beesknees

Got a few random days off this week to use up annual leave, just as The Country Is Open For Business Again (blech). Even so, walked down to Lewisham this morning and as I approached a local fabric shop, open for the first time since December, the random Fallout-esque playlist I had on kicked up Johnny Mathis' Wonderful! Wonderful! Such a mood.

Picked up some waxed cotton fabric, on sale. Got to wash it before cutting, as it's a bit fusty smelling from sitting in a shut shop so long and I don't know how much it'll shrink, but I think it'll make a cute circle skirt?

The angel on my shoulder is all "You have too big a stash already!" and the devil's looking up bus times so I can venture through Greenwhich to check out the Hobbycraft sale...plus I should really pop into M&S to hopefully get some plain single-color shirts to wear with these wild-ass skirts I'm making for going back the office...RIP my lockdown savings, I guess. I am one of the idiots!

I don't play video games any more so much as try to get my mods to behave together. I've started quite a few entries this way, haven't I?

( Cut for mention of Wicked Whims and Sims with extremely poor impulse control. )

Hobbycraft's got a sale on with fat quarters down to £5 (for a pack of five) and I am just barely resisting. I have too many damn bits of fabric as it is! And what I really want is proper lengths of fabric to muck around with skirts. But it's tough.

Did I pick up an improviser/hoarder perk somewhere along the way? "Pro: You are brilliant at bricolaging random bits of stuff into functional objects! Con: Thus, you can never resist picking up bits that totally might be useful some day..."

laridian  guess what finally arrived here? Stickers!!!

Honestly, the 2.5 months it took to get here was kind of perfect. The boys asked for us to set up a dojo-points system at home like is used at their school, so now what reward do we have for earning five dojo points in one day? Pick an awesome sticker!

Thanks so much for these :)

This is definitely not MacCready, and also completely is.

Kind of freaking out about money, in the sense we've been spending it on the things we've been saving it up for all year or more. But we're still spending it. Eep!

One of them was plane tickets to N Ireland in August (cross fingers Covid rates stay the same or continue to drop), stay in R's brother's old place and see his dad. Let the kids run nuts on their grandfather's farm, like I used to as a kid. Different farm, tho. Different country. If timings are kind, I might be able to have my UK driving license then...we'll see. We'd hoped to coordinate with R's sister, back when we were planning this in 2019, but she's due to have her second boy in late July...happy reason to miss out on seeing them.

This break in carpeting coverage has kicked us to get in place some messy flat changes, figure out ways to get rid of our old industrial shelves that we just pile stuff on to get dusty. We've bought a long clothes-hanging bar to put up along one wall, and bracketed shelves above it already installed. Brackets to hang our bikes from the wall, too, in the space we used to have a clunky old chest of drawers, half of them stuck or broken. Put a lot of things out in the estate "Free Stuff!" spot, including all the yarn I can't picture using up in the next year. In fact, I've already finished a blanket from some of the remaining stash:
(I was mentally calling this the "pillowfort blanket", since a photo of the initial row was the first thing I couldn't post upon finding the site was closed for renovations. Wondered how long the blanket would be when the site was back up. Sigh.)

I've also gone old-school and ordered a large pegboard, and pegboard-related accessories, to get my sewing stuff out of cluttered boxes and up on the wall next to my desk.

It's nice to see the place change in good ways.

Hit a snag in the lease-renewal process. We've been trying to keep this totally separate from the ongoing pipes disaster, but it came up in discussing with the solicitor a weirdness in the lease's blueprint. He pointed out that our lease (from 1999) notes on the first page that a major works improvement to pipes was recently carried out, and said he had to raise this with LH if in fact this work was not done to adequate standard and had led to flooding, have that addressed before we consider signing the updated lease without challenging it.

So, okay...turns out he's a good solicitor. Not shying away from a real tangle we didn't ask him to take on, out of sheer professionalism.

But still. I am so tired of this whole mess. Ignoring it certainly won't make it go away. But ugh. Could we not tick one thing off without its neb in the way?

By 2021 standards, I'm counting this as an accomplishment.

Oh no, the computer I really need to reformat crashed on me again, and this time firefox has forgotten my open tabs. They're gone, they're gone, so many thousand-chapter fics I now no longer know where I left off 2 - 64,378 days ago...also, ironically, a few “how to possibly fix the boot-up issue you’re having if you’ll just get around to trying” pages.

Yup, I have got to stop using dozens of internet tabs as my mental pocketbook.

In better thoughts, I’m already starting to feel better, five days into the whatever-this-is-that-isn’t-Goop-yoga-babble (basically the anti-candida regimen, except we minimise some things like coffee, corn, potatoes, and cheese rather than entirely cutting them out). Always resign myself to a miserable 1-2 weeks at the start, except it hasn’t been that bad since the first time we did it, and that was like, yikes, 14 years ago – so, excepting preggo and nursing years, this is like the 9^th time we’ve done this? Anyway my body’s apparently now just like, *eyeroll* this shit again, and shifts digestive gears after a few days. I’m a lot less hungry, sleeping better, generally calmer…the antihistamine side effects also seem to have eased off.

I kind of question why it always takes the threat of apocalyptic London spring/summer/fall allergies to roll me into a familiar regimen that makes my body and brain much easier to get on with. Then I’m like, oh right. Ice cream exists. Eh…worth it!

It’s odd being back on DW. Retro. Never really got a foothold here; not through any fault of DW, but because my real-life/LJ friends had already shifted to FB as LJ declined and I wasn’t in a good zone to reach out and make new friends here. My extended family infested FB and had found my first and then second LJ blog (shakes fist at that one cousin, unwisely trusted); privacy was my priority, even if that meant I stopped connecting with anyone new, being findable to anyone who’d want to reconnect.

Don’t really remember my set-up here. It’s still very, eh, 2002? Whenever I started off with deadjournal in my goth days, before I even had an invite to LJ. Before tags had any use beyond your own categorisation, certainly not for others to search through, and thus were individualised, silly, and opaque to the point of meaningless outside your little circle. Sure, I could organise them en masse, change them to something sensible, but this is also kind of a museum of my brain’s shape in 2006.

And my icons are moody! The 2000s were so grimdark! And I, eh, not sure how to express the little box I was crammed in that I couldn’t present myself as functional and even consistently cheerful. Anyway, they don’t represent the giant goofball weirdo I am most of the time now.

And yup, I miss “likes”. Got low spoons, massive commenting anxiety…I’m reading, y’all! I assume you are too. Still miss the little ticks of solidarity, giving and getting.

None of this is meant to put down DW. I’m glad it’s here. It’s a nice space. Just weird that blogging and its digital-life descendants have existed so long that getting even this close to my roots in it feels alien.

An observation: both the solicitor firms we've been dealing with (one to renew the lease, one to sue about the pipes) had quite extensive and clauses in their contracts with us about the responsibility of their clients to respond quickly to emails.

Both firms send nigh-unreadable emails with such poor grammar and spelling that, combined with their many attachments, gmail interprets them as phishing scams and banishes to spam or quarantine.

Coincidence?