helle

OH GOD, WHY DOES MY PHONE DOING NEW THINGS AND/OR REFUSING TO BE CUSTOMISED IN THE WAY I WANT IT MAKE ME REALLY ANXIOUS AND UPSET? Every time. *sighs*

Have sent no job applications so far this wee, and IIRC none last week either.

Also I am waitressing 6am-2pm and 4pm-11pm tomorrow. Also there are at least two events that I 'ought to'/want to go to tonight and I feel massively guilty that I can't do both. Also not sure I want to go to *either*, what with my present mood of hating everything.
ARRRRRRRRGGGGG.


(On the plus side, have lovely new red blazer as replacement for the one I lost two years ago. Also, I will definitely post pictures of my birthday-presents-to-self soon. They include an MJN Air t-shirt.)

Well, my darlings, am heading off to sunnier climes tomorrow with my parents and C, so contract is likely to be sporadic over the next two weeks. Please nobody do anything particularly important and worthy of immediate comment in that time?
I was also going to use the "D" meme that littlered2 has assigned me in order to play Let Me Talk To You About Diana Wynne Jones, with particular emphasis on Dogsbody, Deep Secret and Dalemark, but alas, phone keyboard is annoying, and also I an bring bugged by C to finish up so that she can 'check on her dragons on my phone' so I will say goodbye here. Be good!

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

EDIT: UPDATE UPDATE
Mum is reading Prisoner of Azkaban to C and they Ste at the insulting parchment scene. "Mr Padfoot would like to register his astonishment that an idiot like that could ever become a professor....
~ glee~

So, I haz cold. This is all frith_in_thorns fault, nyah. Since, unlike hers, it has not yet evolved into Dethflu, I am counting my blessings.

The one thing that is very nice about illness, however, is my recently-evolved tradition (i.e. since I went to university and did not have to worry about my parents Judging my terrible life choices) of Spontaneous Hot Toddies. Growing up, honey and lemon, drunk as hot as you can physically bear, was the sore throat remedy of choice and household mandate. (Frith claims that sweetened hot milk was hers, but that seems a really wrong and strange practice to me. What traditional illness recipes did you all grow up with?) When I was ill and bored in Second Year, I started to ... modify the honey and lemon slightly. At first I started by trying to make actual proper toddies, but I was a housebound/poor/any student and my ingredients were limited. So!

Soon, variation became the fun of it - the recipe I generally go by now is:
Strongest alcohol on hand + most tasty alcohol on hand + fruit juice, or other citrus-based soft drink + spices. Microwave, and then breathe in the alcohol fumes to clear your nasal passages. (I DID make mention above of my terrible life choices, ne?)

It is always different, which is the fun of it. However, last night I made what I feel to be the ultimate version, and going entirely against the spirit of Surprising Toddies, I am going to record my formula for posterity.
*Dram (probably a shot and a half) of rum.
*Decent splash of ginger wine
*Shot or so of lemon juice, plus a splash of weird artificial tropical squash
*Spices - cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg. Chopped ginger.
*Oregano, splash of Worcester sauce, a few chilli flakes.
*Honey
Heat, stir and serve.

You, dear reader, are probably judging this combination HARD right now, I would imagine. But it was really, really good!

... I have never bofore hosted a party where everyone is sitting in their own corner with an Internet connection and posting things at each other while drunk.

Wow, I haven't posted in a long time. First there was exams and finals-term crazy; and then the longer I go before actually sitting down and writing the stuff in my head, the more there is that I totally need to tell and the more News I find it my duty to impart. So, nothing gets written because there is too much to write. But I am going to try and Interact More Dammit, (I love it when I do; I don't know why I find it so hard to make the first step...)

I'm back home now, in Recovery Mode from Oxford and trying to figure out where I'm at. My plan is to tae driving lessons and do some kind of volunteering this summer before going to live in Oxford in September and find some kind of work there. Not very exact planning, but hopefully workable. The only awkward thing to plan around is that I'm having another operation on my oesophagus in October -  more thoughts to come on that, but the gust is that things still aren't great for me, eating-wise, but the only specialist in the Northwest is away from the end of May to the end of September, so unless I'd come home literally the day after my exams and been operated on the following Monday, he couldn't do anything any earlier. I think he (the specialist) is Worried for me in that respect; I infer that most of his cases get picked up very early on and get sorted out definitivly, so he's not used to conceptualising achalasia as a livable, longterm condition. He worries about me coping over the summer - but fuck it, I've been coping with this for years now, it's not like having to live with it is anything new.

I had a conversation with Mum yesterday about Things Which Make Me Unhappy (Many) with particular focus on Things I Don't Like To Admit To But Should (Various, mostly food and drink related anxieties), which was good to get in the open, but hard - it's exhausting talking about feelings you don't think you should have, and I hate adding to my parents stress by being unhappy; they've got quite enough on there plates with my inconvenient feelings. (Though I can see, objectivly, that that is a stupid way to think about it, I hate to burden them.)

Being back is weird - it's going to take some getting used to living with C without having my degree course hanging over me and the perpetual distraction of all the work I'm not doing. I'm used to holidays following a set pattern, and now I'll have to forge a new - hopefully more open - mode of communication. It's hard. I'm not good at taking Herself on her own terms. I can barely undersand her sense of humour, nor she mine; we understand the world in very different ways and I can't unbend myself enough to reach out. I find myself becoming horribly pious and humourless and hypocritical with her, as though embodying The Good Daughter would be any help at all!

I meant for this to be a post to communicate my Thoughts on Dollhouse to alll four interested parties, and most particu;larly <lj user="littlered2"> who has been waiting to here them most patiently, with a short paragraph of here-I-am-now as preface. But this has gone on long enough that I will split the post and cry mercy for your f'lists. I need to sleep now...

Ai. Tomorrow I'm heading off on Adventures with La Famille, and so today has been filled with frantic download-all-the-PDFs ever; get-everything-I-possibly-can-from-the-Uni-library, because if I don't have access to every single paper ever written, I might fail my finals! I'm really looking forward to the holiday though - seeing it as a chance to do two weeks solid work surrounded by sea and sand. Let's just hope it actually turns out like that...

This last week or so's been great - a much-needed recovery space from the traumas of the two papers I handed in 9th Week Hilary; both of which went absolutly fine up until the last minute and then suddenly got awful on me. There was a chain of very minor organisational things that went wrong, all of them my own fault and all of them in isolation completly insignificant that, added together, came up to Doom and Despair and Woe. I'm really frustrated by the fact that, on all three of the hand-in papers I've done so far, my organisational imcompetance overshadowed the work I've put into them all, and will probably -at the least- lead to penalties for lateness.

I haven't much of interest to impart - I keep doing things and thinking 'ooh, I should post about that', but then I never quite get 'round to it until they seem to have faded into irrelevence. Owing to lack of internet on the boat (boat! excite) we're staying, I will probs remain incommunicado. It is Woe, though less so for my than for C, my foster-sister, who will very sadly be deprived of TV and girlsgames.com for that time! (feorseonde bidrorene? At least half of my day has been spent up to my eyeballs in Old English, going though old lecture notes and whatnot to figure out what to take...) Still, I'm sure she'll learn to cope - somehow or other....


I did think that after Hilary was done my posts would be less tinged with Work! Doom! Work! than before. Guessing that won't actually happen until it's all over though....

Just found out, while totally virtuously working on my essay (well, for about five minutes at least...) that one of Renee Vivien's girlfriends, Hélène de Rothschild* (de Zuylen de Nyevelt and probably several other names too) had all her papers that she'd kept about Vivien and her art and stuff looted/destroyed by the Nazis during the occupation of Paris.
( Seriously, fuck the Nazis. )
And this half been your daily history lesson about early 20th Century lesbians! I am totally not plotting out High School AU fic or worrying about characterisation of obscure poets, no, definitely not.

So, I started to write this, and it suddenly took a hard left turn into medical TMI and a long-winded attempts to get My Thoughts On Achalasia*, And Specifically Where I Am Now, a year after my operation, down on virtual paper - as such I wrote it mainly for my own benefit, and it is very stream-of-couciousy and rambly and tl;dr.

( Seriously, begins with digestive TMI )


*Achalasia - a condition I've had for several years. The name means 'failure to relax', which I have just discovered and find rather hilarious; it apparently affects about 1 in 100 000 people a year.

I've been distracting myself with Victorian porn magazines; which( Read more... )