supermouse

(NB: at the moment my dongle is content-locked, so I may not be able to view comments to reply on Livejournal. I can reply on Dreamwidth, so please consider posting there using OpenID or just signing an anonymous comment with your LJ handle).

So, I'm in a bedsit in Nottingham.

I've been getting better for a while now - able to cross the road, then able to get a bus, then able to go and study in Wigan every week. I wasn't very happy in Wigan for various reasons, so I went to stay with my mum over Yule, and found Nottingham to be full of things to do, close to her home. Part time jobs and voluntary positions abound.

I started volunteering at a charity shop, and I'm doing three days a week, six hours a day. If this was paid work, it would be just enough to live on. I'm hoping that one day this year it will be paid, if my health doesn't give out yet again. So far so good: it's been two weeks and I'm less ill and tired now, at the end of a shift of hard work, than I was after my first 6-hour stint. Mostly I steam clothes, which is mindless physical work that I really enjoy. Today though, I seem somehow to have ended up creating a system to log when various items are going to need to be culled, and thus when 'new' items will have to be priced up ready to go out, and how many.

I came home to slow cooked beans in a spicy tomato sauce. The bedsits are in a converted house - you have a room with a kitchenette in it, the bathrooms are shared but the landlord cleans them weekly, and water, heating, electricity and council tax are all included in the £65-a-week rent. I did have some issues with things being broken when I moved in. They were all but one fixed on the same working day as my complaining email, and the one that isn't fixed needs a spare part ordered.

Last night, I went out for a social with Kincaid in what seems to be the nicest pub I've yet seen in Nottingham. The only reason I didn't eat there was because I'd managed to get hold of a whole fresh trout for £1.60, so I cooked and ate that with some buttery carrots before going out. Well, wouldn't you? Kincaid seems very happy with his life just now, and it was a great evening.

Pol and I continue to communicate, in fact rather more than we had been doing. We're still firmly an item, I've just buggered off for probably about six months. I'll have to go back now and then to sort out the garden.

I went over to Nottingham at the weekend and saw my family, in stages, then Cwol. I came back to find a book I'd meant to give Cwol, sitting there looking at me. I might ask Pol nicely to take it with him when he drops off my sibling's books. It wasn't the best of visits: everyone was tired and I had the most thumping headache all day, I think because of the extremely wet weather.

Today has been bright and fine, and I've been able to do loads. I tidied the sitting room up. When it's tidy, I want to spend time there, and if I am sitting downstairs, then all the housework tends to get done in the ad breaks. I also cleaned the kitchen, folded Pol's laundry, sorted out the blue sofa as much as it can be sorted out and planted out bulbs. I need more compost.

Now I am upstairs. I discovered Moth still sitting quietly alert in exactly the same place I left her hours before. Even with the strong painkillers, she's clearly reluctant to move much. She's also having trouble scratching herself and walking around on the duvet - her claws catch in the fabric as if she can't quite keep them retracted any more. I put her on the bed and spent a while scratching her head, which made her very happy. She just wandered off for a while and limped painfully back for more head-scratching. I suppose that's me here for the interim then.