The Dreamwidth Account

1) It's a non-teaching week this week, which means my alarm is turned most definitely off and I am catching up on sleep. It's also cold and wet and rainy, to the point where when I was starting to write up my journal this morning I inadvertently started entering the month as "June".

2) I have managed to complete the AV presentation which was driving me bats, and now I have to concentrate on getting my poetry portfolio done. Which means I have to settle down and actually get into a poetry mindspace, which is somewhat akin to having an unstructured dose of therapy. Poetry involves rummaging around in the subconscious, and the problem with doing this for me is I keep finding things in there I don't remember putting there. Like discovering the reason I'm so keen on Final Fantasy VII as a fandom is because I actually empathise strongly with Cloud Strife's memory problems (because they're rather akin to the ones I have as a result of chronic depression).

3) I've done my vote in the Marriage Equality survey, and I think Steve dropped both of them off in the post-box on Friday. I voted "yes", of course, because quite frankly I cannot for the life of me see how allowing people who aren't heterosexual to marry is going to "damage marriage". The arguments of the "No" campaign appear to be mainly based around "think of the children" (I don't have any myself, and I'm thinking of the non-heterosexual and non-gender-binary children who might want to get married when they grow up); "it's against our religion" (well, nobody's saying you have to go out and get married to anyone); "marriage is about having children" (oh, does that mean my infertile friend is damaging the institution of marriage? How about my mother, who's past the age of reproduction and still married to my father?) and so on. None of their arguments really appear to be based on anything sensible, because let's face it, we can't point to a sensible argument against extending marriage to non-heterosexual people.

(Also, on the whole "freeze peach" side of things: if anyone who is busy screaming about how it's going to result in priests being forced to perform gay weddings against their wills and against religious canon can actually point to a single case of this having occurred anywhere in the world where non-heterosexual marriage is already permitted, then I'll start paying attention to this particular argument. But until then... it's a stupid argument).

4) I have a bunch of seedlings from my mother that I picked up on Saturday - Mum buys a bunch of seedlings every year to plant out in her vegetable garden, but the vege patch isn't really all that big, so she's usually got some over. So now she's giving them to me, and I'm going to be planting them out in my vegetable garden space. If the rain ever lets up for long enough for me to get it done. I will also be surrounding them with enough snail bait to hopefully keep the troops of snails we currently have decimating everything in the garden well away for a while.

5) We have received an invitation to come over for dinner tonight from my parents. My brother, in a fit of enthusiasm (and in the grip of a high-protein diet) decided since today is a public holiday (and he thus doesn't have to go in to work) he was going to barbecue an entire beef brisket. So he went and bought himself what looks like half a cow - seriously, the thing occupied about half the width of my parents' chest freezer. So they've invited myself and Steve over to help consume the wretched thing. I may wind up being given some leftovers to take home with me, which means cottage pie for dinner some time this week.

This week has been a slightly better week than last week. Not heaps better, mostly because the two topics being covered in my two university units are an unfortunate conjunction which means I'm wading into uncomfortable psychological waters. On the one hand, my communications unit, Culture to Cultures, is currently covering the Indigenous History of the region, which means I'm dealing with a lot of racism which appears to me to be based largely on envy, viciousness, and free-floating stupidity (and the really depressing part is it's still going even today... *sigh*). The paladin part of my brain, the part which gets annoyed at unfairness and stupidity, and wants to ride out on a crusade to Fix The World (or at least stop me being so irritated by it), is getting twitchy. On the other hand, my writing unit, Introduction to Creative Writing, is dealing with poetry - which means I'm dipping into my subconscious and discovering things even I wasn't aware of - and not all of this is pleasant.

So there's that side of things. Thanks be to the gods our tutor for Creative Writing is placing a stipulation that we have to supply three poems, and two of them have to be from highly structured formats (which changes the whole game from "the psychological exploration inherent in finding your voice" to "the intellectual puzzle of fitting your idea into the right combination of lines, stanzas, words and metre". Gods know I'm far more comfortable with the latter than the former. I mean, yeah, sure being a writer means being vulnerable, and putting your Self on display. But I'd rather at least be picking and choosing the bits of Self I'm putting on display such that "underbelly" and "key shatter points" are not among them. Call it a reaction against too many years of bullying.

But studying poetry has made me want to read my old favourites, so I'm going searching for my Norton Anthology of Poetry again. Problem is, I don't know which of the various boxes of books in the storeroom it's packed in. So I'm having to unpack boxes of books again. Got one down off the shelf last night, and discovered it wasn't the one (I wasn't expecting it to be - this was a box sealed back in 2011, two moves ago). What I did discover were the last two volumes of the Belgariad (so I'll probably be re-reading that some time soon) as well as the whole Malloreon, Belgarath the Sorceror, and Polgara the Sorceress. Fortunately for me, I've cleared off my "farewell re-read" shelves recently (got rid of everything which has been sitting there for a year waiting for me to give it the farewell re-read, on the grounds of if I haven't done it by now, I ain't a-gonna do it), so there's space for the few books from this box that I might be interested in re-reading to be unpacked onto it, and I'll see about going through them over the next twelve months or so. The rest can go to one of the various op-shops around the area, once the donation bag (which is currently full of the last lot to be donated) is emptied out again.

As a bonus, the space in the storeroom the box used to be occupying is now available for something else to move into, which means there's the option of shuffling things around in the store-room so I can find the box wherein my Norton Anthology of Poetry resides, and retrieve it!

Gearing up for the start of classes next week, which means this week I've been practicing getting up at 5am (mostly to find out whether I am going to be able to get up at 5am, or whether I'm going to have to shift things even earlier in the morning). Good news: I can get away with a 5am start on the mornings I have 8am classes (8am class means I need to be ready to leave the house by 7.30am). Bad news: by about October, I'm going to have to shift my wake-up time back to 4.30am, because I'm still working on extending my writing time each month, and I don't have too much to spare at present. Today I have plans to clear last semester's readings and work off my uni laptop, and make sure its battery is all charged up and ready to go, and then I'm all set to go.

So this week I'm going to get a bit political.

( Ranting below the fold )

Okay, so, spleen vented. How's everyone else this week?

This week I had a tooth crack on me on Wednesday. This resulted in a trip down to the local government dental clinic "emergency" sessions at 8.15 in the morning on Thursday, and a third tooth extracted. I'm sitting here with a hole in my jaw which is throbbing at me, but recovering pretty much on schedule.

( Gory dental details under the fold )

I feel inclined to send the dentist a thank-you card, and the hope the rest of her day's work wasn't anywhere near as frustrating.

I'm currently on a diet of soup, pasta, and other such mush until my jaw heals up enough that attempts to chew aren't interpreted as a direct assault on and by every tooth in my head. It's not actually the socket which hurts when I chew, it's the other teeth near the socket, all of which got jostled around in the process. Clenching my jaw is not likely to happen for at least another fortnight at this rate. I'm taking nurofen (ibuprofen) on a regular basis to deal with the pain (down from every four hours on Thursday to about every six hours today, I think) and hoping things will clear up soon. I'm also on a course of antibiotics (amoxicillin) to prevent any infection, so one of those three times daily, plus rinsing 4 times a day with warm salt water.

I trust I don't need to point out this is a good reason to keep up with brushing your teeth? Trust me, this stuff isn't fun.

Hopefully I'll wind up on their maintenance schedule, and I'll be able to see about things like replacements for the three teeth which have been removed so far (as well as maybe getting a bit of work done on my right-hand incisor, which is also gradually chipping away).

It's a wet, grey, miserable day with lots of rain falling. Perth winter, in other words (we appear to have had a long-delayed delivery of same). As those who have been reading along for the week know, my brain has been busy trying to make me depressed (not succeeding, fortunately, but managing to irritate me a fair degree with its efforts) and we had the washing machine break down on Tuesday (repaired the same day - I have nothing but praise for the repair person).

I managed to choose my classes for next semester (after much puzzling at the whole interface, which is possibly the least intuitive thing I've run across in years - it doesn't show potential classes for more than one subject at a time, which makes it very difficult to figure out whether you actually have a potential clash). This coming semester is going to involve visiting campus a lot more often (I managed to get everything down to two days last semester - this semester it's four) and a lot more early mornings. I have a one hour lecture on Tuesday at 9am, another on Wednesday at 8am, a two hour tutorial on Thursday starting at 8am, and another two hour tutorial on Friday with a 9am start. Given I've just bumped up my writing time each day to about 45 minutes total (30 minutes on my journal, 10 minutes on fanfic, and another 5 minutes working on original stuff with the beginning of the new month) I think I'm going to have to switch my waking up time to a bit earlier in the mornings on Wednesdays and Thursdays (maybe 5am or even 4.30am, depending on how long it's going to take me to get moving) so I can make it to classes on time. I don't want to drop the writing time, because I've worked so hard at building the habit of doing this writing in the mornings first thing, but I doubt I'd get anything done if I tried to schedule it in after finishing classes. I know the way my brain works with regard to that sort of thing.

The housework is starting to settle down into a bit of a routine (up to a point - the moment there's any disruption to said routine, my brain throws a tanty and sulks, but I'll work on that later). I have a system where I alternate thirty minutes of sitting in a chair noodling around the internet with a period of getting up and doing chores, and this seems to be very effective in getting things done.

So yeah, things are going pretty good this week, actually. How's everyone else?

This week the weather has been playing merry hob with my temperature sense at night. Early in the week I was throwing off the quilt in the middle of the night because I was overheating, and I wound up pulling the crocheted rug off the bed because it was just making the overheating worse. Then from Thursday onwards, I've been cold enough at night that I suspect I'm sleeping in the one position all night rather than lose heat (and consequently winding up with a strained shoulder and neck) - the crocheted rug is back on the bed, and I'm starting to consider whether bringing out the summer-weight quilt as well would be a useful move. Or I can give this a week and see whether our weather decides to flip back to comparatively warm nights.

A quick look at the weather forecast says it's possible we might get double-digit night time temperatures around Wednesday and Thursday next week, but single digits for the rest of the week (7 - 10C range for minima). Which, I think, means pretty much more of the same.

The house is cleaner than it was, and probably cleaner than it has been since about mid-March, really. I have free time, and lots of it, and I can now schedule things like cleaning the house as part of my daily routine without running out of spoons for other things. The dust doesn't know what hit it!

Aside from that, most of what I've been doing this week is noodling around on the internet reading things. I haven't even been playing games all that much, which is generally an indicator for me that I'm going through a bit of a depressive slump (which, yes, I am - reaction to not having the week full of uni stuff to deal with). I'm starting to get a bit better at dealing with things. I'm pulling out some old self-care habits, like alternating internet activity for thirty minutes with getting up and doing chores; something which made me more productive yesterday than I had been for most of the week. But it's all a work in progress.

This week everything happened at once.

I've known for a while that I had an essay due, a rationale and reflection document due, a short story to write (1500 - 2000 words) and a rent inspection due at some point this month. This week, the uncertainty bubble surrounding the date of the inspection collapsed, and we discovered when it was going to happen: this coming Wednesday (it's due in May, Wednesday is the 31st of May, it apparently counts).

For those of you not ensnared in the morass of the Australian rental market, let me describe the joys of a rental inspection to you. Firstly, you get told the inspection is happening at some time on a given day - usually with about a week's notice. The current real estate agency are nice enough people - they narrow it down to "some time between 12pm and 5.30pm", which is positively generous. Before this happens, you need to have the property in a condition which would satisfy either your mother, or your mother-in-law (depending on who has the more rigid housekeeping standards - if neither of these qualify, pick your unfriendly local germophobe). You also need the gardens (if there are any) looking good as well - the local mowing places do a lot of good business out of people who have inspections due! So, once you have the property in pristine condition (including things like cleaning off light switches, wiping down walls and cleaning the oven) you wait for the property manager (if you're renting from a real-estate agency) or the owner (if you're renting directly) to come in and have a look over the place. Now, technically, they're not supposed to be judging you on your housekeeping standards - but we all know this is so much horse elbows, so yeah, they are. If it's a property manager, they come in and often (these days) take photos of the interior of the place, in order to prove you've left the walls where they were when you came in, and to prove the roof hasn't spontaneously fallen in or similar. This, of course, means they're usually taking photos of your goods and chattels as well. Anyway, they come in, do their walk through, make sure you haven't knocked the place down since they were last there, then breeze back out again after making a report for the owner. The whole business takes about fifteen minutes to half an hour tops, but it requires about a week's solid effort in preparation because the place needs to be pristine for them.

This happens every three months, by the way (four a year).

We had the tradesman come around to have a look at the kitchen cupboards on Friday at about 7.30 in the morning. He brought the owner with him, which I would have appreciated knowing about beforehand (while the house wasn't in "complete dog's breakfast" condition, it wasn't quite at "suitable for unknown strangers visiting" levels of cleanliness). Basically, the owner and the tradesman consulted with each other, and I suspect the outcome is going to be a replacement of at least some (if not all) of the kitchen benches. Now, when this will happen (and whether we'll be in the property when it does) is currently all up in the air - our lease expires on the 21st of July, and while I'm going to be talking to the property manager about getting another twelve months in the place nailed down, what may wind up happening is the owner might decide (in the interests of "not disrupting our lives", gods help us[1]) to give us our notice to quit at the end of this current lease, so he can get the tradies in to do things uninterrupted. Now, I don't know whether this is certain, probable or merely in the range of possibilities out there, but it's something I've added to the list of potential worries coming up.

I've mostly finished all the uni assessments - I finished off the editing of my major essay for one of my units this morning (it's been sitting there waiting to be done like an albatross around my neck for the last three or four days, but when I try to do it in the afternoon, my brain basically throws up an "Out of Spoons" error and refuses to parse the wretched thing). I just have the short story to write a first draft of (for workshopping purposes) by Tuesday. Which should be fun, right? But once I've submitted that short story (due the 1st of June) I've finished for the semester, and all I have to do after that is wait for my results.

Of course, this also means I have to go and speak to AtWork regarding Work for the Dole, since at present my university study qualifies as my Work for the Dole activity - and technically they have me on the books as needing to do Work for the Dole until about August or thereabouts. So I need to find out whether I'm going to be breaching my mutual obligation requirements if I don't immediately start doing something else (like picking up litter, sorting rags, washing bottles, or picking oakum) immediately the moment I've handed in this last assignment.

Still going on MFF, have deleted Avengers Academy from the tablet (since it wasn't going anywhere, and was crashing on a regular basis every time I tried to open it) and I'm getting very fond of Final Fantasy Record Keeper, which I've been playing for over a year now, and which hasn't crashed, glitched, or demanded money from me in all that time. Why can't there be more games like that?

[1] The logic here being that having renovations done around us would be disruptive. Which, yes, it would. But having to move out on short notice, and find another place to live in for the amount we can afford (preferably close to uni - that's the main qualifying feature of this place, by the way - it's close enough to the university that we can basically be there within 15 minutes of leaving the house) would be even more disruptive.

Yeah, I'm trying to do these weekly. We'll see how it lasts.

Winter is icumen in here in Western Australia - I woke up today to see fog in the valley heading down toward Berwick St, and the neighbours with the wood fire are starting to get some use out of it now the nights and mornings are getting chilly. My current level of rugging up: leggings under my jeans, jumper[1] over my long-sleeved t-shirt, and shoes and socks (I may dig out my ugg boots today, just for the fun of it; Saturday is "stay at home and play games" day, so I can dress the full slob if I want to).

I have a whole heap of stuff for uni I'm supposed to be working on at present (and this week's schedule was complicated by me needing to get to and start writing something I'd previously thought was due about two weeks later - discovered this on the Monday, had to have it in by Thursday). Fortunately for me, it was three five hundred word pieces, and I can do five hundred words in my sleep. So that's been submitted. The harder job for me was actually something where I have to do three hundred words plus/minus ten percent (so between 270 and 330 words) - in one case I was editing down something like 1000 words to 330, in another trying to knock things down from around the 500 word mark to the 300 word mark. What's worse, the brief for this second assignment only mentions a three hundred word minimum - it doesn't mention a maximum at all. So I wound up having to actually ask my tutor: okay, we have a minimum and no maximum stated; what is the unspoken maximum here? (And why they couldn't be bothered to just say: three hundred words, plus or minus ten percent?).

Things I learned this week: editing is hard mental work. I edited down three pieces to fit the word count, and I was exhausted by the end of it.

I'm still in recovery from the flu, but I managed to reclaim enough spoons yesterday to make cooking seem like a good idea. I have some Pumpkin Mulligatawny (basically, curried pumpkin soup, to which I plan to add rice and coconut milk) going in the slow cooker. I did a bit of preliminary work with the potato masher to get the veges broken up a bit, and I'm going to be running the stick blender through it in batches a bit later on.

The Great Caterpillar Cull continues, although it's dropped down to a mornings-only proceeding. Unfortunately, the wards appear to be breaking down, because I've started to find caterpillars coming back into my room again in the mornings (only one or two per day, but still... caterpillars). We're still getting over 30 caterpillars a day in the cull, and I suspect we're going to continue seeing those sorts of numbers for a long while yet.


[1] This is the Australian/British meaning of "jumper" - a knitted garment which covers the upper body; as distinct from a sweatshirt.

Had a very poor night's sleep last night (had trouble going to sleep due to the heat; woke up during the night overheated and dehydrated, and couldn't get back to sleep for over an hour; got jolted awake again by leg cramps about a half an hour before my alarm was due to go off). I'm currently sitting here experiencing one of my warning signs for gastro-intestinal distress (burping up gas which sort of tastes like bacon as it passes over my tongue). I have an appointment with my Job Active provider at 9am (which I am NOT looking forward to, because they're about as useless as tits on a bull, and they're intended to be this useless as a point of government policy). Oh, and I got another letter in my email from the nice people at Moton Group "offering" me a "job", as well as two email letters from the latest iteration of the "LKT Company" scam (the company has changed its name and now calls itself "Nocturne", and refers to itself as "fast-growing", but the other particulars are pretty much the same).

The signs are not positive. Unfortunately my preferred remedy (going back to bed, pulling the sheet over my head and pretending today doesn't exist) is not available (see: appointment at 9am). So I'll need to head to plan B - bull through things.

Just to bring people up to speed on what's happening in my life and what I've been up to.

The good news:

1) I have a new smartphone! I've been saving up for this for most of the last couple of years, and the Telstra shop had a fortuitous sale. My old mobile phone was a little Nokia handset which had been a bit dodgy from the word go - one of its little quirks was that whenever I used it for phone calls, the "6" key somehow kept being pressed. No, I don't know how. Either way, calls were constantly interrupted by beeping and at the end of the call I'd have a page of 6's to delete. Plus it only had text entry from the keypad, which meant it was slow and fiddly to use, and meant I didn't really get much use out of the non-phone functions.

My new phone is a Samsung Galaxy Trend, and it seems to be a lot closer to what I was actually wanting (which was a replacement for my old Palm m515 which could also make phone calls). Certainly it's far easier to use the calendar, note-taking and contacts features than it was on the Nokia. I don't think I'm likely to be using the web-based features of it all that much, though - while I'm at home, I'll use my computer for web browsing, and while I'm out, I'll either be driving, or if I'm on public transport, I'll be working on crochet.

2) I've started to work seriously on improving my performance as a housekeeper. I'm using a combination of Chorewars (to track what I've done, and how much I've "earned" for it - at a rate of 10c per chore) and Habit RPG (to keep up with the weekly and monthly chores and try to keep me up to a couple of daily targets). I'm trying to do 20 "chores" per day on weekdays, and 15 per day on weekends (which, at 10c per chore, means I'd be earning about $13 per week for the housework. Given that by setting my own pace previously I was averaging about $10 per 8 days, this means I'll be saving up for things off my wishlist a bit faster than I was before).

The not-so-good news:

1) Himself was home earlier in the week with a nasty cold/cough combination which I appear to have caught off him. Woke up this morning with a scratchy sore throat, and I'm feeling a bit flattened and dull. Hopefully it will burn through in the next couple of days. In the meantime, lots of peppermint tea, and maybe some lemon and honey later on. Oh, and lots of feeling very sorry for myself, always an essential part of being unwell.