the still point of the turning world

Well, I very much enjoyed cancelling absolutely everything outside my house and hibernating last week, but I did not like the part where I had to be sick for it. I'm mostly back to normal now except for the usual lurking congestion etc and an entire lack of singing voice, though I'm hoping that'll be back by Monday (my singing teacher sent me off early this week because he said - correctly - that there was no point!).

Instead I am mostly fretting about church. Our immensely-experienced parish priest has stepped down after fourteen years to be replaced by a very pleasant Nigerian who is probably half his age, and I am feeling very unsettled. He's arranging meetings with representatives of all the parish groups - I went to the Eucharistic minister meeting on Monday which was a hilarious mix of "work team meeting" and "religious event", and tonight E and I are meeting him to talk about the altar servers and I'm weirdly nervous about what changes he might want to make. Like, realistically he's been pretty reasonable so far, but my brain is definitely in Catastrophe Mode. At least soon I will find out the worst, and then maybe my brain will relax a bit.

In other news, however, the horrible bin neighbours have either left or entirely reformed their ways! The bin store is again a reasonable place with no epic piles of bin sacks! It's been a month or so now, and it's still amazingly cheering every time I go out there.

And it's been an absolutely beautiful day, really cold but bright and sunny all day, so I think I'm going to avoid the saga of the unreliable bus and walk the mile and a half to church. Seems like a shame not to, really.

I finished!! my Bible Study group talk! almost 48 hours before it was due! I spent most of my free moments on Monday wandering around going "I can do anything I want???" in between bouts of frantically reading the book for my reading group meeting on Thursday evening. The talk itself went OK, I think (we had ten whole people at the meeting!!! Pre-pandemic that would have been a low turnout, but post- it's the best we've managed in months and months. And they mostly laughed at my little jokes).

I'm still symptomatic, and bored of it - I feel much less sick than a few days ago, but I can't hear out of one ear and my glands are up enough that swallowing is uncomfortable. I've been taking painkillers once or occasionally twice a day to sort that out, which is working, but still not ideal.

However, nearly all the bounty of second-hand CDs I ordered have arrived, only three weeks after I ordered them! I had three separate parcels from different places that alleged to have been handed over to Royal Mail on 5 September and then... zip. The parcel from 8 September arrived last week. But two of the three missing items turned up today, along with last week's magazine, and I'm crossing my fingers for the remaining one soon. The postal worker also kindly left me someone else's Tracked 48 Hours envelope wedged into my bundle, but it's been absolute stair-rods most of the day so I'm going to drop it off on my way out tomorrow (it's about a 6-7 minute walk away, and sooooort of on the way to the station).

Still plenty to do, and chores I'm behind on, but psychologically I feel so free! My calendar is started to look a little less overwhelmed, too. Maybe tonight my insomnia will give me a break and I'll get more than four hours of sleep?

I did really well keeping my sleep-cycle relatively coherent during my week off, and then fell all to pieces once I was - theoretically - back into routine! Why does 1am wychwood make such bad decisions... Anyway, I had various nights of bad sleep, although only some of it was self-inflicted; then I had a three-hour nap yesterday afternoon, and then I stayed up until nearly 2am reading even though I had to be up early this morning. I intended to nap today, but failed comprehensively, so it's now half six and I'm already starting to feel like my eyes are in different timezones. Based on recent experience, I anticipate this means that I will lie relentlessly awake until approximately midnight, no matter what time I go to bed, and by the end of my day in the office tomorrow I will be seeing into other dimensions.

We also appear to have hit the perfect sweet spot in the weather where my feet still get cold enough that I struggle to fall asleep without a hot water bottle but any such device instantly heats the bed up too much for me to sleep. Truly, my sleeping economy is a remarkable thing, a tottering tower of conflicting requirements just waiting for me to slip up. Or also to stay up five hours too late reading a particularly gripping story, in fairness, I can't avoid all the blame for this...

Anyway. Aside from my bad decisions, it's not been a bad week; my annual review at work went pretty much as straightforwardly as possible, despite what my stress levels were attempting to persuade me of, I think I have wrangled all the Easter preparations as far as I can get them at this point (there will be more to do after meetings on Tuesday, but that's a problem for later...), and we've had some lovely sunshine today. I am not looking forward to all the sweating I will be doing as the temperatures continue to rise, but I do love a blue sky.

Time has been tearing away from me lately. This was a busy week (something on every evening!) and next week's a concert week so mostly full of choir, so I'm looking forward to the week after that for a rest... I've also been indulging in aaaaaaall the doctors' appointments - annual reviews for things, blood tests for annual reviews, overdue unpleasant screening I've been ignoring, prescription renewal that needs an appointment first, not to mention the four pre-appointment questionnaires (three of them for the same appointment... I ignored it the third time, and kept getting sad reminder notifications) and multiple phonecalls trying to book me in for appointments I already had in the calendar - and five separate bookings later I am, hopefully, done for six months.

My doctors seem generally pretty good, and I appreciate their willingness to provide me with services, but I think I'm done now! I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I were also having to worry about associated paperwork and arguing with insurers and so on. And I do miss having my doctors on my doorstep - my current surgery is a 10-15 minute walk from here, which is extremely doable, but "opposite your house" was just such a winner. Although being able to do some of it over the phone is also extremely good - of course there are lots of times when you do want to see someone in person, and pushing people to phone-first when it's not appropriate is a bad idea, but I personally do appreciate being able to e.g. have the conversation which is just checking that no bits of me have fallen off in a way that make renewing this prescription a bad idea as a ten-minute interruption in my working day rather than a 45-minute round trip. I was less keen on the call which required me to be available "in the morning" (unspecified, but based on previous experience this usually means something like "09:00-13:00") - the receptionist was surprisingly unhappy that I had to push the date back several days in order to find a day when my work calendar had absolutely nothing in it; surely it must be a fairly common situation??

Anyway, so far I appear to be in respectable working order allowing for my various chronic health conditions, and just one set of test results warranting a watchful eye. That's the sort of news I like to hear.

My brother came over with the family to visit our parents on Saturday, and now the restrictions have been softened, they invited me to come and see them all. Which was lovely, but slightly inconvenient, since I had church (near my parents' house) in the evening and it wasn't going to make sense to go home in between (since it's a 45+ minute journey), but was going to leave me stuck with three or four hours to kill away from home. However, I capitalised on the occasion and arranged to meet another local friend while I was there, my swimming buddy V who I haven't seen since before the pandemic started.

It was lovely to see everyone, and the weather was nice enough (mostly cloudy but warm) that we spent the whole time in gardens (as the sunburn on my arms and face can attest... I love being such a delicate flower that I burn through cloud cover), and in many ways it felt extremely normal, but also I literally haven't been inside someone else's house in fifteen months. Time went surprisingly quickly in the way that it can once you get into conversation. My niblings are all getting so big now!

Totals for the day: socialised with six adults, four children, three dogs, and one cat; walked an objectively reasonable distance which is about twice what I used to do most days, and which my feet are spectacularly unhappy about; spent eight hours out of the house (also a pandemic record).

I then spent pretty much the whole of Sunday lying around limply and re-reading the Murderbot diaries, while recovering. I'm very glad it was a long weekend.

I kept meaning to post and then thinking, oh, maybe I'll get the booklog done and post that first, except I'm still nowhere near done on the booklog and it's getting later and later in the month...

Church: I did not enjoy this year's Easter very much; I think I'm at that common point of "the end is in sight, I no longer have any patience available" now, and I feel kind of left-out and sulky because I couldn't go to church or do any of the usual planning and coordination, which is exhausting but also leaves me feeling very accomplished when it works. My fellow senior server expressed regret at my absence, though, which helped a bit. But I'm bored now.

Medical: I'm about a month off my second jab (hopefully) but I'm also changing doctors right now, because my current GP (literally opposite my block) has just moved a mile and a half away to a location I would have to take a forty-minute multiple-bus journey to get to. Or at least, I'm trying - I filled out the registration form for the new surgery, uh, a little while ago, but haven't heard anything since. I need to chase them, in general but also because I need to renew one of my regular medications that I can't just request through the website. Probably they'll want to have about eighteen appointments with me as well, that's definitely what happened when I moved here... general check up, asthma clinic, diabetic clinic... Why you gotta move, old surgery.

Home: I did take the opportunity of last week's warm weather to sit outside on my bench several times before it went away again (Tuesday last week: 20C; Tuesday this week: 4C and snow showers for most of the day). I continue to feel like it was a good investment, and look forward to sitting on it again once the temperatures get back out of single degrees.

Fandom: We are watching the final episode of Xena season 5 tonight! Only one more season after this. The writers continue to confound us; they keep setting up situations where we're left wondering "How on earth will they get out of this??", and then finding a solution which is 100% not anything we would ever have considered. In this instance ( spoilers for a twenty-year-old TV show ) This show what even.

I have had my first jab!! On Saturday (I went OUTSIDE and caught a BUS and also while I was there popped into the SUPERMARKET next door to the health centre, INSIDE ACTUAL BUILDINGS WHICH ARE NOT MY HOUSE). It was -4 and we all had to queue in the car park for a while, but I wore a million layers and it was fine.

I felt fine all the rest of the day, too, although I was definitely a bit, hm, rundown on Sunday, felt like I was coming down with something (although it was also a particularly miserable day, we were all rather flat on the family Skype call, and I actually turned the central heating on for the first time in three years because it was down to 11.4C in my bedroom and that is TOO COLD). But then today I felt pretty normal, so if those were side effects then I got off pretty lightly. I should get notification in about 12 weeks to book my second appointment, so until then I guess I just sit here gently encouraging my immune system to pay attention.

That was, of course, the only thing of actual interest to happen to me in weeks, but that's OK. I finished both my book group books (meetings are this week) and a couple of my birthday books, which were marvellous (booklog to come!). I have also unpacked my Brexit stockpile box and am slowly incorporating the contents into my cupboards rather than buying replacements, since actually grocery stock levels don't seem to have been too badly hit so far - I bought almost no vegetables in this fortnight's shop, and am hoping to free up some space by eating the assorted tinned and frozen stock I bought for the original Brexit date. Tomorrow is Shrove Tuesday, so I'm going to use up the red cabbage and apple frozen mix and make pancakes filled with the mix and topped with cheese, which is something we used to make at University. Hopefully it will be as good as I remember!