41/52 2017

Week 41
09 - 15 October




This is the week Jamie turned two. I'm glad, therefore, to have this picture from his last few days of being One.



It's not possible to overstate how excited Jamie gets about builders and associated vehicles. As well as gazing enraptured from the window, we also got to know a group of builders who were doing work on several houses that were so close to ours I never even lost my WiFi signal when we went to investigate. For their part, the builders and the homeowners fell in love with this serious little boy who was content to stand quietly out of the way, gripping his mother's hand, as long as he was allowed to gaze at the "mix mix", the "dig dig", and of course the beloved Van.

The last stage on two of the houses was to lay brick paving at the front, and on both occasions Jamie was delighted to be invited to help with the sand (parental pride moment: that's how confident everyone was by then about Jamie's demonstrated ability to be a very good boy, observe limits, and not make us regret it). He was so thrilled, fetching the toys from his little sand tray in our yard and being allowed to go for it with literal tons of sand alongside his very best adult friends.

Not Blown Up After All

... just a bit tired out.

The New Year fireworks were a resounding success, with the only casualty being one of L's gloves which got singed by a lighter. Then Steve and I enjoyed one day to rest, one day back at work, and one day to get the house passably tidy in readiness for my mum to come and stay for a few days.

We got lots of nice Christmas presents from my family, including a shiny and very spiffy set of saucepans. Nice as they are, sadly, these have not been the accessibility revolution Mr Rhodes seems to think. Firstly, as you will see from their lovely little "42" diagram on that page, the recommended angles only work if you have kitchen surfaces at well below waist height. Secondly, if you watch the video, you'll see that to drain from the saucepan, you need to hold on to the knob on top of the lid as you tilt - fine when it's empty, but in a real world situation that means your fingers are right in the path of the concentrated column of steam as you drain the boiling water away. And thirdly, you actually need more strength in your arms to manipulate it than with a standard pan, because there's no way to get a two-handed grip in order to use the handle as a lever to create stability.

So don't buy them to try and make cooking easier. But, that said, they are very nice saucepans, with a lifetime guarantee. Using the variable draining-holes in the rim of the lid to release varying amounts of steam is handy. And they are fully backward-compatible with a regular colander in the normal way. ;-)

Christmas dealt with, it was just about time for my birthday, which was the main reason for mum visiting. I took down my lovely tree and packed it neatly away for next year.

Between all of them, and Christmas and my birthday, my family have bought me just about every book that was on my Amazon Wishlist. I was absolutely bowled over. I always have to read every book at least twice before I can consider it not-new, and I can't read just new books (it's an ME thing) so this should keep me excited about having books of newness for at least three months, if not longer.

It was good having mum about for a few days. We've always talked lots. As a kid, she would tuck me in to bed every night and we'd chat for a few minutes. It was my opportunity to talk, as there was no getting a word in edgeways with my sister about. In sixth form, my Thursday morning free period was designated as our Cream Cake Day. When I lived in my little flat, I would come over to use the washing machine and stay for a cuppa and a bit of a chat about nothing very much at all. When I got sick, we had a cup of tea most days, and it added routine and a strong element of familiarity to a world which had been turned upside down. Since I've moved to Warwickshire, we still email or speak on the phone if we have anything particular to say... but it was nice to once again just sit and enjoy a quiet, non-pressured chatter with each other.

That said, it was also nice when mum had left, to be able to come home from work and fall apart by myself, without feeling that I had to put a sociable face on. I love my mum but we probably shouldn't live together.

The people at work gave me cake and flowers, which made me squee with delight. Steve is getting me a watch, just as soon as we actually have a spare half-hour to go into town together so I can try some on. He's also sort-of got me a combination printer/scanner/photocopier doodah, which will link to our wireless network and allow us to print from anywhere in the house. He says this doesn't count as a birthday present though, since it's for both of us to use and it wasn't wrapped, he just happened to buy it the evening before my birthday. I think it counts though. It was definitely a surprise - he only went out for a pint of milk.

So far being 27 isn't much different from being 26, except it's increased that feeling of being stuck in a rut.

Finished Object: Birthday socks

Birthday socks
Originally uploaded by girl_of_bats

Hooray, hooray, what a wonderful day, for I have finished my Birthday Socks!

Actually I finished them a few days ago, but what with the miserable weather and everything going on, I didn't get round to photographing them. And what with the miserable Unbloggables going on, I didn't get round to blogging about socks, because really, I have too many things in my life to care about this month which is kind of making knitting accomplishments fade into the back files of my brain. And you can see how bright these socks are - that's some serious fading.

If there's something I'm supposed to be doing for you (writing or making or calling or fixing or whatever) and I haven't done it or I'm late with it, I'm honestly sorry. Odds are I haven't forgotten (Clare and Anne in particular, you are on the Whiteboard of Memory and I will get to it) but a reminder never hurts.

I have also finished and photographed the Top Seekrit Project. I will publish the pictures and the pattern (such as it is) in about a month, when the recipient has recipificated it. Suffice to say I am happy with it, and having a bit of an Umm-Ah about whether I should make another one for myself.

Finished Item: Birthday Sock

Sock on a biscuit jar
Originally uploaded by girl_of_bats

Of course, socks traditionally come in pairs, and I have cast on Birthday Sock 2, but the way things are at the moment, even the completion of One Sock is enough to warrant celebratory feelings.

It's... not a good time. Several things, some bloggable, some not, are causing a certain amount of stress right now. A small taster...

I suspect that tomorrow I have to call the Tax Credits people and/or Royal Mail because of a problem with the paperwork I sent by Recorded Signed For post last week not being flagged as 'delivered' yet. This is going to be made more difficult by me being rather iller than usual at the moment. I suspect I have to make a doctor's appointment as it's getting to the "beyond a joke" point - without Steve, I would be well and truly stuffed by now. I'm worried that even with Steve's help I might end up having to take time off work if my health doesn't pick up again sharpish. I have to sort out some more stuff with the DWP as well.

You get the picture.

I also have to write up a feedback report for Access to Work. Well, I don't have to, which is why I haven't done it yet. But I've been asked to, and I feel like I should.

I need to get some serious praise in for my current adviser, who has been fabulous and got all sorts of things (the taxis, the squishing machine) sorted out pretty much next-day, and I want to say nice things about the scheme in general.

But I also really need to let them know about the problems I have encountered with the system, like the trouble I had getting onto the scheme, the attempts to make One Size Fit All, the catch-22 of not being able to apply for the scheme until you have a definite job offer, but the difficulty of negotiating for a job offer without knowing whether you're likely to get help from the scheme or not.

Actually, if anyone can think of some good phrases I could use, please do put them in the comments, because at the moment I'm having trouble properly saying things I want to say without (a) it coming out wrong and everyone looking confused, (b) half of it coming out before my brain goes off at a tangent and I fail to communicate my original point leaving everyone looking confused, or (c) it coming out right, but far too abrupt/rude/blunt and leaving everyone looking distinctly pissed off. I need all the help I can get.

The sock came out well though.

Obligatory Incapacity Benefit Post

My birthday improved no end over the two days after the actual day. Also, Steve and I have decided that we'll probably not make a big thing about his birthday in February, and just have an "official" birthday for the two of us some time in late spring/early summer.

Every disability blogger and their dog is doing a post about the current government/media demonisation of disabled people. I thought about it but wasn't sure if I could rustle up a whole coherent post about it. Here's the main points I would like The Great British Taxpayer to bear in mind:

1) Not every disabled person is on benefits. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest the possibility that there may be more disabled people who are not on Incapacity Benefit, than there are people on Incapacity Benefit who do not have a disability.

2) Not every person on benefits is a fraudster. I accept there will be some fraud, but that doesn't mean every claimant is a con-artist, just like one City businessman doing a phenomenal tax fiddle doesn't imply that every taxpayer in the country has dodgy accounts.

3) If you really know a person who is fraudulently claiming Incapacity Benefit - you actually know for a fact that they no longer have or never had the specific problems which they claim stop them from working, or you know that they are doing undeclared paid work - then report them. Please. You'll be doing us all a favour. The National Benefit Fraud Hotline is 0800 854 440...

3a) ... but please bear in mind that you do not have access to their medical history and that "disability" does not equate to "uses a wheelchair all the time". That there is a difference between managing to do something once a week (with a wheelbarrow full of medication, and time to both prepare and recover from the effort) and being capable of doing it several times a day every day. That some people have hidden conditions and look perfectly fit and able right up to the (unpredictable) point where they really don't. And that many people are using all their resources to cope with the basics of day-to-day living (bathing, dressing, cleaning, cooking, eating, attending dozens of medical appointments) and just don't have any spare for putting 37 hours of work each week on top of that.

You will look like a prat if you report Bob because you saw him walk to the corner and post a letter with no difficulty, but it turns out that the reason Bob is deemed unable to hold down a job is because TV screens, monitors and florescent lighting all trigger fits for him.

4) I've yet to meet the disabled person who says to me "I don't really want a job, I'm perfectly happy on benefit." What I have heard time and time again, are big long lists of types of support - not unreasonable things either - that a person needs to have in place in order to do a job, which no agency, scheme or individual seems prepared to supply. Simple things like "If I start work at 9am, then I need the carer who comes to help me wash and dress in the mornings to turn up at my house earlier than that, and they won't." Essential assistance and medical treatment for disabled people tends to be based around them being unemployed.


To be blunt though, I'm glad I'm out of it and hoping I can stay out - it looks like "getting tough" on disabled benefit claimants is going to be a big thing for the next election.

26

Happy birthday to me. Sort of. I'm beginning to think I might be karmically paying for having had such a great Christmas.

My birthday did not get off to a roaring start. I'm feeling utterly, utterly rubbish at the moment. This particular definiton of rubbish is the one where I had to cancel the plan for Steve and I to go and have a nice lunch at the Victoria Coffee House because it would have taken so much out of me that I wouldn't have been able to manage work afterwards. When you feel so rubbish that you have to cancel Exciting Plans at the level of sitting in a quiet cafe with your boyfriend... that's pretty rubbish.

I have no presents, and one card, which Steve went out to get while I was at work this afternoon. This hasn't been the worst birthday I've had, but it's a long way off being one of the better ones.

BUT, I do have cake. Let me tell you about my cake. It's good cake. I'd found a little sandwich-shop type place supplied by the same small business that made my mum's wedding cake a couple of years ago. I bought a couple of gift-boxed chocolate brownies. Some excerpts from the ingredients list on the box:
Dark couverture chocolate (32%) (min cocoa content 53.8%)
Sugar
Cocoa butter
Madagascan vanilla
Espresso coffee...

AND, there were lots of phone calls and texts. Apparently not all parts of my pressie (very mysterious!) from my family are with them yet, they were kind of hanging on and hoping, but as it is, mum says she's sent the bits they have got special delivery and they should be with me tomorrow. I am very curious.

One thing that made me super-happy was when my mum told me that my grandmother had asked for my phone number so that she could call and wish me a happy birthday. This is impressive because:
1) My grandmother really, really, really hates using the telephone and will go out of her way to avoid having to make or recieve calls. She can just about deal with calling her own kids and panics if she gets an answerphone.
2) My grandmother lives in Germany. Her English is about as good as my German, ie, Not Very and uses a great deal of mime.

So the fact of her being prepared to make a telephone call, risk the possibility of someone she doesn't know (Steve) answering it, and take her best jump at the language barrier is really quite something. However, we don't have a landline phone, so she was spared it and I got my birthday greeting from her via my mum later in the day.

Work was ok, I was very tired but as I've said before, my co-workers are really good about giving me any help I need, and for the most part it's a fairly simple if time-consuming job. I shared my cake but there's still quite a bit left over.

I think I'm going to have another, pretend birthday later in the year to make up for this one having fizzled a bit. It is possible that this is just any excuse for more cake.

Woo! It's 2008!

Nearly didn't make it though. We had a bit of an... incident... with the fireworks, shortly after midnight.

Firstly, I should explain that we tend to be quite sensible with fireworks. We have them maybe 3 or 4 times a year, at the home of E and L. There is a patch of dug earth (once a vegetable patch) at the bottom of their garden, furthest from the house, and Steve and E go out some time beforehand to plan the display, dig in the launch tubes and whatnot, taking their time and thinking it through. We even use a remote detonator - five electrical cords, one end clipped to the firework fuse and the other end plugged into a little box of tricks, which in turn has a remote sensor, and the remote control is with the spectators. This is not a "light the blue touch paper and stick it up your nose" kind of event.

So at about 11pm, the boys wandered outside to begin setting up. The remote detonator will take five fuses at once, so we had two big rockets, two smaller but still quite sizeable rockets, and one large box which fired about a hundred shots of various types (big, small, noisy, crackly, you name it) but just off one fuse. The display was meant to last just a couple of minutes, and having it already set up meant that as soon as Big Ben bonged, we could run outside, push the button on the remote, and wheeee!

I have since heard from Steve that there was some debate over what order the fireworks should be set off. He insists it was E's idea that the box should be first, and then the rockets.

Anyway, at five to twelve we started getting our shoes and coats on, and at midnight we did the countdown with the tv, hugs and kisses and yay all round, outside, and pressed the button, and our fireworks started, and it was pretty and wonderful.

Until the fireworks from the big box started doing their "fan" setting, two flares simultaneously fired, one to the left, one to the right. And it knocked one of the rockets that was ready and waiting to be set off. Not hard, but it moved just a little as the right-hand flare went past to explode in the sky. And again. And again.

What to do? No one was about to run back to the immediate vicinity of a still-firing one-and-a-half-minute barrage box just to make sure an as-yet unlit rocket was perfectly upright.

Then it caught.

There was just enough time for E (who had the remote) to say "I didn't set that off!" and it took off.

Or it tried to.

It had been knocked just enough, or maybe it lit in the wrong place, but anyway, it clipped the fence and fell back into the garden.

Still fizzing.

BOOM.

E, L and I had ducked, turned to face the wall, covered our heads, that sort of thing.

Steve, on the other hand, was happily taking photos of fireworks exploding against the night sky and was utterly oblivious to events at ground level in the garden.

The first he knew about it was when there was a bang that we could feel and a glowing piece of something quite solid landed on his trousers, at which point he took his eye away from the viewfinder of his camera, started patting himself out, looked to one side, saw me brushing ash and debris off myself, looked to the other side, and saw a charred, spent, 3-feet-long wooden stick with empty rocket bindings that looked suspiciously familiar sitting only a few inches away from him. Smoking.

Swearing may have occurred.

We were a little bit shaken as we watched the rest of the fireworks. There was also a bit of concern when we saw that all five of the electrical fuses had fired, but there was still a rocket that hadn't gone off. This happens sometimes, a duff fuse or whatever, but this time round we were a little bit more cautious than we usually are about hunting out a lighter to make it fire the old-fashioned way. Disturbingly, it was Steve who was going "it's fine, it's definitely not lit, you can see that, give me the lighter" and so on. Maybe he just felt invincible or something. Anyway, the final firework went off safely, and we hung about for a bit with sparklers watching other people's displays

Anyway, we're all feeling pretty good, it could have been Very Bad Indeed but as it is, we're all okay. I have asked Steve to please not be dead any time soon. To back up my position, I pointed out that if he was dead, I would have to claim Tax Credits in order to get by, and no one deserves that. He agreed and will do his best to not get killed this year.

So, after that slightly shaky start to the year, things are pretty normal now. I have today to rest up and try and recover, and then tomorrow it's back to work. Thursday is the day I'm really worried about. My Specific Co-Worker won't be in, and although it's not like I'll be alone in the building or anything, I don't want to have to keep asking people (who already have other jobs to do) if they could give me a hand with XYZ. The Christmas rush seems to be more or less over, but it's still really a two-person job and I fear I may finish the day slightly behind on the work that needs doing. Even if I'm having a good day, four hours of Mary-effort is never going to equal four hours of Mary-effort plus eight hours of Co-Worker effort.

I also want to order some sort of birthday cake.

Happy Birthday To Steve

It was Steve's birthday on Friday and he came to visit for a few days. On top of the birthday thing, we also haven't seen each other for a few weeks and most likely won't see each other again for a bit, because he's currently studying for another bit of accreditation (so that he can apply for jobs paying £obscene) and fixing up his motorbike. If I'm actually physically present, which we tried briefly, then on the one hand he eats properly (because he wants to look after me and as that involves me eating one hot meal a day, it makes sense for him to eat one too, at the same time), but on the other hand he doesn't get much study done because he wants to spend time with me, talk to me, take me places and so on. I am a distraction. And lovely as it is to spend time together, it doesn't lead to any kind of technical qualification. So we are apart, and he is losing weight, which alarms me, but he's a grownup so it's up to him.

It was wonderful to see him though, even if it was rather less of him than I had hoped to see. Plus, for a couple of days (and with a couple of weeks to fall apart afterwards), I can push the boat out a bit - no long romantic walks, or parties at nightclubs, or adventure activity days, or anything like that, but I made sure we could Do Stuff for his birthday.

The day started well. I'd got him one soppy present, one present he knew I was getting him, and one geeky present he never imagined he was getting. He was extremely happy, especially with that last one.

We went to Southwold for the morning where we investigated the Under the Pier Show, which was just fantastic and bizarre, and then we went into the "town centre" and found a posh chocolate shop with a tea-room in the back where we had a lovely civilised cream tea. Southwold is a strange place. It's a bit like the 1950s unless you're trying to find a place to park in which case it's like central London just before the congestion charge. People largely come to Southwold to retire (if they can afford it - beach huts in Southwold sell for the same as houses elsewhere), or for lovely wholesome family day-trips. Lots of parked cars and nothing like enough spaces. Even on a weekday in February. Then it was back to Lowestoft, went and said hello to Pip, tried to say hello to my sister at the place where she works (hadn't realised it was her day off), got some lunch, and went back to the flat.

In the evening we went for a nice meal at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Well, that was the plan. It started so smoothly, too. Wake up from late-afternoon nap. Have a nice cuppa and browse the net together until deciding it's about time for dinner. Start to get ready.

Unfortunately the next bit went: Mary attempts to go and use the toilet, falls over, and lands in/on the bathtub, winded. Steve hears the crash, leaps up, helps the Mary-spaghetti out of the tub and into her bedroom, upon which he realises he's just got a nosebleed, probably from jumping up in panic like that. Both of us sit quietly, me with ibuprofen and him with a tissue up one nostril, until we decide to try again.

Nevertheless we got out and we had our dinner and, indeed, got home again, all in one piece (each).

On Saturday, as you can imagine I wasn't really up to much at all, but we went to the cinema to see Hot Fuzz. If you like Spaced or Shaun of the Dead or Black Books or any of that kind of stuff, you'll probably like this. The homage-o-meter goes through the roof, so I'm going to need to get this on DVD when it comes out.

And today... well, today he went back home. He wanted to travel while it was still light - the plan was he'd pack in the morning, then we'd have lunch, and then he'd leave - but it never works out like that at the best of times, instead he packed after lunch and didn't get gone until dusk. I wanted to go downstairs to wave him off but he was too worried about whether or not I'd make it back up to the flat on my own. He worries far too much. Still, he says it was a nice birthday so I guess that's mission accomplished :)