supermouse

I have pills that might help me turn thinking about doing the thing, into actually doing the thing! Eventually. The drug takes weeks to ramp up, in case your skin falls off.

General news: brain no worky. I am in a foggy haze punctuated by Twitter retweets and writing fiction.

The form's done! I have an email to read over just as soon as I'm not woolly-headed with migraine, but it's not going to be full of some bureaucrat being wilfully obtuse. The actual telephone call wasn't awful either, just incredibly tiring.

Picking up that giant wodge of paper and putting it away was such a relief.

I'm trying to work on a meal plan where I have things I'm supposed to eat, like actual planned meals, to take advantage of SPRING!!! and having one, even two extra spoons a day. We just defrosted the freezer, so I will actually know what frozen food I have and what meal it's for, rather than opening it and seeing if there's something I want to eat, for one glorious snapshot in time.

Spring! So many flowers! So much bright, horrible sunshine. Such bright, lovely colours around! Also, ground elder is edible and delicious, so technically I am growing a crop.

I have trust with a blackbird, who is probably raising several chicks, given the sheer quantity of suet and mealworms I am getting through and how constantly she is there. And the swifts have arrived! All the way from Africa and yelling about their lives overhead, too fast and high to easily see.

Going round my room like it's a point and click adventure trying to work out what I'm supposed to do with each individual item...

I am once again at the point where my washing fits into the two laundry bags, and wondering whether this time, I will stay functional long enough to get past that point (I have not yet in, um, however long it is since I was well enough to LARP at Empire and went to Germany camping for a few days.)

Setting an alarm for every single thing is perhaps making things better. I don't know.

Oh, and I bought jumpers that will hopefully last a good long time. One has cats on, one sunflowers. Wool-cotton mixes, very warming.

Thermostat now goes to a maximum of 17 Celsius, which is about as low as it can go and not end up with black walls.

I read 'Cold Calculation' by Aimee Ogden, which is online here and enjoyed it.

Last visit to Outside was mid-December to get pills. I have to go again to get more ASAP.

I will catch up on what people have posted very soon, hopefully. My headspace has been the opposite of good, my attention fractured into tiny shards, and so I've been living on memes and my own terrible fiction, mostly. Even Stardew Valley is very hard work, at the outer limit of my ability.

There used to be magpies living around this house and garden and now suddenly there aren't. Zero magie presence. Sexy Woodpigeon is still loud and proud, and the swifts? Swallows? House martens? are shrieking away, although in very small numbers.

The fuchsia is in full flower, if about half the usual growth, and has a few bees, as does the new and thriving colony of purple toadflax, which wasn't there last year. We think the neighbour at the back put it in and it crawled under the fence and to a happier south-facing top-of-a-brick-wall situation.

The apple tree behind us has visible frost damage still. Most of the dead, brown parts of our garden have been cut away or are overgrown. The bramble is thriving and has just now been cut back down again.

No wasps this year. The ones we did have once were bizarrely polite, which was why they didn't get exterminated, and took a long, complex route straight up through plants rather than out into the parts of the garden we used. Wasps are useful predators, just not inside or actually on the house or where people walk.

No butterflies. Not a single one. The buddleiah we cut down to a quarter of its size is now the same size it was last year and in bloom. No butterflies have turned up at all. There are a few bees around and a bumblebee.

The strawberries are done. Not as many fruit as usual. I'll root some runners if I remember, which is a big 'if'. The brambles are mid-flower and starting to set fruit. Usually they're ripe about mid-August through to mid-September.

The sparrows are back, hiding in the giant buddleiah, and showing just how important hedge cover is to them. Food was there, but until the cover was too, they didn't hang about. I keep checking they really are house sparrows and not hedge sparrows...

Everything wants mealworms. White suet gets eaten. Pink suet with added calcium is a last resort. Sparrows have worked out when they can shout for food, so I know when they're out, and recently they're eating a lot more than a few weeks ago.

Other than the sparrows, wood pigeon, swifts(?) and a blackbird, I'm not seeing any birds around. No goldfinches, thrushes, starlings, bluetits or great tits. One by one there are fewer species around.

No frogs sighted so far. No tadpoles again. It's been years since we had any.

The potatoes are really happy.

I'm still very much grieving, but life has to go on. Now and then I just have to stop and very very sad for a while. It's mostly about there being something I'd love to tell him the next time we talk and then of course I can't.

The situation in Germany (and Belgium and .nl) look absolutely dire. All the chickens are coming home to roost.

My inbox is full of plant and garden details, I love it! I hope you're all doing okay!

So, for the past several years, I have been Outside barely at all, and by barely I mean literally once or twice a year, and by Outside, I mean past the confines of the garden. My main loss with lockdown was other people going Outside and posting about it. Nott'm police posting pictures of empty places was my jam last summer.

Anyway, that's just to set the expectations. I went Outside! I walked around six hundred steps, which is... not much, at all, on Normal scales, but I'm really glad of it.

My feet not so much. I've ordered shoes that should be good for walking and not setting off plantar fasciitis.

One of my oldest, dearest friends has been cheerleading me on and it does make an enormouse difference. Then I got a text reminding me I post about birds, so...update.

The sparrows went away when we cut down the buddleia, but that's shot back up and now gives adequate shelter again. They are not interested, at all, in egg-friendly calcium-enriched pink suet, it gets eaten only when other suet runs out, and they are overall eating a lot less. They went through a phase of eating some pink stuff, and now it's all mealworms all the time, so I assume that was eggs->chicks.

Regarding mealworms, Demanding Great-Tit has also gone with the loss of shelter. By July it will be very bird-friendly again and not destroying the house... There is a lot, a *lot* of shelter all around this area, that's why we have wood pigeons and owls.

The blackbird and magpies are absolutely fine, although the mad singing has settled down and birds aren't strutting their stuff really at all. I assume they're busy being parents, since they are around.

The garden is, in the original sense of the word, retarded, as in all the growth has been very slow and many common plants are actually etoliated, that is, stretched out long and thin to try to reach light. This is how it was in Aquilegia Year up in Leigh, when I managed to grow those flowers, rhubarb and unusually large rampant slugs. Here, now, dry warm weather has arrived and with it a mass of flowers, but a lot of plants are very, very behind, the fuchsia so much so that I had to check it wasn't actually dead. It's really gone green this last week.


Some plants, noteably the shade-tolerant ones, are doing fine, and I will be displaying my enormous peonies later in the year. When I look at my enormous peonies, everything seems okay.

Paperwork wise, my sibling and accountant are handling absolutely everything because I Cannot. I am trying to get at least some income, and to avoid running into trouble later for ignoring things and putting my head in the sand. I did, however, Do The Things (with help) and even, get this, cancelled my Sky subscription! I had an amazingly clear-headed morning, which happens around once a month or so and got all the paperwork done that I could.

Thanks, largely, to daily (and mutual) cheerleading, I'm even somewhat presentable. Definitely less awful than I was.

I am loving the warm weather very, very much.

I still write every day, it's still absolute rubbish, it's still absorbing and engaging and rather like eating lots of biscuits. Writing about people doing normal things, like playing The Sims games, is something of a prompt to do normal things. Of course I always add magic because wish-fulfillment... I haven't written fanfic in a while though. It's as if posting two stories scratched the itch, or I've just thoroughly plumbed every idea I could possibly have and moved on. I'm a Pantser, so the first draft is, usually, several hundred thousand words of a main character or characters stumbling around a new-to-me world doing the most mundane, boring activities until, more by accident than design, they stumble into a badly-sprawling Plot which will cover closer to ninety thousand words than the half-a-million or so it takes for me to deal with not wanting to actually give my characters serious setbacks because it makes me feel bad.

Editing is done by my going through and cutting out every part that makes my eyes glaze over, which is... a lot. I also have lots of sentences which made sense at the time, and sometimes there's actual word salad from migraines where I have to read before and after and entirely rewrite, but I was having fun, so...

Second drafts are slow. Very. Those are actual work. I don't have a full novel in second draft yet. The writing is always moving forward though. I have two complete novels in terrible first-draft set in the near future as I conceived it before the Pandemic was even a series of odd rumours on Twitter about events in Wuhan. I was revising them when lockdown happened and the world changed so much that it was clear I'd have to do a huge rewrite to take all these new events into account.

So, anyway, I'm feeling comfortable now about incorporating the whole thing, since there's much more of a shape to what 'the whole thing' is. Revising isn't happening yet, but the violent distaste for the whole idea has gone and it keeps coming to mind, which is usually the first stage before a real editing binge, it's just this time it's not fanfiction.

Mentally then, I'm in... a much better place. It's light all day, I'm not SAD, although I am sad. Pol and I weren't in one another's lives that much, but it was nearly every single day and I would think he'll like this, he'll like that and occasionally we'd get to chat. I did work out, too late, that a big problem between us was that he liked to fix things and there's no fixing migraines. I feel very, very sad that he was stuck being miserable and waiting until he could come home, it's just a crying shame. He did have a whole different life up in the North Wet, one he was definitely engaged in more than he was with me, but he was always very, very firm about being married and staying married within our very severe limits of mutual tolerance - I literally can't handle being around people for more than a couple of hours at most, and that occasionally. Even Pol. Even talking to one of my closest and dearest friends on the phone... it's good for a little while then it isn't and I just want to go and lay down in the dark and quiet.

Other than feeling very sad sometimes, though, I'm mostly fine, since other people are handling the things that were turning me into a poorly mess. I try to concentrate on one thing at a time, and, moment to moment, I really am fine and okay. So.

Birds! Yay! Tell me about birds where you are!

Plants! Yay! Tell me about plants you have noticed! Even the annoying ones!

Outside! Have you been?

Vaccines, how are those going? I am past my two weeks on the second and much less fearful, still masking around people, mainly delivery people.

Gosh this got long. Hugs to all, you're all lovely, and I truly do hope you have the best possible day.

Two things! I cancelled my Sky broadband subscription, which was less of a nightmare than I thought. The biggest hurdle was having thrown everything to do with that account in a black bin bag along with all the other papers I was slowly sorting through.

Then I applied for non-means-tested ESA on account of being really disabled. To give you an idea of how disabled: I could not make money selling things on Ebay because I would never be able to get things posted on time even if someone else took them to the post office. I can't concentrate long enough or fill stuff in reliably or even remember that I should be doing something. I can have One Thing I have to do and that's that until I do it and move to the next thing on the list, and it can take two weeks to make a phone call.

Anyway, that particular application process was remarkably easy. It would be impossible on a normal day, but today was a Good Day and I got it done.

PIP meanwhile is going to be a weeks long slog for my sibling who works in administration for a government department and thus does bureacracy for an actual living, and she's already confused as to what evidence they actually want. I forwarded on emails from a helpful afper who knows who they are which I hope will help.

So, two months after Pol's death and a month after his funeral, I am finally getting benefits sorted out.

At some point in the dim and distant future I have a laptop to set up with details from this laptop, which all seems like so much hard work. The last thing Pol helped me with was getting the right laptop to replace this one. He was really, really busy at work so we weren't talking much, but he made time for this.

I have a full inbox I've read and been glad to read, that's really sweet. I will get to individual replies. Hugs to those going through/remembering similar situations. Hugs to everyone.

My PIP application is underway now I've had help with the form from my very patient and kind sibling, and I really needed it too. PIP is a disabilty benefit that is not means tested, that is there to cover the costs of disability and level the playing field. I have qualified for years and years, but it's quite a hard slog to get, and of course my disabilities make it much harder to deal with the process in the first place. I'm hoping to lengthen the time it takes before I need to apply for Universal Credit for my main source of income because that's also no fun even without the migraines.

I'm leaning on the family accountant to try to get all my paperwork and finances in order because I don't have a clue and keep defaulting to being overwhelmed. So that's just a case of waiting for things to happen without me. It's way less expensive overall to have the accountant Pol and I already have sort things out than to hope I'll do things properly with constant migraines and depression.

I have bed risers! The bed's really heavy. So now instead of climbing a pile of pillows every night, I can have a normal amount and just sleep without terrific heartburn, and I can't slide down the pile and end up lying flat either.

Thanks to people being willing to help me get it back together, I have it back together, or at least I'm eating and I slept last night. At some point everything will be sorted out.

Oh, and the magpie has been by, that's always really cheering. They don't need suet nearly as much as they did. The sparrows have returned to the cut-down buddleia too, now it's grown back enough to shelter them. I felt bad about that, but the thing was filling up my upstairs bedroom window it was so tall, and it was killing the pyracantha that the blackbirds live on all winter. We cut it after the end of the worst of winter but before nesting, the end of February, and then we had some sad bare branches and no birds, where before that it was like having an aviary. Now they're coming back! Shelter is so important! (Especially with magpies around... but I cannot dislike the magpies at all.)

Oh and my neighbour across the back way managed to cause me a crushing disappointment by putting a plastic peregrine falcon by their chimney pot, which fooled me but not the local woodpigeons, who treat it as the scenery it is. I worked it out when it hadn't moved for a while.

Still no word on death certificates, so I will be trying to get my head together enough to see if I can get the help offered by the British consulate to clear the logjam. Having had that idea, of course I haven't been able to sleep at all so I just hope I'm coherent and somewhat functional.

I can't imagine what it's like for Kira, who was very close and is the executor of his will and can't do anything without those pieces of paper, and who has of course travelled to a funeral and back.

Magpies have been by at 06:30, feeding time is always after 07:30, but actually there's food out. Once the weather is warm they really don't seem to eat nearly as much, to, like, a startling degree.

Also, setting f.lux to a level that makes playing games almost impossible late at night was a very good idea, but it's still irritating when insomnia strikes and every gem on Bejewelled is green or brown or deep orange.

I've read through the book I was working on in January. It's promising, there are problems but nothing egregious. The story halts just as Obvious Love Interest has dragged Protagonist over to an NPC and I have no idea why or what he was thinking, so I need to work that out (not happening today) and then flesh out the villains (also not happening today). At least I have a decent cast of characters and a decent setting to noodle around in.

The garden is very, very full of spring-flowering bulbs. Like, chocka. I made myself go out and look, go me.

I make myself ground coffee every single morning and have done for years, and yet it is still too many steps to 'just do', I always get stuck and have to work out what comes next, which I suppose wakes me up? There's a whole sequence of putting ground coffee in the Bobble presse, adding hot water and pressing a timer, that is distinctly hit and miss. Usually it's the timer I forget, sometimes it's the hot water instead, and then I've put ground coffee in some odd places before now. Or poured hot water into a random mug and wondered why I was doing that.

So... Pol's being cremated tomorrow. I can't travel up there, it's just not an option. I managed to get myself real coffee this morning and will otherwise be in bed all day. I really need a shower this evening, somehow.

I never gave words to the eulogy and haven't heard back at all on what the humanist minister said. It's all very remote. I'll be watching remotely while it all goes on without me.

There are still no death certificates! The German registry office are dragging their feet over the lack of Pol's passport. I've been sending everything as soon as I'm asked.

Meanwhile I cancelled all DDs as I was told to, only to get asked to not do that please, so there's a huge mess going on up north that's very stressful that I can do nothing about. They need the death certificates they do not have to pay utility bills. I feel as though I've screwed people over but can't fix it.

I'm mostly sleeping or wrapped up in whatever distraction I can find. I'm in the same mental state I was last year when we were on lockdown and dealing with a garden full of trashed bushes our back neighbour cut down and dumped where they fell, a six foot high pile of stuff in a tiny garden, with my mother freaking out and having to talk to the police and stuff, with pandemic everywhere.

A dear, dear friend is making me a rose to remember Pol by, which is just very sweet. Another is chatting online with me right now. I'm wondering what I have to do next. I have a lot of email addresses to change. Twitter and Facebook already have my new, main email address added to other accounts, so now I need to set up a new email for those and just now I Cannot for, well, everything just about. Thankfully I have siblings who will help.

A large plate of liver, dark green cabbage and mushrooms seems to have done something good for my appetite. It tasted delicious. If you don't like these things, good for you, tell someone else please, not me.

I have lots of very good friends. I love you all. I hope you're all as well as possible. Perhaps you are doing nice things for Spring?