Propping up a dodgy memory

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stephbg — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:36:32 GMT

Hello world

stephbg — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 07:57:29 GMT

This is me, being active on my account.

Late night ramblings

stephbg — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 17:48:40 GMT

TW: Self harm; general gloom

This is a bit different - I don't want to sleep. Normally sleep is such a precious thing that I chase and crave it. I had my baseline sleeping pill and pain relief a couple of hours ago, but I just haven't gone with it. Instead put on some shoes and went for a walk in my pajamas. Nothing like my epic dark hour marathons of the past, but I had to get out. I had to move. I'm so over being trapped and caged and immobilised and useless and tied and tired and sick and heartsick and in constant grinding pain. The sleeping pill acts at least in part as a painkiller, so I expect that was why I was able to walk. Only a few blocks, but it felt like old times. No cane, and I was pretty steady on my feet.

I need a circuit breaker. I feel I've been on the edge of a big cry for a few days and would indeed welcome it. I did get something of an adrenaline surge this evening when TribbleJ and Buffy managed to knock a glass in a some kind of 4-dimensional spiral and wet down the powerboard feeding my laptop, mobile phone, house phone, and external drive. Got everything turned off and unplugged before the unit started to buzz, so hopefully no further damage done. But it wasn't what I needed.

I need to snap. Not to snap out of it, but to snap – a raw explosion of expression. I need to feel something that isn't the crushing weight of responsibility of just hanging in there and getting through another day. It's no longer enough to retreat into sleep at the end of the day. A hearty crying session would probably do the trick, but though I've felt on the verge for days, I've lacked a suitable trigger. Maybe I should just sit and wallow in sad shit until I cry but that's not my jam. I don't want to leak tears – I do that all the time and it fixes nothing. I lack viable and deserving targets for an obscenity-laden screaming tirade. I will absolutely not get behind the wheel of my car in such a state. I'm a damned cripple with limited physical options so punching things or running is off the agenda.

I did briefly consider self-harm this evening, but mostly as an intellectual exercise. I was thinking that stabbing a large knife through the back of my left hand might wake me up some. A useful insight into another branch of mental illness, considering my usual focus of reducing the pain, settling the anxiety, getting sleep. If I want pain, I just need to wait. Maybe it's the illusion of control that's so attractive.

I haven't had any alcohol this evening, oh no. Alcohol is for pain relief and sleep, and that's not the plan for tonight. Combining alcohol with a mood like this could be bad. Not going there.

Maybe writing this will set me off, but it hasn't yet.

I want to live, not die.

I miss being able to smell horses. That feels like a particularly cruel theft.

I miss feeling strong.

Time to stop this, maybe do a few dozen sudoku.

Spoon calculations

stephbg — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 02:59:01 GMT

I've been very unwell the last few days and unable to do much of anything at all. This morning I felt a bit more human so I contemplated the possibility of going to hydrotherapy today. Chances were reasonable, and I was excited by this – hydrotherapy is an energy-intensive but highly attractive and rewarding activity. But I really needed to get to the supermarket. OK, it closes by 9pm, there's a good chance that I'd get there by then *hugs longer trading hours*. But then there was the matter of a small laundry crisis - could I squeeze in a load of laundry as well? No.

This is where spoon calculations come in, and since this is a fairly typical and relatively straightforward situation I thought I'd record it for illustrative purposes.

While I was thinking this through Husband was pottering about getting ready for a late morning shift, which sometimes means he has to catch a bus to the train station. I was ready to offer him a lift to the train station because that meant I could do the shopping on the way home. But if I did the shopping first there's no way I could do hydro later, although the laundry might happen, and I'd want to pick Husband up at the end of the day which would be stretching things a bit. Picking him up is optional but there aren't many buses at that time of night so I try to do it when I can. Hmmmm.

I was rescued from the Husband variable by his announcement that he wanted to drop his trousers (hur hur) at the dry cleaner's first. So that left me with the following energy management scenarios:

1. Do hydro (I really WANT to do hydro). Do shopping (I really NEED to shop), and laundry too (I really NEED to do laundry). Unlikely.

2. Do hydro. Maybe do shopping, and possibly laundry. Risky.

3. Do hydro. Quite likely do laundry, but probably not shopping. More risky.

4. Do shopping, and quite likely do laundry. Most likely to produce critical outcomes, but less happy-making. *sigh*

I went with #4 – the shopping is done and the laundry is in the machine. Hanging will just have to happen because it does – I can crash later. No hydro today, and because I have a dress fitting tomorrow, there'll be no hydro tomorrow (a dress fitting is a 100% spoon effort for the day). But maybe I can get to hydro on Thursday or Friday if I have the energy then (which is entirely impossible to predict) and can make one of the narrow windows of opportunity between Babyswim classes.

The rest of my energy scraps will go on taking care of the pets, general pottering about and tidying, maybe some reading if I feel up to it, but today not enough to play with the microscope, although there's a chance I'll publish a picture late in the evening. The very idea of wrapping a present or doing anything else on the list feels impossible. Ironically, writing this has probably used up the spoon that might have gone there, but it's a task that's not yet time critical and I miss blogging.

Good time to finish – the laundry's ready to hang.

...laundry hung, pond topped up and cleaned, fish fed, cat trays done, and now I lie down because I have to.

Pure folly

stephbg — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 17:58:47 GMT

Life has been rather grim lately, particularly with regard to my freedom or lack thereof to get out of the house and do anything resembling fun. Even inside the house my hands are so wrecked with arthritis and I've so little energy that I'm forced to brutally prioritise to a shrinking list of essential activities. But not entirely.

I'm a few early stages into a project to construct the next Pretty Rock gown for Swancon in March 2016. Ostensibly it's a marketing exercise designed to show off one of my fabric designs. But it's a ridiculous expenditure in pure cash terms to even consider it a practical business move, even if I had the energy to make more of the opportunity. What's more critical at the moment is a severe lack of energy. My chronic pain and fatigue have kept me near to housebound over the last year, and a head cold over the last two weeks has squashed me even further. I was beginning to wonder if I would even be able to make a single shopping trip to buy thread and notions and ribbons and lace. I'm not sewing a single stitch of the thing but I do have to wash the fabric and make multiple trips to the dressmaker for designing, fittings, and tweakings.

It's those outings that really made me think (I managed the lace-buying trip yesterday which was a huge relief). Conservatively, an hour a week for four-six weeks would consume a vast proportion of my available energy budget, particularly if I hope to maintain weekly hydrotherapy. Never mind the fuss and anxiety on the actual night where I am the very last person who wants to be a model. It's unnecessary, is what it is. It's a waste of valuable resources. I could cancel the whole thing now and may have lost about half the cash, but I'd have the materials to do something with one day.

Why am I doing this when I don't NEED to do it? I can only afford to do things that I absolutely MUST do. Priorities rule my sad shrinking little life.

I'm doing it *because* I don't need to do it. It's frivolous, a folly, it's fun, it's a tiny rebellion. I've neglected to mention how much fun it is to work with my dressmaker Maureen. Human Contact on a collaborative art project. MAKING something, even if not with my own hands. Not being able to make things has been crushing my spirit more and more lately. I have a very large tattoo with the message of balance – don't just work with words and keyboards and mind – get out there and paint and sculpt and garden and put up shelves and ride horses and go for bushwalks. Balance the physical and the mental and the spirit will follow. Twenty years ago I thought these ideals were sufficiently self-evidently important to brand them on my skin for all eternity. I want to obey, I really do, but I'm fatigued beyond comprehension nearly all the time, and utterly restricted by my pain, especially in my hands in the last year when old injuries and wear-and-tear decided to graduate to officially crippling osteo arthritis. My hands, as they say in the trade, are fucked.

So the dress will happen. The laundry schedule may suffer. The cupboard might run a bit bare occasionally. I may have to skip a few more showers. I might need to ask for help in the kitchen. Hydrotherapy will go on, but I might lose a few hard-fought muscles. I might need a taxi or two. But I will gain a silly confection of satin and lace and ribbons and ruffles, with many giggles along the way.

Frivolous. Folly. Fun. I need this, and I'm going to take it.

They can do that now?

stephbg — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 13:33:56 GMT

Random medical post that I decided to put on the blog rather than Facebook. Does not indicate any greater coherence, just the desire to distract myself for a few more minutes until I can get some pain relief. Today I saw the shrink and my physio.

Odd thing re going to the physio this afternoon to get the stiff part of my spine to unkink - I asked for more exercises and he couldn't give me any. I've come to the end of the road for what I'm capable of, apparently. Nearly 2 years of hydro and sundry land-based stretches and it seems I'm doing what I should be doing. I didn't think physios were even allowed to say that sort of thing. Also re the odd difference in muscle development on left and right sides, it's just how it is, apparently (I've made a few efforts under supervision to exercise the weak side a bit extra with non-disastrous but uncomfortable and ineffective results). "At least you've got one strong leg," he said. So yay?

Seriously - isn't he supposed to be pushing?

Shrink this morning was very happy I'd taken up rock photography again and was generally brighter if more tired and more sore. I think he tried to make a joke about sponges, which is always a good sign. Last visit he didn't smile. This time he seemed positively overjoyed that I'd put up a few new web pages.

And yet, so very fucked up. *sigh* (Pain has reached the "I can see through time" phase, trala.)

Oh good, I've been writing long enough I can take pills now. Physio was brutal, but my fault for letting him.

The Lion King - 2 December 2015

stephbg — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 04:44:57 GMT

For our anniversary outing this year, Husband and I went to see The (fabulous) Lion King at the Crown Theatre (formerly and forever Burswood). To add as many breaks to the experience as possible we also stayed overnight at the Crown Promenade hotel, right next door to the theatre and over the driveway from the casino. I'm not up for a properly and coherently decent post about the experience, but I thought I'd dump some thoughts here.

Firstly, this is what I tossed out on to Facebook:

We (Husband and I) forked out for front row tickets because we both have an interest in the practicalities of theatre production and wanted to get a close look at the puppets in particular. But the puppets, cast, costumes, scenery, props and makeup were all magnificently intertwined. And the staging and sets and lighting and sound were all magnificent. Performances weren't bad either, bordering on excellent. I loved that I got to see the costumes at such close range, and they were beautiful and amazing and sturdy and full of engineering goodness. I loved that I literally got the odd glimpse of the man behind the curtain when I caught some of the action in the wings. The puppets were less complex than I'd vaguely thought (my comparison was War Horse) but that was no disappointment at all, rather it increased my respect for the performers. Loved all the wonderful dancing, body language, shapes, and gestures that made up such a large part of the performance. Didn't detect a single bad note in the music or singing. Diction was perfect (for the bits in English at least) - I didn't feel like I was missing any words. Probably helped by the fact that I could lip read, so yay good seats. Good seats also allowed legs at full stretch with feet touching the side of the stage for a bit of support. Not quite feet up, but definitely a degree easier than fully seated. Minor niggles only mostly re unrealistic animal behaviour and perky over-talented child performer (not their fault). May have startled the musicians by shouting "Thank you musicians!" into the orchestra pit/cage as we left, but got back a muffled thank you in return from the darkness. I liked it.

It won't get much more coherent than that, but I shall push on for posterity.

Next I wanted to talk about how it stimulated my brain. It was a massive and complex production and the little bit of me that is forever a project manager had fun breaking it down into manageable bits. Much of it came down to sectional rehearsals, where little ensembles within the larger action could practice on their own, or even be replaced as a unit by local performers. The interactions between these subgroups were largely seamless, but there was the odd spot where the joins showed, and the fault was always with the person playing the smaller role. But the integration was incredible. There were spots in the show that were clearly designed to give everyone a breather and/or time for costume changes. I could only imagine the lists and call sheets and strictly managed chaos happening backstage to get everything out and together in real time. Real time! I love thinking about how movie productions go together, but live theatre at this level of complexity and quality is astounding to me.

Whenever I watch a singer, I always study their throat muscles to see if they're actually singing or miming. There were one or two points where it's possible that a really complex lead solo vocal might have been pre-recorded, but that made sense to preserve her voice over however many shows per week, mostly 2 per day. We even heard the odd voice directly, rather than through the speakers.

I've previously waxed lyrical about the feature costumes/puppets, but on the flip side there was an understandable economy in the non-hero costumes for the ensemble cast. But it was done so well it just felt like natural perspective – details fading into the distance. Speaking of which, all sorts of wonderfully practical tricks of perspective were used for the stampede scene. (Practical meaning non-digital/physical/analogue effects.)

Adult Simba had really really nice muscles. Purrrrrr. Adult Narla (lioness love interest) was the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.

None of this analysis detracted from my enjoyment of the show. It's possible I missed out on some of the intended illusions, but I really enjoyed seeing the workings from up close, so I reckon I got the better part of the deal. We were only a few metres from the musical director and I had fun watching him too.

A note now about social anxiety. I went out there wearing a one-of-a-kind spectacular gown with serious bling, green hair, and a walking stick. And I'm not a small person. In theory the gown is an advertisement for Pretty Rock Designs, but I must be the worst model in the universe. I wanted to hide. I couldn't bear the idea of standing still for a photograph, particularly not without the help of someone who knows how to twitch a sleeve or get me to suck in my gut for the best view. This turned into something approaching blind panic as the pain and exhaustion settled in.

And yet...

At interval I stood up, turned around, and calmly and without any effort cast my eye over the audience from the edge of the stage. I could tell at least a few people noticed me (and a small girl nearby said she loved my dress – yay!) but this didn't bother me in slightest. Somewhere deep inside (maybe nestled closely with the project manager I used to be) lurked the performer I used to be. Also I think there's a comfort in the definition of roles – milling about in a crowd it's not clear that I should get any sort of attention and that uncertainty gets to me. Facing a few thousand seats and faces it seems to make more sense. Whether they looked at me or not, it was ok.

Brains are stupid generally, but I was so pleased that this show pushed me to think so much.

Possible future topics of discussion – feature puppets; not taking someone's eye out with that thing; the psychology of carpets in a casino resort; my love for room service; traffic management by avoidance; lions don't do that (stop over-thinking about real lions).

Low Dose Naltrexone update

stephbg — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 12:14:33 GMT

I'm about six weeks into my LDN trial and well overdue for an update.

I'm still trying to find the right dose, which is not unusual with this drug. General consensus is that most people find it useful between 3-4.5mg but you need to start slow. I started at 1mg and until a few days ago worked my way up to 4mg. I've since dropped back to 2.5mg but haven't yet settled. Changing a dose is based on the usual side effects versus benefits equation, with the additional factor of the body coming to terms with the changes, so you have to give it some time to sort itself to a new equilibrium, or decide that it either won't, or the new equilibrium is not somewhere you want to stay. One of the primary effects of the drug is allegedly to stimulate the immune system to flush out deep-seated infections, so you have to decide whether you feel terrible because your immune system is doing good, or if you feel terrible because you feel terrible and should stop what you're doing. Feeling terrible aside, you need to decide if the positive effects of pain relief are still working or might benefit from a change.

It's tricky.

On the good side it's clearly helping with the pain as I've stopped routinely taking codeine, amitriptyline (Endep), Valdoxen and Cymbalta. I pretty much suspended paracetamol for a few weeks but have had to take the odd dose here and there to manage muscle soreness and arthritic pain. TBH it hurts quite a bit but I've got to give my liver a bit of a chance to recover. I dropped magnesium from 450mg down to 150mg but have since picked it back up to 300mg to manage cramps and shakes. I dropped Vitamin D as another favour to my liver. Previously it was necessary to keep all kinds of pain under control lest they spark the nerve pain of fibromyalgia. For a good few weeks I was able to put up with the non-nerve pain and stayed free of nerve pain. It's still mostly under control, but not quite as obviously so. Still, the weather has been awful and I hope things will warm up soon. Last week at hydrotherapy I most definitely overdid it, so that contributed to the general creakiness. I've a blood test next week and it will be interesting to see how the needle feels, given the almost miraculous reduction in pain from the last couple of tests.

Also on the good side was a remarkably unremarkable period where I not only didn't want to kill anyone, but wasn't crying in pain from the full flare I always got every month. Even my skin was clear. Sadly the second hasn't been so good, including some rather spectacular zits the like of which I haven't seen in years. Whoa. It would seem that the hormones are still finding their feet. Must remember it's still a huge improvement.

At first the initial side effects were all related to digestion, but that appears to have mostly settled itself. I'm most pleased by the drop in appetite and craving for sweet things and cheese that was the very much hoped-for result of dropping Endep. It's possibly I've lost 5kg so that it wonderful. I can actually see that my top spare tire has deflated slightly.

The bad news? Fatigue. Yes I already had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) which apparently has been re-dubbed Exertion Intolerance Syndrome Or Something. I thought for a while that my more conspicuous fatigue on LDN was due to me doing more with reduced pain, or the fatigue was just more obvious relative to pain levels, but no, it's a known side effect of LDN and my biggest problem at present. Not helping is the LDN being a known disturber of sleep, and the fact that several of my ex-meds helped me sleep. I'm left with Stilnox, which works less effectively with LDN. Yay. Taking them at least an hour apart helps, but it does make Every Single Night an exercise in clock-watching. Most nights I try to get by with just half a tablet but if I'm completely awake at 2am-ish and desperate for some shut-eye I'll take another quarter or half. TBH I feel like I haven't had a decent night's sleep in at least a month, but that can't be true. TribbleJ has developed a new habit of poking my face on random mornings, presumably because my morning schedule has shifted, but he does sometimes wake me up just when I feel I've finally gotten to sleep again.

So, 9pm is LDN time, which inevitably includes a salty snack of some sort to defeat the incredibly horrible taste of the stuff. I'm getting through a lot of olives and Vegemite. Some people take it in the morning to avoid sleep disturbance and I eventually tried that for a day. Trying anything for just one day is pretty much useless, but I felt so unremittingly awful I couldn't bring myself to continue the trial. Yes, that bad. Maybe I'll try again some time when my calendar is clear and my courage is high.

Other options include skipping the odd dose which I've done just the once I think, but it's recommended in the long term as a way of keeping the body responsive. It's not quite the same mechanism as drug tolerance, but the result is pretty much the same in the end – your body gets used to it.

So, where am I now? I'm tired. I had five says of severe fatigue in a row before I dropped from 4mg back to 2.5mg and recovered a little, maybe overdid it again, then got tired-but-not-quite-as-tired again. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to scrape up the spoons for Hydrotherapy #19-in-a-row. Every four weeks the pool schedule and mine are such that I only get a single window of opportunity go for that week, and it's Friday at 4pm. I hate those days. I currently hurt, but I reckon most of that is weather plus over-exertion last week in the pool followed by a long stretch of near immobility. Bah.

Around the 3-4 week mark on LDN I was very impressed but still cautious – when I started Valdoxen I had six weeks of working back to near normality but it was never as effective again and I was bitterly disappointed. Now the LDN has definitely lost its would-be wonder drug status but it's absolutely one of the best ones I've ever taken and brought me back from several types of brink. I'm not yet finished with the tinkering so fingers crossed I'll get a bit of energy back. If my next liver test shows further signs of improvement I might treat myself to some pain relief. And Spring will spring again.

New drug: Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN)

stephbg — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 03:41:15 GMT

A few days ago I started a new drug trial so I'm a bit remiss in making a full report. This might not be entirely coherent but should contain enough of the basics for future reference. Disclaimer – I'm simplifying in the extreme to the level of my own basic understanding which may or may not be particularly accurate.

Naltrexone is a drug normally prescribed to treat alcohol and opiate addiction. It blocks opiate receptors thus removing all the fun factor from one's recreational drug of choice. My life lacks both fun and recreational drug use let alone addiction, and I really need all my opiate receptors in good working order for natural fun things like endorphins, so what am I doing taking this stuff? Turns out dosage matters.

Here's where I get vague and generic for my own purposes, because at low doses (typically 3-4.5mg as opposed to 50mg) LDN is supposed to help with a wide variety of conditions, from boosting your immune system, to improving fertility. This sort of thing makes me immediately suspicious, but I came across it first via the fibromyalgia community where several people are reporting success via a more intuitively acceptable mechanism.

Naltrexone blocks opiate receptors, and if you have chronic pain and chronic fatigue, that's not good news. Stay Away. Awooga Awooga. But at low dose the idea is to block some opiate receptors which then stimulates the production of endorphins. The opiate receptors recover quite quickly, the endorphins hang around and generally make life better. Rinse and repeat.

Theoretically once you get the dosage and schedule right, you can sleep through the bit where your opiate receptors are blocked (bad news) and be more awake and feeling a lot less pain the rest of the time (good news, trust me), right up until you take your next dose.

The bad news, finding that right dose is a literal rollercoaster. For a start, codeine and naltrexone don't mix. I'm no heroin addict but I was accustomed to taking a conservative 30mg of codeine at bedtime to help me through the night, and the occasional rare extra 15mg once or twice during the day if I had the right kind of pain for it. Information varied wildly as to whether I'd need to wean off this codeine entirely before I could start LDN. Professionals (psychiatrist and pharmacist) said the only possible effect would be to slightly reduce the effectiveness of the codeine. People on user groups and various information sheets warned of wild side effects featuring terrible nausea. I decided to take the middle ground and drop my night codeine to 15mg for a few days before starting LDN.

There was an other complicating factor in all this, that I had also recently tried to exchange my main nerve painkiller Endep (amitriptyline) for a very slightly different drug called nortriptyline. Endep does great things like treat nerve pain and help me sleep, but it also has a pile of unpleasant side effects affecting appetite, taste, weight gain, and depression (it's also used as an antidepressant). Unfortunately the amitriptyline > nortriptyline experiment failed with spectacular (*sigh*) nausea, so I was off both of them when I started the LDN trial. Had to do *something* to keep pain at bay, because with fibromyalgia if you don't control the small-medium stuff it flares into agonising off-the-chart stuff in record time. Panadol Osteo does a pretty good job of maintaining the balance during daytime, as long as there's nothing else going on to trigger pain, like weather, or exercise, or a cold, or eating too many vegetables, or having a bath that's a bit too hot, or reading for too long, or lurching into furniture... you get the idea.

So basically pain management was in a very precarious place when I started my LDN trial a few days ago, because I pretty much had nothing left to deal with anything other than the small-medium constant background all-going-well stuff.

Back to the LDN. Interactions with other things notwithstanding (although there are more of them to come) all the advice was to start low and slow. The first three nights I had 1mg. This was achieved by dissipating (not dissolving – it creates a suspension, not a liquid) half a 50mg tablet in 25ml of distilled water as per (thankfully consistent) instructions. Used a small syringe (sans needle) to draw up the dose and fling it at the back of my throat as I'd done to cats many times before. It tastes vile, but it's not the worst medication I've suffered through. I suspect my blunted sense of taste is actually helping me, but it does take a coke chaser and things like kalamata olives and eating Vegemite from a spoon to help it down and stop me from sticking my tongue out and shaking my head.

Getting too tired to go into the complexities of timing LDN and sleeping pills, but LDN is known to disturb sleep. Thought I got the hang of it while on 1ml, but on night #4 I went up to 2ml and again woke every couple of hours. I'm actually adding broken sleep to the list of reasons for cautious optimism.

Other reasons for cautious optimism include improved productivity in the last few mornings, and some instances where normally agonising spots have felt much more dull. Plenty of room for placebo effects, but things seem good thus far.

I've not yet found my maintenance dose, so what that means is after I've had a possible little endorphin boost in the morning, it flattens out and then I get a crash in the mid-late afternoon. This gets worse until 9pm when I can take my next dose and make things a bit worse for a while by blocking even more receptors. All this depression crashiness is accompanied by lack of pain relief options. The last few evenings have been grim, and so I stepped up to 2ml perhaps a bit faster than is generally recommended. My mood this evening will be one to watch. I'm hoping for something outside the square of crushing depression, because really I've not much to fight it with these days. Thank heavens for friends on Facebook.

So that's where we are. Cautious hope for pain relief, wariness while finding the right dose, sleep might need to be renegotiated, and some nausea at first but it seems to be settling.

Apologies to those who know more than I do for gross errors and medical misunderstandings. For everyone else, do not take anything I say as medical advice of any kind whatsoever. Ever.

Demons, puppies, and recorders

stephbg — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 13:34:13 GMT

I will be very pleased when tomorrow's tradesman (due "about 10am") has completed his work.

Last week I investigated a strange squeaky noise outside and discovered that one of our roof ventilation units (a.k.a. whirlybirds or whirligigs) had developed a wobble and thus a squeak at low speed. At no speed it became clear that it had taken a hammering during last year's hailstorm which had possibly pushed it sufficiently out of alignment to place uneven wear on the bearings, which in turn had finally decided to protest.

There's no going back from a squeaky bearing and battered vanes, so I arranged a replacement immediately. Unfortunately it's taken a week for the right colour to come in stock, and the noises have evolved in the meantime. I've been daily expecting an angry delegation of neighbours with torches and pitchforks demanding an end to the noise. I've also been expecting a visit from the RSPCA.

It started as a birdlike chirp, only noticeable because it was incessant. But that was only during light winds. At first when there was enough wind we couldn't hear anything. It was really only bad in the bathroom when one was attempting to concentrate on other things.

For a couple of days the chirp transformed into the anxious whining and yipping of a distressed puppy that could now be clearly heard from my nest in the lounge room. It was also incessant during light winds, but unlike the birdlike chirp it was all too believable that a real puppy was being tortured for hours on end. Not a fun sound to live with. I lived in expectation of a knock on the door from the RSPCA demanding doggy justice.

The wind picked up and the intermittent sounds stopped, replaced by a continuous discordant whine that twisted itself amongst the spaces where insanity lies. Imagine Satan had a toddler who liked to play the recorder. That sound. Even Husband--notoriously unflappable about such things--was moved to comment "Wow, that's really annoying."

I actually remembered this sound well, from when a neighbour's whirlygig had developed a similar fault several years ago. For weeks I wondered at the tenacity of the recorder-wielding demonic child who made such a noise, and the apparent deafness of the parent who permitted it. I eventually tracked the sound to the empty rental diagonally behind us. It stopped eventually; such bliss.

Now the wind is high and That Thing is making the odd sound here and there. Maybe it's constant and I've blocked it out. Maybe I'm imagining the whole thing. Are you real? Am I real?

Tomorrow.

ETA: It is 5am and I have awoken to the clopping of a five-legged lame horse on cobblestones. Maybe the horse is just drunk, but it definitely has five legs and iron shoes.

What ungodly creation is this? (It's Vegemite chocolate!)

stephbg — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 12:59:35 GMT

Earlier this afternoon I attempted to consume one square of Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate with Vegemite. You won't believe what happened next.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

I was finally moved to try it after the price was slashed to about 25% of the original. Curiously enough there was still plenty of it on the shelves. I wonder how they'll dispose of the excess? Will the states have "not in my backyard" debates, whilst happily accepting nuclear waste as a far less noxious alternative? Can the stuff be destroyed? How many young priests and old priests will it take?

I don't think I've ever in my entire life voluntarily consumed one single square of chocolate in a single sitting. Even the Vegemite's predecessor Salted Caramel lasted at least a row before I could be really certain what it was doing. Believe me when I say I have a serving size problem – a whole block of as-nature-intended-full-of-sugar chocolate is not a problem.

So was it irredeemably disgusting?

Let me get to that. First, some declarations: I like Vegemite. Vegemite on toast is one of the best medicines in the world. I suffer from frequent tummy upsets, and Vegemite on toast has been my frequent saviour.

I also currently have severely limited senses of smell and taste, largely due to the effects of one of my pain medications. A week or two ago I managed to clear the drug from my system long enough to once again smell the incredible overpowering stench of Husband's socks. OMG I though the dead had risen, changed their minds, and gone back to quietly rotting again. Hoo boy, that was nasty. On the same night however, I smelled hamburger. It was just the wrapping, no traces of scraps but my golly I was in ecstasies. I very nearly ate the paper, and could smell it for hours afterwards. I could smell the meat, oh the meat, the sauce, the bun, the tomato, THE LETTUCE... It was good, so very very good. However, the pain reasserted itself and I had to sacrifice both olfactory heaven and hell to take the drug again and I am thus protected from the both horrors of socks and the bliss of food.

I'm pretty sure Husband's socks still smell like all the demons of hell. I'm a bit worried that I might smell, that my house might smell but I just can't tell. My sense of taste has been effectively reduced to salt and sugar, but at least I have a deep appreciation for texture.

So you're the last person in the world qualified to conduct a taste test of any sort?

Yes and no. Mostly yes. I didn't taste the Vegemite chocolate (which I gather from nearly all reports is a mercy up there with being immune to Husband's socks) but my brain did its impaired best to feed me information about it. This is what my brain reported after half a square: Nothing. I was at least expecting salt and sugar, but no. I ate the other half of the square. Ah, there it was, generic hints of salt and sugar, pretty much like the salted caramel.

But then it hit me.

My brain exploded. It even aspolded. I think it went into some kind of panic normally associated with the biochemical realisation that you've just consumed something Very Bad Indeed and that given the choice (and assuming you survive the first taste) you should never ever do that again. Never ever ever.

Ever.

However, there were two things missing from this experience – an identifiable flavour to go with the warning, and the usual sense of disgust that the reptile brain likes to throw at you to teach you lessons about Bad Things You Should Never Ever (Ever) Put In Your Mouth. Ever.

Weird is the word we're all looking for here. Weird. But ever-so-slightly familiarly weird because I've trialled a lot of prescription medication in my time and this was a bit like a drug side effect of the to-be-avoided variety. It was not Food, is what I'm saying. And even though I couldn't taste the stuff I've spent much of the evening attempting to cleanse my palate of whatever it was. In the end celery sort of did the trick. I had planned to repeat the experiment before attempting a write up, but I just can't, so you're getting slightly stale memories here.

I have yet to decide the fate of the remainder of the block. I can't in conscience consign it to landfill for future generations to deal with. Burning it will pollute the atmosphere and possibly melt the glaciers. Any ideas?

What's in the news

stephbg — Mon, 04 May 2015 03:13:41 GMT

OK, I've had a coffee, so let's clear a few things up.

(1) Happy Star Wars Day everyone who likes the idea, the rest of you can go celebrate Monday, or I Made It Out Of Bed Day, or Bloody Hell, That Was A Nice Coffee Day.

(2) I have been culturally conditioned to believe that the arrival of a baby princess is a wonderful and magical event. I am almost entirely able to override this conditioning, but not all of it, so here it is: "Naw, a baby princess." That aside it's an extra dose of surreal to be reminded that this baby is now 4th in line to have non-trivial levels of power and influence over the country of my birth. Also, I'd go for Elizabeth for a name – previous monarchs of the type have done rather well for themselves. Perhaps she shouldn't be allowed to watch Game of Thrones as she grows up, or there'll be fire-breathing winged corgies emerging from the palace labs.

(3) By all means, appreciate the art and science of boxing if that's your thing (the hitting people variety, not the packaging variety, although as a frequent purchaser of fragile items delivered by post I care rather a lot about the other kind of boxing). I shall simply sit here and wonder why on earth there's so much money involved. Like, truckloads of the stuff. It's not like there aren't other sports where athletes put their bodies on the line, never mind professionals of all sorts. It's weird, I say. Weird.

(4) I think there is a place for the death penalty in the world, but only in a vanishingly small number of very specific cases. And for whatever's sake not by firing squad. Jeez.

(5) OK, I'm tired now.

(6) Yes, I don't blog here much any more, see above.

Swancon 2015

stephbg — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 02:22:32 GMT

Swancon is here again and come hell or high water I'm going again for the full event and staying at the convention hotel. I think this will be my 14th, so I've a long way to go before I collect a badge – they only hand those out to people who've been to 20 or 33. This year is the 40th, and doubles as the NatCon.

Speaking of hell and high water, there's a lot of it. Basically my health and ability to cope with Swancon get worse and worse each year, but in balance my coping strategies also improve. Increasing numbers of people suggest I should use a wheelchair for the event, but I need to remind them that sitting is an issue for me – I'm better off lurching about on my stick for limited periods.

Social anxiety will feature of course. I'm absolutely comfortable in front of a keyboard using shape recognition to identify people's names and handles in my own sweet time. Put me in front of them and I suddenly need face-recognition or to verbalise a name on the spot? Not so good. So I'm keen to see people, but feeling shy and a bit anxious. My eyes tend to flick around the room searching for the familiar, so if my eyes briefly meet yours and move on I'm not deliberately ignoring you I promise. I don't deliberately snub people, I panic. Big difference.

In other potentially rude behaviour I may suddenly cut off a conversation and announce I need to sit or rest. It's not you, it's me.

I'll have to be brutally selective in the panels I attend, and learn to leave if they're not worth the effort. Love them, but an hour in a chair (even with my feet up on another chair which I will do wherever I can because by golly it helps) is a high cost.

This year I'm entering the masquerade in a relatively serious fashion. The ensemble will be a team effort of 6 people by the end, it's been lots of fun to assemble, and I hope the prep phase on Saturday will be too. I'm not doing this for competitive purposes, I'm using it as an excuse to frock up, and Husband will be equally resplendent as my Consort. I really don't like being photographed, but the event demands it so I shall attempt to pose appropriately to capture everyone's hard work. Advice appreciated.

No art show for me this year, but Pretty Rock Designs has been nominated for a non-professional art Tin Duck which is nice. Never managed to crack that one, but an honour to be nominated :-)

For the duration I'll be in technology Holiday Mode, meaning I'll only have my phone with me for basic twitter and FB.

I shopped for clothes, and I think I liked it.

stephbg — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 07:52:27 GMT

I shopped for clothes, and I think I liked it. But I probably won't do it again. (Warning – this gets depressing.)

It's two weeks until we jet off to the wilds of Tasmania for a week, so I've been reviewing my wardrobe for suitable things to pack. There were some specific gaps that I needed to fill and today I went to do that. In person. Like, not on the internet. Specifically at the fat old lady chain called Millers. They're cheap, have generous sizing, and are generally inoffensive. The ability to dodge walking frames and ignore the curious smells of fellow shoppers is a necessary skill. Right now they happen to have a lot of nice prints (and many horrifying ones with sequins) and this former bastion of polyester currently stocks a good selection of items in cotton. I ended up with a couple of shirts and a couple more pairs of pants.

The main reason this shopping experience didn't crush my soul as it usually does is because I largely ignored the mirror in the dressing room. I used it to make sure that shirt buttons didn't bulge over my bust, but beyond that I just paid attention to whether or not I could move comfortably when clad. I did reject one top that technically sort-of fit but was so bizarrely cut there were extra bits bulging out where I can't imagine anyone would need extra bits, unless they were attempting to hide wings.

Ignoring the mirror saved me from the soul-destroying question inherent in every clothes shopping trip: Do I look good in this? I was thus saved from a uniform response of "No, you do not look good in this." I don't care what standard of beauty or self love or self acceptance or sheer bloody-minded positivity you or anyone might choose to bring to the table, but for me it's very simple: I hate my body. I hate it with a ferocious and bitter loathing. I hate it primarily for functional reasons, but over the years I've learned to hate it for aesthetic reasons too as the functional failures have taken their toll. So today it was nice to pretty much ignore all of that.

Nice. I grab the feeling of nice and cling to it with all my fading strength, because nice is about as nice as it gets. Through whatever combination of physical and mental illness and their respective medications this body of mine can no longer experience pleasure. If they can do it to lab rats, they can do it to me. My senses of smell and taste are blunted not quite to the point of uselessness--I can smell terrible things without much trouble—but nice smells and tastes are lost to me. With my tummy issues I can't even eat intensely-flavoured food, so really texture is mostly what I care about, and a rough sense of salt and sweet. That and the likely response of my digestive system to whatever I send down to it.

Physical contact is pain. It's always pain. Sometimes I'll accept the pain for the comfort that a hug or a caress can bring, but it's always a choice. There's no giving in to pleasure for me. My monthly highly-specialised gentle massage helps, but it requires concentration to get through it. What really annoys me is that I can't even enjoy vicarious pleasure – this champion of a carcass now interprets any form of arousal as horribly intense period pain. That really pisses me off.

Sound, light, movement, air, heat, cold, breathing, kissing, everything hurts.

I get occasional relief in the hydrotherapy pool, but only after I've been going continuously for several weeks. Any break in the schedule and I'm bumped back down again. It's worth the effort, but it takes a lot of work for occasional and fleeting rewards. There are no easy rewards in my life any more.

The thing I like most in the world is competence - I can still enjoy the skills of others. Sadly the fuckups of others are a problem so I have to be careful where I look. Not Canberra, obviously.

I'm quite worried about my continued lack of interest in pretty rocks. I'm enjoying other people's pictures, but find them more depressing than inspiring when it comes to picking up the camera again. Thanks brain. I need a plan.

I get occasional relief at night if I take my maximum bed time drug cocktail, because that makes everything just go away for a while, plus if I'm lucky I score a few minutes of near-giggly happiness before I get sleepy. But I can't do that every night because I need to manage both a range of side effects and the growth of tolerance. I worry a bit that some days I can't wait for night to fall because that's a good drug night and I know I'll get to escape for a while. Time to back away for a few days and suffer some terrible nights, because that's The Right Thing To Do. Every day and every night I need to make those calculations. (One of the worst side effects is depression! Isn't that hilarious?)

Yesterday I enjoyed the wild weather immensely for the first time since the storm last October that damaged the house. I felt the electricity in the air and felt more alive than I've felt in over a year (I believe that makes me some sort of frog zombie?). I felt glee and awe. I chortled at the magnificence of the lightning show, and was happily startled into swearing at unexpectedly bright flashes. I revelled in the deep vibrations of the roaring thunder, and imagined a fleet of spaceships taking off just over the horizon. That was good. That was great. But it was rare. I'm not planning to move to the tropics to try and repeat the experience any time soon. Today I ache with yesterday's efforts at standing still and looking up. Thanks body.

My body is a traitor, so I must clutch and claw at anything I can to keep mind and body intact. I fail often, then have to drag myself back up again and again. And again. And again. It never ends. I'm so very tired of having to do that. I want it to end. Can you blame me for wanting to fall asleep and stay there?

But I have some pants that fit now.

I have really cool red boots.

TribbleJ is showing signs of growing up.

Husband is amazing.

We're going to renovate the bathroom.

The next council pickup is in May, and decluttering is fun.

Swancon is in April and it's in a really good venue.

Tasmania has proper rocks in it.

Sometimes a bad day is also a good day

stephbg — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 11:47:49 GMT

Today I'd hoped to go to hydrotherapy, but unfortunately I was not in sufficiently good shape to go. This was disappointing, but a useful reminder of something important.

My physical illnesses and mental illnesses are separate things. They're by no means independent of each other, but they are different. Sometimes it's useful to be reminded of this, so here we are in rare blogland.

This morning I woke from my mid-morning nap feeling very weak and tired. But I know that how you feel when you just wake up is not always a reliable measure of one's actual well-being, so I gave myself 100 minutes to get in gear for hydrotherapy. I was pretty keen about it today, so that involved drinking rather a lot of coke. I drank, I stretched, I pottered/lurched about, and generally tried to wake up and find spoons. The body was having none of it, and when the deadline came I was disappointed to find I was still much too sore and tired to go. Experience told me that pushing on would be worse than pointless.

Bummer, no pool for me. Plan B, do laundry. I schlepped a load of washing into the machine and later hung it out to dry. I brought in the bins, and checked the letterbox. It was a triumph of activity over extremely unwilling flesh. A few hours later I brought the washing back in. A notably unspectacular day.

But here's the thing – I felt physically pretty damn awful, and disappointed that I hadn't made the pool, but it was OK. My brain happily shifted my plans about and didn't succumb to crushing despair. I like it when my brain doesn't succumb to crushing despair – no, really, you should try it. Writing this I'm far from clear-headed – actually my thoughts are getting more and more disorganised – but I'm feeling quite cheery. Cheery in a balanced-emotional-state kind of way, not an are-you-showing-signs-of-bipolar-excessive-happiness kind of way.

Tomorrow is another day. Friday is another day after that. I have modest preferences and priorities for what I might achieve in those two days, but if I don't, I don't.

Reading this back I feel I have completely failed to describe what it was I'd hoped to capture about today. But hey, that's OK. And that's probably it – a nicely balanced reaction to perfectly reasonable disappointment. Screw you, mental illness, I beat you today. Physical illness, I admit you got this one.

It's not a tooma

stephbg — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 02:07:03 GMT

For the last few months I've been bothered with pain in the lower joints of my right thumb, ranging from a sensation of mild bruising to oh-no-you-didn't system failure and collapse when trying something adventurous such as drinking a glass of water. It responded to codeine and amitriptyline, but those are at the heavier end of the pain relief spectrum and I try to keep their use to night time. I can't take anti-inflammatories of any kind.

Last week I got an x-ray and this morning got to see the report – it's osteoarthritis.

Dang.

I was a little surprised because it's several years since that particular joint got used extensively when I was a regular (computer) mouse user. Apparently it was a bit of a ticking time bomb just waiting for the last bit of wear and tear to start things rubbing together that ought not to be rubbing together.

The main problem here is that I have fibromyalgia – a nervous system that's prone to overreact to pain signals. I can go from a bruised feeling in the base of my thumb to electrical burning shocks up my arm and out along my index finger. If I don't stomp on that sort of thing right away it could set off a whole body flare. Like I need another trigger for those.

Osteoarthritis is common as mud. A lot of people have it. It's degenerative. I don't want it.

It doesn't like me typing right now so I'll have to stop before I get to the positive sunshiny part of the post.

Warning: shrinkage may occur

stephbg — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 11:43:34 GMT

Today was my 6 monthly visit to Dr T my psychiatrist. Six months is the default interval so in a sense that's good news. That said I would have brought the appointment forward if it wasn't already there. Things got very very grim around the turn of the year.

I've well established with Dr T that short of new research findings coming out, there's not really anything he can do or say any more to help me manage the psychiatric side of my life. This includes depression, anxiety, grief, pain, and failing artistic ambition – all the fun things in life. For the last couple of visits his only real practical contribution has been to renew the same small mountain of prescriptions and charge me a small fortune for the privilege.

So why do I go? Well, for one it gives me the illusion of medical supervision, a sanity check if you will (and he does) on how I go about managing the inconvenient things in life. Just because I've apparently been doing a good job of managing that small mountain of medications so far doesn't guarantee I'll keep doing so. It's possible I might start to abuse or corrupt the collection of psychological tricks and tools that I use to dig myself out of holes (it's happened before, it might happen again). I like having an alleged professional keep an eye on my experiments. And who knows, maybe one day my experiences might indirectly help another patient.

Those twice-yearly visits are also an opportunity to take stock of the events and experiences of the previous half year as I report/confess all the stuff that may have contributed to the state of my mental health. Mostly he just sits and listens, but occasionally I'll say something that makes his eyebrows lift and and his hands stray to the keyboard to add a note to my file. I like it when he takes notes - it's like he's validating that yes, something horrible really has happened to me.

Today he took quite a few notes. It's been a surprisingly rough half year, when you add it all up. I won't list it here because some of the worst of it I'm not at liberty to share on social media. The fact that I've not been able to share it on social media was another list item in itself. (Dr T definitely allowed that TribbleJ's glass shattering habits were a significant stressor.) We talked about camera gear for a while.

He agreed with all of my drug hypotheses, and approved all my experiments and changes in schedule or dosage. I *hope* he was paying attention – when he just lets it all happen I wonder if he's missed something. But hey, I have been at this a long time, and in the distant past I was an actual trained (and practising) scientist. Come to think of it I was working as a research scientist when I first broke and thus met him.

Next stop: July 2015.

TribbleJ survival notes

stephbg — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 13:46:53 GMT

I haven't been doing much at all in the way of long form blogging here, but over on Facebook the perilous adventures of TribbleJ are well documented. After he broke two (more) glasses in less than 24 hours over new year's eve I was a broken woman and conceded that maybe one day he might have to go back to the Cat Haven from whence he sprang. It's too much to recreate all of the fun and games here, but I wanted to cobble together some of my notes on where we are and where we might go.

My working theory with TribbleJ is that I'm his favourite cat toy, and that he wants to do whatever I'm doing. The house is full of potential disasters, but his favourite play spaces are the two places in the house where I'm most likely to be doing something interesting (where I'm conscious, basically) - laptop area and kitchen. He's my stalker.

He's at his most troublesome (i.e. attempting to get my attention) when my energy is lowest and I'm least able to entertain him. Unfortunately at such times my ability to cope is also at its lowest.

In the kitchen I've gained a measure of control by encouraging him to sit in a basket on a ledge where he can watch me, rather than getting on the actual benchtop and poking the things that I'm poking. It works for whole seconds at a time, but he's definitely getting better at it. I think we need a bigger basket.

One of his more annoying habits is to poke at the edges of my laptop, and particularly at the small collection of stationery I have on the lap tray it sits on. Until now I've responded to these pokes with a soft but firm push at his forehead (this is cat body language for "please stop what you are doing, I really don't want to fight you over it but I'm prepared to if necessary") plus the usual tssk tssk noises and "No Kitty!" Today I wondered if it had become a game to him, so I chose not to engage and sure enough after a couple of pokes he stopped on his own. Maybe I should just let him play with my favourite pencil and my precious rubber and remove the mystique completely. He's abandoned nearly all other cat toys unless I happen to be holding them.

Right now he doesn't seem to understand how heavy he is, nor where his feet are. By far my worst injuries have been when he's attempted to sit (or rather flop) somewhere on my person, slid off, then hung on with claws that suddenly seem an inch long. I was considering clipping them, but some have blood and nerves running almost to the tips, so we can't take much off anyway. Blunt claws can sometimes make more ragged wounds, so I'll leave him with his surgical scalpels for now. His play fights with Buffy are getting noisier as she has to fight more strenuously to get away from him. He's taller than her at the shoulder and weighs more. She's still dominant, but has to work for it and finding it a bit of a strain. No sign of actual bloodshed yet (plenty of mine, but no-one else's), but it's clear Buffy's summer ruff provides less protection around her throat than her winter fur and his teeth are getting too close for comfort.

His eyes are always wide and his tail is forever twitching – I find it hard to relax under those conditions because to me it means trouble. He very rarely responds to the slow blink which has always calmed other cats, but perhaps he's too young to understand that particular signal. He does respond in kind when he's already sleepy, but that hardly seems to happen. I can work on my reaction to his body language, and must remember he is not even 10 months old yet.

My plan: give him lots of positive attention and provide entertainment by pottering about the house as much as possible. He seemed to really enjoy today's paper shredding session as much as I did.

The end of an era with the Australian Computer Society (ACS) (2001-2015)

stephbg — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:19:48 GMT

At the end of January 2015 I will allow my membership of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) to lapse. It's true that for the last couple of years I was only paying discount membership rates because of my employment/health status, and during that time I rarely if ever attended branch events. But before that I was an active member of the society, and I'd worked hard to be accepted as a member. At my peak I was a Certified Computer Professional (MACS CPP), a professional accreditation similar to being a Certified Practising Accountant – not a bad effort for an Arts graduate.

[Note: The standard of writing in this post is embarrassingly poor, I know. I was better when I did it for a living, honest, but now I'm just too tired.]

Getting Started

In 2000 I was working for a small bleeding-edge technology company when I narrowly escaped a round of involuntary redundancies. My boss fought to keep me, but the senior management in the US weren't entirely sure what I did. On paper I had only my BA Hons (Psych); in practice I did a lot of things to help keep the software development team ticking over: I wrote specifications, user documentation, designed job and issue tracking systems, and a bunch of stuff like that. I had that job because I knew people who knew people who appreciated the value of someone like me.

It's a different prospect on the open job market, and that scare made me realise I would have huge trouble finding a suitable job if the current one were to disappear. I was a solid technical writer, a bit of a business analyst, a bit of a project manager, quite a lot of (but not quite entirely) a project officer, a good chunk of a QA manager, a useful tech support person for an obscure range of technologies, and I knew how to use a shredder. On paper I would be hard pressed to qualify for any single one of those jobs (except technical writing, and at the time I wanted more than that), and the weird jobs such as the one I held were constructed as required from the organisational and technical spaces in-between. Those *never* got advertised, they grew.

So, I decided to take the job scare as a warning and went looking for courses that I could afford, were at a useful level, and could be done at the same time as full-time work. To cut a long story short, I was pointed at the Australian Computer Society's (ACS)certification program which was exactly what I was looking for – an opportunity for experienced but unqualified people working in the industry to Get That Piece Of Paper. Even the assignments could be based on your current workplace issues, so you could impress the boss by occasionally producing (on your own time) scholarly works of direct commercial interest. The fees were steep, but much more reasonable if you were a member of the ACS, so I looked at joining.

Getting In

Joining the ACS at that time was easy if you had a degree in computer science. Even students of computer science were encouraged to be become associate members. You could still join if you had no degree and relevant experience, but that took a bit more effort. The further that experience drifted from programming, the more challenging the application process became. Let's say I was at the pointy end, and had to amass a pile of forms, references, recommendations and begging essays to become just an Associate Member of the ACS, but I did and it was Good.

Two and a half years later I'd finished my studies, a little older, and large amounts wiser, and with the equivalent of roughly a third of an MBA and near the top of many of my units. At some points I'm told I both puzzled and intrigued my instructors, which I thought was just awesome. I was then accepted as a full Member of the ACS. I had letters after my name!

I did some interesting things at work too, and felt much more confident that I'd be able to carve a niche somewhere new if necessary. As it turns out I never did get another job through standard interview channels, but the subsequent positions that found me wouldn't have happened without that study. The business studies were particularly valuable.

A few years later the ACS implemented it's Certified Professional program, whereby full members in good standing could become certified as Computer Professionals as long as they completed and recorded their quota of professional development hours each year. I gained a few more letters after my name but I also relished the feeling that I was officially a respected member of an ethical and professional organisation.

Getting Involved

The easiest way to collect those PD hours was to attend the monthly branch forum meetings to listen to generally very interesting topics in current ICT technology and practice. It could be challenging just to turn up to those meetings, never mind the networking chat-with-drinks-and-nibbles after the main presentation. As a decidedly non-corporate type of female in her 30's, I was not like the majority of silver-haired suit-wearing male academics and senior management types who came to these things. The other main group were the middle-aged (male, of course) engineering types with whom I was more familiar. Occasionally I'd spot another Lady or two, but generally much older than I. It took a little time but I became used to it it, determined not to be intimidated. More useful skills acquired.

I always sat near the front for a good view and a best chance of hearing, and was happy to ask questions here and there. Sometimes I'd buttonhole the branch president and suggest that perhaps the annual networking Golf Day was not the most encouraging of environments for the female membership to get involved. When the W-ACS (Women's ACS) group/branch/subcommittee/division/department/whatever was formed I was not shy in suggesting that perhaps the purple floral theme on the new W-ACS website was perhaps inappropriately fluffy in a professional context. (The website had been outsourced and the person in charge was embarrassed and horrified to discover this, so I felt OK about pointing it out.) With a brain inclined to see the human aspects of technical and organisational problems I was able to introduce different viewpoints here and there. Not many in the room had studied anthropology, for example, and yet I found it one of the most useful things in my technology troubleshooting toolkit.

So yes, I was Trouble, and proud of it. (I also said some remarkably stupid things out of nerves during unstructured chit-chat – that's a skill I never did master.)

Getting Up There

[Ed: All these presentations were available on line at one time but have been shifted or de-linked. At time of writing I've not republished them, but do intend to and will remove this notice when I update the links. If I can find them. Oops.]

I was never one for committees and such, but there was something I could do to earn my keep, and that was become the speaker for one of the monthly Branch Forums. The company I was then working for had developed and were rapidly improving an amazing data analysis tool which addressed many of the issues that were currently under discussion in the field, so I volunteered to speak. I doubt they were flush with speakers, so it was probably easy to get that first posting. I was immensely proud and terrified beyond belief to present: Combining Financial and Physicals People, Data and Tools in Business Planning (Australian Computer Society, Perth September 2007)

tl;dr Engineers and Accountants speak different languages, count different things, and play with different tools, but eventually their knowledge and data must be combined to produce a unified business outlook. This is how you do it.

It went down well :-) It must have, because I was asked back the following year to do another one, to be repeated in Perth and the new ACS Branch in Bunbury. What Can Your Technical Writer Do? (Australian Computer Society, Perth, Bunbury July 2008; System Administrators Guild of Australia, Perth August 2008)

tl;dr Technical writers are critical links in establishing clear communication between groups with wildly varying knowledge, assumptions, and expectations.

This was very exciting for me as it's the first time I'd been asked to travel to a speaking engagement. OK, it was Bunbury (a couple of hours drive away), but it was very symbolic for me nonetheless, and a great chance to have a long talk with the official who drove me there and back. The additional invitation to speak at the System Administrator's Guild was an added bonus, and a chance to speak to a very different (i.e. more practical) audience.

I'll note here that a room full of system administrators had just as much trouble setting up a digital projector as a room full of heads of computer science departments and IT managers.

A non-trivial part of "What Can Your Technical Writer Do?" focussed on risk management (communicating the wrong thing can have dire consequences after all), and on the basis of that I was asked to present at a local Security Risk conference. I have many friends who are academics who frequently jet all over the place to attend and speak at conferences, so all this may seem a little ho hum. But I was proud of myself from coming up through the ranks to get to a position to be heard. The wrong ranks at that – the number of psychology graduates at these things tended to approach zero, never mind being of the female persuasion.

Sadly by now my health had started to deteriorate significantly, and I struggled to prepare the conference presentation, eventually needing to withdraw. The organisers liked what I'd done so far, and with my permission published the solid but unpolished draft in the conference papers.

A call came out of the blue asking if I could fill in as an emergency speaker at a W-ACS event. I had a week or two to prepare, so used the Communication Risks presentation I'd been working on, with a slightly tweaked introduction since it really didn't have much to do with gender: Communication Risks (Australian Computer Society Women's Group, Perth August 2010)

From the introduction:

"Unfortunately I haven’t noticeably suffered from being a female in the IT workplace; I’ve felt no glass ceiling. I haven’t met anyone who’s done quite the same job that I do, so I can’t really compare pay scales. I’m childless and comfortably so. No sexual harassment. No obvious discrimination that I recall. I’ve worked in a statistically male-dominated workplace almost my entire career, but in the long run it hasn’t really been a problem for me. Sorry.
I’ve certainly SEEN huge amounts of sexism. And to a certain extent I’ve had to become one of the boys but I believe I’ve managed to avoid the trap of becoming a ball-crusher of some sort. Occasionally, I’ve also found it necessary to become one the girls. I’ve often had to become one of the developer group, or one of the consulting group, or one of the training group. You do what you have to do and so far I haven’t had to do anything too terrible.
I have noticed that I get more professional respect than I used to 20 years ago, but as far as I can tell I haven’t changed gender lately, so I put that down to experience and professional development. A good chunk of that professional development has been through the ACS and perhaps they have cured me of being a girl.
So without personal experience or any desire whatsoever to talk to you about feminist theory I’m either the best person to talk to a group of Women in IT, or the worst."

I got two job offers out of that night, but I had to present while sitting down and there was just no room in my life to pursue those opportunities. Over the years of my active ACS membership I received a lot of interest from recruiters—the networking was doing its job—but I never had any spare capacity to follow them up. But by golly it was nice to be asked, and I could have earned embarrassingly large piles of cash if health had permitted and I was more interested in chasing money than staying with projects and people that I knew were interesting and fun. For a while there I was spoiled for choice.

Falling Down

And now the sad part. My health did not permit. I managed to stay in the workforce for a couple of years longer than I might have because I was only able to work part time and my client could only afford me part time, so it worked for both of us. And then I was only able to work from home, for a shrinking number of hours per week (I did some of my best work between 4-6am). As a last hurrah I was given an extended remote handover/training gig for a few hours a week until that too came to an end. I don't have a date handy for that, but it must be something like two years now.

Quite apart from all the benefits listed above, my ACS membership had brought me a good deal on my mortgage, and the email address I'd been using for about 10 years. Those two attachments kept me paying my dues at the fortunately reduced unemployed rate for a while, even though I'd had to give up going to the monthly meetings—it was just too painful to sit in a chair for a couple of hours—and stopped keeping up with the society news. (I did send in the odd mildly angry letter about sexism.) I cleared the mortgage, and I've done my best to switch over my email address.

A week or two ago I took a deep breath and advised membership services that I would not be renewing my membership when it fell due on January 30 2015. It hurt. It hurt a lot. I thought I was long-since finished with grieving the loss of my career, but the ACS years represented the very best of it. I wanted to write this post to explain to people what it had meant to me and why it hurt so much to officially leave, to finally give it all up, but I was shocked at the effect it had on me. Last night I had a big cry but eventually felt better for it. It really is all gone now. I'm not that person any more, and never will be again. But damn I was good.

Bugger.

*sniff*

Hydrotherapy

stephbg — Fri, 07 Nov 2014 07:02:36 GMT

I am relieved beyond measure to have done hydrotherapy today, and was lucky enough to have the pool to myself for a really nice session.

I was so shattered yesterday it just wasn't possible, but I brutally drugged myself to sleep last night to aim for today's precious 2 hour window. I've been shattered a lot lately, as various life events have forced me into more activity than I have spoons for. Hit quite a low yesterday, wondering if the costs of hydro outweighed the benefits, and sad that after nearly a year I haven't managed to make any progress. I'd thought I might be up to two sessions a week, or walking laps in a proper pool (or indeed on land), or maybe even some limited actual swimming.

Instead it's a weekly struggle to get there just once. I do see occasional subtle signs of improvement – it's easier to get out of the pool at the end of the session (sometimes); it's easier to climb out of the bath (sometimes); when things are going well it's much easier to sit upright; my flexibility is the big winner and for that alone I'll keep doing it. But it is at best moderate exercise and it flattens me, every time. Only once have I reached the point where I felt "normal" (i.e. the same as before the session) on the day after going to the pool. Shortly after that I collapsed, had to miss a couple of weeks, and then pretty much had to start from complete scratch.

Some of these setbacks are pretty heavy inspiration to give up.

But I haven't.

Yet.

I'm sick. Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) are like vaccinations against fitness.

All I can do is try to get to the pool every day of the week until I make it, then start again the next week. I have to treat each session as an independent event, and try not to focus on a sense of progress. Abandon fitness goals all ye who enter here. Just because I managed to do 10x a certain exercise the last three weeks running, is absolutely zero guarantee I'll be able to do it even once the following week. Will I be utterly wiped out for an afternoon, a day, two, three? Who knows?

What I can do is concentrate on the sessions themselves, the warmth of the water and the blessed blessed buoyancy. Wonderful pain relief when motionless, and magnificent pain relief when I'm moving. I can dance in the water like I cannot on land. I am graceful in the water in a way I never really was on land even at my best. I can do Tai Chi, ballet, anything. Some sessions are better than others – it depends how bad I felt at the beginning, and who I'm sharing the pool with, but there's nothing like it. I count it as a mindfulness session and it soothes the brain as well as my body. I don't think the nasty little voices like the water, come to think of it.

Back to the pool next week then, if I can manage it.

Hail repairs update

stephbg — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 01:31:01 GMT

As I write this a Nice Man is up on the roof measuring up the patio roof area for replacement. I've had a lot of information thrown at me in the last ~~ten~~ forty minutes and I'll attempt to record it here.

Firstly, today's visit from RBD Building and Maintenance is the first of two quotes to repair the damage. I've yet to hear from the second builder, so there's an unknown delay there. The quotes will go to the insurance adjuster (I think that means the assessor?) who will choose one to go on with. Quotes will include patio roof repair, internal and external painting, and an electrical safety check. The assessor will choose the quote, then the builder will arrange all the subcontractors to come and do their thing. The insurance company pays someone (the builder I expect) and at some point I pay the excess to the insurer. Then the insurer pays the assessor.

Eeek, pause for ten minutes for an intense lecture about flashing and the evils of the construction methods used in the past, plus a bonus quiz about my render. My render is very popular with tradesmen (I almost wish that was a euphemism, but sadly no.)

I asked about the possibility of painting the dining room ceiling (11-12m²) as an extra cash job while the painters were here, and I was advised to negotiate directly with the painters when they called to book.

Ye gods, so many words and now I can't remember anything else of note, but basically there's a hell of a lot going on on my behalf. It's good to know those wildly expensive insurance premiums actually bought something.

Didn't get a chance to ask about how empty the rooms need to be to paint the ceilings, but I'm hoping (and frankly praying, with bonus goat sacrifice) that we won't need to shift the shelves and display cabinets lining the walls.

Now, if I can get some uninterrupted nap time I might just be able to get to a hydrotherapy session in the narrow window available.

Hail from hell

stephbg — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 12:44:46 GMT

tl;dr On Thursday 18th October 2014 at roughly 4pm Sector 7 was struck by an extreme hailstorm which destroyed our patio roof and caused some water damage to the ceiling. Also apologies for timey wimey vagueness and possible cruelty to tenses. Spoons have not been in good supply lately.

The Bureau of Meteorology had promised some wild weather for Perth that day, but we sit in a corridor that somehow often gets missed by the most interesting weather. The Great Hailstorm of 2010 bypassed us completely – it fell to the north, south, east and west but missed us. Yesterday's weather didn't miss.

This is what the storm didn't miss – our front patio.

When I heard a distant rumble of thunder (confirmed after careful listening that it wasn't traffic, a plane, or neighbourhood power tool usage) I checked the weather radar and saw several intense storm cells, coloured deep into the red on the rain scale. One of them was still a fair distance north of us, but close enough to account for the thunder. I like thunder, so I was happy when it started to get louder. The sky started to look interesting and all I could think about was louder thunder, yay!

May you live in interesting times.

Now it could be my imagination, but it looks like there's a bit of rotation happening up there.

Hmmm, looks like I won't be getting that CSI Photograph Enhancer job any time soon.

At some point I became aware of a roaring sound. It was a bit like wind through thick trees, but there was almost no wind. It might have been a plane flying low, perhaps trying to avoid the weather, but the pitch didn't vary. I went outside again and looked up and out to the north east, joining a couple of other neighbours who'd also come out to stare at the sky. My next best guess was that we could hear the sound of heavy rain, but the noise just kept going on and getting louder and louder with nothing to explain it. I didn't give hail a thought. Later one of the neighbours said the sound lasted for four minutes, and by golly it was *weird*.

Eventually the rain came, and we scattered for cover. But the rain was nothing much, just a light flurry coming in from the east. And then the west. And then it danced around for a while. Hmmm, I thought, that doesn't look good. Then the hail started – jagged pieces of ice tore down with incredible force. They weren't large, but they bounced and although I was several metres under cover I got hit by a couple of ricochets before I retreated behind the safety mesh front door. I noticed a small hole in the patio roof and thought it was annoying, but not worth repairing.

And then it really kicked off. I shut the main door and clung to a bit of internal wall that allowed me to see out of the kitchen window, but would offer protection if the glass went. When it storms I've usually got my nose pressed up against the glass, but this one I gave some distance to. The roar was incredible; one neighbour who also lost a patio roof described it sounding like an AK-47 (and I suspect she actually knows what that sounds like – details at 6). I could see the pond and the poor fish took a bit of a pounding – most of the floating duckweed was splashed out and replaced by shredded bits of garden.

Somewhere in there the hail turned to rain, but the gutters and drains were clogged with ice and debris. Water starting to run down some of the walls inside the front door, and water ran from the light fitting. Collected a couple of litres coming from there in a bowl, deployed a saucepan under another drip, and put down newspaper here and there to mop up other spills.

When it stopped I discovered the ruins of the patio roof and an incredible amount of hail lying around, some of it in drifts up to 20cm deep. The reason for the internal leak was soon apparent – a large drift of ice had gathered in the roof valley immediately above.

Some of the ice blocking my roof.

Some more ice blocking my roof. There's a patch of damp ceiling right underneath the worst of this on the right hand side.

It was quite Christmassy, if you ignore the season, the hemisphere, the damage, the fear, and pretty much everything else. I doubt (I hope) I'll ever see such a thing again.

The Sector 7 front yard. At least the hail squashed the weeds as well.

Piles of ice hung around for hours.

The individual hailstones weren't huge, and the biggest I found was only about 20mm in diameter, but they were really interesting shapes. I'm used to hailstorms coming in sweltering heat which melts any hail pretty quickly into smooth round balls and then it goes. After this storm the temperature dropped like a brick (I prepared myself to outrun the freeze down a corridor) and the hail hung around for hours. I wasn't together enough at that point to take pictures, but some of the shapes were really interesting, like chunky snowflakes. The body was roundish, but covered in sharp flat crystalline planes, and some had spikes and shards sticking out of the main body.

I tweeted a picture of the patio roof and it go retweeted a few times, but on Sunday morning I was rather surprised to find a Channel 9 news crew on my front doorstep. I was happy to let them take footage and chat, but I declined to be interviewed on camera (to be frank it was all about my appearance – yes I am that shallow. And puffy and pale.). I sent them next door and they got several minutes' worth out of them. It was quite fun to watch the cameraman duck and crouch trying to get interesting shots of a static object. In the end they went with a loving pan from the debris on the ground, up our bins and to the roof above. Sadly in the news report they described it as a backyard patio so it looks like you can't trust the media after all.

When I went to the shops on Sunday torn leaves were everywhere, but most noticeable on the street and in the shopping centre carpark, but some streets between my house and the shops looked quite clear. Picky things, storms.

Greenwood Village carpark the day after the storm.

Since the house was secure and seemed dry (and I was frankly dithery) I didn't try to get in touch with the insurance company straight away. The patio roof damage was clear but I wasn't sure how to handle the potential ceiling damage – was it something that would dry by itself, or was action required? I'm grateful I'm not at all familiar with the insurance claims process, but I wasn't sure if I could add water damage to the claim later if and when it turned up. I wanted to talk to a human, but my insurer keeps office hours. In the end I submitted an online claim on Sunday and just described all the damage, knowing that there would be a human involved at some point. The online claim process was not without difficulty – for one, my policy number didn't fit in their form so I sacrificed a leading zero (apparently there's an extra 1 they didn't need). I gave them the advertised four business hours to call me then chased them to clear up any problems. My claim was in, so I was told to expect a call.

Here I'm getting a bit fuzzy about the timing of things. If you're reading this it means I didn't go back to Facebook to check on the records I kept there at the time.

A call came the next day, telling me to expect another call from the assessor in a day or two. Half a day later I got the call from the assessor to say he'd be there the next day. By now the discolouration in the ceiling and especially under the eaves had started to show up so I was easier with the idea of showing the assessor where the water had gone.

About this point I got a gutter cleaning firm in to clean and inspect the guttering and roof. They found a couple of shifted tiles in the roof valley where the biggest drift was, and put them back. There was plenty of storm debris up there, but nothing to indicate that we were negligent, so that was good. I'm pleased to report that my ridge capping is officially "perfect" :-)

The insurance assessor came and he was a lovely bloke, called in from the country to handle some of the flood (sorry) of storm claims. I think it was storm + 5 or 6 days at that point. Much to my surprise he said he would expect the insurers would pay to paint the whole ceiling in the affected areas, so there wouldn't be an obvious edge. For once the house design works for us, as this means we might get quite a lot of ceiling painted as we'd been meaning to for years. And given that there were damaged areas under the eaves on three sides of the house, he said we'd get the whole lot redone. We've only had that new paint for six months or so, so it was sad to see it bubble and go yellow. Nice to know it will be back to new again. There was no question that the patio roof would be replaced!

And now I'm waiting for a call from the builders mid to late this week. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the claim had come together so far, but now the pace slows a bit which isn't too much of a problem. Somewhere in the process we'll get a visit from an electrician to check the affected light fittings, but in the meantime we're doing without them.

So that's where things stand. Looks like the carpet that got wet has dried out properly with no hint of mould. The ceilings weren't damaged enough to need replacing, and we can live without a few lights and external roofing for a while.

It's nice to know that those hideously enormous insurance fees were actually doing something useful.

Free to good home – wedding cake, only used once

stephbg — Sun, 14 Sep 2014 11:30:04 GMT

Near enough to 21 years ago, Husband and I got married in a fairly traditional manner, and this included a two-tiered fruitcake-based wedding cake. The lower tier was consumed at or around the time of the wedding, but the top tier remained intact and on display in our homes for, let's say a long time.

How long is a long time? Well, one tradition suggests that the last of the wedding cake should be consumed to celebrate the birth of the first child of the marriage, expected somewhere between 9 and 12 months after the wedding. A fruit cake soaked in alcohol and sealed in thermo-nuclear-rated sugar would easily last that time. After about 18-19 years we looked at our cake, still standing proud in a display case, and thought it really was time to let it go. (Although I had harboured thoughts of it being a critical supply of sugar after the apocalypse.)

After all this time and multiple house moves, much of the spidery icing sugar decoration remained intact.

But how do you dispose of a wedding cake? You can't just chuck it in the bin. For a long time we looked for opportunities to give it a decent send-off. Viking funeral was high on the wish list, but the logistics defeated us. Death by flame was impossible for many months of the year, and tricky enough at other times. I'm not a fan of boats nor especially attached to the ocean, so burial at sea never happened. Vague thoughts of launching it off a cliff into the sea never came to pass ("Fly! Be free!"). A shallow grave in the traditional shallow grave hotspot of Perth located conveniently close to Sector 7 seemed a little too grim, even for our dark sense of humour. We liked the idea of cutting it up and distributing the pieces to friends to deal with as they saw fit (we really didn't mind how after that point), but that involved way too much organisation.

Ever hopeful--but without any specific plans--we took the cake with us when we went down south to the Pemberton region a couple of weeks ago (it also went to Dunsborough last year). Nothing really occurred to us for the bulk of our stay, but when we decided to drive home via Nannup that gave us ideas. We honeymooned in Nannup, and hadn't been back since. A shallow grave in the forest around Nannup started to look good (there's several stories embedded in there), but it was somewhere along the scenic Nannup-Balingup road that we found the perfect spot.

A spot.

OK, maybe not the perfect spot, which would have been in thicker forest, but we didn't want to trespass on private land nor defile a national park. A remote roadside copse of trees it was, surrounded by startlingly green fields and close to a flowing river. Decent granite-based geology decorated the landscape. It was quiet, pretty, and simply Felt Right. We took the following shot in situ, then buried it amongst the deep leaf litter.

A spot, close up.

Hopefully we've done no more to the local environment than make a lot of bugs quite happy, and possibly drunk.

We took a selfie for posterity and drove on, forever leaving this symbol of our union to enjoy the great outdoors.

Husband and I after ~20 3/4 years of marriage, somewhere near A Spot.

And that's how you dispose of a wedding cake in the event of a long and happy marriage.

Compose yourself

stephbg — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 08:31:05 GMT

I'd promised The Catmobile a run today to help chase the cobwebs out of her engine. Due to lack of spoons and thus imagination I ended up in the Sorrento Surf Life-Saving Club carpark, which is where we usually go to look at ocean sunsets and such. By pure co-incidence the club was hosting an art show, so after a period of time sitting on a wall in the sun I thought I'd give it a look. I then discovered I'm some kind of monster. So, a post in which I ramble incoherently about art...

It was a community art show, vastly dominated by landscapes, seascapes, still lives (lifes?), sad pets, and mutant children. Only a couple of honest abstracts in the lot, not counting the landscapes etc that were insufficiently realistic to be labelled real, but were insufficiently abstract to be "properly" abstract.

Most of them hurt to look at.

I've been in shows like this. I've submitted work like this, and to be perfectly honest if I'd managed to produce any out of a good half of the entries I would have been thrilled to bits. But thrilled to bits by just the bits – what was overwhelmingly lacking in most of these paintings was a complete lack of composition and a lot of perspective worth of escher girls (so many horses with broken legs :-( ). So yes, that tree looked great, and those eagle feathers were very clever, but that building next to that tree is apparently made of diamond-shaped walls, and that beak looks like it's been caught in a car door. That creepy child with the beautifully rendered hat is *floating* above the sandy beach(?) on which it romps *shudder*.

Good bits do not an artwork make.

One artist stood out with his acrylic outback landscapes. They were so perfectly composed and competently painted I nearly fell asleep in front of them. All were sold.

I guess these days ahead of all other considerations I need art to have strong bones, and that takes real talent. Deliberate wrongness can be the best part of a work, but accidental wrongness just plunges me into the valley of the uncanny and hurts all the more for it. Those few precious good abstracts were like oases to me, but the relatively low prices being asked for them probably says more about the artists' environment than the absolute quality of the work.

Are you painting this sort of thing (trees, pets, houses, roses)? Trying to improve your craft? Bravely exhibiting in community shows? Having fun? KEEP DOING IT. Don't be put off by people like me. Yes, people like me are out there (or out here, since I'm there too, here) but if you think you're making art, damnit you're making art. If you're not sure you're making art but want to, keep trying. I may not buy it and hang it in my bedroom, but that's irrelevant (unless you're a professional and then you should probably care at least a little about the market, and have some actual skill.)

Vale Giardini's

stephbg — Sun, 17 Aug 2014 08:46:25 GMT

One of the very few regular outings I get to enjoy is a semi-regular Sunday breakfast with Husband. Mostly we go to Leederville, and when there we habitually go to Giardini's Cafe.

Giardini's holds a special place in my heart because it was there I first tasted white chocolate cheesecake. I also remember going there on the night of our wedding rehearsal, where I failed to eat much of anything. We've ended up there many times over the years for various gatherings, and by virtue of having the most comfortable and generally available al fresco seating it became our favoured spot for breakfast. If we couldn't get a spot outside we could usually get the front corner position right by the window and watch the passing parade from there.

The place was usually packed by mid-morning and service could get a bit slow, so we generally arrived around nine-ish. This morning we happened to be up and about and in need of medicinal bacon a bit earlier than usual, so we arrived at 8:15am. I figured any self-respecting cafe that served Sunday breakfast would be open by 8am, but when we arrived the al fresco area was bare. According to the posted opening hours it should have been open, but there was movement inside and someone came out and said yes, they were open, could we come back in 15 minutes.

Inertia is a wonderful thing. Having had a disappointing breakfast experience last week I was really looking forward to the reliable service and food at our usual haunt. Where my response to this request may otherwise have been something along the lines of "Screw that", no other establishment grabbed our attention. I lacked the gambling will to go to somewhere unknown, and the other places on the strip we'd tried before had failed to become the regular spot for good reasons (mostly furniture-related I'll grant, but there you go. Life is hard--I would not recommend a career in the hospitality industry.)

So, we wandered up Oxford Street to peer in shop windows and came back again in probably much less than 15 minutes, but still we marched in. From there until we left we were the only two customers in the place, versus an estimated end-count of five staff. It was very weird. Very Very Weird. The place looked to be in the process of redecoration from Italian to Chinese (province unknown, pardon my Western cultural imperial vagueness) and most tellingly the Licensee/Manager sign had been papered over with a new name. Our spot had clearly undergone the dreaded Change of Management. Did this explain its abandonment by the usual clientele?

The menu and prices were the same, but there was pepper on the table. Old Giardini's had never before trusted its patrons to wield their own pepper. Personally I was glad to see it, but slightly uneasy at what this development might signify. (The less-than-ideal place we went to last week had also offered its customers the freedom of the pepper – was this a bad sign?) I ordered fried eggs on toast with bacon (I usually go with scrambled but somehow craved hot runny yolk – is that some kind of chicken vampire thing?) and Husband had eggs benedict as he often did. When the order came we were confusingly offered cracked pepper from the giant No Customer Can Touch This pepper grinder, so there was another pepper-pot mystery.

The food (and coffee) was not up to the usual standard, which was sad but not terribly surprising. Had the other regulars discovered this fact in the weeks before? It would explain their conspicuous absence. We pondered missed Today Tonight horror stories of health department violations and food poisoning episodes that might have kept more savvy diners away. It's hard to pin down exactly how the food was Not Quite Right, but it lacked some subtle artistry. There was no sense of composition on the plate, no zing at all to the flavour, and felt very much like what you'd expect from the restaurant at a 3 star hotel. It was ok, but I want more from these precious outings than ok. We—like everyone else apparently—are now in the market for a new favourite breakfast spot that's as handy to home.