beautiful reprobates

D kindly drove the three of us to Liverpool and back today, to pick up an old Singer sewing machine from someone who really needed it out of their house.

It was a lovely afternoon: the kind of blue-sky shorts-wearing day that we often get in September, usually nicer than the summer that's just passed but no less a gift for the heatwaves this summer. I watched the Twins play a meaningless baseball game just because soon I'll really miss pointless baseball games during the long dark off-season. I took Mr. Smith outside a couple of times; it was no hardship to sit outside and make sure he didn't do anything he shouldn't (escape the yard, get behind the shed, etc.). I wore shorts and sandals and needed D's hat in the car to keep from having to stare at the sun. Radio 1 mentioned that last night had been Europe's Biggest Dance Show, something I remember fondly from when we stumbled on it last year, so on the way home he found it on BBC Sounds and played it for me; we got through the UK's and Sweden's sets as we zoomed down the motorway home, with the setting sun shining in our rearview mirrors.

Struggling to stay awake today. Haven't done as much of yesterday's work as I'd hoped to. New work has appeared.

Good thing I'm not about to go get a covid booster, that never wipes anybody out!

And I've got to get up early tomorrow to have a 13-hour day going to London and back.

The guy at the pharmacy doing the vaccines was delightful, he invited all three of us to come into the little consultation room when it was clear we were all together. He was great: he was sympathetic to V not being able to get a free booster even though they're very disabled, he didn't bat an eye at our masks or how hairy my upper arm is when I'd just told him I'm a Female...

When we said we were getting the shots early so they have kicked in by the time D and I are going to Germany, the guy asked "for a holiday?" and I laughed and said "For an operation I can't get on the NHS." When we were all done and saying goodbye, he wished me well with the operation, which was very sweet.

When we got home, I started an email to a colleague with "Hey Erik." Her name is not Erik. It doesn't even have any of the same letters as "Erik"! Erik is me! Not her.

I just have not been sleeping enough lately.

I did manage to make dinner, except I forgot to make rice, but D had to serve it up (and make microwave rice). And I started thinking wistfully about bedtime by 7:30.

• I've been drinking coffee most days lately; I have no idea why. As the person who's awake first in the mornings, I make a pot of tea for the household, enough for us each to have some. I'm the only one who can drink coffee in this house so I normally can't be bothered with it, but lately it just seems like a good idea almost every morning. I think I'm feeling homesick.

• My ankle has been bad the last few days. It does a thing that just makes me feel uncomfortably aware of it sometimes, which started on Friday, but it actively hurt on Saturday. I got through lift club thanks to my old pal ibuprofen gel. And I pre-emptively added some more on Sunday because D and I helped J move, into P's house. It's been a little better today, but cranky after circuits.

• J was already at P's a lot thanks to P's care needs in the last year, but now they're formally ending their tenancy and moving all their stuff into P's place. Their flat was up a flight of stairs and almost everything was going up a flight of stairs in P''s house to the Room For Putting All The Things In. So yeah, a lot of stairs. P fed us afterwards and J was generous in their praise of us when I thought we had the easy work, just lifting and moving things. They had to do all the decision-making, and a good part of the emotional work, themselves and that's by far the most difficult.

• This morning, along with telling D and I that they hoped we weren't suffering (I wasn't! I truthfully told them that I went to bed almost immediately last night so I'd had lots of sleep and felt surprisingly good for a Monday morning), J also told V "thank you for training 2 good spoony allies. To get to that level you need to be incredibly kind for starters but it also takes a lot of practice with a brilliant mentor." I was very happy to agree that V has been a brilliant mentor to me in learning how to not be a dick to chronically ill people, or at least less of one than I was before I knew them. I really lucked out in them and D being the first friends I made in Manchester.

• I forgot I have an in-person meeting tomorrow morning -- only in Manchester, but still. I'd neglected to put it on my work calendar so I was extremely glad for the reminder e-mail today! And the offer of meeting me at the train station nearest to wherever this building is, which saves me from finding it myself. My guide is also visually impaired, so fingers crossed we find each other tomorrow, heh.

• I am extremely grateful that we have access to covid vaccines, that we can afford them now that they're not freely available. We talked about the importance of D and I getting ours early enough that they'll have kicked in before we go to Germany (which is in less than a month now!) and other stuff has conspired to mean that it's good to do this week. The only time we're all free is Wednesday afternoon. I am going to London for work on Thursday, which means an early start and a long day. I don't normally react very strongly to the covid shot but please cross your fingers for me because it'd be just my luck to be wiped out by it this time!

• "Touch my leg!" D greeted me with this morning, and held up his calf. He's wearing new corduroys! They're extremely soft, and a very pretty dark blue.

• Last week he said "Sniff my beard!" He ordered new clothes, he's trying to grow out his beard which means finding a beard oil that doesn't set off his sensory aversions to smells or greasy things. His careful research in this area has resulted in something I'm borrowing because I actually like how it makes me smell, and I'm starting to have enough beard to want it to be softer and particularly for the skin underneath to be a bit better looked-after.

We're cat-sitting Miss Frost.

Yesterday afternoon, she wedged herself into the space between the mattress and the edge of the daybed in our spare room, nestled among the cushions so thoroughly that all I could see of her when I got home from work was her dark eyes in her white face, and one ear. She wasn't asleep, she let V pet her, but she was also extremely content there.

Last night her meowing woke me up at 5am. I got out of bed amiably enough, figuring that she was hungry after not eating since the morning before because she hadn't moved from her cozy spot all evening. (I later learned she'd had a pouch of food, and a ton of pets, from V a few hours earlier!)

Her food dish was empty so I gave her a pouch of food. She was so excited that she got some food on the top of her head by not waiting for me to put it in the dish before she stuck her head in between my hands and the pouch of wet food.

She let me pet her and rubbed up against both my legs until I, barely awake, needed to go back to bed. I showed her she could follow me, and praised her bravery when, cautiously, she did.

I heard her going around my room (she has a bell on her collar).

At one point, I woke up and saw her sitting on the floor, sitting quite happily on my space rug, which made me smile because I remember so many times when I could look over and see Gary curled up there (he liked it because it's so soft). So I could happily go back to sleep.

When my alarm went off and I was getting ready for work, there was no sign of her near her food or water or litter box or the daybed covered in cushions.

Later I found her, under my bed, among the dust and the storage boxes. Again her dark eyes were looking right at me, but she seemed perfectly content: not excited about my presence but not skittish about it either.

V has twice today lured her out long enough to have food and some more pets. She's happily accepted this, but dived right back to her spot under the bed when she'd had enough. She's clearly fine, just likes being under the bed.

She's an only cat now, but for most of her life lived with two other cars and she spent a lot of time under her humans' bed then. So clearly this seems like a good idea to her here too.

The loveliest thing happened this morning: I got a package which I'd forgotten to expect despite being reminded of it just yesterday.

Online I know someone who goes by "Inarticulate Quilter." I don't know about inarticulate, but she sure is a quilter. She shares so many lovely things that she makes. A few months ago, one of the works-in-progress that she showed us was of the new Minnesota flag with words on the light-blue part: "If we cannot find words, may we find the will." It's from the poem Amanda Gorman wrote when Alex Pretti was killed.

Just seeing the design made my heart feel so full I thought it'd burst. I told her how wonderful it was. She DMed me to say that she'd love to gift it to me so that it'd go to someone with such a connection to Minnesota. I feel so little connection compared to my friends there, who were and are still doing real things to resist (ICE never really left of course). But I'd been meaning to get something with the new(ish) flag design on it anyway, and I wasn't going to say no to this kind offer.

Relatively recently, it was finished and of course I had to offer my address -- and once again a refused offer of payment or at least covering the exorbitant shipping costs, which was refused so I've donated a similar amount to Haven Watch, which I'm assured is doing good work.

I'll get a proper thing to hang it from, but for now it's just clipped to a trouser hanger and hung from the curtain rod in my bedroom; scruffy though the arrangement may be, I am made so happy by seeing this wonderful wall hanging in my room. The dark blue is a similar color to the glow-in-the-dark constellation curtains it's currently in front of; the light blue is a similar color to the one I painted (most of) my bedroom walls, even before Minnesota chose it for our flag.

I had seven meetings today, one a two-hour workshop about Something Important (though not quite as important as I'd previously had reason to hope it was! ah well, still very useful), and when I left the one about our pensions early -- the Q&A session started and I didn't understand the Q's never mind the A's; as a millennial who got my first white-collar job when I was 40 I have no expectation of a pension ever being that useful to me -- I'd barely taken my headphones off when a colleague called me to ask a very reasonable question to which I can only offer vague and unsatisfying answers.

It was such a Monday! But good thing: Monday means circuits. I didn't do as well at the squat presses as last week (last week I was thinking wow I've gotten good at this! this isn't hard at all! so naturally it was time for hubris to bite me in the ass), but I still felt much better about everything in my life afterward.