shewhomust | Entries tagged with meta

I started this post on Tuesday evening, when

durham_rambler had gone out to a meeting, and I was free to entertain myself. This would have been a perfect opportunity to post something substantial: what a waste, that there wasn't have anything substantial that I wanted to write just then. But I did have a collection of fragments that I wanted to get out of my head (by getting them onto the page). I had written the first three by the time

durham_rambler returned; so if I add two more now, this will be a post, won't it?

We did, eventually, have tea with S, last Thursday. We failed to attend her post-Christmas party, because we were snowed in; we failed to connect at Phantoms (ghost story event) because of a conflicting committment; she failed to come here after a meeting two months running, both times because she couldn't face the journey (weather / train disruptions). But on Thursday we combined a visit to S. with me attending my (graphic novels) book group in person, so that was two good things in one. S. not only gave us proper afternoon tea with little cakes and her own bread, she also invited G-N to join us - and then I sloped off to the library and talked about Star Wars comics...

One of the pills I take to control my diabetes has gone out of favour. A couple of years ago, the practice nurse at the GP's surgery suggested I stop taking it, and I tried, but felt unwell - the sort of unwell I feel if I have eaten too much sugar - so I went back to the pill. Now the practice has resumed the campaign: it seems that this particular pill can cause hypos, and my blood sugar is low enough that they don't feel the risk is justified. We compromised: I would halve the dose (by cutting the tablets in half, which is fiddly) for a couple of months, then go in for a blood test. Yesterday an actual GP (Dr. Fleming, in case I need to remember this) telephoned, to say that the blood sugar reading on that test was actually lower than my previous reading, and I should discontinue that pill altogether. The reading, she said, had gone down from 5.1 to 49: there is no missing decimal point there, there are readings on two different scales, and no, she couldn't do the calculation necessary to give me both readings on either scale. I should be pleased that my blood sugar is low... Anyway, I'm due a review in April, so we'll see how it goes.

Is the tide turning back towards Dreamwidth? In the last couple of days, not one but two friends who had gone elsewhere for their social media have reappeared: welcome back, weegoddess and fjm!

One reason why I didn't make more progress on Tuesday is that I kept being distracted by things I wanted to ask the internet. One arose from a recent conversation I had had with boybear: he had talked about a project he was involved with, and quoted Charles Aznavour's La Bohème. I did not know this song, but YouTube did.

Watch on YouTube

I can take or leave the song, but I love the retro views of Montmartre: starting at the carousel in the place Louise Michel. How long is it since I was in Paris? (Too long.)

But we have booked a week in Orkney this summer. D. will celebrate his birthday with a stay at a Landmark property in Aberdeenshire, and once you're going to Aberdeenshire, you might as well go to Orkney, mightn't you? It turns out not to be quite a simple as that, because of the ferry timetables, but we will drive up to the north coast, ferry to Stromness, stay at a guesthouse in Finstown for a few days and then at a fancy hotel in Kirkwall for the weekend, before getting the night ferry back to Aberdeen. So we will arrive on the morning of D.'s birthday. I haven't yet decided where I want to break the journey north- and south-bound, but I'm thinking about it...

Today is Harry Houdini's 150th birthday, and I didn't find out until tea-time. That's how much I am not keeping up.

People whose kind comments have gone unanswered already know this, of course. I have been amazed at people's thoughtfulness and support - InRealLife as well as online, but given the constant background noise about the evils of social media, I love this reminder that the opposite is also true. I like, too, the mixture of who comments: people I have actually met, people with whom there's a constant give-and-take, but also the reminder of the goodwill of lurkers.

The same is true off-line. Friends and neighbours have been helpful, and sometimes quite unexpectedly. J and J came from York for a cup of tea and a chat, bringing a Victoria sponge and a posy of pale yellow daffodils. They were certainly, for a number of reasons, people I would have chosen to see, but I was surprised when they offered, out of the blue, to make it happen.

We had a date to meet S. for fish and chips before she goes to the (livestreamed) opera; we won't do that, but she will call in for a cup of tea.

This morning we went to Lidl:

durham_rambler hunted for (and found) treasure in the middle aisle, and I bought some emergency supplies. There's a lop-sided chicken in the oven right now.

I don't have anything coherent to say about A.S. Byatt. I have a vague affection for her, because I always enjoyed hearing this very literary grande dame praising Terry Pratchett. I enjoyed some of her books, struggled with others.

Instead, since today is the 70th birthday of Alan Moore, I thought it would be a pleasure to write about someone who is still alive. Admittedly, he has turned away from those of his works which have given me such pleasure over the years, but they have given me very great pleasure ...

And I've never written here about The Birth Caul... In fact, what have I written here? And why have I never tagged the relevant entries?

So instead of writing anything new, what I have been doing is tagging all my previous entries about Alan Moore. Not so much a birthday tribute as a meta-tribute. Oh, well.

I have been composing posts in my head, but theyu don't seem to have made it into actual posting. Mostly they are a step by step account of getting to know my shiny new cooker, so you haven't missed much. Andsome book thoughts which, who knows, might eventually happen.

But this weekend is the Hartlepool Folk Festival, so I won't be around for the next few days, either. That goes for reading as well as writing. Sorry.

I have not posted very much in the last few weeks. This isn't because I have nothing to say (as if!) but because I have been too busy doing things to write about them. Which is a good problem to have, but manages to feel like a problem nonetheless. This is not the missing post, but a statement of intent, a promise that I would at least like to write a bout -

- But that's just an aide mémoire for my benefit, which is pretty dull for anyone else. To brighten it up, one photo from the last weekend:

The closing procession of the family strand of the Hartlepool Folk Festival almost - but not quite - ready to lead off. Other subjects ( under the cut. )

Will I ever write them? Or will I be distracted by other plans, not to mention domestic trivia? Certainly, we have other plans, and no shortage of domestic trivia. But oh, I would like to write those posts -

I have just deleted my LiveJournal account. (I think. Can it really be that easy?)

I didn't do it sooner because -

Well, hello, this is me. I don't let go easily. We had some good times together, and it took me a while to make the switch to Dreamwidth. I kept my LJ because crossposting seemed like a good way of staying in touch with folks there, and I was using a backup programme linked to that account. Neither crossposting nor that backup are now working (and it does look as if that's because of something LJ has done). So there's that.

This will cause broken links in some older posts, which were interlinked. I've been switching those to DW links when I came across them - another reason I was in no hurry to delete my LJ. My apologies to anyone frustrated by this.

This is not some grand gesture of boycott: that would be silly. It's just a piece of housekeeping that I should have got round to earlier.

( Has he gone yet? )

Instead, have a pretty picture: Surfing in the Cradle of Storms. (The artist's website is too busy for my taste, but more lovely photos if you have the patience!)

poliphilo posted recently about how sometimes he thinks he's going to post about something, and then when he sets out to do it, the post doesn't want to be written. That happens to me, too.

But sometimes I think I'm stuck, and then I find a new way in to the topic, and the post just takes shape.

What brought this to mind this morning was thinking about what to cook for dinner. There are quite a lot of vegetables left from my last delivery, and I should cook those before ordering more. In particular, there's a romanesco cauliflower, which ought to feel like a special treat, but felt like an obligation. I could serve it as a side vegetable (there are burgers in the freezer ...) or curry it? I suppose so. Or cauliflower cheese? No, don't feel like it ... And then I thought that we had several tins of anchovies, and there's some parsley (I wonder whether Ocado know, when they try to tempt me with special treats, how glad I am that they stock curly parsley?) - and suddenly I had the makings of agrodolci, and a whole new way in to the meal, and feeling enthusiastic about it.

Plus this post just cooking itself up out of thin air.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/748198.html

All this explaining to people that yes, Christmas this year is a curious shape, but actually our Christmas Day is pretty much as usual, has set me thinking back to previous years: to happy times with friends and family, but also to all the years of rushing from one place to another so that no-one feels slighted, trading a New Year here for a Christmas there, a pre-Christmas birthday visit or a Christmas Eve celebration for the big lunch ... And before that, childhood Christmases visiting uncles; or the year an uncle visiting us set off for home on a snowy morning, and returned the same evening, turned back by the weather. Was that the same year that my mother decided that Christmas decorations chould be extended to paining and wallpapering the sitting room? I don't remember.

I had also forgotten, until J. reminded us yesterday, when we phoned to wish her happy birthday, that exactly ten years ago we had been in Italy helping her to celebrate a significant birthday. Here's a post I wrote at the time, and while this isn't a particularly seasonal picture, I like it.

And here's a bleaker view of a Boxing Day tradition:

Watch on YouTube

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/741532.html

helentaven tipped me off that Ocado had had second thoughts about their don't call us, we'll call you approach to delivery slots: they had not called her, but she had checked the website, and managed to secure a delivery. I too checked the website, and found a list of times at which no deliveries were available, but with the encouragement to keep checking back, as more slots are being released all the time. If you offer me a delivery, Ocado, I might take you up on it. But I can't help thinking you are just stringing me along.

Instead I checked Sainsbury's who offered me a choice of a delivery between seven and eight o' clock the following morning, or click and collect at a time to suit me. durham_rambler declared himself prepared to answer the door at seven a.m. rather than drive to Bishop Auckland, so that's what he did.

The delivery driver was apologetic that social distancing makes delivery less sociable. Not necessarily, and at least one of our local suppliers is always ready for a chat, but it does remove the option of quibbling over substitutions. Given the chance, I would have refused the coarse sea salt substituted for the fine sea salt I had ordered (not because I don't like coarse sea salt, but because I already have plenty). There's nothing to be done about the eggs, though: the precise eggs I had ordered were not available, so they had not sent any eggs. Since it doesn't seem possible that Sainsbury's (even Sainsbury's Sunderland, the day's supplier for some reason) had run out of eggs altogether, I suspect they were simply overwhelmed by choice.

Other items which were simply not available to order included dry chick peas. I begin to suspect that this is a strange old-fashioned thing to want to buy, and supermarkets have gone over entirely to tinned (or equivalent). I have ordered some from Wholefoods Online, instead. Also freezer labels: I have been using the same roll of labels forever, but it has finally run out, and I have ordered some, from Lakeland (feeling quite smug about remembering this alternative to Amazon).

I started conscientiously posting about my adventures in lockdown shopping because I didn't want to be hitting any outlet too often - one day is so like another that I don't always know, unless I note it down, when I last shopped from each place. Mostly, now, I think I've hit a rhythm, and probably don't need to write it down. Nonetheless, for the record, Sainsbury's delivery was on Tuesday 9th - and I need to order some fruit and veg tomorrow for delivery on Saturday. And that'll see us through the weekend.

The more often I post here, the more I feel that I have things worth posting; the more I don't post, the less what I have seems worth the saying. Right now, I don't feel as if I'm posting very much, and things I might post about feel either trivial, or irrelevant. Using the 'Archive' tab reassures me a little about the frequency of posting. though not about the quality: maybe it only feels as if I have nothing interesting to say, but then again, maybe it only feels as if what I have to say is ever interesting. This is not a bid for reassurance: if I've learned one thing here, it's that the posts other people respond to are rarely the ones I would expect. Never mind. Onward ...

We dined last Saturday in Sunderland, with cousins: three brothers, now living in different parts of the south, who periodically meet in Sunderland to watch football, for the uncertain pleasure of the game itself and the certain pleasure of family. Numbers vary: last time was just the youngest brother, his partner,

durham_rambler and me, but this time we were a larger group: three brothers, one wife, one partner and a couple of grandsons. We would have been even more numerous, if all had gone to plan, and this was why the decision had been taken to transfer from our usual restaurant on the sea front to another, much larger one just round the corner. But two separate parties, the families of the two sisters who are the daighters of one of the cousins, had had motoring mishaps: nobosy was harmed, but one car had simply died on the motorway north of Bath, the other had burst a tyre heading south from Crail, where the family had been spending hald-term week. This as less decisive, but had delayed them long enough that they had missed the match, lost their tempers and decided to go straight home. Since the only person I had known would be present was the cousin who had written to invite us, my disappointment at this is entirely retrospective. We were as large a group as I could converse with, anyway. The restaurant was fine: we had been there on a previous visit when it was severely overstretched, took a ridiculous length of time to bring very mediocre pizza, and tried to compensate us with dree bottles of wine. It was still large and quite noisy, but the food arrived at a reasonable pace and was much better than I remembered.

The main point, though, is the company, and we talked. About family and holidays, about music and the inadequacies of planning departments, about having to replace electrinic devices: "Did you know we'd been struck by lightning?" asked R.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/708772.html

Have I broken the Dreamwidth spell checker? I don't rely on it for spelling, but it does help me spot typos, of which I make a large number (as anyone who reads me already knows). The last few posts though, it has told me there are no spelling errors: what, none? No typos. no names it doesn't recognise, no markup tags, no British Englidh spellings? It doesn't seem possible ...

I have just packaged up a small birthday gift which, if I can get it to a post office tomorrow, will arrive no more than two weeks late. I am pretty disgusted with myself about this. There are various excuses I might produce (it's hard to focus on a birthday in early January; the recipient is a college friend, we are barely in touch and this ritual exchange of gifts has become silly ...) but none of them is the reason for being so late. I am just really bad at finding packaging, and wrapping things up, not to mention taking them to the post office,

When did January become such a big deal? New Year resolutions have always been a thing, I suppose, but they were personal - in the sense that you didn't know whether someone had made any, and if so, what, until you asked them. Now my daily paper is full of 'New Year, new you' articles, encouragement to observe Veganuary or Dry January. Even Saturday's Travel section was full of wellness retreats and spas. This is probably no more than the usual level of wellness and lifestyle advice, dialled up a notch for January - but since it is already in excess of my requirements anyway, do we have to increase the volume for January?

I'm not interested in a spa holiday. With one exception: Spa itself looks rather inviting.

And in other holiday news: no news, but some long-standing plans. We will spend midsummer on Lindisfarne, and help D. celebrate a significant birthday in Scotland in August. It is too long since we have been in France, and I intend to do something about that this year, probably in the autumn. Which seems a very long way off. We are expecting various visitors in the spring, which is a fun reason for not going away ourselves...

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/705550.html

... my computer seems to have forgotten about the card reader I use to transfer photos from my camera to my desktop (and thence to the internet). Now when I plug it in, it tells me that this drive must be formatted before I can use it. I'm sure I can find a workaround: via my notebook, possibly? Or it might respond to

durham_rambler speaking to it severely, bot not tonight, as he is at a meeting. So tonight I will do something else...

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/698361.html

I find Dreamwidth's spell-checker very helpful, in spotlighting at least some of my many typos. I very rarely take its advice in correcting them, though. For one thing, it wants me to use US spelling. For another, it struggles with proper names. Here's what it has just suggested as alternatives to 'Bellowhead':

Bellow head, Bellow-head, Bellowed, Bullhead, Blowhard, Billowed, Wellhead, Bellied, Behead, Blockhead, Bullheads, Bullhead's

It didn't recognise Vindolanda or Gateshead, either, and I was going to say that its suggested alternatives were less inventive, but looking again, while 'Wonderland' for Vindolanda has a certain logic, confronted with Gateshead it just gets silly:

Stashed, Guested, Gusseted, Gusted, Starched, Gestated, Stitched, Gestured, Gazetted, Quested, Dustsheet, Mustached, Cosseted

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/690292.html

The summer weather is not as extreme as it is in other parts of England, let alone parts of the world with continental climates and southern latitudes: we have even had the occasional shower. But I'm a northerner by choice, and it's hot enough for me. Hot enough, indeed, to disrupt my routine: my study is in the attic, and in the afternoon it becomes too hot for me to work there. As I said, excuses.

I do what I can in the mornings, which makes me lazy about going into town shopping. And it's an excuse to spend the afternoon reading, or watching Countdown and trying to keep up with the ironing - but I can only do so much of that before it becomes too hot and steamy for comfort!

So I haven't been posting much here, partly because there's not much going on to post about, but mostly because the heat is making me lazy. Even this post is a piece of laziness, because there's a half-written book post which I keep tweaking and turning round, and am dissatisfied with. Time to complete it and move on...

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/644992.html

It was the Folk Degree students' concert at the Sage last night. There are always worthwhile, even if some years are more to my taste than others, and I sometimes feel we're the only people in the audience who aren't the parents of one of the performers. Last night was a good one - some promising performers, some good material, and we were sharing a table (they call it 'cabaret style' seating, and it disguises the comparative emptiness of the hall) with a couple who spotted

durham_rambler's Fair Isle Bird Observatory sweatshirt, and told us they were from Shetland: their daughter was one of the students, and they lived across the road from Steven Robertson - and no, they hadn't been to Fair Isle...

The show opened with the whole of years one and two singing Leon Rosselson's song for William Morris, Bringing the News from Nowhere, which I am disappointed not to find on the internet. A trio already performing together as Hareshaw Linn (it's the name of a waterfall) did three songs: one of their own composing, Terry Conway's Fareweel Regality. and Hares on the Mountain - a bit pretty, perhaps, but very promising. I would not have expected to enjoy Katie McCleod's two songs - dramatic delivery, jazzy cool, not my style at all, but against the odds, it worked. There should be more videos in this post, and I've been looking for them, and not finding them - worse than that, in fact, I've discovered that embedded videos don't seem to have transferred from LiveJournal, leaving holes in a number of posts.

Meanwhile, our bathroom fitters were texting us to say that they now knew how they planned to fix the underfloor damp problem, and could they come at eight o' clock this morning? That's the good news, but it's also the bad news. We settled for nine o' clock, they arrived, opened doors and windows, and turned off the water; I gave up any idea of baking bread, and we went out to lunch. It's all progress...

ETA: Even in an edited highlights post, I should have mentioned The Big Band With No Name, because although this may sound like an ad hoc arrangement to emsure that every student, however unconfident, does something of their own, it actually included at least two individuals who played with great personality, despite not appearing elsewhere. Also the young woman in the checked shirt who sang Willie o' Winsbury (performing in a trio which also, if I am remembering this right, included the ubiquitous Bertie Armstrong) - good voice, interesting if slightly over-arranged accompaniment, brilliantly confident introduction. "She'll go far," says

durham_rambler.

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/578311.html

One of the tweaks by which Dreamwidth (it's late, and I just mistyped 'Creamwidth'. I'm almost tempted to keep it) improves on LiveJournal is that it has rethought the whole concept of 'friending'. The very word is discarded: here we subscribe to journals we want to read on our reading page, rather than friending their authors so that they appear on our friends page. And we grant access to people who can be trusted with the information in our locked posts. And those two groups need not be the same people, because DW separates out those two functions.

The LJ system never caused me any problems (I very rarely lock posts anyway), but the DW version pleases my logical mind.

The only thing is that we who were socialised by LiveJournal continue to behave as if the two functions were inseparable, and to subscribe and grant access as if there weren't the option of doing one without the other.

Which is very ungrateful of us.

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/577064.html

A State of the SheWhoMust update - which, dammit, is not what I wanted to be posting about. Then again, if my posts are to reflect the things that occupy my thoughts and take up my time, we are due several more on this subject. There are practical reasons, too, for a PSA along the lines of I am still here, I am trying to make this work, I am learning slowly, please bear with me...

I have not burned my boats with LJ. It may come to that, but for the time being I am still cross-posting, and I am still checking my friends page there. With diminishing results, admittedly: it's a bit of a tumbleweed town over there. Some people, I know, have moved to Dreamwidth, though I haven't found them all yet - and I was slow to work out how to do the 'subscribe / grant access' thing, so I hope I haven't seemed to snub anyone (and if I have, I didn't mean to honest!).

So I have a to-do list, and item one is: find friends. If you are reading this and I haven't made the link, please wave, and I'll remedy that.

Item two: find feeds. Unless DW doesn't do that, in which case, find out what DW does do to fill the gap (something. surely?).

Item three: in any case, find out more about how DW works. And whether there's an equivalent to the LJ-Archive software I've been using - still am, although it isn't ideal to be backing up a cross-posted account, even if LJ continues to support both sides of that equation (and I'd rather not be counting on that, either...).

Three items is enough for now. In other news, we have signed up with a bathroom company to convert the downstairs bathroom / shower room into a wet room, agreed a start date (beginning of May) and told the builder who did so much work for us last year that we have not accepted his bid. I'm sure we've made the right choice, though I'm frustrated that we can't have exactly what we want. Some of that is for technical reasons: I liked the idea of an overhead shower, but it would have meant replumbing the entire house, and rewiring the basement (I don't really understand the need, but that's why we employ professionals...). Some of it is just fashion: if you want two separate taps on your sink, it seems, you have to have an Edwardian style retro pedestal basin. Two taps is not modern. (In which case, I'll settle for a single mixer tap, but not without grumbling). These compromises make the whole project less exciting, but since it has to be done (and it does) I'm glad that we are that much closer to having it done. Now we can go on holiday and not think about it -

Oh, wait! Going on holiday: add item one-and-a-half to that list! Make sure I have DW logged in on my notebook...

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/573075.html

Who thought it was a good idea to warn users that they might suffer downtime because of maintenance, and then to welcome them back with a cheery: "Sign here, or else!"

That post to the News feed, explaining what's going on - wouldn't it have been an idea to let peope see it before they decided whether to click 'accept'? How hard would it have been?

Too hard for LiveJournal, apparently.

Reading those terms & conditions, I don't actually think there's anything sinister going on. Yes, there are things there that I can imagine being misused, but I always can when I read T&C. I'm inclined to believe the News post, that this is a piece of legalistic tidying up after a change of ownership. But you don't have to believe changes have been made with evil intent to decide you don't like them, and I'm not happy to be told, if I'm understanding this correctly, that I no longer have a paid account: instead I have a free account, on which I am purchasing additional services. This puts my relationship with LJ outside a specific piece of legislation, and I'm not too worried about that: if it comes down to litigation, things are already broken beyond repair. Will it have unintended results (as changes usually do)? Wait and see.

And I will wait, and I will see. I don't want to leave LJ, which has given me many good things, good friends and good times. But having had a Dreamwidth account for quite a while, and made minimal use of it, today I'm taking a couple more steps towards using it.

At least, I am if this works...

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/572514.html

One of the questions in the pub quiz last Wednesday (in a round of questions about blood) was: "Which town in Scotland is known for its black pudding?" I had no idea. It rang no bells at all: surely black pudding comes from Bury, in Lancashire? The team discussed it, and nobody knew the answer. Eventually, the majority vote went for Dundee. I wasn't convinced: surely jam, jute and journalism are enough industries for one town? Besides, Dundee felt too big, I wanted a smaller town... But since I couldn't come up with a better answer, we handed in our sheet for marking, and it was returned to us with a cross beside that answer. We carried on kicking it back and forth, while we waited for all the papers to be marked, and somebody said "Tomintoul", not because he thought it was the answer but because it was a good Scottish town-name. Something about the metre of it threw a switch in my mind, and, dammit!, I knew perfectly well where it was, of course I knew -

( That lightbulb moment )

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The Shadow Gallery

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News from Nowhere

Entries tagged with meta

Bits and pieces

Overwhelmed

Happy birthday, Mr Moore

Apologies for absence

IOU

Goodbye, LJ

Driving past the car crash

Petits propos culinaires

Christmases past

Five things make the grocery shopping

A token post

Five things make an unexpectedly January post

While I've been away...

Further to our last

Too hot, and other excuses

A night out and a rude awakening

Access all areas

Are we having fun yet?

Really, LJ?

On memory and forgetting