The Bottomless Chasm of Enismirdal's Mind

Just realised I updated Facebook but not here...

Lupanine was a real champion. After the whole pyometra thing over July and August, she bounced back amazingly. For a while, it was like she was a hamster 6 months younger, zooming around and doing all sorts of projects in her cage. I was grateful for every single day, because each one was a gift I didn't expect to have. I'd never seen a hamster actually recover from pyo and have a good quality of life before.

But time went on and age started to creep up. Hamsters don't live a long time, and ones born from random breeding with a large congenital hernia even less so. She was still perky and friendly when she was awake, but she slept more. She got more picky about her food. She lost some weight. We started to supplement the food with hamster-safe baby foods as she'd devour them and hey, it kept her weight up.

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It's been hard. Especially for CRI, who isn't used to hamsters and their little, intense lives, but for both of us, because Lupanine-Bob was both of ours really.

It's been harder because the cage has sat there all week, huge and empty, staring at us, without a little orange loon bouncing around it.

It's been harder because we are about to move house, and then later we have a holiday, so it's not sensible for us to have another hamster till nearly Christmas. So I have to be hamsterless for over a month.

But I suppose it's better to go all of a sudden like that than spend weeks feeling rotten.

I have a big packet of love that I will give a hamster when the time is right, but for now it is sitting inside me ready to burst.

So at some point, I will be getting a Deltamethrin-Bob, or a Tithonia-Bob, or a Quercetin-Bob, or a Rooibos-Bob. I will find a hamster nobody else wants, and love it very much.

For now, I will remember my brave little orange hamster, with very much love.

I hang out on a couple of hamster groups as they're a useful source of tips, advice and ideas about making Lupanine's life as interesting and fun as possible.

One thing that has been really irritating me lately, however, is some of the teenagers on them. Typical scenario would be a 16 year old, keeping a hamster they legitimately do adore and want to do the best for. But then they come up against either the hamster getting sick at 10pm on a Saturday night. "Mum refuses to let me take it to the vet and I can't get there on my own!" Alternatively, it's pointed out that the cage is not suitable (too small, or wrong design for that type of hamster). "I can't afford the big cage!" or "Mum won't let me have something that big!"

I realise finances are tight for lots of people, and that circumstances can change, but I am firmly in the camp of, if you get a hamster knowing you cannot afford an emergency vet's trip out of hours for your hamster, you cannot afford to have a hamster and need to not have hamsters. And if your only way to get an animal to an out of hours vet is to be driven by your parents who don't believe it's necessary, you're basically accepting that you're prepared to let your pet suffer if it's unlucky enough to get sick between 5pm on a Friday and 8am on a Monday.

The number of teenagers recently who have been in tears on the group because their hamster has wet tail or their parents are threatening to take an accidental litter to an indiscriminate pet shop, and when you ask, "Well, can't you get a taxi? How much trouble are you willing to put yourself to in order to sort this - will you organise a pet taxi yourself?" and realise they can't (or don't have the maturity to) do it themselves... It just seems so unfair on the hamster in such a situation.

I wish there was some sort of pet savings account where people had to show it had a balance of £300 in before they'd be allowed to buy/adopt a pet. That still wouldn't go far in the case of something like a cat hit by a car or a dog with cancer, but it would cover short-term hamster emergencies.

It makes me frustrated because there's nothing I can do about it. You can't really have a go at these teenagers as that doesn't improve the situation and just makes them feel more guilty. But I really wish people would think pets through properly and consider the worst case scenario as well as the fluffy cuddles.

(Yes, I realise this might be controversial and there are complex situations, but still... I don't think there are really any excuses for messing with pets' welfare.)

...I just remembered takeaways exist and can deliver to houses.

Longish day at work (stayed late as popular colleague was giving an evening public lecture), CRI away, don't fancy cooking and didn't really want to divert to one of the big supermarkets on the way home and go through shopping faff.

But if I want to, I can use the power of the internet to furnish me with curry and I don't even have to talk to humans!

Like many others, moving to DW. Not comfortable with having my Stuff held under Russian law for longer than is necessary to import the old LJ stuff into DW, sorry.

Same username. Currently importing entries.

Once all the archive is moved across I'll probably delete this fairly quickly. We had some good times, LJ, but you are not the same site that the orignal inventors had in mind back in the day.

An annoying, potentially catastrophic, but expected thing happened today. In the interests of not moping about that, I will list the things that were excellent that happened today:

1. Excellent meeting with many potential collaborators, which is likely to lead to exciting work stuff!


2. Tea with doseybat, who I haven't seen in person for ages but is still as lovely and interesting in person as online, and that was super!


3. Our toilet flush sheared off last night, which wasn't great, but the eternally lovely and ingenious CRI bought a replacement flush mechanism and fitted it while I was out, and now the flush works better than it has in months and I am very grateful to him.


4. I got to prance around cherry trees in blossom (with comfrey growing underneath) looking at bees and got some good pictures too, I think, and saw a pair of yaffles and a jay and parakeets.

So on balance, I enjoyed today despite politics.

OK, so thought experiment...

A magic portal opens up between you and a magical parallel universe that's pre-industrial (or near-as) - think Narnia, Arda, Damar, Valdemar, pick your poison - and you get to control what influence from our collective Earth culture goes through. What do you introduce, and what do you intentionally deny/spare them?

I mean, we need to make a few assumptions: do they have polio? Is it the same as our polio? If the new world has preventable diseases that are like ours, and we have vaccines/treatments, I couldn't in good faith hold them back. I mean, could you really say, "Sorry, we want to keep your culture and world pure, so your daughter is just going to have to get polio, oh well"?

And I guess if they grow, say, potatoes, and we grow potatoes, and we have better yielding varieties, I'd want to introduce the new varieties, because how can you really refuse a community the option of increasing their yields by 200% or something? But you'd have to do it without introducing all the associated pests and diseases.

But they probably have their own crop pests and diseases. So do you introduce pesticides? If I met a culture and I wanted to help, could I, in good conscience, say, "Look, here's lambda-cyhalothrin, I'll sell it to you"?

Of course, then it gets more complicated. If they had massive reserves of a trace metal, like vanadium or something and an unnamed other Earth government approached them, bypassing you, saying, "Look, if you let us mine your vanadium, we'll build you nice roads and sell you cheap cars and cool gizmos," how hard do you argue with the hypothetical magic Queen that no, she really doesn't want that to happen to her country and the road-building will involve introduction of invasive plants, the quarrying will rip out sections of forest and grassland and they won't be the same for millennia, etc.

Makes me want to write a novel. I guess the Sparrow and Children of God touched on some of the ideas, but were really about other matters.

Perhaps I'll doodle some scenes about it...

When the weekend comes around, my natural inclination is normally to spend as much time vegetating on the sofa, spodding and generally minimising human contact and maximising tea intake. (Indeed, if I don't get a decent amount of downtime at weekends each month I start to stress out.) The trouble with this is, when taken to extremes, I end up stuffy-headed, grumpy and with a monster headache. All of which is not desirable at all.

I've finally reached a stage in life where I can get up at "average human" times without physical distress, and getting up between 8 and 9am on a weekend recharges my batteries properly and leaves me feeling non-tired. This helps. It gives me much more daylight to do Things in.

The other thing I've found that helps to avoid symptoms of extreme vegetation is the Three Things rule. On weekends, bank holidays and other days off, I set myself the task of doing three distinct tasks over the course of the day. These are governed by a few guidelines:
1. They have to be useful. Binge-watching Silent Witness on Netflix is NOT an acceptable thing.
2. Following on from this, they can't be purely for pleasure even if they're sort of useful, like writing stories or playing Fungi with CRI. (Incidentally, Fungi is an awesome two-player card game and I wholeheartedly recommend it.)
3. They mustn't be things I'd do anyway, like having a shower, or washing up after dinner. They have to be in addition to those things.
4. They can't be non-negotiable things that must happen that day no matter what, like cleaning out Lupanine if she is due for it.
Thus, a combination of check car tyre pressure/repot plant/sweep kitchen floor counts, as does go to Tesco/mark students' papers/mend hem on trousers. I am still on the fence about whether something like laundry (which can be put off for a while but isn't really a lot of effort) should count, and ditto for cleaning out the stick insects, as that can be procrastinated for a couple of weeks if needs be but probably ought not be.

But it forces a certain level of activity, means my body has to generate its own heat instead of absorbing it from a radiator, and leaves me feeling more human, so I guess that's a thing.

I can totally do this Adulting thing, look at me go...

Today I was scheduled to lecture both in the morning and the afternoon.

Oh, did I mention that at our university, a "lecture" is normally a 3 hour session?

Finished both of them early, but am still wiped out. *keels over*

This is pretty pathetic for someone who has held a full license for 4 years and owned a car for 2 years, but...driving still scares me if I'm on my own or on an unfamiliar route. I get all wound up and stressed about it beforehand and am not a happy dragon. Before today, I had never driven on a motorway on my own, despite having done it with a passenger loads of times and largely without incident.

Today, I had to go to a meeting with a collaborator. The collaborator's site is accessible by public transport, but you have to go train-bus-train, and the second train only comes once an hour. So I'd have to leave home at about 8am to be sure to arrive between 10am and 10:30am in case the connecting bus ran into traffic. Alternatively, it's about a 30 minute drive (if the traffic is good). I almost wimped out and got the slow, overpriced, but less scary public transport option...but decided to be brave. So drove all the way there, even on the motorway, then a dual carriageway, then some entirely unfamiliar roads through some villages.

It took a bit over an hour, because it turns out one of the villages is a hellish bottleneck, but I did it. It gave me extra time in bed, and when the meeting was over, it meant I was back at work a good 45 minutes earlier. It also saved money despite being awful for the planet.

While "I drove 25 miles today" isn't really something most people would be proud of, I am proud of myself today, for doing something that scared me. Now it is less scary, because it went OK and I didn't cause any accidents.

Sometimes, it's little things. But little things add up to big things and one day perhaps I'll be brave enough to do something big, like drive up north to see my dad, or take myself on a weekend away somewhere that requires going round the M25.

I imagine some other writery types on LJ can relate to this...

World-building is jolly good fun when you're shaping an original world - or even fleshing out one someone else made. But I've been finding lately it's very easy to get a bit carried away, especially if you have areas of personal academic interest or expertise. Unfortunately for me, a combined interest in the history of Normal People, and a job that is as much international development as it is research means I have had time to do a fair bit of musing about how a pre- or non-industrial village in a fictional fantasy pre-industrial (with or without magic) country might or might not work.

So you start with your character and their village. You decide the country will be temperate, perhaps cold end of Cfb climate, similar to the coldest and rainiest bits of the UK. Great. The character lives on the coast, in a small village. After some musing, you decide it's a limestone bedrock.

Fine, what does the village do to support itself? Well, it's coastal, so there's probably a fair bit of marine economy - fishing? OK, who goes fishing - everyone? Just the men? All the men, or just some? What do they catch - deep sea fish? Shallow water fish? Flatfish from the bottom? Do they just catch shellfish of some description? What do the women/non fisherfolk do - can they collect anything from the shore?

But people can't just live on fish, so what forms the staple diet? You've established it's pretty windswept, and limestone soil means alkaline, so anything acid-loving is out. The soils, you decide, are rubbish - along with the cold and wet climate, that probably means large-scale wheat cultivation may be tricky. So what's the main starch? Potatoes? Well, then you have to take into account that potatoes are introduced to Europe, so you're shifting the available botanical diversity and have to consider why potatoes and not quinoa/tarwi/tomatoes and so on... Maize won't grow (too cold), cassava likewise (same reason). Barley might - if your character is eating a lot of barley bread, does she cook it at home - can all the households afford a bread oven and the fuel to run it? Perhaps you should invent another sort of starchy root, like a temperate cassava, that works on poor soils?

What are they using to fuel their cooking fires? If you've got a windswept landscape and poor soils and have already decided there isn't a lot of woodland, firewood will be expensive, right? But it's alkaline soils so there won't be peat or heather to burn (indeed, Ericaceae in general probably won't be an option). Dung? Driftwood? Invent a plant that grows like heather, but on alkaline soil?

Do the people keep livestock? If so, how many, and where? If timber is expensive, what are houses made of? Where do people get cooking utensils - is there a smith or a wood-turner in the village, or must they trade? If so, what do they trade? How do they get new clothes - can they grow flax for linen? Are there are enough sheep to provide wool? Do they have access to milk, cheese, butter in any quantity? What do they eat over winter? What do they do for vitamin C? Do they drink water, small beer, tea or something else? Is anyone in the village literate?

Where else do they travel to - nearby towns? Do they have a road? Who else travels that road? Where is the next nearest village? Do they talk to the people there? Do they intermarry a lot, a little? Does the character have extended family in those other villages, or in her own village? In pre-industrial societies with large families, I guess it's pretty normal for families to be large - how far, in this one, would her parents siblings' or grandparents' siblings have moved away? How many family members would she associate with growing up - cousins? Second cousins?

...yeah, it all gets quite intense.

I'm starting to realise not all these things necessarily have to be dealt with in the text of a story. Perhaps I need to make a personal Wiki-style set of backing documents that deal with this stuff and then I can draw on it as needed where it's actually critical to the story to know whether or not they would realistically own an oak table or stuff their mattresses with heather, straw, grass or something else!