Black Doggerel

when I fell in love with Spike, I didn't only fall in love with him as an individual. I fell in love with the entire breed. I didn't, and still really don't, ever want to have a dog that isn't a border collie again.

( Would you like some cheese with my whining? )

1. i aten't dead.

2. sore throat, swollen glands in my neck, a lowgrade headache that's persisted so long I've started to treat it like a regular body part, palpitations, nausea, chronic fatigue on top of my normal chronic-fatigue baseline to the point where walking the dogs round the block needs psyching myself up for as if I were sailing round the world singlehanded on a reed fucking raft. and often a nap afterwards. wtf, body. also my ability to think clearly is intermittent and shortlived. Flowers for Algernon r us.

three weeks-ish and counting. i've told myself i'm calling the doctor monday. everything about this scenario - starting with the having to telephone people and going on into all the possible crap like blood samples, repeat appointments, whatever might be necessary to fix it - makes shooting myself now feel like the saner and pleasanter option by far.

3. Spike had a UTI which is now fixed yay. After talking to vet about foreleg-licking I'm trying him on painkillers. Almost immediately the licking stopped and he's got a bounce back in his step that he'd been losing so very gradually I hadn't noticed it waning. This is not as depressing as it would have been if I weren't still riding the dodged-a-cancer-bullet high, but it's still fucking depressing.

4. finally remembered to plug the battery recharger in so i can at least take photos. m'not kidding, i've had that on my to do list for weeks. all it needed was to flip a fucking switch and it took three weeks to get round to it. what is this i don't even.

aargh fuck oww. My twisted knee was nearly BETTER. I could nearly walk again. Then last night I bent over to slide Spike's cushion from his spot by the Uncomfy Chair over to be by the bed, and my knee unexpectedly made this sharp crack-pop sound.

I have a friend with a chronically bad knee and I've heard her use the phrase "my knee exploded" before. I hadn't realised how literally she meant it. EXPLOSION OF PAIN. I couldn't sleep last night despite the icepack and painkillers, there was no position I could rest it in that didn't throb with pain and I couldn't stop fretting about how the fuck I was going to walk dogs like this. Getting from the Uncomfy Chair to the bathroom or kitchen is just about possible but unprecedentedly difficult. Down the stairs didn't seem likely.

In the end I scooted downstairs on my arse with the dogs offleash and let them out to piss in the communal back garden. This is strictly not allowed in the tenancy agreement and it worries fuck out of me to resort to it, even though downstairs neighbour does it every day with his greyhound. But it was either that or have them both piss on the floor in here, what can you do? Spike didn't drink for a day and a half after he had that accident on the floor last week and I'm not risking that again.

happier news: Spike had his stitches out yesterday, barring a few inside his mouth that he'd broken. The vet put those back in with dissolving sutures so we won't need to go back. The lab results are back on his poor departed nose, and all the indications are that we got a good clear margin and Mouth Thing is no more. YAYYYY WOOO HOOO YAYY!

they also both really enjoyed the back garden. I was too paranoid to leave them out very long but they ran and bounced and were happy.

my cat boxes need emptying and my kitchen is an unholy shithole. I was looking forward to ...not doing those, but having gotten them done. Now I can't even fucking stand up without a piece of furniture to lean on and fuck fuck fuck OW. Did I say ow? OW.

I've managed to cripple my fucking right hand somehow. It's not my usual swollen finger joints that I get when I type too much. this time it's the tendon that runs down the back of my thumb into my wrist. typing isn't TOO bad but mousing is near impossible, as is picking anything up. also, right now the shift key feels too much like fucking hard work - my apologies. okay, I went back and edited in most of the caps. too picky for my own good sometimes.

dunno if it was dog-inflicted - they have this way of suddenly pulling hard in opposite directions on-leash that's hell on any wrists and fingers caught in the middle - or if I did it to myself battling imaginary dragonslayers or playing stupid solitaire and slots games online for fake money. either way, I'm pissed off. fucking stupid shoddy meat-thing. shame I voided the warranty and replacement parts are such a bitch to source.

the only good thing about it is it's given me an excuse to continue not attempting to commit art for just a little while longer. now, I have been successfully avoiding the making of art for something like fifteen years - I've even got to the point where if I didn't have two living parents, all traces of my former artcrimes would have been expunged from existence.

but - once an addict, alway an addict. I've been running with the wrong crowd lately. I deluded myself into believing that I could stick to words. maybe I still can, but I'm increasingly conscious lately of my stash of unused paper, brushes, pencils, Fimo and acrylic paint. I'm seeing mind-pictures of the sweep of grey wings over waves, the flash of white teeth in the green, the spray of sand under hooves. I'm getting dangerously near that place where not attempting art hurts more than attempting it. I hate that so much.

my chosen soundtrack sums up the relationship between me and art so well that I need to show it to you. bob dylan is god.

I have now been waiting over forty minutes for my email to load.

Edited: I left it trying to load and clagging everything else up for 90 minutes and then gave up. If you've emailed me anything it's going to have to wait. Sorry.

LJ and Subeta are much less problematic, but the Doorstop (I always name anything I have to work with) seems to find Yahoo rather indigestible.

I'm not even attempting Neopets. This wouldn't be a big deal - I really only go there to keep the pets neolodged and check my stocks these days - except that I was meant to be transferring one of my labrats to someone else. That annoys me.

I am also not attempting driveforlife. I feel a great deal worse about this than I do about Neo, obviously, but it depends rather heavily on being able to access the email account. I should be able to pick it back up after the weekend, though.

I can get on IM, but only if I shut everything else down. So I am not doing that much either.

So if I've not answered a comment or communication, that will be why. I am sorry. I hope very much the problems will be over after the weekend. Also, topbit completely rules. Just for the record.

( In which I whine about the weather some more. Includes brief chatlog extract. )

So, yeah. Not dead. Still reading my f-list, still looking at your photos, still love you. Just too fucking hot and grouchy to do anything about it.

Arrrgh, my bloody C drive just turned up its toes and died!

The bad news: It contained a large chunk of my music collection: all my Graham Parker, Men They Couldn't Hang, Nick Lowe, Peter Blegvad and Bob Dylan MP3s, as well as the few bits of porn I liked enough to keep on my hard drive, all my ebooks, and my chatlog backups.

The good news: All of that is backed up onto data DVDs somewhere or other.

The bad news about the good news: I have a thousand-odd data DVDs in this room and the backups are scattered over hundreds of them; basically every time I write a DVD and there's a bit of space over, I shove some music or chatlogs or audiobooks or something on it. I do not have any sort of catalogue or system to keep track of what's where, other than writing on the front of the disc. So it may take me a month to find the stuff I've lost.

The possible good news: For a while now I've been having a weird computer problem, where the entire system would reboot if I clicked certain links - notably Amazon and Wikipedia, but also some other links sometimes. topbit reckoned it was a hardware issue, but couldn't narrow it down further than that. I thought he might have solved it when he upgraded my RAM, because it happened much less after that, but it crept up on me again. With luck it will have been the C drive causing the problem and it won't happen any more.

The other good news: The C drive was the smallest of my three hard drives, only (I think) 20 gig or so. Shouldn't be hard to replace/upgrade it.

I've added the "psychic paper" tag to this entry because I haven't heard from you for ages. You still reading this? Talk to me!

Lately, all my dreams have a common theme; someone holding me, loving me. The dream characters are often implied sexual partners in the dream, but these are not sex dreams, merely dreams in which there's someone in my life who holds and hugs and loves me.

I miss that. I don't, I truly don't, want to be part of a couple. I don't want to live with someone, I can't deal with the expectations and obligations that sort of relationship carries. I'd fail miserably if I tried. But the thing the dreams are telling me is that I could really do with someone to be in my corner, that way. That I want someone around that I matter to enough that they'd hug me.

I know people who are reading this care about me in varying degrees. You know it isn't the same, and in any case none of you are here. I don't know what to do about it.

Getting out more would probably be a start. *sigh*

ow ow ow owwwwww.

dog leash misadventure sprained my left pinkie a while back.

it was almost better. it was just slightly twingey. then today, we were at big park. i was just leashing mine back up after their run when a girl on a bicycle with a collie came past.

all the dogs behaved, really. this was no one's fault. spike did not bark, girl's collie stayed trotting behind bike with no deviation. squish didn't go nuts. he just sort of... darted briefly in the collie's general direction. he didn't dart far. it was just that his leash - that i was in the middle of clipping on - was between my ring & pinkie fingers. so my pinkie got wrenched in a direction it was not designed to wrench. on top of the not-quite-healed last injury.

i screamed like a little girl. my whole hand hurts so much. it's twice normal size. i have it on ice and am taking diclofenac.

i am very aware that a lot of people i know have way bigger, way more painful, way more serious shite going on. so much so that i have no real right to whine. i love you guys and i'm sorry.

but i'm still gonna whine. it hurrrrrrrts!

My fucking split lip has swelled up and gone bright red. Whether this is an infection, a reaction to the chemicals in the hot tub or a reaction to the aloe vera lipsalve I bought on Monday, I have no idea; but it hurts and it's nasty. Not happy.

And some fucking pea-brained local adrenaline junkie - living within 500 yards of me, I might add - has picked tonight for the first firework display of the autumn. I didn't think they were even on fucking sale yet; perhaps he's saved them from last year. Luckily, he gave me a short preview several hours ago when it first got dark, and I gave Spike a melatonin then. So he's coping uncharacteristically well now. Small mercies. Once again we are massively grateful to cottonmanifesto. Love you!