Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • Allergies

    My allergies are back. The thing that my doctor calls ‘hayfever’ has returned; I’m sniffling like a small child and my head is full of goo. This is not a cold. It will abate, and my headache will go – I hope – but this is a new degree of insanity; not only is it not remotely summer like it’s not even fracking warm. It’s 2 degrees outside, there’s not a flower in the country, the grass is not seeding, and yet I feel like crap. I am now thinking very rude thoughts. That is all.

  • Plenty of running, no discernable movement

    It’s been one of those days. It’s been okay, I had a really good swim – by which I mean, vastly overcompetitive racing Nikki down the pool, arms and legs complaining, beating the frustration out of myself swim. I’m way slower than I was; I’m not getting nearly enough time in the water.

    It’s this darned work.

    Of which I’ve achieved a little today. I struggled to get going – but managed to find some papers and things; and then… ran out of paper. So I used that as an excuse to head over and see Nikki and John – who were trying to coax his SC100 into running. I scabbed lunch and as it started to snow I headed off – much kudos to Nikki and John for going on with trying to get it going despite the worst / coldest weather we’ve had for days.

    Anyway, I headed off to open a new shiny bank account – managed – got stuck in traffic, bought some paper (discovered Woolworths nee Big W no longer stock multipacks of reams of paper) and err, a Cafetiere (sp.). Look, I know I shouldn’t spend money. But it was 3 quid, and Aunt Peter gave me this fucking excellent coffee, and it goes straight through my little single cup filter – so I’ve only been having it when other people are here. And I want to have it for me. Because it’s really damn nice (and also running out. Trey’s been given strict instructions to grovel for me for more coffee when she arrives in the frozen North).

    So, then I sat in traffic some more, got home, reloaded the Ozone Creator Laser Printer with fresh shiny 80gsm paper (my, so thin) prodded at my work some more in a half hearted way and then realised I’d given them the wrong NI number. I’d managed to swap the first and middle pair of numbers. Gah. So I’ll be heading down again tomorrow to say “I’m some kind of moronic fool who gives you random numbers instead of my own NI number….” I also twigged that I got it wrong on some other form. I used to know it off by heart – and my brain still thinks I do, but I don’t. Which is frustrating. *sigh*

    Never mind.

  • Dull, dull, dull.

    So, I’ve got the next two days ‘off’; in that time I’ve got several things I need to do:

    • Action plan for essay. Find evidence. Implement plan. Write 2000 word essay.
    • Polish of reviewing those last two papers. Hope the two I’ve ordered are good.
    • Attack the EU Packs a bit.
    • Swim.
    • Find out what I need to have done for Friday’s Uni Day; and do it.

    I’ve rung about the moved goalposts / government forms. I’ve prodded into action the machines that need prodding. Christ knows what’d’ve happened if I’d’ve not rung.

    I also need to:

    • Service my car (in the near future, it’s not desparate yet but the brakes are starting to pull slightly to the left, so I reckon they’re due the service they’ve not had for the last 2 and a bit years…). They tyres need ‘rotating’ – because the front ones are looking a trifle worn. Not at the wear limit, but getting awfully close, so I shall swap them round a bit. Hopefully it might help me track down the hideous shudder. But I really can’t afford to replace them before the end of the placement – and this placement is hard on tyres (all bloody roundabouts and nice-to-drive curvy British roads)
    • Strip my bike’s frame. Someone’s very kindly (incredibly kindly) offered to weld up the frame for me – which I really need done, but I need to strip the bike down to just the frame.

    Excitement is clearly brewing in the House of Elliott ;-) (more…)

  • Holy fucking crap…(TV!)

    Okay, you may not twig this from recent journal posts but I’m so not a TV person. My standard TV requirements for the last few years can be summarised in one line:

    Dead Like Me; The L Word; Battlestar Galactica; Hustle.
    I watched Lost. I even got quite into Lost. Then I went to Alaska, got out of Lost and now can’t even find the enthusiasm to watch it. I may do at some point, but it generally fills a space. Films. Films I watch. I love films.

    Anyway, so, Life On Mars. Each week I say the same thing: “That was the best episode ever”. But that one, that last one, episode 7 of 8, I barely breathed during the whole hour. I was so tense for the entire programme. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tense for an entire TV programme. I am desparate to see next week’s episode.

    And nervous about it too; it being the last in the series. Is it a one off series? Is he going to die? What the hell is going to happen. It’s insane, he’s in a coma and this richly textured world around him… it’ll all be gone? All these people, figments of his imagination. Gaaah. Anyway, it’s fucking excellent. Totally fucking excellent. It’s insanely well written. If you’ve not seen it, you should. Now. It’s torrentable, and it takes my breath away every week.

    Incidentally, BSG episode 16, also goram excellent. It’s bizzare. I’m so used to not-really-watching TV that when I do, it’s stuff I really want to watch and, well, the stuff I watch is really tailored to my taste, so I have a very skewed view of how good TV is :)

  • Secret life of Kate

    Apologies before I start, I read my post earlier – and decided I really was too tired to work. My plan to do work after I got home changed when I realised that my English had deteriorated to the level that I saw…
    So, there are things about me that no-one knows, not even my exs, although I think that’s something that needs to change with my next partner. Some of these dark corners are getting dusty, and I’m lonely in them ;-)

    Anyway, there are some things about me that aren’t secret – not as such – but they do seem to surprise people; the first of these is that I cook. This tends to come out quite quickly. I rarely eat anything which isn’t prepared by my own fair hand. By which I do not mean ‘I pour a sauce on and cook some meat and rice’; no, I mean starting from raw ingredients; I can’t remember the last time I had jar-tomato sauce. This is not to damn those who don’t cook. What you eat is up to you, I just like to know what I’m eating… and I prefer the taste of my own food to shop-bought-food. Even if I am trapped in a white sauce / tomato sauce / curry loop (that’s not so true now, I’ve been doing more dishes, just to maintain some interest in the food!).

    The sad thing is, the thing I really love cooking? Desserts. I love making desserts. It brings me great joy to produce something incredibly delicious as a dessert. I don’t mind cooking mains and starters, but it’s desserts which bring out my real pride. I remember making a Sylabub when I was about 13; my family were amazed – they thought it’d collapse, but no, it was just right. This is not bragging. I can cook. I can’t sew. Hopeless at sewing. Once sewed my GCSE project to a chair level of bad. (more…)

  • Freezing bloody cold

    This house. Gah. I know, the heating isn’t set to come on ’til 5 (remembers this, runs out, sticks heating on), so the house is bloody cold when I get home from work. I’m wary of changing it, because basically, if I changed it to come on before I came home every day, and to be on until near when I leave it’d be on all day (which is actually what I did in one house).

    So it was bloody freezing when I got home.
    The new heater’s been put into service already, this morning it made the bathroom bearable while I got up and now it’s heating this room while the inadequate house heating attempts to pull the temperature up.

    Anyway, so I’m in a bit of a foul mood because as I was walking to my car leaving work I saw someone driving off – and as they did so my car lurched backwards. They’d used the ‘drive until you hit someone’ method of parking. Now I’ve nudged cars when parking before but I’ll always stop and check that I’ve not done any damage but this wo/man drove off. I can’t see any in my quick scan – the chromework just having some black paint on it from her car which wiped off (on my finger…); but people looked a bit shocked as I yelled “OI!” and ran. Didn’t catch him/her plate though (I did the shouty runny thing before checking my car).

    Anyway, that put me in a ranty mood. And I’ve come home to what I thought; a confirmation that I’ll have to be in the UK for 2 years at least post qualifying if I want to go over and work in the Emergency Dept (which I do) – and for even more negativity ‘we don’t get much work in Canada for ED nurses’ – although apparently there’s more work in BC. But really, for the sake of simplicity I’d prefer Toronto / Ontario – it’d just save a ton of effort on my part (and anything that reduces the complexity of moving continent is good).

    I’ve got a response back from UHN as well, but it’s just a “we’ll pass it on” at the moment. Meh. I need some good Canada news now. Having my life on hold for two more years (at least, post qualifying (in 5 months time)) doesn’t seem wildly fun to me, I’ll do it, but I’d rather bypass it somehow.

  • Progress Report…

    I’m still struggling with the dissertation. There’s a whole ‘enthusiasm to actually do it’ thing; and trying desparately not to leave it, like the EU packs, to the last possible minute. So actually getting down and working is really me beating myself repeatedly over the head with the self-knowledge stick of “if you leave it you’ll still have to do it in the end”.

    At least, this weekend, I’ve actually made some more progress – but I’m still battling against having chosen a topic in a field that very little research appears to have been done in. Although if you type in ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ or even ‘homosexual’ into the British Nursing Index or the Cumulative Index of Allied and Health Literature you’ll get lots of hits. Lots of them. Scrub out all those before 1995 and you’re suddenly into far fewer. And do you know what the majority of them are on? They’re on AIDS. They’re on AIDS and the medical system staggeringly failing to care for people.

    But there’s very little there on the gay / lesbian patient experience. In fact, finding 8 primary research papers for a literature review that are less than 10 years old, in English, published, peer reviewed and centred on the patient experience has become something of a crusade. I’ve not succeeded yet. I’ve got 2 probables. I’m not sure if my search terms aren’t right, but even searching just by hand through upwards of 200 papers that have the word ‘lesbian’ in hasn’t yeilded results that I’ve missed.

    I’ve looked up papers from other papers (I’ve forgotten the name for this, there is a technical term for it) – I’ve just searched on Google for things, I’ve used PubMed and asked for papers from the British Library – and I’ve got a huge stack of papers that turn out to be secondary (not always suprising, but I’ve been getting a bit desparate), paper’s who’s abstracts are subtly misleading. Well, by huge stack. I’ve got about 20.

    I’m scared, frankly, that there aren’t going to be enough, that my dissertation is going to be a disaster because I won’t be able to find two more papers.

    What has struck me is that my scan-reading of papers is not as effective at catching out the bad ones as I’d once thought. Although I know what to look for, if I scan papers sometimes I don’t notice the subtle missing things that indicate something’s wrong in my quick scan read.

    Mostly it’s the sampling technique – if you’re trying to reach a difficult to reach population, and this certainly counts as that, then it’s understandable. But it does mean that some of this research has all the transferability of a RISC OS programme. It’s a big scary thing, the dissertation. I know I can fill 3,000 words easily, on this topic. Finding an argument is harder; because pretty much everything I’ve read has been depressingly similar; Gay and Lesbian individuals get a raw deal from health services.

    It’s changing my practice; because there are things I’d not realised – which is only because I’m staggeringly dumb, heterosexual-assumption based questions instantly put the glbt individual at a huge disadvantage. They’ve got a mountain to climb; to come out against you making heterosexuality the default. I tend to say have you got a partner, anyway. But there are other questions which… I now feel more prepared for.

    I have managed to work this weekend – as I said – I’ve actually worked my way through 2 papers – they’re all down into 2 pages of notes on what’s good and bad about them. I’ll be converting that into a table as soon as I tackle the last two. That’s 6… there’s one more ‘possible’ paper – which I might use anyway, which extends it from just nursing to midwifery as well, which’d give me 9; more than the recommended minimum 8.

    I’m pondering, actually, referencing series 3 episode 6 of the L word; because it actually tackles one of the major issues with glbt healthcare, which I won’t go into (‘cos it’d be a spoiler); but yes. Anyway. That’s progress for you; 2 possible papers to order from the British Library and 2 more papers reviewed ready for me to start writing the actual review. This is goodness.

  • I just spent an hour…

    Creating an exceptionally bad to drive to CD:
    Moby – Extreme Ways
    Arctic Monkeys – When The Sun Goes Down
    Punk-a-Wallahs – Desi on the Streets of Calcutta
    Ladytron – Destroy Everything You Touch
    Madonna – Hung Up
    Praise Cats – Shined On Me (E.Smoove Vocal Mix)
    The White Stripes – My Doorbell
    Sugababes – Hole In The Head
    Republica – Ready To Go
    Run Lola Run – Running One
    Paul Oakenfold – Ready Steady Go (ft Asher D)
    Kaiser Chiefs – Na Na Na Na Naa
    The Bravery – An Honest Mistake
    Basement Jaxx – Do Your Thing

    I fear what this will do for my driving. But… Hey. Fortunately my minor’s wheels are still not balanced right, so there’s only so much ‘fast’ I can do; and also my car’s not set up right and travelling swiftly tends to engage the “why bother putting petrol in the tank, I could just set it alight on the forecourt” feeling in my head.

    Still it should help me to wake up in the morning :-)

    (I am working, slowly, really….)

  • Cue manic laughter

    The quality of this screwdriver set might not be all that I’d hope…

     
    The new fan heater, it smells revolting; but it’s got a ceramic element, and hell, it was 10 quid. Unlike last time I’ll be keeping the receipt (you have no idea how many itterations of the word receipt I went through before my brain went ‘no, you spell it like that‘), because these days 10 quid matters much more than it did when I bought that EWT pile-o-crap. This one is also held together with screws, but disconcertingly, it has a ‘caution’ light. What’s that about?

    Anyway, if John has an appropriate screwdriver I’ll take the other one apart ‘gently’ and fix it for garage use, if not then I’ll use it as my first welding project – making a new metal case for it after I chop the plastic one apart to get the bits out. I can’t just junk it. It’d make quite a good garage heater – 2,000 Watts is about as warm as I need down there. Also I can add in a ‘fan only’ switch which is always handy. This thing is suprisingly warm :-) I also, in a spate of overspending, picked up a squeegie entirely for my rear view mirrors. Problem is they’re too small for the normal window one, and it’s been driving me nuts that I can’t see out of them. So now I’ve got a specifically for mirrors one :-)

  • There’s no place that’s home

    It’s bloody cold here this morning. It’s probably not that cold, but sat around in my big teeshirt and socks I’m fracking freezing. The wet hair probably doesn’t help

    If you’re wondering about the whole ‘fracking’ thing, it’s a BSGism and it’s because I’ve noticed that Europeans, or more specifically the British and the Irish swear a hell of a lot more than Candians and Americans. For example. Had I written that sentance the way I first thought of it it’d’ve been: “swear a fuck load more than…”

    When I visited Ireland all those happy years ago (3…) I thought “bloody hell” – and my ‘Irish’ accent is largely based around me dropping in about 60% more instances of the word “fuck”. Apparently it sounds like TV-Northern Irish. Anyway, I guess that’s how I must sound to Canadians…
    Anyway, so, in an effort to make myself more polite I’m trying to drop the swearing. Thing is, I don’t swear at work, I’m really shocked when nurses swear – there’s this really nice Spanish nurse at work who learned English in the North of England, and her choice of words is rather more colourful than you’d maybe expect… Which is quite entertaining.

    Yeah. So. It’s funny, I’ve felt this before and it’s usually a transient thing, but I’m kind of feeling it again; the whole not feeling at home anywhere. I mean, it’s my home, this is my house, some of my friends are here in Bristol. But I kind of mentally disconnected myself from the place when I decided I wanted to move to Canada. It’s bizzare. Bristol’s now just the place I live. Like my mum’s house, it’s a place I stay. Which has the unfortunate side effect of no-where feeling like home. I’ve ensnared myself in my own mental trap.

    Not so clever after all :-p

    Anyhow, that’s been bugging me, I’m treading water waiting for the time when I don’t have to wait for the time. Which is made more frustrating by discovering that the recruitment agents and the hospitals in Canada want 2 years post-qualifying experience in your chosen field before considering you for work. This is agonisingly painful. I now feel like I’ve hit the pause button on my life and can’t press play. The idea of staying here for 2 years after qualifying instead of 1.5 from now, well, it’s kind of depressing really. On the other hand it’s probably a more ‘reasonable’ timescale for me to raise the money and so on – so the sensible part of me is going “well, I guess it isn’t so bad. It’s only 6 months”; and the impatient impulsive bit of me is being driven nuts by it.

    I’m still stuck listening to Desi on the Streets of Calcutta, incidentally.

    Anyway, other stuff, namely Northern Exposure. I’ve finished season one of Northern Exposure off; the disks managing to last a week of viewing only with emmense effort on my part. I’d never seen Season one before, it’s (obviously) no where as developed as the later series, the characters seem rather two dimensional – and lack depth… Sometimes it feels like not only do you not know their backstory but that they don’t really have one. On the other hand, there are sparks of what the series was to become – and there’s some really good episodes hidden in this first series.

    That – and the first episode when Joel is sent to Cicely is just hilarious. It’s the final epsiode of the series which really grabbed me though; the characters have started to get that rich depth that was so much a hallmark of the series and that episode – it grabbed me and sucked me in completely. I could watch it again right now. Highs and lows, humour and pain; all the things I loved about Northern Exposure.

    One thing though; the DVDs are absolute shit. Complete and total pathetic crap. For the first time in my life I’ve submitted an Amazon review because it’s beyond poor. The quality of the video is fine, that I don’t really have any complaints about; in fact, I thought that the quality was suprisingly good. No. It’s the fact they’ve not even bothered to put chapter markers in it. No chapter markers at all. So you can’t stop an episode and come back to it without having to fast-forward through it video style. In fact, it’s worse than video because video you could stop and come back to, but not the Northern Exposure disks.

    I don’t mind not having extras. I don’t actually care about that, they’re nice but I didn’t really expect much from a series shot in 1990, even not having scene selection – I don’t care. But no chapters at all? What kind of crap is that? They want 26 quid for the third DVD in the set, and it better bloody have chapter markers.

    And in other news I’ve caught up on The L Word (spoilers (short)). (more…)