Black Doggerel

Whenever my back is turned the dogs destuff sofa cushions. It's got to where there's no longer enough cushion left to stuff the stuffing back into.

This is totally a metaphor for my entire life.

So the doctor thinks I either have post-viral fatigue syndrome or possibly a thyroid issue. Today I went to have blood drawn so they can check thyroid functions. I don't have words for how much I was dreading this. I never had easy veins to start with, and I destroyed what little there was very thoroughly during the junkie years, so that getting blood out of me is normally only slightly easier than pulling hen's teeth. What normally happens is that the first nurse will stab me five or six times in each arm, fail to find a vein, call in a different nurse and sometimes a third, and eventually they'll send me home with both arms bruised and sore from wrist to shoulder with instructions to come in next week so they can try again. When I had my dental surgery they put the drip in my neck because no one in the entire hospital could hit my arm veins. That's how bad they are.

So I'd warned them about sucky vein access when I made the appointment, and they smiled serenely at me and said "Don't worry. We have Ying." I gave them a funny look and went "...Okay. Whatever."

Ying turned out to be a dry, quietly-competent nurse that made it hard even for me to be anxious in her presence. She felt over both my arms carefully before she so much as touched me with a needle and bugger me if she didn't hit the vein squarely on the first damn poke. That's never happened in my entire life with anyone, professional or otherwise, not in those veins.

I have typed more words today than I have in weeks. I seem to be having a good day. This has been driving me batshit because I haven't had the energy for IM conversations. I've been staying out of the Khimeros chat; I've tried, but one of the side-effects of feeling this shitty is that my brain-keyboard filter is holed and shaky and it's too hard not to get snotty with people. So I'm only talking to people who don't tend to piss me off and who understand if I say something tactless by accident. It's made me slightly stir crazy, but most of the time I've just been too fucking tired to care.

This is likely to continue for a while yet. Today's been a good day, but I've had a lot of days when the combined effort of hitting Post Comment, stringing an intelligible sentence together and then typing it has been more than I could deal with.

In other news, Spike is still licking his elbows. Also, I have liquorice allsorts and rhubarb-and-custard boiled sweets, neither of which I ordered - Tesco sent them as substitutes because they'd run out of the toffee I did order. I love the way internet grocery shopping occasionally produces these little serendipities; the rhubarb-and-custards are a bit harder than I really fancied but man, they taste good. And liquorice allsorts are complete love, especially the pink and blue sprinkle-covered liquorice jelly cushions. Though admittedly it's more usual for them to send me filthy camomile tea when I ordered blackcurrant or ginger or fennel, but still.

Today is my Dad's birthday and I feel vaguely guilty that I didn't remember till my sister posted something about it on Facebook. He was never very good at remembering birthdays either, mind you.

/end ramble

The daffodils are out, the squirrels have arrived in force, the foxes are fucking and the other morning I was nearly hit in the head by one of two wrens, so busy fighting over tree rights that they never saw me at all. The grass has taken on a shine as new shoots start insinuating themselves among the old crap that's been there all winter, and Squish dog wants to eat it all. It's officially spring here.

One should never go shopping when hungry, yet it's often the only time I'm motivated enough to bother. So I end up buying way more than I can easily carry home, not to mention more strawberry and white chocolate muffins than any sensible person ought to need. Also discovered Italian ground coffee in 1lb packs for 50p each, which is insane, so I had four packs as well as the muffins and the dogs' chicken parts and pork ribs.

Our Asda has automatic self-checkout scanners, but I refuse to use them. They issue orders at you and catalogue your shopping in a synthesised voice. When it says "Two point four kilos of baking potatoes" I can't stop my brain hearing "Exterminate!" and frankly, it freaks me the fuck out. So I joined the queue on the only human-operated till, despite the woman in front of me who was either recruiting an army or feeding a family of teenagers. We got talking about the bargain coffee and the strawberry muffins and she ended by offering me a ride home, which goes to show you should always follow your instincts in the matter of shopping queues. She won't read this and I thanked her a lot at the time, but I'll thank her here again: Blonde lady with the SUV and the teenagers, you made my night.

My mother's friend Ossie died unexpectedly this week. He used to work the checkout at Asda as well - sweet guy, but utterly incapable of working a checkout and a conversation at the same time. He made shopping with my mother wryly entertaining, as I'd stand there listening to the two of them gossiping for what felt like hours while the queue behind us grew steadily longer and grumpier as their frozen food melted, unmoving. You have to admire someone who attains that level of cheerful, oblivious unhurriability even when it irritates the fuck out of you.

This rambling, mostly pointless post is dedicated to his memory.

...usually when I get self-indulgent, there'll be pizza, cheesecake, Chinese food, weed, Farscape marathons, sex in public or all of the above involved.

Except today I was shopping and my impulse buy was a box of this stuff. Because who could resist something rose and vanilla flavoured containing a herb whose name means 'she who has 100 husbands'? Not me.

It smelt fucking divine and tasted ...like I was drinking a goddess' bathwater. Mostly in the good way. It just felt disconcertingly like a thing I should have sprayed on me rather than poured in me. It's also a bit disconcerting to enjoy anything that's meant to be good for me - what, am I suddenly growing up or something?

First off, who hasn't heard the greatness that is Squeeze? You really, really should.

...second, my father leaves the country tomorrow. A little less than two weeks isn't a long time to build bridges over thirty-odd years of anger, misunderstanding, stubbornness, resentment and generally getting each other wrong, but we seem to have done pretty well. It helps that he's mellowed a great deal and I'm no longer a rebellious teenager. As I said to a friend afterwards - on the one hand, I feel a great sadness for all those years without him, but on the other hand, if there hadn't been those years, it's entirely possible that the old resentments could have solidified into something we couldn't break through or get over. I think we needed the time apart from each other, though I question whether we needed quite so much of it.

He'll be back in the spring. I can't wait.

I'm still reading everyone. I haven't gone anywhere. I'm just... rather drained and it's made me retreat into myself and go quiet. So I'm sorry for not commenting. I do love you.

I usually try and pick an icon that connects in some way to the post's content. I'm still rewatching B5 - I'm up to the end of season four now and just coming to a lot of my own favourite episodes, but really, that icon's just there because I've never used it before and it makes me happy.

And now a meme. kiss_kass did it first.
( But mine is sillier. )

...Dog photos tomorrow.

( As my friend Nye says, other people's dreams are boring )

In real life, my aunt is here now too. Today she and dad are going up to London to visit my grandmother's grave in Brookwood Cemetery.

So I am walking the dogs this morning, and I see a cushion. As in, a whole-body-sized cushion, designed to be tied onto a sunlounger or the like. And it's in the middle of Woodbury Avenue, and traffic is swerving around it. Now Woodbury Avenue is already narrow enough that people have to stop and let each other through if anyone's parked there, and I didn't think it was a great idea to leave the thing there. So I went to move it.

I'd only had one cup of coffee, or I'd have realised what was about to happen.

( Hilarity ensues )

Paid, yay! daffodilblonde and I went to Winton yesterday, which we do when the soul-destroying blanditude of the much handier Castlepoint Shopping Centre gets too much for us to bear. Winton is an old-fashioned little down-at-heel high street, complete with charity shops ranging from posh to manky, actual family butchers, a discount health food store, a ship's chandler, cafes whose menus aren't dictated by a Head Office in a Milton Keynes business park and even a fishmonger.
It's dying, of course; more boarded-up windows than actual shopfronts, and parking there is a huge pain in the arse to boot, but Mum and I don't care. The only reason I don't do all my shopping there is that, faced with actual flesh-and-blood shops, I can never control my overspending. Still, I feel a lot better about spending £6 on books when I can bring home a whole carrier-bag full for that price. And new dog and cat toys don't count as luxuries, though possibly the creme-patissiere-filled brioche did. But it was cheap. What the hell, you can't take it with you.

The filthy oppressive grey damp heat that's been giving me a headache all week also finally broke; not a storm, but a tender English summer rain gradually gathering strength from yesterday's misty drizzle into today's steady trickle. It's like a cool breeze blowing through the soul. So the dogs and I went to Big Park to test drive the new dog toys in the wet. Just an ordinary everyday dog-walk; only transmuted, somehow into one of those shining days that stay with you forever.

I filmed a little bit of it, because I love filming my dogs. But none of you need to look; it's much the same as yesterday's vid except in a different park and with new rubber rings instead of balls. I film and upload them for myself; even now, the same day it happened, watching them on screen makes me smile. Spike will be six soon, Squish will be five. One day they'll be grey and arthritic and slow; one day they'll be gone, but - assuming I actually live past losing Spike, which I don't much fancy - at least I'll still have this. That's the only reason I do it. So you don't need to click the cut. Nothing under there but a slice of my heart, being pressed for posterity.

Also, randomly, nothing in the world smells better than freshly-rained-on elderflowers. If someone would bottle that, I would smell of nothing else for the rest of my natural life.

( Two pics and a non-embedded video link )

It's not Mother's Day here. We had that back in March. But what the fuck, I love my Mum anyway.

Storms. And torrential rain. I feel guilty, because I only gave the dogs a quick on-leash walk instead of a full-on park romp this morning. But two out of three of us didn't want to be out in that weather, and once that thunder gets louder Spike won't be so keen either. I gave him a melatonin tablet wrapped in cheese in case it gets worse later.

Squish's ears catch in high winds, and flare out around his head like wings. He hates it, but it's unbelievably cute.

I found a perfectly functional pair of nail clippers lying on the pavement. How does that happen? Was someone walking along cutting their nails? Who does that? A few yards further on, when we had turned off the road onto the grassland behind the houses, there was a flapping assemblage of red and black fabric caught on a hedge. I thought it was a jacket, but when I looked closer, it had black plastic feet. I finally identified it as the remains of one of the huge inflatable Santas that sprout on some of the houses here in December. One down, far too many to go.

Whenever we pass by a discarded plastic drink bottle, Spike pounces on it and bounces at me to try and get me to play with him. I probably shouldn't encourage it, but sometimes I do. At least they're safer than sticks.

This rain will have filled Spike's paddling puddles in Big Park to overflowing with nice clean water. I'll take them there tomorrow. I'll try and remember to recharge my batteries and take my camera.