds in my stomach. Mmm, lovely migraine and shooting pins and needles all over my body.


• Period pain, to add insult to injury. A few days early. Couldn't my reproductive system have waited for my digestive system to get better?

With the sinus headache and migraine on top I haven't been in any state to look at a screen at all, and the odd text message that I had to send was wobbly and full of typoes. I've just been lying in bed feeling sad and lonely, but too out of it to actually contact anyone.

I am grateful for the fact that you can now get vanilla soy yogurt in this country, because all I have been able to keep inside me for the past couple of days has been that, ginger biscuits and peppermints. Last night I branched out and had some utterly plain pasta with a tiny bit of Pure fake butter spread, eating it v e r y   s l o w l y. Wondering if I can risk real food yet.

Also my hair is disgusting from all this lying in bed, but I haven't been able to wash it because I haven't been able to control my body temperature for long enough to have a bath. Still not sure it would be a good idea to try.

Moan moan moan.

Very grateful to Richard for all of the looking after me he's been doing. It sucks that he has to spend so much of our relationship being a nurse, but he is very good at it.

Tags: icky girlstuff, moaning
Current Mood: sick

From yesterday's Sunday Times: It’s a grolar, the climate-change polar bear. The photo in the paper was even cuter, it featured much more of the bears and you could see that the polar bear had his paw on the grizzly bear.

From today's Metro: Dramatic pictures of polar bear encounter. Featuring omg baaaaaaaaaby polar bear triplets! Obeys many of Cute Overload's rules of cuteness, e.g. #7: A thing, accompanied by a smaller version of that thing, is always cute and #9: Piles of a cute thing jack up a cuteness rating exponentially.

Also, some other newspaper articles:
'I lost the gift of joy for a while'. The artist behind Purple Ronnie and Edward Monkton writes about depression. I hadn't realised it was the same artist but it makes sense - they're both simple art styles with surreality.

And I have been checking the date to make sure it's not April Fools' Day... London commuters in a spin as Circle Line becomes a tadpole. Seriously - there was once a time when I would have known about this sort of thing months before normal Londoners. I miss Usenet.

Tags: links, london, photos, wuzzie

Had a fairly meh weekend due to my entire body crapping out on me on Saturday. I'd wanted to go to Birmingham BiFest but with my back, legs, right hip and left ankle all hurting, I wasn't going to manage 4 hours on trains. Even my gall bladder decided to get in on the action! I haven't had gallstone pain that bad in years. Instead I spent 15 hours asleep. Woo.

Yesterday was much more interesting. Richard & I went to see Ghost Forest in Trafalgar Square. It's an exhibition of tree stumps from rainforest trees in Ghana. Some of the trees had been felled sustainably (every tree in the rainforest there is numbered, and you can only take a certain quota of trees from a particular area in a 40 year period), others had fallen naturally. It was particularly useful to have the exhibition there because Nelson's Column is a similar height to the mature trees, so you had an immediate reference for the size of them when living. Also the plaque alongside each tree had a simple graphic comparing it to Nelson's Column (like when blue whales are compared to London buses, or in a video game info screen where you see size of monster compared to your character). Richard took lots of photos and I shall prod him until they go online.

Today the exhibition was being taken down, and sometime this week the trees are going to Copenhagen for the climate change summit. I don't know if there is a comparable building to be a size reference there.

I like the story about the Denya tree not wanting to leave the ground.

Tags: bifest, hippyism, london, my evil gall bladder, trees, wuzzie
Current Mood: okay

It's very pleasing when someone who knows far more than you about a subject comes to the same conclusion that you did, independently of your thoughts. It's happened to me a couple of times lately, most recently this evening when I saw my doctor and he agreed that I should increase the dose of carbamazepine that I'm on from 400 to 600mg per day. I think it's more sensible than going back onto a higher dose of Efexor (venlafaxine) because:

a) I spent the summer trying to reduce my venlafaxine dose, and got it from 225 to 75 mg before I started to experience symptoms again.

b) What's wrong now is mood lability and instability. I'm depressed on and off but I'm also hyper on and off, and having "attacks" of crying for an hour and a half with no trigger when I don't actually feel sad. A mood stabiliser seems like a more sensible option to try to level that out than an antidepressant, which will just make any hypomania worse.

Unfortunately as usual he was running excessively late (my appointment time was 6.50pm and I got seen at 7.35pm), and so I completely forgot to tell him about all the possible thyroid issues that I'm still having. Tired all the time, cold a lot of the time, even worse temperature regulation than usual, hair falling out so much more than usual (I'm actually alarmed by the amount of hair that's on my pillow in the mornings), putting on weight despite eating less than usual. I meant to ask whether I should have another blood test, not least of all because carbamazepine is known to affect the results of thyroid hormone screening, and it could be useful to see the results pre- and post- changing the dose. Damn. And looking at this list of possible hypothyroidism symptoms - yep, definitely having a lot more joint problems than is usual for me, and ( TMI ). I suppose I should phone him, as he's only doing physical appointments on Tuesdays now, and I only need to talk about it. Bah!

Tags: better living with modern pharmacology

I'm still reading livejournal very sporadically, and can't see this changing for a while. I've been hideously busy with work-for-money to the point of neglecting work-for-college, and now that my job isn't eating my life quite so much I need to make more time for college work.

I've thought about reducing my Default View further, but I can't easily rank people in order of importance. People are on that list because I enjoy reading their posts. And there is the possibility, as nitoda said last night, that if I trimmed people from that list based on the fact their lives were going okay, that something bad could happen to them and I wouldn't know.

So please bear in mind that I'm not "here" as much as usual, and if I haven't commented on something that's happened that's important to you, please drop the link into whichever of my posts is currently top of my journal. I don't get comments emailed to me, so commenting on an older post isn't much use - even if said post is a good deal more relevant to the subject. You could also email my baratron at livejournal address - that goes to my primary email account which I do check almost every day.

Hope everyone is mostly okay.

Current Mood: okay

Back from Berlin now. Well, actually, we got back very late on Tuesday night but I've been too hideously busy to write about it online. Currently we are having a power cut which means no Xbox, internet or lights, so there isn't much else to do other than sit in front of a laptop on battery power. Bah!

The overriding impression I have of the Festival of Freedom is that it was interesting and I'm glad I went, but I can't say that I "enjoyed" it as such. My mother kept bouncing up and down saying "Do you like Berlin? You don't seem to be enjoying yourself!", which didn't help. The main reason I'm not sure that I enjoyed it was because the history is rather grim and upsetting. It's not very pleasant to see how a government utterly oppressed its people for several decades. Seeing things like the parts of the Berlin Wall that still exist and realising the scope of the thing is incredible. You can read about it and see photos, but it doesn't convey the size. (It really was colossally wide - now there are several streets with buildings in what used to be no-man's-land between the two halves of the wall). And it's all very well to have a celebration because it's 20 years since East Germans became able to vote and travel freely - but what of all the countries in the world that still have dictatorships and totalitarian governments?

It's also rather thought-provoking to imagine oneself in that situation. What kind of person would I have been in East Germany? Would I have been one of the rebels, writing the underground newspapers and risking imprisonment or death on a daily basis? Or would I have been one of the rule-abiders, sticking to the law even though it meant repression of spirit? Could I even have been one of the Stasi (secret police), spying on my fellow citizens? It's impossible to know because I wasn't there and didn't grow up in that environment. Certainly I was incredibly rule-abiding when I was at school. (I've always liked to think that in the Harry Potter universe I'd be Hermione Granger or Luna Lovegood - very smart and willing to risk trouble if it was necessary, but really I was more like a Percy Weasley - unquestioning of the rules and determined to follow them because It Was The Right Thing To Do, even if they didn't make sense).

Also, while we were learning about what everyday life was like for "normal people", they were all apparently white, heterosexual and able-bodied. It's true that the Nazis made it very difficult for people who weren't white to live in the country, but we were looking at life in the 1980s. What happened to gay and bisexual people? What happened to disabled people? (Abortions were free for the first three months of pregnancy). What about the mentally ill? The communist government encouraged women to go to work by having huge state-run nurseries, in which children were potty-trained en masse. All of the toddlers would be put on the potty at the same time and they'd all have to sit there until everyone had finished. What happened to children who couldn't manage potty-training with their age peers?

So yes, lots of things to think about, and maybe some things to research when I have the time and feel up to it. I'll write more about what we actually did another time. Also, Richard has lots of photos which may go online eventually. I'll definitely go to Berlin again - it was one of the most excellent places to eat that I've found in Europe. (You think Germany's all meat and sausages? Well, there were tons of vegetarian & vegan restaurants as well!).

Tags: berlin, mum, travel
Current Mood: thoughtful

Here's an awesome set of photos that I should have posted the day I saw them: Winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009 award. Features wolfy!

Also, I should be packing right now because we're off to Berlin tomorrow. Half of the clothes I want to take are still in the wash though. Argh!

Won't be reading much. See you when we get back.

Tags: links, photos, travel, wolfy

Today's Questionable Content really is amusing. (And yes, it's work-safe).

Tags: links, queer
Current Mood: amused

Yesterday we went to see nitoda and met her cat, who has unbelievably long whiskers. As a result, I am now amused by the thought of what humans would look like if we had whiskers as wide as our shoulders. wuzzie is quite whiskery already, but that would indeed be a handlebar moustache in excess of any human currently alive!

Also, I should have posted this link yesterday. It's a collaboration between Liz Enthusiasm of Freezepop and "a local Japanese audio guy" for Loft, a big department store chain over there.

we "collaborated" on the lyrics, which basically meant constructing a loose narrative around a list of halloween characters that they provided us with (as much as i wish i could take credit for "bad smell candle" or "gecko", apparently the japanese ad agency thought they were pretty spooky characters). the result is a masterpiece of engrish.

Halloween All Stars: 2009 Loft Halloween.

I think the song is really catchy :)

Tags: engrish, freezepop, links, music, wuzzie
Current Mood: amused

Re: extreme right-wing politician on TV
What Nick Griffin said about his Question Time appearance.

What Bonnie Greer said about hers.

Re: homophobic columnist in the Daily Mail
Jan Moir continues to miss the point.

Meh.

Tags: links, politics, queer, racism

I have been working all weekend. My bank balance will be happy but my spoon balance less so. I'm feeling like I'm going down with a cold, which is entirely normal for me if I have to work 5 hours a day for two days. Yes, I know that's pathetic, but that's my health for you.

It doesn't help that on Friday I went shopping for birthday presents for Richard, which involved too much walking round central London. I seem to be "allergic" to London, in that I always have snot from hell the day after going there. It's probably pollution, and there probably isn't anything I can do about it. I bought him a new drum stool. The one he had was this piece of crap. Well, I suppose that's unfair - it was free with the drum kit and perfectly fine for free, but really uncomfortable and hard to adjust, especially for multiple users of different heights (see those notches? It can only have those 6 fixed heights). I've now bought him the top of the range Mapex "drum throne" that is basically the same as this but with a soft plushy top instead of a vinyl cover. It has a spiral like old-fashioned circular piano stools so you can get it to exactly the right height, and adjust it easily if someone else wants to play. The guy in the shop said that soft tops are better than leather or vinyl as they absorb sweat (and you sweat a lot whilst drumming). It is really rather comfortable. I did see a stupidly-expensive Yamaha drum stool (£130! You can buy an armchair for that!), but it was like the bench type of piano stool and way too big.

I have given him the drum throne right away because it was too exciting to wait. Also we're spending his birthday in Berlin watching giant dominoes fall because it's the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I couldn't possibly carry it to Berlin and back on the plane, it would take up all my luggage allowance! The other thing I've got for him is small enough to be carried.

Also, I "accidentally" bought this: Rock Band sheet music for Cello. I haven't played the cello in years again because it hurts my back (when I have Copious Free Time (TM), I need to figure out whether it is actually the position involved in playing the cello that's the problem, or if a different type of chair would help), but I couldn't resist. It was only £8.95, which seemed worth it even if all I do is look at the music and imagine playing it on the cello :) Seriously, since when have you been able to buy rock music scored for cello? You certainly couldn't when I was a teenager.

And we picked up Guitar Hero: Aerosmith because it was £14.99, and it turned out there were enough points on our Game Reward Card to get it for £4.99! It is based on the Harmonix Guitar Hero engine and so is awesome, unlike Guitar Hero: Metallica which is based on Neversoft's Guitar Hero World Tour engine. (Have I ranted about this before? Stupid purple lines!)

Tags: my weird medical stuff, spoon management, video games, wuzzie
Current Mood: tired

I've just been watching Nick Griffin (short BBC biography / long Wikipedia entry) on Question Time. Some thoughts: ( Long )

The "Wisdom" of Nick Griffin
"Indigenous British" people are descended from the people who were here 17,000 years ago."Skin colour is irrelevant". Nick Griffin apparently has no freaking idea of the history of this country. Being an island, we've been invaded a ridiculously large number of times - Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, just in the past couple of thousand years. Our blood is so co-mingled that, even were records available, I'm not sure anyone could trace themselves back that far.

I'm pleased to know that if the BNP suddenly got into power, Nick Griffin would permit me and all the other non-white people to stay in this country. I wonder if the rest of his party agree with him on that, though? Pretty sure a lot of BNP members think that brown people should be sent back to where they came from, which is a problem if you come from here. Maybe they'd have some sort of "Britishness" test.

Nick Griffin thinks that the BBC is "ultra left-wing". This would be the same BBC that is officially impartial and allowed him, as an ultra right-wing politician onto the programme in the face of Cabinet criticism and serious protests? Riiiight.

I'm glad the programme wasn't 100% everyone pile on Nick Griffin, let's see what an idiot he is. Apparently he went to Cambridge, so he must have a brain in there somewhere. I find many of his views repugnant, but it's worth noting how he's managed to drag the BNP from being an extreme racist party with a handful of jackbooted supporters into something that ordinary people are prepared to vote for.

An audience member asked the various panelists about Jan Moir's hateful Stephen Gately article in the Daily Mail. The four panelists who were not in the BNP gave essentially identical answers in favour of free speech (unsurprising considering they were willing to appear on TV alongside the BNP), but suggesting that a person/newspaper should consider whether their opinion is in good taste. Nick Griffin however came out with some wonders:

"I'm against the teaching of homosexuality to primary school children. I'm against the teaching of any kind of sexuality in primary school, I think it's wrong." I started my periods in primary school - was I supposed to think I was bleeding to death?

"Most British people find two men kissing creepy." It's the view of most of Britain, along with all the Muslims and all the Christians. Erm... for someone who is anti-Islam because you think it treats women as second-class citizens, why are you now acting like you're all on the same side? Also, most Christians in this country are not actively against homosexuality.

"Homophobic prejudice - I don't think there's any place in a civilised society for it" - go, Chris Huhne!

I'm going to write some stuff about me sometime. Not sure when.

Tags: politics, queer, racism, uk

Really not doing very wonderfully at all. To give you some idea, today involved my alarm going off at 3pm followed by me falling back to sleep multiple times until it was about 5.30pm. Then I sat in bed reading and having bursts of crying until 8ish. Feeling very tired, very sad and very "heavy" - my limbs feel like I'm in some sort of extra-strong gravity field and moving feels like far too much effort.

Not altogether certain whether it's depression or chronic fatigue or both. For the past few weeks, I seem to have been having an okay day followed by an absolutely shitty day, over and over. Probably need to go back to the doctor. And it's fucking frustrating because I spent the summer reducing the dose of my antidepressant and now what? Dire depression. Richard says "You don't remember how bad you were years ago" and he's right, but nor do I want to go back there.

My concentration span is rotten too. I can't concentrate on anything, then I hyperfocus on something. Like ranting about the stupid Daily Mail article. It's all or nothing, and it's never on the right things. Also I feel cold all the time and my hair is falling out worse than usual.

I'd quite like to crawl into a hole and hibernate for a few months until it's spring again.

Not keeping up with livejournal terribly well. If there's something you want to make sure I know, then post the link here.

Tags: mental health, sad
Current Mood: depressed

Further to my last post, please now die of shock to discover that Janet Street-Porter has written an article in today's Daily Mail which I agree with! The Daily Mail really does have some sort of multiple personality disorder going on - and I use "disorder" advisedly. Sometimes it can be a perfectly reasonable newspaper and print articles which are socially conservative but relatively tolerant, and at other times it reverts to spewing bilious hatred towards anyone who dares to be anything other than "middle England".

I've been trying to find the list of people that the Daily Mail hates (there's a checklist, and you can count up the number of points you get), but it seems to have vanished off the internet. Hrm.

BBC News reports that there have been more than 21,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission about the original article, which is apparently the most ever made about a single newspaper article. Good.

In other news, I am still alive, and not getting a lot done. Even Richard has SAD now (something to do with having been in Florida for a week, I think).

Update: I've just discovered that one of yesterday's Mail on Sunday columnists was even more scathing! "Let's get just one thing clear: the cause of Stephen Gately’s death was not gayness.

He was a young man. I don’t know if he had sex or alcohol on the night he died.

Many young men do drink and have sex, though, don’t they? Or is that just a gay thing?"

This is particularly awesome considering that the Mail on Sunday has historically been even worse than the Daily Mail for sheer bigoted ranting about gays/ blacks/ Muslims/ illegal immigrants/ single mothers...

Tags: queer
Current Mood: blah

I am having a lousy day today with depression. I haven't technically got out of bed yet, although I have cleaned my teeth and got dressed. However, even if I don't get round to doing any house-tidying today, I've managed to do something "useful" - which is to join the apparently 1000 other people complaining about this hateful and homophobic article in the Daily Mail about a recently-dead celebrity who hasn't even been buried yet. The original title for the article was even worse.

I think Stephen Fry's comment on Twitter sums it up best - "I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathsome and inhumane." But Charlie Brooker's article on The Guardian's website is also pretty good.

I usually live with the fact that the Daily Mail has regular rabid attacks against anyone who is "different" in any way, i.e. not white, middle-class, heterosexually monogamously married Church of England. But the timing and vitriol of this one is so awful that I thought I'd drag myself to the Press Complaints Commission website and join in the complaints. I'm rather pleased to see that the Make a Complaint page has a big link saying IF YOU ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE JAN MOIR PIECE IN THE DAILY MAIL PLEASE CLICK HERE.

For my reference, this is what I said: ( Read more... )

Tags: queer
Current Mood: angry