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$wychwood: road sign is excited (gen - \o/)$

Christmas was good but also SO MUCH. By the end of Boxing Day lunch I was trying to work out how much longer I had to stay in company, but I ended up in my mother's living room where she was silently playing a game on her new tablet and my sister's fiance was silently playing a game on his phone, and I just sat there silently reading on my phone for an hour and felt much better.

Family updates:

my sister is engaged! this came as a surprise to me and the brother who doesn't live near her, although mostly because we thought they were already engaged (there have been casual discussions about weddings going back some years)
my sister's endometriosis op in the autumn revealed that she does not in fact have endometriosis, but she did have a nasty tumour-y thing which was not cancer but apparently also not not cancer and now she is down one ovary and fallopian tube, which is particularly upsetting for her because all of this was part of the fertility investigations they've been working on
my middle nephew is dating a boy! He is definitely the least surprising candidate for this out of my niblings. Apparently he is not presently interested in labels, only in dating the person he likes, which seems perfectly reasonable to me, particularly since he's fourteen

Apparently I made a good decision to leave when I did on Christmas Day since several family members were already pretty drunk, and it sounds like it got significantly worse after I left! Not in a bad way - my family are generally very well-behaved drunks, they just enjoy themselves - but at least one person apparently needed considerable help to get upstairs to bed. Mum said "they were singing all sorts of things to Dad's guitar! Oasis and Simon & Garfunkel and lots of things!"; I said that sounded nice and she said "IT WASN'T" (I gather they were fairly raucous...)

Both my parents stayed home from the Boxing Day walk this year, which meant that for the first time in years I was not solely responsible for the cooking, and was surprisingly stressful (Dad: "Oh yes we can cook all six of those things in the last half hour before lunch!" Me, silently: YOU CAN FIT A MAXIMUM OF TWO THINGS INTO THE OVEN, AND I DON'T BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACCESS TO TIME TRAVEL). However my mildly panicked promptings did cause enough things to happen early that it wasn't a disaster (three or four things were cooked while we were eating and brought up as additional items, but that's fine). They didn't want to cook things early and let them get cold waiting around, which is very reasonable, but also if you are trying to cook:

three trays of sausage rolls (vegetarian spanakopita; sage and onion; cheese; chorizo; black pudding; "Chinese takeaway" (with five-spice, hoisin and soy sauces); homemade by my sister's fiance and apparently all very delicious - obviously I only had the spanakopita ones)
two trays of cheese potatoes
two sticks of garlic bread
a tray of pigs in blankets
three small trays of brie and cranberry parcels
a pack of chicken goujons
a small tray of beef and stuffing Yorkshire puddings(?!?)
a Greek omelette / fritatta thing

you cannot in fact do them all at once even if you have a four-oven Aga. Something is going to be lukewarm and this is simply a fact of reality. Particularly since the temperature starts dropping when you keep opening and closing the door, cooking lots of frozen items in it, etc etc, so the cooking times on the packaging become more and more distant from reality (the 17-minute brie and cranberry parcels had I think 35 minutes in the end and were only barely beginning to brown then).

Mum was pretty down about food things because - well, ok, she has pretty much spent six months during her chemo eating the exact same meals every day at the exact same times, which has been working for her, but means she does not yet have any real idea how to calculate the appropriate medication for meals with different food in them, or how to arrange them around eating at different times, or how to schedule everything so that she can still eat her before-bed weetabix to prevent any overnight hypos. I'm fairly sure this is a one-time problem, because by next year she'll have varied her diet and activity sufficiently to be able to work it out better. But right now she's feeling very confronted by how not-"normal" her life is, and it's been no fun for her.

But everyone had enough to eat and there were left-overs, so it was a success. Then I came home and did nothing and talked to no one and hopefully tomorrow I will have energy to start on my to-do list backlog.

Christmas is here aaaaaaah I am somehow not mentally prepared for Christmas Eve to be tomorrow.

However, all my preparations are sorted except for the things I need to do on Christmas morning, and I have done the tragic washing up so my house is ready for me to mostly abandon it for a couple of days.

Choir went pretty well - our Christmas concerts have had real issues with falling audience numbers for the last few years; we used to sell out four or five concerts, but lately it's been more like "two or three half-full". So this year they obviously decided to try something new, and we did three different, although overlapping, concerts with different vibes - two were basically sold out, and the third was all but the top tier, which only had about 50 people in it, but was probably still better turnout than any of the concerts last year. So it looks like that has worked, and we can expect more of that in the future.

We did a lot more "popular" music - White Christmas, Mariah Carey, the JoBros, Shakin' Stevens... I'm kind of torn, because I'm not really good at that sort of thing, and I'm not really sure why you would want to come and see us do "Like It's Christmas" rather than a rock or pop choir, whereas we can do you a genuinely excellent rendition of O Magnum Mysterium or Stars or something like that which plays to our strengths. But the audiences really seemed to enjoy it, and most of the songs were quite fun to sing. And we did do Darius Battiwalla's arrangement of "O Holy Night", which is gloriously over-the-top (the bit where the fortissimo orchestra drops out from under the chorus!).

Our conductor kept encouraging us to "bop" while singing the more fun pieces, but I really wasn't sold - the community choir were doing something similar, and frankly I thought it looked messy and distracting no matter how often he claimed it was essential for the music. I think you do actually need to do properly synchronised movement if you want it to look good (NB: I absolutely do not want to do properly synchronised movement either! this is not why I am in a choir!).

Tomorrow I'm going for brunch with Miss H and then over to my parents', probably to help with last-minute prep before the rest of the family arrive! I won't see them, though, because I'll be off to church before they get there. That will be a Christmas Day treat.

Today I mostly Power Automated. Or attempted to. I had to call in the expert several times, and at least one of them he was like "yeah I don't know why it's not working either", which was at least validating. My first flow is now sending emails, although I still need to tweak it a bit.

Also: honestly what sort of bullshit is it that you can't get Microsoft Forms to send an email to the person who filled out the form with their details in! That's been, like, basic form functionality for at least fifteen years, and it's all very well saying "oh well you can do it with Power Automate", but that is much more complicated than ticking a "send submissions to user" box and requires access to a whole separate system plus someone to set up all the permissions for you to use whatever Outlook mailbox, etc etc etc...

Anyway. I have three? four? forms that my boss wants me to have up and running before Christmas. Now I've got all the accesses and permissions configured that should hopefully be possible, which is good because I did promise...

On the home front, I have now ordered all the remaining Christmas presents I can do before Christmas Day itself (why do so few places allow you to buy gift-cards to ship on a particular date!), wrapped all the physical things I already have, sorted out the last grocery delivery before Christmas so I won't accidentally starve, and checked in with my siblings to discover that other people have been working on the stocking presents for my parents, and what isn't bought is at least planned.

I built a beautiful tracking spreadsheet that shows what each parent is getting, calculates how much each of us has spent, and checks that against the notional budget for hopefully easier working out who owes what to whom once we're done. And so far no one has got super mad at me for being "bossy" or declared refusal to participate, which is unfortunately what tends to happens. I'm trying to back off now while we're still OK!

Now off to choir!

The carol service on Sunday felt terribly chaotic, but there's a reasonable chance no one in the congregation noticed, which is sort of a win. One of the instruments playing was horrifically out-of-tune, to the point where I was struggling to stay in the same key as the organ because it was so distracting; everyone except the organist inexplicably stopped at the end of verse one of a choir-only item and then had to hurriedly scramble back in as she kept going, but she said we were sufficiently in unison that it almost sounded intentional; and there was one choir item with a three-part split where the first soprano completely failed to provide the descant that was supposed to be there, but since the rest of us ploughed on with the melody and the lower harmony probably no one else could tell. I was very glad that that one wasn't my fault... at least directly.

(Indirectly, I had been singing the top line previously, and was moved onto the melody at a rehearsal where the first sop was absent, so I suspect that what happened was that she was expecting me to come in and panicked when I did something else entirely. But. The congregation didn't know it was supposed to be there, so.)

I got roped into helping out with the last graduation ceremony, at which I can't really complain because it was only my second of the season. The VC said nice things to me (twice!) about my scroll-handing job, which suggests to me very strongly that he must have overheard me talking to some of the other people before the ceremony about the time he had to move me because I was accidentally blocking the line of sight for the official graduation photographer taking pictures of the handshakes, my personal most-mortifying graduation moment of the last ten years. But embarrassing though that realisation also is, that's actually really nice of him to care enough about the fact that I felt bad to deliberately say something positive! The old VC would never.

(There was also a bit in his most recent all-staff email which, when boiled down out of the delicate phrasing, amounted to "literally all my colleagues thought it was hysterical watching me, a non-hugger, get hugged by lots of excited graduands". I do so enjoy having a VC who does a good impression of being human instead of an Auton! Even when I disagree with him he mostly sounds like an actual human being!)

This week is mostly choir, but I am at least working from home which is going to be amazing.

I made an automation flow that actually works!! I did realise afterwards that I need to add more error handling into it, but I am fully into celebrating the initial success right now.

Particularly because work is otherwise not as rich in successes as I would like. My inbox is a disaster area (everything in there requires action; I aim to keep it under 100 items and right now I'm running at 125 on a good day), the last report I actually completed in full was for July and I have a cumulative 2800 items to review in case they need moving, 900 duplicate records that need cleaning up, three test plans to write, an entire component that is supposed to go live before Christmas but which isn't with me for testing yet... and none of those things are even on the action tracker Boss Lady and I go through in my weekly 121.

But I did cross off one of my ten KANBAN items this morning and deleted two or three to-do list items. I'm hoping that tonight I will sleep instead of going for a series of one-hour naps all night, and maybe tomorrow I'll have the energy to tackle Power Automate...

My boss gave me a Christmas present, which is very nice of her! It's... a coffee mug (I only drink cold water) with snowy London landmarks on it (why).

In other puzzling news, I haven't had to wade through two inches of water to get to the station since last spring! I was assuming it was just because we'd had such a dry summer, but there have been several downpours which 100% would have flooded the station entrance last year now. We had a whole thing where the back of our site kept flooding and our management company spent months arguing with the water company about whose fault it was, and eventually the water company admitted it was them and did a bunch of work on the main road to fix it; I'm thinking the flooding by the station must have been part of the same problem, since it's the parallel road downslope. Who knew it was actually fixable without completely reconstructing the whole rear station entrance area! My wet boots thank them from the bottom of their soles.

I've been experimenting again with the automation software at work; at this stage it's a process of continuous failure - you create a process, you run it, it falls over, you spend ten minutes working out why, you fix that, it falls over at the next step, you spend fifteen minutes and call a colleague to fix that, rinse and repeat. On the other hand, the buzz from getting anything to work (I would say "a process" but I haven't actually got a complete flow for anything yet!!) is pretty good. And if I can get the flow I was working on yesterday up and running, it'll save me a couple of hours of extremely tedious manual checks every fortnight, and I'm all in favour of that.

December is busy! I looked in detail at my calendar last week and had a little meltdown about it. How do I do this to myself so often.

Anyway. On Saturday I used 7 onions, 2 aubergines, 4 peppers, 6 courgettes, a little under 1.5kg pasta, 3.5 jars of pesto, and 2 bags of cheese and made just about enough packed meals to get me through to the end of next week. On Sunday A came over and we put up my tree and made disappointing experimental maple and pecan cookies (edible, but weirdly cake-like and not particularly good). I am more-or-less up-to-date on laundry and washing up and the like, and have started my Christmas cards.

I am in the office tomorrow as usual and then every working day through to 15 December inclusive, and am also out every single one of those seven nights. Then the week after I have choir four days in a row. Then I get a whole one day off between finishing work and Christmas Eve, for which I shall be duly grateful.

I think I am sufficiently prepared to make it that far, although there's going to be a lot of things waiting for me! But I've got most of my Christmas shopping sorted, I'm OK for food, and I don't think I should run out of clothes. Anything above and beyond that is a bonus!

Also this evening I made a little graph of how many books I finished per month and the point where I stopped intensively playing computer games is extremely visible. I knew all the hand-wringing about my reading decline was futile anyway, but also it turns out that the cause is almost entirely Bioware. Spoiler: if I'm playing ten or fifteen hours of a computer game, I do not read as much, who could have predicted.

I saw another article today that mentioned something in passing about libertarians wanting to go back on the gold standard, preppers hoarding gold, etc, and the thing that I don't understand is - why do people think that gold will be valuable in an apocalyptic / post-apocalyptic scenario?

The idea seems to be that paper money is a fiat currency and therefore won't be worth anything when society collapses (not to mention that hardly anyone carries any paper money these days!), which is probably true, or close enough. Therefore you should put your money into gold, which will still be valuable.

But it seems to me that gold in this context is effectively just another form of currency, a medium of exchange - gold itself doesn't have any real use that I know of beyond a) looking pretty and b) being exchangeable for things of value. Maybe c) there's some electrical stuff that uses tiny amounts of gold I think? So it's only valuable because other people agree that it's valuable, because other people will take it in exchange for other goods or services, because we have culturally agreed that gold is valuable.

I just feel like, you know, after the apocalypse when the survivors are starving and everyone's trying to grow crops or whatever, to quote what is probably Revelations 6:6 (via Larry Norman) "a piece of bread will buy a bag of gold". Or as Peter Blegvad (via Fairport Convention) says, "gold is the lowliest of metals - too soft for serious use; pretty, of course, warm to the touch..."

On the other hand, a lot of different cultures from many parts of the world appear to have agreed that gold is valuable. So what am I missing? Why are you better to put your savings into gold than, I don't know, aluminium or seed stocks or liquid nitrogen or something - anything - that would have actual use-value?

Pro-tip: reading two books called "The Seven [nouns] of Evelyn [surname]" at the same time is a bad idea and will lead to confusion.

( The Commonweal books 2-5 - Graydon Saunders ) A very satisfying series; I look forward to the next book when it comes out!

( 114. A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine ) I loved the first book, but found this one a slog for slightly inexplicable reasons.

( 115. The Trials of Life - David Attenborough ) Entertaining as ever.

( 117. Nettle and Bone - T Kingfisher ) I don't know if it's me or Kingfisher who has changed, but I don't enjoy these as much as I did. This is fine! But I used to find her books better than fine.

( 120. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid ) This was so much better than I had anticipated; I'm definitely looking out for her Fleetwood Mac book now.

( 121. DallerGut Dream Department Store - Miye Lee ) I enjoyed it enough that I kept reading, but I was glad it wasn't longer.

( 122. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches - Sangu Mandanna ) This was very fluffy and pleasant, but had just enough depth that I enjoyed it instead of getting annoyed.

( 123. Rivers of London: Deadly Ever After - Ben Aaronovitch, Celeste Bronfman, Andrew Cartmel, Jose Maria Beroy, and Jordi Escuin Llorach ) Not especially memorable, but fun enough.

( 124. The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society - CM Waggoner ) I really enjoyed this, and the way it's messing around with genre; I think I'd like to re-read it, and see how it feels when I know where it's going.

( 125. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton ) I suppose this is cleverly done, but it was all so loathsome I really had to drag myself through it, and by the time we found out all the answers I didn't even really care.

( 126. Translation State - Ann Leckie ) I liked this more on re-read, and I liked it quite a bit the first time! Just so many nice people doing their best, and complicated politics, and it's so good.

( 127. England - John Lewis-Stempel ) A generally solid nature writer; I don't know if I'll read more by him, but I did enjoy the English focus.

( 128. Leviathan Wakes - James SA Corey ) Much less space-opera-y than I had osmosed, but this was pretty gripping, and I'll definitely be reading the next book.

( 129. The Feud in the Chalet School - Elinor M Brent-Dyer ) this is solid as ever.

( 130. Phonogram vol 1: Rue Britannia - Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie ) This is clearly well done, despite my somewhat mixed feelings; I feel like it's probably a must-read for actual Britpop fans, but even outside that there's still something good in there.

( 131. Testimony of Mute Things - Lois McMaster Bujold ) If you like this series, you'll enjoy this; I did. And it was nice to see baby Penric again!

( 132. Deeds of Youth - Elizabeth Moon ) I enjoy this world, and the stories she tells in it, but ultimately I think I mostly want more about the specific characters I already know and love! But I enjoyed these anyway.

( 133. Batgirls: One Way or Another - Becky Cloonan, Michael W Conrad, Jorge Corona, and Sarah Stern ) I have less patience for the actual High Stakes Superheroing than I used to, but I loved watching the three Batgirls working together. Delightful.

( 134. Stress in the Workplace - Howard Edwards ) The failure mode of satire is dull, as this book demonstrates capably.

First day back at work fairly whizzed by; between catching up with email, Teams messages, and the spam queue, redoing and circulating all the team monthly reports because it turned out we didn't have any data for 30 or 31 October when I did them, and my interim PDR I was fairly bushed by the end of the day. The PDR went well, but was quite intense. Then I staggered off to my singing lesson, but surprisingly was somewhat revived by Schumann, who is not normally that inspiring for me.

Then I came home and tackled a pile of evening tasks. The cleaner is coming tomorrow, and I had an accumulation of things in my to-do list that I hadn't got to. There's still quite a few left, but I have least ordered the things I wanted from Boots. Or Miss H did it for me, at least, after a catalogue of disasters including six successful orders cancelled immediately after I placed them, Paypal getting into a loop where I had to input a 2FA code in order to be shown a captcha which then told me I had completed it successfully and hung indefinitely (at least three times), attempts involving two payment methods, three computers, two different web browsers, on multiple days... all of them identically unsuccessful. As I said despairingly to Miss H, I just wanted to buy some insoles, how could it possibly be so hard.

It worked fine for her, anyway, and I've paid her back so soon I will have my spare hot water bottle etc.

And on that note of triumph I am going to transport myself to bed where hopefully the current hot water bottle will have made everything lovely.

Annual leave is so nice but now I have to go back to work on Monday :(. On the other hand, I do still have a whole weekend first, even if it's relatively busy. The deacon trainee is being ordained acolyte and lector on Sunday and some of the training people showed up last weekend and Announced that we would be providing more servers than we actually have seats for and also a thurifer, and since I am presently the only thurifer available, I have to go. Truly I am punished for not having arranged the training I was supposed to be organising back in the spring before Mum got sick. Fortunately one of my four Sunday video calls has rescheduled so it's a slightly less ludicrous calendar than might have been the case.

Anyhow. I have done very little; read two turn-of-the-century novels (nineteenth to twentieth, that is), finally caught up with laundry after getting out of cycle while I was with Mum, got through the three Tablet issues I had waiting and started the one that arrived today, did the tragically overdue washing up, and went to the cinema to see The Choral. I enjoyed it! I would say it was a war story more than a choir story, but Gerontius is important to the plot and I did like what they did with it. And, much as I love superhero films, it's nice to see something that isn't one of the endless sequels, remakes, shared universes, etc etc, that make up most cinema these days.

I also progressed my ebook catalogue a bit - went through all my StoryBundle purchases, downloaded anything that wasn't on my phone and therefore in the catalogue already, and added them to the catalogue (along with the source) and the phone. Also added a sheet for audiobooks and put in the ones I've bought from libro.fm since I started my subscription. Next up would be the various Humble Bundles, which is a much larger number of bundles and piles of audiobooks as well as ebooks, so I've put that off until another week...

Despite *gestures* everything, there are still nice things sometimes!

Miss H just got made redundant, but on Friday she heard that she'd successfully interviewed for another job at her institution, so the cat's Dreamies are no longer in peril.

Another friend just got promoted! Exciting new job title.

I have some annual leave this week, and it's going to be amazing.

Pictures!

This one's from quite a while ago, but I came across it while I was uploading the others. I did know that flowers could break through pavement, but it's still pretty impressive to see! Tiny little leaves tearing up the tarmac.

Between Reform somehow, horrifyingly, topping the polls, and my city being smothered in Union Jack flags put up by people who definitely don't have any racist motivations of any kind and who are only purely coincidentally buddies with Tommy Robinson, it's nice to see something I can agree with for once.

This was on my parents' road - one of the trees in the allotments was dropping these absolutely colossal leaves all along the pavement. I thought they looked acer-ish, so presumably sycamore, but I've never seen one a quarter of this size before. I told my swimming buddy who volunteers for a tree charity about it, and she suggested it might be a London plane (after saying "I know you said the leaves were absolutely enormous, but I wasn't expecting them to be that big"), which seems plausible on a quick internet search. Just so comically gigantic though.

Not so nice: now I have to go to a double choir rehearsal where a) the conductor has already made it clear that he's not going to follow the precedent of our newly-retired chorus director and finish the second rehearsal early because everyone is tired by then, not that anyone thought for a second that he would, and b) they've cut the break between the two rehearsals down to thirty minutes, which I am not convinced is long enough when we have two and a half hours of rehearsal each side of it...

( Paladin's Legacy - Elizabeth Moon ) Not Moon's best work, but I very much enjoyed these; more than I did the first time around.

( 100. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense - Suzette Haden Elgin ) I have read enough agony columns to know that people like this do exist, so maybe I'm just lucky enough to have avoided them...

( 102. The Reign of George III - J Steven Watson ) Still enjoying getting more of this big-picture view of history; it's not my usual preference, but it does make me think differently.

( 104. Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge - Ovidia Yu ) I continue to enjoy this series; Aunty Lee is a great detective.

( 105. The Mountain in the Sea - Ray Nayler ) This seems to have been a polarising book, and the rest of my book group weren't keen, but I thought it was doing some worthwhile things.

( 108. Deeds of Honor - Elizabeth Moon ) Enjoyable for completists.

( 109. Connexions - LA Hall ) Just such a charming series, full of genuinely decent people.

( 110. The Death I Gave Him - Em X Liu ) Cool concept, hated it.

( 111. Winter's Gifts - Ben Aaronovitch ) Surprisingly charming, considering all the horrific elements.

( 112. The March North - Graydon Saunders ) I do love this series.

The most obvious thing about visiting Mum is how much better she is than last time. You can tell, because instead of lying on the sofa snoozing she kept coming in to stare at me, poke things in my vicinity, remind me of things I agreed to do several hours later in the day, and generally manifest an almost physical aura of PLEASE HANG OUT WITH ME. I did my best, but between work, online social things I already had scheduled in my calendar before this visit was agreed, and my desperate need to spend some time On My Own In The Quiet With A Book, it definitely was not enough. Hopefully my brother will do a better job now he's there.

Anyway, I came home and unpacked, caught up with as many delayed chores as I could bring myself to face, and plunged straight back into ordinary life. The laundry is going to be a couple of weeks to get caught up, I can see already...

Work is not exactly quiet, but mostly the sort of normal where I can hope to catch up with some of the lurking to-do list. I'm still three months behind on the reporting (technically four, but there's only about half-an-hour left on July) but I am feeling much less out of control about everything. At least, unless I think too hard about all of the ongoing items in my 121 action tracker.

I've taken the opportunity to book a couple of days off, at which point I'm hoping to make a start on Christmas planning. I didn't have my usual too-early panic this year because September and October did not have enough time for extra panics, but now it's November and I need to get on with it. The year zooms past, my personal to-do list app accumulates overdue items, and the last international posting date is looming, or will once they announce it.

I like the book meme that is going around - I saw it first on

naraht's journal, but it seems to be spreading vigorously!

Lust, books I want to read for their cover:
I don't think there's anything at the moment, but I first read Flying Dutch by Tom Holt because of the Josh Kirby cover! Does that count?

Pride, challenging books I've finished:
Speaking purely personally, finishing Arcadia by Iain Pears was a real achievement, although I've no idea why I found it so impossible a read. I've read some books that would probably fall under the popular definition, but I feel like it doesn't count if I was reading them for fun! Maybe St Augustine's City of God; that did feel like a real achievement to get through, it's so enormous.

Gluttony, books I've read more than once:
I mean. Even these days roughly 40% of my reading is re-reading, and growing up it was a lot higher than that! I don't understand people who never re-read. Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons can stand for the vast number.

Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest:
lol where to start. I acquired Consilience by Edward O Wilson in 2009, I think that may be the oldest physically sitting on my to-read shelves.

Greed, books I own multiple editions of:
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan - I have a Penguin Classics copy, a giant hardback edition with illustrations that looks rather William-Blake-esque, and a tiny pocket hardback that used to live permanently in my rucksack pocket. Oh, and an ebook from Project Gutenberg.

I also have a few dozen audiobooks that duplicate paper or ebooks I already had, and an increasing number of ebooks duplicating paper I already had. Mostly I get one format or the other, but I've picked up quite a few cheap ebooks of favourites where I don't want to get rid of the original, or where I have the whole series in paper and don't want to give away the one or two I have in ebook, etc... I suspect I will gradually prune things down over time.

Notably I'm up to nearly 50 Chalet School ebooks now! But I have spent nearly forty years accumulating my paper set, and it's going to take a while before I'm ready to give them up. Greed indeed.

Oh, and five? six? Bibles? One in German. Plus a couple of New Testaments including one in Greek (I don't even read Greek, it was just so beautiful!).

Wrath, books I despised:
I'm sure there are a ton of better choices that will come to me after I post this, but such is life. I looked through my "Product of its Time" booklog awards and found some promising candidates, but then I remembered Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, which left me with the sort of loathing that feels appropriate for this category. It's not that it was rubbish, because those mostly aren't worth despising really, it's that it was just persistently unpleasant in a gloating kind of way that left me wanting a shower. Ugh.

Envy, books I want to live in:
Relatively few, without a guarantee of being one of the lucky ones! Graydon Saunders' Commonweal books are pretty invested in everyone getting an equal chance, more or less, so that might not be too bad as long as I could be sure of being in the Commonweal and not one of Reems' slaves or something.

Otherwise mostly looking at positive high-tech futures, to be sure of having access to medication and/or medical treatment for my numerous chronic health conditions! Maybe Bujold's Vorkosigan saga? I'd like Beta, I think. But again, I could end up on Jackson's Whole, and that would not end well for me. Maybe a Star Trek novel, that universe is probably as safe as anywhere I can find.

I feel like I'm moving into zombie mode right now. Hopefully that will help me fall asleep on time??

I had a lovely weekend, though. The Augustinian no-longer-youths were as delightful as ever, we had some interesting talks, it felt like the time absolutely zoomed past while at the same time not all that much happened... and it's just never long enough. We talked in the end-of-gathering session about how nice it would be if there were more of these, maybe in different places, and then all of us who had any involvement in planning this one were like "but who is going to do it" because even with half-a-dozen people working on what is deliberately a very low-key event, it was pretty exhausting. But it WOULD be nice.

One of the parishioners who came along this year is someone I've known for probably thirty-five years, whose kids were very much in my peer group in the parish, and it was really good to catch up with her; she has thirteen grandchildren now! Although she did have six children, five of whom have children, so that's not quite as unreasonable as it sounds. I haven't seen most of them since probably the mid-nineties, so it's a bit disconcerting to find that they're married with three children, but that is how it goes.

Now I'm at Mum's; I've set up my work station (where I am currently typing this while she blocks crochet squares on the other half of Dad's table) and unpacked my belongings and generally done my best to make ready for the week. We have also come to a detente where I have agreed to spend more time chatting with her if she turns the TV off, or at least mutes it while I'm in there. I 100% cannot filter out "ambient" TV (a cause of suffering to me in waiting rooms!) because my attention gets yanked to it, over and over. I think it's probably because I don't watch much of it, so I haven't learned to ignore it, but either way it's very off-putting. I have run away now, though; there is only so much socialising I can handle in a day, and between the Augustinians this morning and multiple hours chatting with her already, I am pretty much tapped out.

I'm feeling outrageously exhausted, but also I can only slack off so much because I'm in the office tomorrow, out all weekend with the Augustinian no-longer-youths, and then going to Mum's for the week on Sunday afternoon, which means I need to be more-or-less ready for the next ten days by bedtime. This is not in fact going to happen, but at least I've packed my work bag.

Of all the indignities of middle age that I was warned of, the most annoying so far is one that no one mentioned: my nose hair has suddenly started growing so long and luxuriant that it starts tickling the inside of my nostrils. What is this bullshit. Constant random tickling! I did not sign up for this!!

My flu jab went ahead fine (and no side effects except for the bruise) but they didn't have any private COVID vaccine on hand. They were supposed to get back to me about it, but they haven't yet, which I assume means they're having trouble finding it... and I'm not going to be available to pop in until November now anyway so there's not much point chasing right now.

We are solidly into Dehumidifier Season now. I've been trying to get at least some open-window time just for ventilation (it's smelling fairly stale in here) but it's so dank outside it makes the humidity worse if I'm not careful! Although I did manage to get the kitchen hygrometer up to 89% earlier this week, and it's not that wet outside even if it's still raining heavily. Ah, the joys of a damp climate.

I have been enjoying the slightly calmer pace of life; being back in a work routine has really helped, so that even being out every evening last week was not actually that stressful! However it looks like I'm going to be spending next week, or possibly the week after, at my mother's while dad goes to shut up the house in France for the winter, so I shall be all out of sync again... The plus side is that the main thing I miss when I'm there is my computer gaming, and right now I am doing basically zero of that (well, a couple of hours of The Sims 4 at the weekend, but that barely counts).

The second attempt at my annual diabetic retinopathy check was rather more successful, and I came out with a clean bill of health (yay!). Tomorrow I have my flu and COVID jabs, although the NHS has reduced the criteria so extremely this year (even dad doesn't get one, and mum only does because she's literally just finished chemo!) that I'm going to have to pay for it. There's definitely more fun things I could do with that £75, but I'll take it.

Work has also calmed down slightly, to the point where I can actually find some time to spend on the urgent things my boss wants me to work on, instead of purely on emergent... stuff. I am solidly three months behind on reporting, but the big testing project I was supposed to be doing this month has shrunk because most of the work is not in fact ready for testing yet. The next round, early next year, will therefore be much worse, but that's next year's problem (and hopefully I should have more support from the rest of the team then, because it's not the start of the academic year! or so I can dream).

And now I need to run around and get things ready for the cleaner tomorrow, instead of accidentally doing nothing for another hour.

This month was ridiculous, so I'm splitting the booklog in two, in the hopes of getting at least some of it out of the way!

( 86. The Chalet School Wins the Trick and 87. A Future Chalet School Girl - Elinor M Brent-Dyer ) I'm always very happy to read any of this series.

( 88. The Life of Birds - David Attenborough ) I personally am not invested in birds in particular, but all of this stuff is fascinating.

( 89. Steering the Craft - Ursula Le Guin ) I think this would probably be useful for someone who wanted to improve their fiction writing - and it's interesting even for someone like me.

( 90. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet - Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse ) A good snapshot of a moment I remember, and a reminder of how much things have changed!

( 91. The Tainted Cup - Robert Jackson Bennett ) I unexpectedly enjoyed this; not particularly memorable, but solid entertainment.

( 92. Tales From the Folly - Ben Aaronovitch ) I would say this was really only for fans of the series, but if you are a fan there's some really nice moments here.

( 93. We'll Prescribe You a Cat - Syou Ishida tr. E Madison Shimoda ) Not much depth, but it was quite pleasant to read.

( 95. Conclave - Robert Harris ) I really enjoyed this book, and I thought it did a great job of the Catholic vibes.

( 97. The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley ) Ultimately I don't think I have any idea what this book is doing, but I do think it's at least trying to do something different; I would try Bradley again.

( 94. Sheepfarmer's Daughter, 96. Divided Allegiance, and 98. Oath of Gold - Elizabeth Moon ) A really classic fantasy trilogy; I still love these with the wholehearted commitment I did when I first came across them in a second-hand shop as a young teenager.

Even with the first storm of the season coming in on Friday, we've had some really lovely weather. I was waiting for the bus on Sunday morning in beautiful sunshine and crisp coolness. It's gone a lot colder, though - since the weekend I am wearing the official First Hoodie of the autumn, and in the last couple of weeks I've gone from sleeping under a sheet to a duvet with a blanket on top, at least to warm up.

We had a fancy dinner out on Thursday with the suppliers for our new system, who have been great colleagues, so it was nice to spend some time with them. It was a Chinese "banquet", with lots of terrifying whole-animal courses (a whole turbot! a giant dismembered lobster! what looked like an entire suckling pig with, like, the ribcage removed, splayed out on a platter with its face on one end and four trotters on the corners!), but they'd spent a couple of weeks negotiating with the restaurant to make sure there was enough I could eat, so I definitely had plenty of options. The highlight for me was some particularly good salt and pepper baked tofu, but I also had egg fried rice, and half-a-dozen vegetable dishes, and crispy noodles, and I forget what else.

But actually the nicest part was that the suppliers called me the project MVP right there in front of everyone! Which is of course extremely flattering. And I did put in a lot of work, including some serious project management effort, so it's nice to have that recognised.

The next day was moderately entertaining, because practically everyone was massively hung-over in the office ("I'm not feeling very clever", said Boss Lady). One colleague had driven, so also didn't drink, and she and I congratulated each other (privately!) about it. I did have a bit of a social hangover ("oh no, did I talk too much?? did I say anything stupid? was I super embarrassing???") but mostly I tried to console myself with the fact that practically everyone else was drunk, so probably they wouldn't have noticed or remembered if I did. Ahhh, the joys of being socially awkward.

Now I could do with a resurgence of those project management skills, because there is still Too Much Going On at work, and I am not doing a very good job of, like, properly engaging with it. But I did at least go through the 52 IT Service Desk emails in my inbox and reduce them down somewhat; the "under 100 email" inbox is within my grasp, possibly.

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wychwood

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the still point of the turning world

high untrespassed sanctity of space

Recent Entries

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