Mostly lemon based

Category: Pride

  • Bye face.

    Today’s the last day that I’ll have this face. Which is an interesting situation.

    It’s hopefully the last day that the damage that testosterone did – most noticeably in those four years between 16 and 20, when I finally started HRT, when I finally got my shit together at least somewhat, and that I see in the pictures of me, will be there. I know that it’s going to take a long time for that damage to disappear because it takes a long time for the swelling to go down and your tissues to adjust. And I know that I’ll look in the mirror at least for a good long while and wonder whether it was worth the pain, and whether I look different at all. This I know, because I’ve been chatting with people who’ve had FFS.

    And I also know – because in the last 2 years I’ve put in a ton of effort to lose a ton of weight (stabilized at ~66-67 kg for a good long while) that my face has been changing, constantly. The change over these two years has felt pretty dramatic as I’ve shed the extra weight, but it’s also brought more clearly into focus the things that I dislike. Despite that, I know, and can see that over the years the woman looking back at me has aged and changed, I’ve had my hair long, and short, and whatever the fuck it is now (it’s PURPLE! And I have a number 1 on some of it and the rest of it is longer than its been in years. But all the same, how do people not notice that it’s PURPLE?! I’ve had 3 people notice at work – and only one of them is someone I work with regularly. I mean it’s handy because i can just point at my hair if anyone asks if I look different. But still).

    I’ve worn make up and not.

    I’ve worn glasses and not.

    But also – also – underlying the nervousness, the anxiety about surgery, about healing, about sleeping sat up which is something that I have never, historically, been able to do (incidentally, ebay sellers: check the address before you send stuff? My sitty-up-pillow-thing did not arrive and y’know why? Because the dozy pillock appears to have sent it to a random not-my-address)  – underlying all that is this bubbling excitement.

    The idea that I might be able to look at myself in the mirror and not just see the damage.

    That I might be able to look in the mirror and not shy away, or find myself focusing on the things I hate.

    Because I don’t see him, I don’t see the person I pretended to be to survive.

    I haven’t for a long, long time.

    But I also don’t see me. And the idea that I might get more than a passing glimpse of me is terribly, terribly exciting.

  • On facing up to things

    Before I write this – I’ve been looking at some of my old posts. Seriously old posts. The first posts I wrote that still exist (unless my old Tripod site remains on some archive somewhere. But I can’t remember the address for that, or what it was called (although it might also still exist on my Risc PC)). Anyway, the earliest posts that exist and I’m painfully aware having read them that apart from a ton of just general working out shit from being in your first throws of adulthood, and the oh, second puberty is wild, there’s also a ton of internalised transphobia and pseudo-patriarchal stupidity which I had yet to identify and to whatever extent I have so far managed to overcome it, overcome it.

    So I’m pretty certain that in another twenty years I’ll look back at this page and wince. Because I sure as hell did as I uploaded some of the posts into the blog from 2000.

    Well, I’ll wince if in 20 years time the internet still exists in anything like a recognisable form. And society still exists and hasn’t crumbled into post-climate-change Mad Maxian scarcity. But anyway, just putting that out there since I’m gonna be rambling. And it’s been a while since I’ve had this kind of ramble.

    Trigger warnings: Suicide, death, dysphoria, self-harm, mentions of domestic violence.

    The last year has been tough in many ways. COVID continues to be a thing that so much of society is cheerfully ignoring, while I – someone for whom the first twenty years of my life passed in a blur of dysphoric dissociation – am moderately paranoid about both getting sick, and getting long COVID. It’s like being constantly gaslit – we know this disease is shit, we know that if you’re unlucky then it can hop in and not only destroy your immune system, but rewrite your oxygen transport mechanisms, fuck with your brain and clotting cascades and…basically everything. And yet we’re plodding along allowing it to repeatedly rampage through society. Which means even though I’m marginally less burned out than I have been in nursing, the forward looking bit of my brain is absolutely shitting bricks about what nursing, and healthcare in general, might be like in a decade. I’m already seeing what anecdotally feels like a hell of a lot more very sick people – sick as a result of clotting things – which we know is a sequale of COVID thing, and whether what I feel is that or isn’t that, well, anyway. That makes the future worrying in a way that I can’t so far work my way around.

    But this year has also been interesting mainly thanks to me reading Alyson Greaves. I’ve known Alyson for a long old time – we came out at the same time, and she was on the trans youth group mailing list I ended up running for a while. We chatted a bunch back when I was writing ill-informed internalized transphobia shit on this blog. Somehow she didn’t murder me and we’ve stayed in some-sort-of-touch ever since. Anyhow, she’s written a lot. In fact, I think she kinda inspired me to up and get back to writing because I really enjoyed what she was writing – and reading her work I suddenly realised there aren’t enough trans stories out there. And since that’s what I write, and I am not a terrible writer, maybe I should put fingers to keys and…y’know finish it. But that’s for another day.

    But the other thing, and this has been something that’s been very slow dawning is that reading her work – and others as a result – , and the diversity of experiences in particular in the trans experiences that she’s written has allowed me to spend a lot of time exploring my transness.

    Which is fascinating because honestly, I though I was done with it. Exploring transness, I mean.

    Realistically I’ve thought a lot about transness, and mostly for the past few years it’s been a part of my identity which has mainly existed as there’s this thing in my past that I share with some of my friends, and occasionally I crack inappropriate trans jokes about genitals, or lean in with a strong northern accent and proclaim “Oh, when I were a lad.” But then over the past few years trans people have become the butt of right wing ire about our very existence. There’s been the obvious, tedious rise of TERFism in the UK – which thanks to funding from evangelical shites in the US – and the western press’s absolute addiction to bothsidesing every argument even when there’s actually only one side; especially when there’s really only one side, has risen to a level of prominence that’s really spurring hatecrimes and hate-legislation. There’s been the constant, nagging, dispiriting chant of “fairness in sport” because, yeah, sure, my likely inadequately androgenised brain has some massive fucking enormous advantage in chess, ‘cos all women are bad at spacial awareness because really they’re just Suzie-Homemaker-Baby-Machines, or some such other sexist bullshit.

    Or the fact that I can’t build muscle for shit because E-no-T… That definitely gives me a huge advantage in sports – that’s why I’m an Olympic Triathlon Gold Medal holder.

    But then, in the last while there’s been the absolutely destroying knowledge that kids like I once was are going to be back to dying instead of ending up like me. That there’s going to be another generation of trans kids in the US who don’t end up having people a little older than them to help share their experiences. People who won’t see someone like them to know that they can be them. To know that being trans is a thing that is real in the world and that they might be that. That they might be able to make sense of their selves, and their experiences, and their child-I-don’t-understand-this-and-examples-would-be-fucking-useful-ness. There are kids who won’t know – and will have a huge black fucking hole in their selves – in their perception of who they are and how they interact with the world – and some of them will make it to adulthood, and maybe, maybe get to transition then (if they can escape those states, and those countries), and some of them will absolutely fucking die. And that fucking rips me apart.

    I’m a fucking elder in the trans community.

    I transitioned 20 years ago, and when I did there were so few people like me.

    There were a vanishingly small number of trans late-teens/young adults, and basically no-one a few years older.

    The few trans people I saw were all people who’d transitioned in their 50s and 60s. They’d had kids. They had families.

    I could not even conceive of living past my twenties.

    Fuck, I’d decided that at the age of 21 I would do something about being trans, or I’d do something about being alive, and we’d see which came first.

    Part of that was that trans people were “encouraged” to hide ourselves. To disappear into cis society. To not discomfort others with our transness, lest we lead others astray or cause discomfort. Or get the shit beaten out of us by some bigot – which would be our fault for being insufficiently cis.

    But most of that is that the vast majority of people like me (who ‘knew’ we were trans) and people who coulda/shoulda/woulda worked it out in their 20s and 30s. They died. By their own hand.

    I know – I know people who did. Because the ‘care’ that was available was so fucking poor. And that’s what they want to recreate.

    Trans kids don’t die because they’re trans. They die because they’re unsupported. They die because they’re othered and forced out from society. They die because their parents harm them. They die because they don’t see a future.

    I couldn’t see a future with my body the way it was.

    I hated it.

    I hurt it.

    I did it on purpose and I did it by accident. I did it because I didn’t care for it, and I did it because it hurt me, because it let me down every single fucking day. I did it because every time I looked in a mirror; every time I saw a reflection; every time I looked down; every time I had to touch it or perform even basic self care it felt alien and disgusting. It felt like it wasn’t me. It made others see me in a way that I couldn’t relate to.

    Christ, even now just thinking about it I can feel my old wounds. Scars no one can see.

    But for me I felt so much better after gender confirming surgery, and then I was entirely taken up with an abusive relationship, which once I got out of it took ‘quite a while’ to come to terms with the fact that was abusive – mostly because I didn’t realise quite how harmful it was. And then, well, life. I’ve spent so long examining the stuff inside my head, but I never really looked at the bit of me that went “huh, I really don’t like looking at me.”

    I mean, we don’t really have much in the way of mirrors around the house. Never have. I didn’t like them, and there was a background “I don’t like them”, which basically was just there – and had always been there – and like the background assumption that all boys hated being boys and just sucked it up and dealt, and I was just fucking terrible at it, I didn’t really look at it. I have a big degree of face blindness anyway, which means that I can’t picture my face basically at all, so I don’t really know what I look like except in the mirror. (I can’t picture anyone’s face, when I see people I know, I’m like “yes, that’s their face”, but I’ve also walked past good friends while actively looking for them because they’ve taken a jumper off and thus ceased to be recognisable). So yeah, to an extent the “I don’t like how I look” just kinda washed into the background of “I don’t like mirrors [let’s not think too much about why that might be]”  and “I have faceblindness, so this discomfort comes from that.”

    And then, as I read, and chatted on Consensus Discord with other trans people, and spent time actually processing some of my own trauma, it gradually dawned on me that what I was feeling was dysphoria. Not at the level that I’d experienced it with other parts of my body. But dysphoria none-the-less. And giving myself permission to accept that and think that “huh, I could do something about that”, that was a slow process. And then accepting that maybe, maybe I should do something about it. And that was harder – because I look at the things I’m uncomfortable with around my face. Brow ridges, jaw line, etc., etc., and I look at my mum, and my grandmother, and y’know what, they’re genetic. Like, a lot of south-Asian women have some brow ridge. A lot have a higher hair line. A lot have a stronger jaw. It’s probably just fucking genetics. And frankly – once you start looking at other women, this whole idealised fucking nonsense about what a woman’s face looks like is utter, utter bollocks. Basically everyone I work in my ER has some feature that when you look at Facial Feminisation Surgery (FFS) would be shaved off or hidden. A bunch have significant brow ridges, strong jawlines, ‘deficient cheeks’. That’s why makeup is such a big part of the beauty industry, it can help cover the terrible sins of being inadequately feminine. for patriarchal society.

    And then I had to spend a lot of time processing the nonsense in my brain of “well, if I was cis, would I want this”. And by extension “should I do this?” And that’s a whole ridiculous thing because at the end of the day I’m not cis. There’s no universe in which I would be me, and I would be cis. Had I been cis, the person that I ended up being would be so radically different from the woman I am now that — well, I have no idea who she’d be. Would she be queer? Would she be cis-by-default, or would she one day have ended up being non-binary? I don’t know, frankly, fuck knows. She doesn’t exist, at least in this timeline. Would she spend half her life in hoodies and jeans, and the other looking queer-as-fuck for a YT channel talking about cars and clean energy and moving the world to a better, more equitable (and survivable) future? Who knows.

    Who knows who that woman would be. Christ, I don’t even know who I’d be if I’d’ve transitioned as a kid. The concept of me coming out of the womb all cis’d up? That’s so far removed from who I am now, that the question of whether that person, whoever she might be, would want something that I want is patently absurd.

    Which is why I eventually realised that:

    1. I have saved up some money and it’s enough to cover this* (*I believe)
    2. This thing might make me more comfortable with my own appearance (risk: I might become incredibly self-absorbed and an unbearably sexy trans icon (as if I’m not already ;) ))
    3. It’s my fucking money and my fucking body and I should be able to do with it as I will
    4. I want this damn thing

    And booked an appointment for FFS.

    And then scheduled a date for the surgery.

    And so far, the only thing I regret is that I didn’t do this 20 damn years ago.

  • Not since November?

    Wow. It’s been a while. I mean it’s not entirely surprising. Life’s been full – at the same time as it’s been the same as always. But November was pretty much all taken up with writing my book – first draft finished but not edited. Dear lord is it not edited – and my short story. First fiction I’ve published online since a terrible start to a terrible story back in, what, the late 90s? That’s here, by the way. I’m quite proud of it. There’s things I’d change – every single pass, every read, I’d fiddle with stuff. There’s more that I could do, but I’ve decided to let it go.

    People don’t seem to hate it, which is nice.

    I’m back to editing the book. That’s a slog, which is why I’m writing this.

    That’s not true. I’m writing this because I decided to log in to post Chapter 1 of an Audiobook version of Glow, Worm – by Alyson Greaves. I’m not going to promise to keep recording it, but it was fun to do this one and it didn’t take quite as long as I though it would. I’d like to get better at soundscape stuff. I know audiobooks don’t generally have a lot of soundscape, but the few I’ve listened to have a bit, sometimes, and part of it is that I’ve been using just the freesound stuff. Nikki’s happy for me to use TE stuff (but then I’d feel the need to credit TE. Which is fine, but also…I feel weird about promoting my work on the back of someone else’s).

    Anyhow. So I logged in and realised that I never did my year in review thing (which, ha. I’ve not done that reliably for years anyway), and I’ve not updated you on my awesome ongoing life events, that you all care so deeply, deeply about. Well, anyway. So. What have I been up to? Well, there’s been slow progress on the garage. I’ve been clearing it with the theory that I have about four-hundred-billion projects that I want to get on with in there, but it’s hard to do that when you can’t actually get to any of the workbenches because they’re all covered in shite. However, it turns out that I still at a fundamental level neither like organising, nor do I feel particularly good at it. But I’ve been plodding along, giving an hour or two here or there. Another couple of hours might see it sorted to a point where I can get some projects done and out and get back to working on RebeccaMog. Which I really should do. I should really be doing the garage today, or working on the house, but in my defence, it’s freaking cold outside (there was ice on my car at lunch time) [please insert other excuses here].

    I have been intermittently working on the house. I really need to cut some more trim – I’m so close now that it’s painful to think about. The bathroom is the worst, it’s missing a bunch of trim around the tile edges, and the interior door trim, and the window trim. But honestly? It’s probably two – three days worth of work to get it all cut and oiled and up. (Although there’s a solid week inbetween of letting it dry). I also need to actually cut and attach the skirting board in the two bedrooms. That’s trickier because there’s furniture in both bedrooms, and that… is going to be more of a pain. But since they’re oiled and ready and just need cutting to length and attaching to the damn wall, I really should get on it.

    Once that’s done the main thing is the doors. We really should have some doors.

    The main thing that’s been taking our time has been adoption stuff. We eventually signed up with an agency and that means that we’ve been spending a lot of time filling in adoption related paperwork. It’s long and – while not complicated – takes a lot of thinking about it. And doing that and creating our profile book took a long time, and occupied a lot of the space that I notionally allocate as free time. Between that and my writing, oh and my singing, I’ve been fairly full up.

    Singing has been fun, hearing my range expand has been wild – I’ve gained, like, an octave plus since I started singing (a chunk at the top and a bit at the bottom). Hilariously, I discovered a ‘boy’ voice which I don’t think is my actual voice from pretransition, because I don’t think I ever really did chest resonance. People always thought I was my (female) flatmates on the phone (or my mum / sister when I was home). Most of my vocal therapy was focussed on getting me to have some intonation. But yeah, it is theoretically available – funnily enough though I was trying to do it today for recording Glow, Worm and could I do it (even after vocal warmups)? Hell no. Wouldn’t happen at all. So feh. Trans-girl-doing-boy-voice it is. Also, apparently I’m crap at breathing. I’m better now than I used to be, and it’s really noticable, but I’m not great a breathing still – and trying to remember to breathe before singing a line rhather than discovering mid-way-through that I have run out of breath is a whole thing.

    I’m also now singing with a group. As in, a people-with-instruments-and-lots-of-practice-and-skills-expectation-I-might-eventually-perform-in-front-of-people which is fucking terrifying, if I do say so myself. But last week I actually put some welly into it and sang in front of them (all it took was Sarah telling me to shout at Erik), and lo, I was off. Fuck if it’s scary though. And trying to develop some kind of faith in my body, and my voice, and my abilities? Not something that I’ve got a lot of successful past experience with.

    Still, I’m having fun. And Kathryn got me a little mini-synth for Xmas, which is awesome fun. Had a play with that this afternoon, which was fun. I feel like I need a sequencer to get the most out of it, and then I want to play with the BBC Micro / Music 5000. And then, and then. I really need to just be wealthy, it would make “not working and just doing the stuff I want to do” a feasible option.

    In other, other news, I got approval for FFS. I don’t think I’ve talked much on here about this, but it slowly dawned on me that other people look at themselves in the mirror. They don’t necessarily love what they see, but they can deal, and they feel like the person in the mirror is them. That’s never really been the case with me. There are bits of my face I’m fine with, but some of my face I’m really not. To the point that doing makeup, I’d focus on the eyelids, or the lashes, or whatever I was doing. Same with lipstick. I would then glance at, like, my whole face for a moment to check it looked “okay” as a whole look – and actually, with makeup on it was much more tolerable. The faceblindness meant that away from a mirror it wasn’t so bad, although in my head my face feels suuper angular. I can’t picture it, but I can’t picture anyone’s faces. It’s always kinda aggravating, because I ask my brain what someone looks like and it just produces this fuzzy blob. Me, them, anyway… so to an extent I think that’s what made it somewhat tolerable. But this year I realised that fuck me, that’s more dysphoria. That’s a discomfort with myself. And those discussions I had early on with my shrink about it – they’re still fucking relevant now. 20 years later.

    Genius that I am.

    Anyhow, I realised that I could, in fact, get something done about it. And that’s my plan this year. I had my consultation just prior to Christmas, saw a psrhink in December, and the surgery was approved by insurance this year. So.

    Apparently, also, in the list of “things I should have known but didn’t get fixed”, when my endo back in England advised me that I might want to see an ENT specialist about my nose, I should have listened because the FFS surgeon said that my nasal structure is why I find it hard to breathe through my nose. I’d always attributed it to allergies, but no. Apparently I have ‘hypertrophic turbinates’ and a deviated septum. Both those things are fixable. So that’s also on my list for the year. If I wanted nasal work as part of my FFS then he’d do it, apparently, but in my case, I don’t. So apparently I get to have that separately. Yay.

    Anyhow, so that’s the big kinda catch-all update. I now have paperwork to go fill in, so I should, uh, do that.

     

  • In other news…

    The A Pride of Minors 2006 EuroPride video is now available for download at the video page. In two flavours, Huge and Quite Small But Not Very Good Quality. It’s also in the process of being added to Google Video, so for those without enormous bandwidth availability it should be on there soon. Just getting verified at the moment.

  • V is for virtuous

    Which is how I’m being with not swearing at Premier. I don’t know quite what it is about Premier which winds me up so much – but it does just annoy me.

    The editing functions are nice, but why does exporting video have to be a trial by experiment affair – especially when rendering each time takes ages. I’ve no idea why it won’t export video that anything else can actually view, or why everything leaps up and says “this video has not been rendered for sequential viewing. You should reinterleave the video before exporting it to a slow medium” and then plays something of such staggeringly poor quality that it’s unwatchable.

    I don’t know what settings it *should* have, but none of the ‘default’ options work. I just end up fiddling with it until it works, which is tedious and because I’m normally tired and “just want the fucking thing to save the fucking movie” by the time I get to exporting, well, my patience tends to be a bit thin.

    This is my last attempt of the night though. And I need to work more tomorrow, so, well, we’ll see what happens. I’ll probably play a bit but I can’t afford to spend my whole day trying to coax it into rendering video.

  • Fame! I’m gonna live forever….

    I’m on Channel 4…
    FAME!
    (Okay, only radio
    but surely that counts anyway)
    FAME!

    Err. Um. Yeah. I’m on the Channel 4 Radio Podcast from EuroPride – 10 minutes in… That’s your illustrious Kate :-)

  • Famous!

    We’re in the Flickr photopool:

    Here, here, here, and here.

    Info on more sightings greatfully recieved. Yes, I am a media whore.

  • Blimey, that was fun

    You’ll have to excuse typos, I’m absolutely wrecked, and I’ve imbibed some alcoholic fluids during this rather warm day.

    I’ve also piled on the laundry, so I really am exhausted.

    No, yes, so, we did Pride yesterday. Me, Chrissy, Lauren and James (who’s the token heterosexual who saved our float, all cheer for James, he rocks and is an absolute star). Yes. We headed out *early* and this year opted not to forget anything, apart from where Baker Street is. Having found it, we parked up, Lauren and Chrissy registered and I assembled the car…

    I have to say, that’s about the only photo from the day, fortunately James managed to get quite a few more. So I shall await his photo collection with impatient excitement. I’ve also been scowering the internet for pictures of Pride London, just to see if there’s any of me, ‘cos I am a media whore.

    I spent most of the time in the Parade Saluting (interesting the effect on the police of saluting them :) ). It was enormous fun though. Are you getting the fun and excitment. Everybody loved Rebecca, and some people loved me ‘n’ James too (although I suspect James wasn’t up for that much lovin’)  :-)

    Much to my suprise, given last year’s disaster, she coped completely fine with the heat, although the clutch got a little juddery near the end of the parade, and as I got tired I managed to stall her twice (forgetting about going out of gear before letting my foot off the clutch).

    After we pulled off from Pride we deposited Lauren and Chrissy and headed out to the outskirts for the finding of the free Parking. Mission accomplished – parked outside the house of an retired-Irish-Mog-Builder (no, really); And James and I headed back via the much-closed Tube system, meeting up with Lauren and Chrissy in Soho at the alledged Women’s Festival. Only a lot of the women there seemed to be… well… men. Semi naked sweaty ones too. Anyhow, we still had a great time, and I spent far too much on funky rainbow striped earings, twin female symbol earings, a rainbow striped wallet (to replace my almost entirely disintegrated one), an excellent film called “Saving Face” (watched that today)… and other stuff which I can’t think of right now! Then we headed out for Dinner at… various places, but ended up at Garfunkels, just as we were giving up hope of finding something to suit all requests :-)
    Finally we headed home, dropping James off at his place before making a rather tired run back to Bristol. It’d’ve been fine if it weren’t for the rather unforunate fact that the M4 was closed and the diversion they’d put in place took us not so much on a diversion as a full on country tour. Having looked at the map I’ve still no idea as to why they sent us that way – and as we pulled into the services, fuel gauge on E I had to admit defeat. I was so tired it was unbelievable. Thankfully, Chrissy had managed to get some Kip in the back of the car and she drove the last 20 odd miles home, because I was really not fit to keep going.

    But, I had an AWESOME day. AWESOME. It was without doubt, the Best Pride I’ve been to, aided of course by me and my beloved car being centre stage. And boy did Rebecca get some lovin’ yesterday. I don’t think she’s got as much attention nor as many photos in one day, ever, ever in her life. It rocked :-) And she looked so cool, little blue light flashing. Police sign a’top the car. Although it makes me fear for humanity when I came to understand why the police were worried. People did think she was a real police car….

    Heee :-)

    Incidentally, here is the flikr photo pool for EuroPride 2006… And endless thanks from me to James, Chrissy and Lauren without whom this wouldn’t have been possible.

  • Not working yet…

    So, yeah, yesterday. Got home from work via a car-parts shop with enough spray paint to start a career in Graffiti; but I didn’t; no, instead I set to on making the stuff for Pride. After a few hours I stopped and headed over to Nikki and Kates for a relaxing evening eating Kebab, watching Dr Who and Playing Fluxx (we love Fluxx).

    And then I came home, chatted to James, went to bed at 2ish, got up at 8:30ish and set to on props for Pride again.

    Well, at 10, anyway, because I needed to eat and then my mum rang.

    So, yeah, I’m done now.

    We have:

    – A roofsign
    – Magnetic letters of doom
    – A blue-light with an extended lead
    I just need to nip to the shops, find a white blouse (*CHEAP* and a black, short, skirt). I’d wear the hockey one but I’m not quite back down to size 12. Well, that’s not true, my jeans fit and they’re size 12. Hrm. Now I have to go check.

    Okay, so it’s a very tight, but it sort of fits. At worst I *could* wear it. Just.

    I also did some ‘pimp-quality paintwork’ on my car. Just to tart her up a bit. She looks way better, actually. Although the quality of some of the paint work is beyond questionable, and I’ve discovered just how close I am to needing a new front wing (–>< -- that close - you can actually, well, could (before I threw filler at it) actually see through the wing. It's that rotten). Anyway, here's some teasers (one you've seen before and some new ones).

    Pride Prep

    You can see how big-er difference it makes having the grille painted white. What you can’t see is how bigger difference it makes covering up the rust with filler. Even really *badly* done filler.

    Anyway, it’s time to get on with my dissertation :-)

  • Damn this summer lazyness

    I need to do the editing of my Chapter 3 – but the sun’s out and although I’m not a sun creature (more a mountains, snow and rocks creature) I do just feel the urge to laze. Not made any better by the fact my hayfever’s been completely evil today – and I’m still an itchy eyes / blocked and runny nose type person. At least the anti-histamines have made me feel human.

    I shall have to work after I get back from my appointment, but the enthusiasm for riding into the centre of Brizzy in all my bike gear for an appointment where he’ll tell me to get some blood taken, I’ll get it taken, he’ll make an appointment for me in a year’s time, and la, that’s it… well it’s not great. But I must go.

    I just spent a little while crafting a post on Gingerbeer – who we stewarded between (them and dykes on bikes) a few years ago begging, nay pleading for 2 stewards (for Guy). Hopefully they’ll come through or we’ll be the world’s shortest float. Not that I mind, but people might think ‘that’s a bit odd’ :-)

    Anyway, Dr’s Appt, then Dissertation, I promise.