The Packbats' Dreamfeed

Like D, I have been telling all the canvassers who come to the door that I'll vote for whoever has the best chance of beating Reform, but I am relieved that now the constituency-level polling indicates that it's more likely to be the Greens than Labour, because I really didn't want to have to hold my nose and vote for Labour. I'm a trans disabled immigrant and they went through a phase last year of trying to make things more difficult for every single one of those groups of people.

And I do like the points the Greens in the person of Zack Polanski are making, particularly in their most recent party political broadcast. (With one note: I have very strong feelings about "make X Y again" constructions of any kind these days, but I'm grudgingly willing to make an exception for "make hope normal again" despite how loaded "hope" and "normal" are as the X and Y in this case!)

I am so tired I can hardly string a sentence together but I wanted to say that today went great from a "finding a new place on my own" perspective, from actually being incredibly useful from a work perspective. Getting back was actually the annoying part (road works made it difficult to escape the area I'd arrived to by bus, and I got lost trying to walk back to anywhere I could get a bus or Uber; getting back from Stockport took much longer thanks to Piccadilly still being closed).

But I made it just in time to get to a much-needed yoga session, and got home to eat delicious takeout, and a basically-empty weekend and most-of-a-week off now stretches before me.

For work-related reasons, I can get a free round trip on any TransPennine Express train.

I'd basically be working on the outbound journey but could come back any time I want, doesn't have to be the same day or anything.

I was excited at having an excuse to go back to York, until I remembered that TPE trains go to Scotland as well... I could go to Edinburgh or Glasgow!

I've got I think four days' vacation I have to use up in March, as well...

It's much longer since I've been to Glasgow, but Edinburgh is closer to where I have friends.

It'd probably mean going on my own though, and that isn't my best thing. But a few days away from Normal Life does sound really nice...

I've got all of next week off work except the Wednesday, which I'll be spending in Chester. It did occur to me that it'd be fun to see how cheap a midweek Premier Inn or whatever would be, and hang out for a few days around the work trip...

I love my house and my people but I like to do different things too.

I hung out with a guy from Ecuador today, and we talked about what immigrants always talk about: how much we miss the food we can't get here. (His wife is originally from Venezuela -- they both grew up in Spain before ending up in England -- and our extensive talk about food made me miss the Venezuelan who made arepas, but I think that place didn't survive lockdowns. Apparently there's no Ecuadoran food here; the closest thing he could console himself with is a Colombian place in Liverpool.)

When someone from queer club who has chronic pain and fatigue asked for help with the heavy lifting of moving house, of course I volunteered. This was the man-with-a-van that he hired.

It's funny, when Matt told me to text Dennis I expected that Dennis would be an old gammony bigot, but instead I got Denis, an adorable wife guy, a decade younger than me, helping people move house as a side hustle.

Denis called me Matt at first, which didn't bother me -- Matt's the person he's mostly been dealing with! -- but he could not have been more apologetic. And then apparently he called me Kevin for a while, which did make me laugh (I didn't even know this until he apologized for it!). I did try to assure Denis that all these white guy names are the same but he was adamant.

I don't know Matt well, except that he's a single-in-the-sense-of-not-cohabiting person who's 30 or 40 years old. I expected a room full of stuff. This guy had an amount of books I'd expect from boomers who haven't had to move to a new house in fifty years. And the heaviest bookcases, I think Matt said they were made of old scaffolding or something? And because the bookcases had to go in the van first, they had to come out last, and thus be taken upstairs when I was already wiped out.

We collected stuff from his storage unit and brought it to his house first, then went to his previous house to get stuff from there and there was so much we didn't think we could fit it all in the van and that we'd have to come back to make a second trip. We really really didn't want to do that, though, and managed to avoid it by packing the van so full that Denis's hand truck had to come with us in the front -- I sat in the middle, and it got shotgun. But we were so pleased with ourselves for not having to go back, and it's a damn good thing. I could barely walk the 20ish minutes home by the time we finished -- and when I got there, it took me most of an hour to eat and shower even though I very much wanted to do both of those things!

As we were dragging the bookcases up the stairs, Denis could not stop talking about how strong I was, he was shocked when I told him (not quite in so many words) that I have a bullshit email job, he absolutely thought I was a fellow manual laborer. "How did you get so good at this?" he said. I didn't know how to tell him it's a combination of my dad instilling his (manual laborer) work ethic, and transgym making me hench.

I was not looking forward to having to go help V's relative get stuff from his mum's house to the tip again tomorrow, but it sounds like we almost certainly won't be needed! He got extra done this week and extra help today, which is wonderful for him and well-timed for me. Apparently the last bit, a friend of his with a van, might fall through tomorrow so we're on standby but that slight possibility feels a lot better than the absolute certainty!

Now I'm off to take some more ibuprofen and sleep forever.

I'm going to Huddersfield for work on Monday, Wrexham on Wednesday, and at the very end of today I had a call where I ended up agreeing to go to "somewhere near Walsall" on Friday next week (I'm still awaiting the promised email with more specific details than that!).

(For non-locals, these are all 2ish hours away, or less, but one of these in a week would usually be a big deal and leave me really tired the next day and etc.)

They're all trips I really want to make, all for unrelated things that just happen to have turned up at the same time. I'll be fine. But oof!

Tomorrow I'm helping a fellow Queer Club member move heavy furniture to his new place, while V has an unpleasant hospital appointment testing for something potentially serious. Sunday D and I will once again be doing tip runs for V's relative who's clearing out his mum's house...

Everything is... a bit intense at the moment.

I do have almost all of the next week off work (except for a trip to Chester lol, which I actually really want to do). Really looking forward to that.

This morning I got to call one of the candidates we interviewed yesterday and offer her the work placement. That felt nice.

But also weird. I've never done anything like this before! I am in a very technical sense her line manager, in that her actual manager, my manager, is now on leave for the next week and a half and he asked me to take care of this. Which meant not just the fun phone call but doing paperwork, and that meant having to write down my own name and contact details where it said "Manager."

Wild.

The less said about the rest of the work day the better, but the rest of the day was good. I went for a nice long walk in the warm(ish) drizzle with Teddy, who drank from so many muddy puddles that he had a big dirty circle on his snout. Like the dog equivalent of a kid with a milk mustache. The air smelled amazing, the plants and the soil are starting to wake up.

Then angelofthenorth invited us over for cheesy toad in the hole, which is a genius idea and I think I might have to make it in future. It was great to see her, and Mr Smith.

And since we'd all planned to go to the gym, she and I walked there while D drove V home and then came back to join me (Miriam having gone swimming). The gym is so much more fun with him there.

• I helped conduct five interviews this morning (which as my manager who's doing them with me pointed out is always weirdly draining -- there's something about having all these potential futures appear before you, where the decision you make affects people's lives so differently, depending on what you choose...even here when it's only for a ten-week placement like this).

• I had a really demanding meeting this afternoon that I had not been able to prepare for at all. It went okay but oof. Coulda been better!

• Then we went to go collect groceries, and V's shoes which have been repaired.

• Then I had counseling. Today we talked about what we ended up calling different "circles" of my life: work, Minneapolis, local stuff (by-election mostly), household, community care, self-care... Normally when one circle has felt like too much there's been a nicer one I can shift my focus to, but lately it feels like they've all been shitty. It helped to talk about this even if it wasn't anything I don't think about regularly.

• I walked into my bedroom where I do counseling (it's on the phone) and my first thought was oh yeah, I meant to change the bedding yesterday and then I didn't...I should do that. And it was mostly done by the time she called! And I did the rest right after.

• And on only the second time I went back upstairs after that I remembered to take the laundry down with me! And the washing machine was free so I chucked it right in. This is all like warp-speed, by my usual standards.

I didn't even have time to walk Teddy today. But we did get fancy takeout (yay, vegetable tempura!) re-scheduled from me fucking up the plan last night, and watched some TV and I managed to stay mostly awake until 9pm. That's good enough.