Month: Jul 2020

Feeling Hot Hot Hot

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Well we won’t be going to Disney this year, but the heat today in the South of England is roughly comparable to the weather we’d have had out there anyway, so maybe this is nature’s way of apologising for coronavirus.

We were due to get the results back from Lady M’s MRI scan this morning, but the specialist got called in to perform emergency surgery first thing, so we’ll talk at some point this afternoon. Work sent me home so I can look after her, so it at least gives me a chance to catch up on work emails rather than be front of house. On the positive side, the leaks from upstairs have been fixed, so that’s a good thing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m back to the fridge for cold water. Stay hydrated everyone!

Pronoun Practice

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As I’ve mentioned earlier, myr s is non-binary, and by request I’ve not talked much about their journey. The happiness I’m witnessing as we travel with them really does warm the heart.

The biggest problem has been training myself to use the right pronouns, in particular when talking to other people about them. I don’t need correcting often, and I usually catch myself first, with the interesting side effect of my being a lot more deliberate about how I talk to or about anyone.

In practice it means I’m using much more gender-neutral terms for everyone. I’m starting to use they and them when describing people in general, and use ‘folks’ instead of ‘guys’ as often as I remember. More effectively though I’ve started just using people’s names as interchangeably as general pronouns in that deliberate attribution of things and actions to specific individuals.

Its an exercise in relearning the use of language, but its in service of not being unkind, of accepting, and that’s never a bad thing.

Doodles and Sketches

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Drawing is a huge stress relief mechanism for me, and with everything that’s been going on of late I’ve been pouring more time and attention into it than I have in a while. It has certainly given me plenty to revisit as I prepare graphics for sale through RedBubble and Amazon.

Here’s some recent scribbles, some of which will end up on things in the days and weeks to come:

Indoor Water Features

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Well, I was hoping to have a bit of a chilled weekend, given we’ve managed to finalise when Lady M is getting her MRI scans done.

No, instead we’ve had steady drips of water descending from the extractor fan which has then expanded to come out of a light fitting in the hallway, so I’ve turned off the light fuses while we wait for a plumber and swap out buckets as they fill.

On the plus side, while moving books and damageable items out of the way, we have been able to rationalise some of our old notebooks, and tidy the contents of the bureau. That’s been quite nice, to go through old journals and line up all the ones I haven’t used yet.

So, how’s your weekend going?

And still we wait…

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Something continues to be going very wrong in the arranging of MRIs for Lady M, which now leaves us in the position of feeling like Shrodinger’s patients twice over in terms of when a scan will take place and what is being scanned. If it wasn’t so serious, you could write a great farce out of it all.

As things stand I’m going to work tomorrow as usual and Lady M may or may not get an Uber to one of two hospitals for either one, two, or no scans. If that doesn’t happen then there may be an as yet to be determined number of MRIs on Monday.

No wonder we’re exhausted.

I’ll be working with the public as a rest from all this tomorrow. At least it will be a good distraction, whatever the day brings.

People Like My Stuff?

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No matter how many times people admire my artwork I’m still caught in the imposter syndrome trap of not believing it – because my brain insists that it’s all a trick and I’m being set up for a fall. Yay for survivor-brain and being a burnt-out ex-gifted child. Okay, this is a roundabout way of telling you I had the amazing news that someone has actually bought one of my redbubble designs in the last twenty four hours, so somebody in Canada has the dubious honour of being the first person in the world to wear my artwork on their face.

Whoever you are: thank you very very much, you mad fool. I have raised a glass in your honour this evening.

I also this morning received an acceptance email to be able to sell through the Amazon Merch program. If nothing else it has forced me to work out how to do transparencies for png files, let alone work my way through the extremely unintuitive user interface this evening (which has led me to drink the rest of the bottle after first saluting my Redbubble customer).

So – that’s a nice thing that has happened today, and I shall use it to beat my imposter syndrome with a massive stick on an ongoing basis.

Surprise!

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We’ve been trying to arrange it for a while, but yesterday we managed to surprise Lady M with an unannounced visit by myr s and Lady B, and then consensually kidnapped Lord S to drag him away from his opera practice. In short order we then had most of the DDC in our flat, and never have we been so grateful for having so many sofas.

A motley crew? Us?

With advance knowledge of when they were arriving I was able to have the kettle going and suitably obfuscation their arrival so that myr s was able surprise Lady M with a massive bunch of flowers – and nearly launch her out of her skin. Saying Lady M can be startled easily is something of an understatement.

We exchanged various gifts, chattered away, and the afternoon sped into evening with barely a pause. Lady M, myr s, and I were also able to put on our rings for each other too – much delayed by lockdown.

It was just so good to finally get us all back together – some of us for the first time – and those of us who haven’t really been out much during lockdown I think at times found it overwhelming. Here’s to it fast becoming a more normal thing again.

Morning all

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Writing is being perpetrated, the sun is shining, and I’ve had my diabetic blood tests done early today so the full morning is spread before me.

Not a bad start. I’ve had a coffee and some breakfast, can you tell?

Yes, those are masks on the sofa, why?

After a restless night its good to be using some of that energy productively.

The blood test went as quick and easily as you might hope, despite my stupidly forgetting my mask (they had spares). It’s the first time I’ve had one done at the GP rather than wandering down to the hospital – and I may take the booking approach more often given how stress-free it was.

That said i have just remembered I didn’t actually book the follow up appointment with the nurse for a couple of weeks time, so I had better sort that out next…

Designing and Updates

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We’ve got a cluster of family birthdays happening at the moment, and yesterday was a pre-birthday online gathering of the clan which generally turned into a catch up. I was pleasantly surprised to hear my parents praising the redbubble shop to everyone as part of the proceedings. I’m not sure why surprise is the reaction I’ve taken away from it, as proud parental statements are not exactly a scarce thing. At the same time, I can’t remember direct recommendations and praise of my stuff to my family happening recently in such a direct way before.

As a result I kind of feel even more embarrassed to talk about things I’m doing in front of people than usual. Its the sort of adaptive cringe I’ve adopted over the years and have been fiercely trying to overcome and mitigate in recent times.

So this evening, as everyone is generally feeling quite grim, I’ve just been doing some more designs and updates of existing ones while we chat away on Discord. The file sizes are huge so I’ll not be posting the originals here, but I will do a mini gallery at some point. For now, here’s a link to the most recent one:

https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/A-Flick-of-the-Tail-by-Ludd72/50585999.1YYVU?asc=u

Workspace Shenanigans

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I’ve been rearranging my home working space today to take advantage of Lady M getting a second screen from work so that I can reclaim my aging Xerox monitor (17 years and counting). I have daisy-chained screen adapters from digital to vga to hdmi to work with my very cut-down aging laptop, and have grabbed a spare stool in the spare room. I’m using one of the glass-topped desk units that came back from Switzerland with Lady M just tucked inside the room – so the real test will be tomorrow when it’s time for D&D.

Why all this effort? Well my leg is still spasming and generally hurting every time I’m sat for any length of time on our sofa, so I’m hoping that a slightly different seating arrangement will help my leg heal properly. We’ll see. In the meantime I’m carrying on with setting up items on the redbubble site and have finally managed to get Amazon to accept my financial and tax credentials so that I can sell Kindle writings and potentially more merchandise through them

Fingers crossed, and all that.