damerell

Celebrating. My 35^th birthday! With a picnic at the allotment (and the allotment fox, and a slow worm, and THE WOODPECKERS); and birthday cake courtesy of my mother. :)

Reading. Finished The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Susanna Clarke, and enjoyed myself so doing!

Then What An Owl Knows, Jennifer Ackerman, showed back up from the library. I am making better progress this time and continue to enjoy Owl Facts.

I have made 0 progress on any of the books on pain, and The Silence Factory (Bridget Collins) has jumped to the top of my read-next list courtesy of getting to the front of the holds queue much sooner than I'd expected to...

Writing. PIP submission got to Good Enough by very early Friday morning. That has been most of my make-words-go brain this week, shockingly.

Playing. I Love Hue: I am Infuriatingly Stuck, presumably at more or less the point I got Infuriatingly Stuck last time. I am more-or-less at the point where I am going to just restart the level and hope I get luckier on my second attempt, but that is never a particularly satisfactory!

Cooking. Choy sum with oyster mushroom sauce, garlic, and peanuts: didn't really get the point of the peanutty topping; unlikely to bother with again. White miso ramen with asparagus and tofu: I was extremely dubious about this based on reading the recipe, and somewhat to my surprise wound up actually really liking the broth; not a high priority for eating in-season asparagus in future, though. Bay, rye and hazelnut cake with poached rhubarb: Y E S, especially using the poaching syrup as a drizzle!

Eating. A made me Saturday brunch waffles, and conveniently we had leftover picnic strawberries and some cream that needed using up, so I got fancy strawberries-and-Chantilly-cream waffles as a Birthday Treat :)

Also had a cream tea at Wimpole early on Sunday afternoon, and curry from a restaurant in Cottenham following Terrible Further Sunday Afternoon Adventures. Some of my mother's bread; birthday cake courtesy of my mother also; also also lentil moussaka ditto :)

Exploring. Visited Home Farm at Wimpole Hall, where we scritched piglets and observed a variety of rare breed hens, rare breed ducks, chicks and ducklings ditto, The Horses, The Rabbits, The Bogat Goats incl. Baby Goats, and we waved to the donkeys, in addition to being very pleased about the various swift-ish things and sparrows making their way in and out of the barns.

Also spent an afternoon sat at the junction of the A10 and Landbeach Road, for terrible hobby purposes, and relatedly a little bit of time poking around the even-more-immediate vicinity of the NEW SITE for Admin: the LRP, aaand also drove past the house we are not even remotely going to buy just to sort of wist at it.

Making & mending. Sawed some wood! All of the bits for railway sleeper raised bed #1 are now in position and I've filled it; but on reflection I deemed the 180mm screws Too Short so am awaiting delivery of some 300mm for Final Assembly. (Whereupon I get to decide to do it all again for bed #2...)

Growing. First broad beans will be ready for harvest any day now (and in fact if we wanted to eat some immature pods I could have the first handful already). Peas are starting to flower! Strawberries are extremely Set Fruit and might even start ripening at some point soonish!

I am extremely excited about how happy the raspberries are looking.

Have sown all of my remaining elderly quinoa seed, which I am not expecting to do much of anything, and will be pleasantly surprised if it does; having one final go at getting any viable plants out of the pineapple physalis seeds I bought at the beginning of the season; have been Donated some Moneymaker tomatoes and a basil plant from my mother; really really need to get the cucumbers started, but Not Quite Yet.

Have started putting squash various outside. Need to finish prepping beds for them to actually go into.

Oh! And the tomatoes are also going out! Annoyingly I lost track of which were Orange Banana and which were Blue Fire so I'm not entirely sure I'm going to actually manage planting up a rainbow of the things, but -- fingers crossed, eh?

Observing. IN ADDITION TO the excellent allotment wildlife and the Creatures at Home Farm, we enjoyed various plantings around Wimpole (including the incredibly striking Very Tall Straight-Stemmed Ferns), and while Doing A Traffic Survey At The A10/Landbeach Road Junction saw also: lambs! corvids harassing a red kite! more swift-y things! goldfinches??? wild rabbits, to A's delight. Some geese, honking merrily away to themselves.

It has been a particularly good week for Creatures. :)

I was caught unawares in the background of photos taken yesterday after the game, and I was so amused by the exhaustion evident in my position and expression that it had to become an icon.

(I was revived with cake and a drink shortly after this was taken.)

 My sister Gillian lives in the Pennines (an area we both love), and she does fell-running. Rather like myself with morris-dancing, she's suffered from injuries and other issues, but picks herself up with determination, gets back to fitness and starts all over again.

For something you love, it's worth it.

This year, she's taken on a really big challenge - an 8-day expedition race in Scotland,  going from Fort William to the top northwest corner of Scotland (the lighthouse at Cape Wrath).

All the participants wear trackers, so you can follow them.

I can see that she's made a good start and is now at Glenfirman

If you want to look, click here.  She's number 92.

I'm rooting for her to make it to the end, but it's a tough course!

 Great piece of Murderbot fic Secrets by Penny G.

I'm not normally a big fan of Gauathrin, but this story really drew me in.

Penny does the kind of fan fic I love - tight canon-com-pliancy, that picks up on small details and uses them constructively to creat 

Yesterday Kodiaks B played Solent Valkyries in Gosport. I hired a 9-seater and drove a bunch of the team down and back, and in between played a game, captaining the team for the second time. For some reason I am tired this morning.

Some milestones:

• It was the first win for Kodiaks B, certainly this season and I think ever.
• I got my first points for Kodiaks, ever: a goal and an assist, doubling my lifetime points. (1 assist for Women's Blues two seasons ago, 1 assist for Warbirds late last year)
• That's my first recorded goal ever (I scored my first goal ever in a scrimmage at the end of last year)
• For extra hilarity I did not actually score this goal, it was an own goal credited to me because I was the last Kodiaks player to touch the puck before the poor Valkyrie kicked it in her own net. A point is a point and I'll claim it. But I have yet to actually score a goal in a formal game.

Also at one point my stick blade got stuck in the boards at the side of the rink when I was digging for a puck. I couldn't get it out, so I went skating hard back to the bench yelling for a change and instead one of my teammates passed me her stick, which I grabbed at speed and went straight back into play. So dramatic! So much fun!

(the ref retrieved my stick and returned it to the bench and I got it back when I changed with my line; it is fine from its adventure)

Late this afternoon or, well, early this evening, getting a very late start on a flying visit to my parents (I have been fed birthday cake), my train of thought was abruptly completely derailed when I finally worked out what was going on with the the individual loitering on the grass outside our block.

They were walking their lizard.

Or, more accurately, their lizard (possibly an iguana???), complete with harness and lead, had plonked itself firmly in a very bright patch of sunshine and was making it very clear (tail curled up and everything!) that it liked this basking spot, thank you, and had no intention of going anywhere.

The human tried at one point to gently encourage it to contemplate moving. The lizard, without moving at all, became visibly heavier.

The human, resigned, returned their attention to the phone in the hand that wasn't holding the lead.

Today I have: moved my body, joyfully, in ways I did not imagine might ever be possible, only a handful of years ago. I've provided expert support for a disability benefits submission. I've contacted people to let them know I can reunite them with things mislaid but also loved. I've played with stationery. I've eaten cake. I've built structures and made music and read books and tended plants. I've watched foxes and a slow worm and a woodpecker (greater spotted, apparently, though I didn't get a good look at it), and listened to the yelling from its nest. I've written to my government -- one small action toward justice. I've put water out for birds.

I've travelled around the sun thirty-five times.

It's been a good day.

Item the first: I totally failed to mention, yesterday, but one of the things we Observed the teenage coots doing -- okay, well, one of them was successfully managing to invert itself, Köpfchen in das Wasser, Schwanzchen in die Höh' -- but we only observed this after having already spent Quite Some Time laughing (delightedly) at its sibling, which was making great big determined accelerating shoulder-shrug motions, and separately managing to put its head and only its head underwater, but had not yet quite managed to work out how to combine the two movements so as to rotate itself around its axis. I realised while trying to describe this earlier that the reason for my feeling of Great Affinity is just how much it looks to have in common with learning to do a wheelie.

Item the second: cake of the day.

Item the third: the tomatoes I planted out and then abandoned for a couple of days seem to be none the worse for wear for it (and I established this on the trip where I took the water condensed in the dehumidifier from the latest round of laundry up to the plot, in an empty milk flagon, for the purpose of watering the blueberry, on the basis that the water butt is running low and there's still no rain forecast...).

Item the fourth: I am continuing to greatly enjoy Owl Facts. Favourite so far, which I am utterly failing to track down a specific reference for: apparently owl chicks start vocalising before they emerge from the egg, at the point at which they breach the air cell in their Containment! which you need a very sensitive microphone to pick up. The second favourite is a long shaggy dog story that I might manage to type up tomorrow, but I'm not holding my breath.

Item the fifth: I am now at two nights running for "watch thinks my sleep quality is significantly better if I spend ten minutes listening to wave recordings after lying down and lights out". If it continues to hold I will be both very pleased (about having a way to improve energy levels) and mildly irritated (about not being able to replicate this effect some other more convenient way). We Shall See.

 Do you ever click on 'Network' on any of your friends' pages?

I've done that several times recently, and added several new and interesting people to my subscription/access list as a result.

I think that's how I found Puddleshark - who turns out to a. Live in Dorset and loves visiting the kind of places I love to visit.  Especially beautiful gardens, and b.  Is  a fellow dancer, belonging to a team I know well, and I have definitely met her in real life!  (But will have to wait until Anonymous Morris and Holly Copse Molly meet up at a festival or dance out, to work out which member of the team she is!)

A persuaded me to make the ridiculous stale pistachio croissant breakfast. This was absolutely the right call and I am very happy about it.

It is definitely the weather for linen. Went out to meet A and acquire dinner ingredients; bimbled home via watching baby birds (two sets of teenage coots! two batches of Canada gosling!) and eating pastries and collecting a pile of drugs for me.

And then this evening I got myself onto the mat! Did a sequence! Full of happy chemicals about it! (Laughing at my brain for trying to pull the "nooooooooo if you get on the mat you'll want to do the whooooole seeeeequence and that would be baaaaaaad".)

Sleep now? Sleep now.

https://dotat.at/@/2025-05-13-if-is.html

About half a year ago I encountered a paper bombastically titled "the ultimate conditional syntax". It has the attractive goal of unifying pattern match with boolean if tests, and its solution is in some ways very nice. But it seems over-complicated to me, especially for something that's a basic work-horse of programming.

I couldn't immediately see how to cut it down to manageable proportions, but recently I had an idea. I'll outline it under the "penultimate conditionals" heading below, after reviewing the UCS and explaining my motivation.

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I managed to kick my cold enough to play the ice hockey tournament Saturday and Sunday afternoons. One of my teammates gave me a lift from Cambridge rink to Romford each day. It's an easy drive and we get on well, and the tournament itself was great fun. Exhausting, but fun and definitely great for developing and improving play. The other four teams playing were pretty friendly and we made some connections and enthusiasm for playing more games against each other as individual teams.

Unfortunately my ride home got injured in the last few seconds of the last game of the tournament on Sunday evening, a "needs A&E and good drugs" level injury. So I went with him to the local A&E on the grounds they'd probably want a responsible non-drugged adult to get him home, and it'd only be a few hours, right? Ahahaha, it was 16 hours before we got out and it was not a good experience.

Also neither of us had showered between "playing lots of ice hockey" and "showing up at A&E", so very sorry to anyone who had to sit too near either of us.

I got a very minimal amount of work done today on my phone from the hospital, but went to bed for a few hours as soon as I finally got home and feel more human now. I will have to figure out whether I take leave for today or make up the effort elsewhere in the week. But that is a problem for tomorrow; tonight I'm hoping to reset my sleep schedule by going to bed on time.

 Sorry for the recent lack of posting.

Ever since my new grandson started nursery, he's picking up new bugs roughly every ten days. Then both his parents and grandparents fall ill.

There are few things worse than a small baby awake in the night feeling hungry and unwell, and his parents not feeling well either.

The first bug was so bad that we had to take him for two nights - his parents looked like zombies.

I'm currently collapsed with bug number 4...

Reading. SEVERAL.

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Next up is... probably skim-rereads of a couple of books on pain I've already read, making notes this time, and then onward to the stack I haven't actually read before. (One of these is Mindfulness for Health, which I expect to be middlingly annoyed by (the last time I tried it I put it down in frustration fairly early on, at the point at which it became clear that both authors were fundamentally healthy people who'd had An Accident; this time round actually assessing the impact of that perspective on the advice is kind of the point). Then there's Hurts So Good, and finally Touch, which I acquired from Oxfam on the basis that if nothing else its chapter on pain is actually titled "Pain and Emotion".

(I am not going to get through all of these next week, but I will make some progress. I also maybe slightly searched the library ebook catalogue for "pain" and thereby added yet more recent-ish things to my reading list; Abdul-Ghaaliq Laikhen's books are a fairly high priority.)

Writing. Quite a lot of PIP submission (for someone else, at least!). Not done yet. This remains the priority for the next week.

Watching. The new Old Guard 2 trailer!

Playing. I Love Hue: The Alchemy now COMPLETE, and... so is The Ascension/Earth.

Cooking. A was away. Consequently, two recipes from East that they expected to dislike: black rice congee, of which I am definitely a fan, and a kimchi fried rice I had no objection to but no particular plans to ever make again.

Also the caramelised onion and chilli ramen, about which we were both meh although!!! I did! get to use choi sum THAT I HAD GROWN, which is still novel enough to be exciting; a recipe for tinker's cakes from a tiny cookbook I bought for EYB indexing purposes -- Welsh cakes with grated apple, which I liked enough to probably make a note of; and a slightly underwhelming "saucy Japanese greens with sticky sesame rice" that did at least use up some of the spring greens in last week's veg box. (I then made something up the next day to use up the other half, and that worked much better for our tastes: ginger/garlic/mushroom stir-fry sauce/little bit of mirin.)

Eating. CHOI SUM FROM THE GREENHOUSE (I am extremely excited about this, in case you couldn't tell). I think my great excitement about my first British asparagus of the season was last week? And also first British strawberries of the season yesterday, as the greater part of my treat for Anti-Migraine Stabs.

I have also been very much enjoying apple and pear juice + angry water + ice + a little bit of fresh (garden/field) mint.

Making & mending. Actually dug some trenches and started moving the railway sleepers around??? I have a whole entire outline of a raised bed in a place I've meant to have one since I got the plot in the first place?????

(First layer needs screwing together and then I need to sort myself out corner posts to attach next-layers-up to, and also I need to decide whether I want to have it two deep or three deep, but feeling v positive about this.)

Growing. Choi sum!!!

Also: despite my earlier misgivings the redcurrant is actually doing astonishingly well compared to the last several years, so good job me on that particularly vicious pruning??? Gooseberry also looking extremely promising; jostas I am much less surprised about looking good.

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Observing. A saw a slow worm at the plot today! Also the allotment fox; also, on my way home from the allotment the other evening, the previously mentioned Gawky Teenage Fox. At home, we've seen the bat! Also there is Yelling coming from a portion of the hedge that very notably has a pair of robins shuttling back and forth to it at fairly high frequency. I'd rather it weren't so dry, but the fact that it is means I've had the wood pigeons and the corvids balancing in deeply ungainly fashion on the water dish in order to drink, which has been fun to watch.

We are less happy about the local outdoor cats having decided that they too wish to take up birdwatching on our patio.

Even I am ... mostly moved in.

I need to copy some e-mail data over from the one account I can only access via POP, and Mate is not behaving... brilliantly... in terms of "the touchpad doing what I tell it to" or "letting me have All the screen resolution" or for that matter "doing sensible things with system themes and program icons", but it's not yet annoyed me enough to cause me to seriously consider switching away from it.

I have not yet applied stickers but thankfully A's is already covered with stickers so it is possible to tell the two of them apart while closed.

It is as ever an enormous relief to not be stuck with the Sad Dell as my primary machine. Long may it continue.

(The delay in getting all the way set up -- it arrived on Thursday -- was in no small part that I had blithely trusted A when they told me they'd got the hard drive out of the previous laptop. I had not gone digging around in it myself and I was not in great brain day-of so when I hit the point where New Laptop wouldn't boot off Old Drive, and the partitions made no sense to me, so I put it to one side to be an A problem when they got back from away-for-work.

... they stared in utter perplexity for A Bit, in a "this surely could never have possibly worked" way, and eventually went "... I'm going to check whether there's another hard drive in the old laptop, because that's the only way I can think of that this could have worked, ever."

... they had indeed ADHDed an entire hard drive.)