Selenay's Ramblings

So, I've been making a couple of circle-locked posts here on DW over the past few weeks about some health stuff that's been happening and I don't plan to make them public because I'm not sure the entire Internet needs to know the exact details of how my uterus is fucking me over. It does feel like I need to have something public somewhere, because some elements of this are impossible to hide, but let's go with a summary.

In summary: fibroids, unpredictable bleeding, hospital admissions due to the bleeding have been involved, so much unexpected laundry, it's all very unpleasant and turning me into the flakiest person ever because I cannot guarantee I'll actually turn up for anything I plan.

I'm on the waiting list for surgery but thanks to covid and 10 years of Tories fucking over the NHS, waiting lists are ridiculous and gynecology is has the worst waiting list of all specialities, so I'm prepared for the idea I won't get surgery before Christmas. In the meantime, I just have to manage it and accept that I will miss many fun events until it happens.

Work is...a lot. The biggest project of my career is due to launch at the beginning of July (delayed from November due to things outside my control), so there's a lot of work, so many meetings, and I'm anticipating that July and August will be even worse as we bed in the new systems we've developed. It's also been one of those projects that has stretched me and shown me that I'm capable of taking on senior roles on big things like this, so it's been great, but it's a lot.

I've been picking away at a fic since late last year, which keeps getting interrupted by health problems and work exhaustion. I went back to reread it to pick it up again last week and it's good! I love the concept! I like what I've written so far! I've got 22k of great fic that needs about 40k more fic before I can call it done, because there's a lot of plot left and Wangxian are nowhere near their happy ending yet and god damn it, I need happy endings right now.

This extends to my reading and viewing as well as my writing. Happy endings only here. I don't have the spoons to deal with traumatic endings right now.

I haven't been stitching as much as I'd like--all the health stuff has left me low on spoons a lot of the time--but I've been picking up projects when I can and I have a one day course booked next month with the Royal School of Needlework. I really will have a meltdown if a major bleeding incident prevents me getting to that. I feel like i've already missed too many things I was looking forward to this year.

It's frustrating knowing that any plan I make can be disrupted by my body doing silly things and I've lost confidence in making any plans that I need to pay for in advance or where my absence will cause issues for others. I'm still working out how to navigate that in a way that doesn't shut my life down completely but also doesn't leave other people in the lurch and me hugely out of pocket. It's a work in progress.

So yeah. 20220 is turning into a year to remember for a whole variety of reasons.

Thank you for all the lovely comments on my post about Kate-cat, I read and appreciated all of them so much.

The last month has been weird and often difficult. It was my birthday a few days after Kate died. I'd already planned to largely ignore it, which ended up being a good call because that was the day I finally cried for her. I tend to have delayed-action grief, where I'm fine and powering through for a while and then it just hits me. Sucks that it was my birthday, but I'm glad it was a day I'd booked off work (to avoid all the birthday wishes) so I could just do what I needed to.

Annie is adjusting well. She's still a bit of a shadow-cat, but she isn't distressed when I leave the house anymore, and she's taking full advantage of having no competition for my lap. She's also started taking over a couple of Kate's roles around the house - she grooms me and a couple of nights ago she pulled Kate's holding my head so she could nuzzle my hair trick. Silly kitten.

But life goes on as it must.

I'm now living in a tier 4 area of the UK, so basically back in lockdown. Thankfully support bubbles are still allowed so I can walk over to my parents for Christmas Day. Plans with my sister and nephew had already been cancelled before the government announcement, so it's not been as devastating for us as it was for some families. We'd even already arranged couriers to get presents to the right houses! So my nephew will get all his Christmas presents on his first Christmas. I'm just sad that we won't be able to watch him punch wrapping paper and make faces at his first taste of turkey.

This year has been so weird.

I'm going to try to do some kind of year end wrap-up later. At the moment, I'm just focused on the idea that I've only got to get through today, tomorrow, and Wednesday morning, and then I'm done with work for the year. I can spend lots of time on my sofa, admiring my tree and watching telly until my eyes are square. Bridgerton! New Year Doctor Who! C dramas! And if I need a break from that, being in the Untamed fandom is spoiling me for quantity and quality of fic :D

So my Christmas plans should actually be quite nice despite everything. And thankfully, my little local independent coffee shop is staying open for takeaway, so popping out to pick up a mocha every couple of days is still on. Phew!

If I could explain the meeting I had today in a public arena, it would be an EPIC thing. I just...it's several hours later and I'm not over it.

(Not in an "OMG my company is terrible" way. It was just...both hilarious and awful, but the further away from it I get, the more hilarious it is.)

(It's days like this that I wish my job were interesting enough to write an AU fic about, because this little gem would have been comedy gold.)

In other comedy gold, my sister told me a story from her NCT group that had me lying on my side laughing for five minutes during Sunday Skype. So, er, if I ever write a kidfic then I need there to be at least one section with a baby just so I can use that.

The Untamed fandom is lovely and the comments on my fic have been great. Phew! How did I start off vowing not to write anything because it looked intimidating to write for and now have one fic posted and two WIPs? How?

Also, how has this fandom got so much absolutely amazing fic?

Not that a bucketload of amazing fic is a complaint :D

Should I start writing up lists of excellent fic I've found?

It is sticky and warm here and I am not happy about this, but apparently it's going to be less sticky soon. This is good because my office is the warmest room in the house and both cats are currently doing Very Dramatic Flopping everywhere, which is both tragic and hilarious.

My brain is in five hundred places at once this afternoon. I blame the combination of the hilariously awful meeting and an intense discussion of Xiao Zhan's new haircut in one of my group chats. Probably time to turn off the laptop and swan dive back into fic.

There was no poop in yesterday's extended family Zoom! That was because the other family with a baby are caravanning in North Wales right now (in the middle of this storm, with a baby and two other small children - fun times!) and my sister was so tired she kept nodding off during the Zoom.

But gosh she was determined to talk to adults about something that wasn't a baby. Poor love, she adores her baby but she's missing non-baby adult time.

My work calendar has been shockingly bare for the last week and there has been no screaming in my inbox. Coincidentally, the MD for one of the companies and the group head of finance are both on holiday. Gee, I can't imagine why my schedule is so much easier to manage!

I might actually hit my deadlines for the project I'm currently working on. Can they stay on holiday please? For the next six months?

Before the lockdown, there was a plan that I would take long-term loan of my dad's electric piano. This weekend, I need to get the spare room tidied up a bit so I can finally move the piano here. It will give me another thing to work on and I miss making music. It's a surprisingly good way to get outside your head for a while and I've always found it much better than meditation for that instinct.

The electric piano is a good one, responds almost like a real piano, but has the advantage of being able to plug in some headphones so I don't disturb the neighbours as I get my fingers back into some vague semblance of competence.

In fandom things...

I have hit the 8k words mark on the Guardian fix-it fic I'm writing and I'm finally getting to the fun parts to write. I think this will definitely be a long fic, because I know I'm only a third of the way through the plot right now and it's probably going to expand as I write. It's completely self-indulgent, unusually angsty for me in places, and I'm enjoying playing in a fandom where intensely romantic love between my ship is practically canon because I can just indulge all my favourite things without holding back.

(I am not writing Untamed fic. I AM NOT. Even though it also has licence to get intense and powerful on the romance front. Argh.)

One of my new favourite fic writers has just published a new 66k story, but I've also just started Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray so the fic will wait until I've finished that.

Gosh, I love having a fandom with excellent longfic writers :D

I'm told The Untamed also has reams of excellent longfic. Hooray for fandoms!

So much pruning. SO MUCH. Good thing it's garden waste collection tomorrow, because my bin is full. But the garden looks less like a triffid is taking over, so that's progress.

Today I also got brave and went to the shops. Just to the local chemist and butcher, but as I've been shielding since mid-March that felt like a major thing. Gosh, shops are so weird now. I wore my new Dalek mask and got horribly flustered about normal things, but I remembered how to pay for things with my phone after a couple of attempts and I achieved buying my own toothpaste and ham for sandwiches for the first time in over four months, so that's progress?

Part of me things I should take advantage of this because it sounds like they're already contemplating reintroducing shielding and maybe expanding it to more groups. Argh. I'll see how that goes. Maybe I can talk Mum into taking me to the garden centre tomorrow despite her strong hints (via compost delivery) that she's not comfortable with me being around that many people?

Relaxing has felt a little less stressful today, maybe because I was less focused on trying to do it *eye roll* I've read a bit, watched some telly, sent a fic to beta, started writing a new fic...it's been both relaxing and productive. That could be the balance that works for me.

Might get some tea and watch the next episode of The Untamed now. By the end of the week, I may actually have the hang of this holiday concept!

Gosh it is very hot here. I do not like this. Ugh. Thankfully the temperature is supposed to be more reasonable tomorrow. Please let the forecast be right.

I'm an hour away (ish) from downing tools and going on leave for a week. I can't wait. This week has been ridiculous and I need a break. The level of anxiety and horror from people around the business when I noted that I'm out next week just makes me more anxious about doing this, but it's going to be fine. I've cleared the decks of all the urgent things. The key departments know I'm not going to be in and anything they need me for will need to wait.

Co-worker L has been given all the handover stuff she should need. I've verified that there are people in next week who have access to anything she doesn't have. We've set the expectation for what she'll achieve as "definitely not what we'd achieve if both of us were in", and everyone who might need things has been told this. We've agreed her priorities and she's only to take on extra tasks that are genuinely time sensitive, not tasks that someone wants but could manage without for a week. And if she takes on any extra tasks, then the work she'd planned next week will slip and nobody is allowed to complain about this.

Hopefully this is enough and I'll actually get my week off uninterrupted.

My plans mostly involve my sofa, some books, some fic, and The Untamed. Maybe a trip to a gardening centre with Mum if I'm feeling brave.

Maybe not.

I've got that meta I want to write about text, subtext, Guardian, and Xena. I have a fic to get beta'd. I might try to scratch the fix-it fic itch at the back of my brain.

I'm going to try to keep my break low-key and relaxing and not feel guilty about not doing anything productive. It's been such a weird and stressful few months, I really just need a break.

When I last posted, it was the day my house became mine and I got the keys. Gosh, that feels like such a long time ago. Practically a different world!

With hindsight, the timing of that couldn't have been better. I moved into the house on January 20th and got the most urgent stuff done by mid-February, which meant I was in a good place by the time the UK went into lockdown (and I went onto the NHS shielding list) on March 23rd.

The last three months have definitely not been what I expected. It's made me appreciate my house and it's beautiful garden so much. I've become a gardener (like so many other people) and I really don't know how I would have coped with all this in my old tiny flat. Having to be shielded and therefore not leaving the house at all until a couple of weeks ago definitely wouldn't have been good in the flat.

The first couple of weeks of lockdown were hard. I had a lot of anxiety and stress, because suddenly online grocery slots were impossible to get and I wasn't supposed to leave the house and my parents are 70 and 67 so not the people I'd chose to hit the supermarket for me and gosh that's surprisingly stressful! But eventually I got onto the priority list for Ocado and that side of things settled. My parents have been amazing about picking up stuff (medicine, bags of compost, bread and treats from the bakery) and bringing it round to me. I have a box set up in my garden for deliveries to into and for me to put things in that I want to pass to them. It's great they're just round the corner.

At the beginning of May I got onto the delivery round for my local dairy, so Mum hasn't needed to pick up milk for me at all since then. I'd been getting groceries every two weeks and running short of fresh stuff a few days before each delivery (it turns out I'd usually been doing several small top-up shops between deliveries and that's why fortnightly worked, who knew?) and milk was the one thing I really couldn't do without.

I'm keeping my milkman. It was something I'd planned to do anyway and I'd been kicking myself for not doing it before lockdown.

And this week I switched over to weekly grocery deliveries, which is making food and planning what to eat a bit easier. I'd been reaching a point of "why do I bother eating?" about food, but now I'm trying to vary things and try new things and that's really helped.

Local businesses stepped up so well here. My favourite local coffee place now delivers coffee regularly so I get lovely lattes (and a mocha on Fridays) several times a week. I have to order a week's worth in advance, but that doorbell announcing my coffee has arrived really brightens up my morning. I'll miss it when it has to stop! I'm quietly hoping things like that can continue after things reopen.

My local butcher delivers to people isolating so I've taken advantage of that a couple of times. And last week I put in my order, walked down with Mum (at a safe distance), and she went in and collected the order. I think we were following the letter rather than the spirit of the new shielding recommendations, but it felt nice to achieve that much myself.

My house is comfortable and spacious enough for me not to feel claustrophobic after three months in it. The garden has been such a help - I love sitting out there with a cup of coffee in the morning when I can. I managed to get a desk and chair delivered a few days into lockdown and now I have a home office set up in my smallest bedroom. It's something I'd always planned, the lockdown just kicked me into doing it rather than procrastinating. Working here is actually going really well and I'm planning to ask to be largely remote even after my office reopens. I get a lot more done here than I did in the office! And having the commute time back has made a big difference to my work-life balance.

Speaking of work, this has not been a good year to work in the travel industry. Thankfully my company is doing better than many and is optimistic about recovering well. But they did cut my hours to four days a week in April, May, and the first half of June. I'm back to full-time now, which is a relief. And even more of a relief - thanks to careful budgeting, I was able to get through it without dipping into savings or missing any bills. Phew!

I've had a lot of downs during this, times when I've felt lonely or the anxiety has been overwhelming or I've started to wonder whether anything has any point, but I've also had a lot of ups, too. Getting together with friends online for games or watching stuff has been lovely. I attended virtual vidukon_cardiff this weekend was brilliant and I'm still feeling the happy joy buzz. Working in the garden always lifts my mood and I'm so excited to see things I planted are growing. Carrots! Sunflowers! Sweet peas!

I don't know what's happening next and I'm sure whatever the government is planning to announce for shielders will send my anxiety skyrocketing until I adjust to the change. I don't do change well right now. But today I'm feeling content and enjoying my current life, and I guess that's all I can ask for right now.

Star Trek: Discovery! The first two episodes have delighted me and I'm enjoying it a lot more than the first season.

Afternoon teas. Sis and I took Mum out to afternoon tea on Saturday as her Christmas present and it reminded me how much I love the entire experience. We went to the Midsummer Night's Dream themed tea at the Swan by the Globe and it was lovely. We're making a list of more afternoon teas we want to do.

Books! I'm on a good book roll. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was brilliant and kept me guessing all the way to the end. I'm almost at the end of Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik and as long as it sticks the landing, I'll recommend it. And somehow I've eaten almost the whole of The Duchess Deal by Tessa Dare in less than a day.

English winter. So much less distressing than Canadian winter. Today I'm working from home and enjoying the sunshine glittering on the pretty dusting of snow we got last night. It's melting off now, but it's still pretty.

Choir. It's such fun, I've met new people, and I'm getting to sing some wonderful pieces. We're doing three songs from The Greatest Showman this term, plus a beautiful John Rutter and we're tackling the Hallelujah chorus. The choir mistress has also fallen for Kirby Shaw, so we're doing a number of his arrangements of different pieces. And Marylebone liked us so much that we've been asked back to sing at Christmas and they want us to do an evening during the summer.

My cats. They're frequently ridiculous, but they're also the best cats and so snuggly.

(Feel free to get Disco spoilery in the comments. Also, warning that there might be Disco spoilers in the comments.)

I had a lovely day out in Oxford on Saturday with Mum, getting odds and ends of Christmas shopping done and generally enjoying the seasonal vibes of my favourite city. I feel a reread of Doomsday Book by Connie Willis coming on...

And on Sunday, I sang in my first big concert with my choir! It was really good fun and we were a sell-out, which is good because it means our nominated charities are getting lots of dosh. We even sang almost all the right notes and, except for two lines of Jingle Bell Rock that went slightly awry (the dangers of deciding going off-copy for an extra song two weeks before the concert!), we even sang all the right words!

I suspect we're better than I think we are. I don't get the full effect, standing with the other 80 sopranos with one slightly tuneless person to my right, so I can't judge. Mum and Dad reported we sounded great, but they would, wouldn't they?

If you are a Londoner and you want to judge for yourself, come and see us at Marylebone station next Monday (December 17th) between 5pm and 7pm. Bring some change, because we're raising money for Scannappeal.

The important part is that we had fun with music, I'm making new friends, and I'm definitely continuing next term. Hooray for singing!

After several weeks of incredibly mild weather here (no snow, lots of rain, not terribly cold), winter has decided to remind us it isn't over. We had a storm today and another nor'easter is heading in tomorrow evening/Saturday. Then another one might hit us early next week.

Ugh.

I know, I know, the UK can also have some nasty winters...but still not quite like our version of nasty.

So it's likely that my plans to go to writing group on Saturday might not happen :-( But I made it out shopping (to the giant shopping centre I'd never found before!) last weekend so I haven't been a total recluse.

I bought clothes. It was fun. I enjoyed getting compliments on my cute new outfits this week. What's happening to me?

As for other stuff, I'm still doing a lot of training, reading, and prepping for the concept of a job hunt. I now have a LinkedIn profile (DM me if you want to connect). Doing all of this, brushing up skills, monitoring job boards, etc, is giving me a much clear idea of what I want to look for and what might be realistic. I know that I don't want to just do the same job except in a different office. That's not a step forward, and a step forward is what I want. So I'm starting to get a clearer picture of what that means. I'm starting to work out what a small step would be and what a big challenging step would be, and feel like I've got the confidence to maybe push myself further than I thought about originally.

It's actually exciting, which I never thought I'd say.

( Cut for career and computing babble )

In less career and future related news, Star Trek Discovery was amazing and I need to blog about it. Legend's of Tomorrow has become the Arrowverse show I actually keep up with and I suspect that's because it's the queerest. I <3 Sara/Ava.

And Holby City is keeping me going. I <3 Serena. And Dom/Lofty. And Jac. And Frieda forever. My medical soap is so great.