They checked it

Sep. 21st, 2025 05:37 pm
azurelunatic: Hinky: adj: pure evil fuckery afoot. Syn.: suspicious (hinky)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
The worst part of colonoscopy prep turned out to be the sheer number of trips to the bathroom, which knotted up my legs something fierce. The second worst part was the taste of the solution, even with added flavorings. It was salty! (I got the huge jug rather than the Miralax version. Miralax at least isn't salty.) Next time, probably either green unsweetened Kool-Aid or lemonade Crystal Lite or whatever.

Off topic for FFA )

I did make the planned gallon of orange jello, but since it was a little late for me to actually eat it, I put mandarin orange slices in it. Since that's often part of Belovedest's lunch. Today I packed it into smaller boxes to help with that effort and to decrease the crowding in the fridge.

I got a slight nap after everything was about finished. The split prep schedule meant that I started the second half around 12:30 am. Appointment check in time 6 am.

The distance in the facility wasn't super bad, although we brought my chair just in case. (Speaking of the chair, I have decked it out with retroreflective tape and electroluminescent wire. It looks much safer. The cup holder went on Friday.)

The procedure wasn't bad. )

I got dressed again. I had picked a cute nightgown for the outing, black with flowers and butterflies. Instead of a coat (it's getting chilly at night) I wore my dramatic black velvet robe, the one with lace trim and bell sleeves. I received a compliment. And as soon as I proved I could stand up without excessive wobbling, we were off.

Belovedest gathered breakfast for me on our way home, and I took a much needed nap (interrupted a few times to confirm that I could be made conscious and accept hydration).

And that was that.

We did our usual Friday shopping on Saturday. I was still sore. Today my legs are thankfully feeling normal.

vital functions

Sep. 21st, 2025 08:22 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

[... sorry about the template, I hit return in the title field and IT POSTED. details to appear shortly. :-p]

Reading. Ann Leckie, Monty Lyman, Ronald Melzack & Patrick D. Wall )

Writing. ... I have actually put some more notes into The Document.

So many lost property e-mails. (And at some point I'm going to need to start replying to them, too.)

Watching. On YouTube: True Facts: Bats, The Science Of The Hunt. NSFW. Definitely... An Experience.

Cooking. ... yeah no I managed to make veg spag bol on Friday but otherwise we've mostly just been feeling faintly sorry for ourselves. Okay, no, that's not quite true, I did also achieve baked potato on Wednesday.

Eating. Misc takeaway from The Field (leftover Sunday night curry for dinner on Tuesday; leftover vegetable fried rice + Szechuan tofu for breakfast on same...). I remain mildly resentful that the Wagamama menu still does not contain any of My Favourites.

Growing. The second attempt at pineapple has NEW LEAVES. The second attempt at lemongrass is maybe Going? And other than that I have no idea because I have spectacularly failed to make it to the plot this week.

Observing. BATS. A variety of excellent dahlias and passion flowers on a Trip To Town (post office, pharmacy).

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

... and doesn't quite make it.

On page 187 (of 218), we finally get this paragraph:

At this point we need to return to a crucial caveat. In most cases of persistent pain, whatever caused the initial injury has healed. Pain is now the primary disease. But there are a number of cases where there is continual damage that triggers nociceptive fibres; chronic inflammatory diseases are good examples. It is also important to point out that not every case of back pain is our brain's overreaction. A small -- but important -- minority of cases are caused by serious conditions -- cancer, some infections, spinal fractures and the nerve-compressing cauda equina syndrome -- but these can usually be ruled out by doctors, who will be on the lookout for 'red flag' symptoms. However, in the majority of cases of persistent pain (and over 90% of cases of back pain), there is no longer any identifiable tissue damage; our brain has become hypersensitive.

In a book that otherwise dedicates a lot of time to talking about gender and racial inequalities in healthcare access, including a solid half-paragraph on how common and how painful endometriosis (a chronic inflammatory condition!) is, the bit where "well this only applies to most people..." gets breezed past is certainly causing me more feelings. And yet it's still the closest anything I've read so far actually gets to engaging with the fact that the rest of us exist, so... no get-out-of-writing-essays-free card for me here, alas.

(The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, mostly pretty good and definitely got me to think constructively about a few things -- like the merits of classical vs contemporary Pilates for my specific usecase via discussion of knitting -- and introduced me to some more, like open-label placebos and "safe threats" and the impact of paracetamol on empathy. It's incomplete, but not disrecommended.)

[growth] pineapple is go!

Sep. 18th, 2025 07:19 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

A little while ago the toddler's household told me that you could turn the top of a pineapple into a whole entire pineapple plant (with the caveat that at least 60% of the time it goes mouldy). My first attempt at this had got as far as growing a whole entire root network but then suffered a Tragic Incident from which it never recovered; the second had been sat around with partially-browned but no-longer-becoming-more-browned and definitely-still-partially-green leaves for Quite Some Time. I had more or less hit the point of "... is this actually doing anything? at all?" and then upon my return from the most recent round of Adventures I rotated it in service of watering it, to discover...

a pineapple crown, growing a whole new set of leaves

... that it's growing a WHOLE NEW SET OF LEAVES. Look at it go! I am very excited!

(My understanding is that if I manage to keep it alive that long it'll take somewhere in the region of 3 years to fruit, and then in the fashion of all bromeliads will die having produced said single fruit. Happily this is about the rate at which we eat fresh pineapple...)

tired. so tired.

Sep. 16th, 2025 10:24 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Have spent most of the day asleep.

  1. Attempt #2 at pineapple-from-trimmed-top has NEW LEAVES.
  2. I am also fairly sure that attempt #2 at lemongrass is taller than it was when we set off on our terrible adventures about ten days ago.
  3. Actual bed. Favourite mattress.
  4. I got to make someone's entire day by sending an "... I think I have your object" e-mail.
  5. Leftovers for dinner: curry from the crew party on Sunday night. Didn't have to think about food. Extremely grateful for this fact.

Colonoscopy week.

Sep. 16th, 2025 01:10 am
azurelunatic: A metal sculpture of a walking duck with a duckling on its back, in front of the University Place Library (ducks in a row)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
I'm not looking forward to this.

On the other hand, I wasn't thinking with some of the usual parts of my sense of humor when I was picking out my non-red jello for Liquid Diet Day (24 oz food service pack) and rolled the wrong citrus out of three: orange.

I could have had lemon jelly.
https://youtu.be/ioudby-xooc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_Jelly
azurelunatic: "Where's the goddamn NERF BAT when you *really* need it?" Animated cartoon tech support loses her cool.  (nerf bat)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Goodbye to bad rubbish BJ, who could make simple things like Madonna being active in the music industry longer than most people of our generation being aware of, plus she didn't look in her early 40s at the time, into some kind of sinister conspiracy theory situation.

You were an absolute jackass, and I honestly don't care if you're alive or not except that I might need to avoid you.

Thanks to Votania and Darkside, who helped me realize what a bad friend BJ was, never mind as a prospective life partner and spouse. Bleck.

This random thought brought to me by the death of Charles Entertainment Kirk, which would probably have been making BJ's circles flail in panic, and hearing a Madonna song on the Doof. (A back episode, we didn't have a SunDoof that I'm aware of.)

vital functions

Sep. 14th, 2025 11:59 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Tiny bits of Solutions and Other Problems and The Painful Truth.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac.

Exploring. Chester, including Chester Zoo!

Eating. Almost all of my favourite field foods, including raspberry and lemon curd toasties, noodle pots with the addition of the prepped salad bits (spinach! red onion!), the giant lemon and sugar crepes, and flapjack. ("Almost" because the cake options CHANGED.)

Observing. The Milky Way. Something that might have been some kind of satellite or might have been some kind of shooting star. CHESTER ZOO, etc. At least one field bat.

For Ellie

Sep. 12th, 2025 08:39 am
sorchawench: (Default)
[personal profile] sorchawench
I have an LJ friend who lost her husband in the Towers, 24 years ago. She doesn't post much anymore, and I wonder how she and her daughter are doing today.
I wrote this, back in 2008. I hope their diamonds are shining bright.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sept. 11th

I sometimes wonder what it's like to walk a mile in your shoes. Especially today. My mind tries hard to conceive the amount of change that you have gone through. I try to wrap my own minuscule experiences around that one singularity that took you from perfectly normal to forever changed. I've watched you, since that brilliant morning. I've watched as you picked up the pieces, tried to fit them back together as best you could, and tried to move on.

And I've watched as every year, your two steps forward seem to come round to this point again. Not a step back really, but a place of memory and memorial.

You were individuals. You were singular humans, in your singular world. And in one moment, you were thrust together in a way that many...no...most of us don't and will never understand. You were individuals and all at once, you were a city's heartbeat, a city's fear, and a city's loss and strength, all at the same time. Suddenly all those individual faces became part of a greater story. Each was a character on the page of this story, each was a letter, and each letter of this story had a face and a name. But I lost the faces and names in the scope of the story.

My mind wanted to lose myself in that mass becoming. I wanted to distance myself from those humans because, in my humanity, I couldn't grasp so terrible a thing. And for a while, I accomplished that.

And then you started coming apart. I saw beyond the dust and the paper and the smoke. I started seeing faces again. I started seeing people again. And I began to wonder, as I would watch the memorial shows, newscasts, rebroadcasts of that day. I started to grasp the concept that these were individuals having a world moment.

Now, as then, I sit here safe. In my own singular world. My own individual moment.

I wonder what it must be like to walk a mile in your shoes. I can't help but wonder and pray...

I attach my own feelings to you, with this. You had no reason to open the door to your world. You could have chosen to remain one of the nameless individuals I think about, at this time. But you did and I am thankful that I was given this window to look upon.

I wish for you, good things. I wish for you peace. And I wish and pray that for you, those times, that change, transforms you. Much like the pressure of the Earth creates a diamond, that this wasn't unlike knocking a bit of the coal off your surface.

Because as I look at you, and wonder what it must be like, to walk a mile in your shoes, I can see the shining, glittering reflection of each facet of the diamond you are becoming.

Procreate stuff

Sep. 11th, 2025 05:13 pm
ysobel: (Default)
[personal profile] ysobel
New version now has a release announcement of "next week" [edit: might be available already?]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9QdA_SDnLY is a video going through all the brushes, including effects from pressure and also tilt and barrel roll. (I turn off tilt variation options, because not moving arm or wrist means tilt automatically changes through a stroke ... I may have to disable azimuth for the opposite reason, because I can't change pencil orientation. I don't have the Apple Pencil that supports barrel roll so can't do twists.)

TIL that a pademelon is a small marsupial, not a melon at all... (The new brushes are named after flora/fauna/locationsetc in Tasmania, which means the names aren't functional (no "gel pen" or "smoke" or "medium airbrush", now it's "chocolate" or "sandpiper" or "night heron") ... which means I have no chance at remembering what's what aaaaa

Anyway there are some reeeeally cool brushes and brush options.

(The old brushes will still be available and included, so e.g. old tutorials can still be followed, but I'll probably use the new ones more.)

notes from brush designer )