Livre d'Or

I'm mildly ill with a cold, and as a result I've been predictably slow and stupid all day. But it's combined somehow with whatever was wrong with my chest and now my lungs are really painful to the point that it's distracting. I was trying to figure out if I needed medical attention and if so how to obtain such, given that I have been procrastinating on actually registering with a GP since I moved. And I got caught up in a triage system which can't properly distinguish between pain which happens to be localized to my chest, and, you know, chest pain. So I've ended up with an urgent care appointment at quarter to midnight tonight. I'm really hoping that because it's an appointment I'll actually get seen, and it seems better than hanging around all night in A&E, as well as hopefully a better use of resources because I'm pretty sure I don't need to be hospitalized. If I get yelled at for turning up at urgent care with a bad cold, so be it.

Of course in the middle of this I've landed myself in some DW drama, where I managed to give someone I respect the impression that I was mocking her for a completely imaginary social justice fail. I have apologized, not that that ever does any good. Goodness knows that if I thought someone was hunting around for any possible allusions to anything less that perfectly social justice-y in every off the cuff comment I make in order to feel superior to me, I'd be pretty annoyed myself and likely not willing to hear an apology. But I do wish I could find a way to communicate that avoids giving that kind of impression, it's not the first time either. I don't actually think of myself as a particularly good ally or SJW, and I'm certainly not trying to look better than others. (This is something I should think about when I'm not tired, stressed and in pain, obviously.)

I would cry, except I strongly suspect that crying will make my painful lungs feel even worse.

I hatehatehate packing. SA and a colleague came over yesterday and helped a bit, but I still haven't quite finished, and tomorrow is an absolute deadline (cos that's when the driver is coming to collect all my stuff). All my books and personal items are packed, now I need to do clothes and figure out if I have any space left over for kitchen things. Also need to clean before I box up my vacuum cleaner!

I've been tidying up at work too, obviously, and it's a bit depressing how I keep coming across my notes from early on when I had such grand plans for this project. Bah. I left early today and went to buy some plastic storage boxes because I wasn't sure I'd have quite enough cardboard boxes. Ended up with a giant suitcase as it was considerably cheaper than the equivalent volume of boxes and may be useful in its own right.

Of course I have been procrastinating from evil packing by writing emergency FAQs and a journal-tweaking guide for Dreamwidth. This is why I should not get involved with volunteering! But Dreamwidth firefighting leads to adoration, whereas packing just leads to big piles of boxes and depressing reminders that I am about to leave my beloved little flat for an uncertain future. Guess which is more gratifying?

Plz snd hugs?

In more cheerful news, Screwy is coming here tomorrow, for a flying visit at a slightly awkward time. I have carrot and lentil soup. Thursday I am going out with all my colleagues, to the lovely veggie restaurant, Hermans, and even a few ex-colleagues, like RS, are joining us. And although leaving is going to be very sad, the result of leaving is that I get to see jack and possibly some other Cambridge folk, and a week on Thursday I'm going to New York and seeing hatam_soferet, and once in north America I shall get to see rysmiel and if things go well, darcydodo and compilerbitch.

So. I've lost most of my correspondence from the beginning of 2004 to the middle of 2005. I'm really very unhappy about this, especially since that period includes the second half of a very precious relationship that was conducted almost entirely by email. Not to mention several other interactions that would be called relationships if they weren't standing in opposition to the romantic kind in this particular sentence, boo English for being useless at naming such things.

( how I managed to be this stupid )

I only have myself to blame, but this really hurts.

We have another of the amazing Swedish four-day weekends when no-one works from mid-afternoon Friday until Wednesday morning. The trouble is, I am in a very poor position to take advantage of this holiday. My primary problem is that I have no money. I mean, literally none; I had to get a new bank account for annoying bureaucratic reasons, and of course the new card didn't arrive til Friday after the banks had shut early due to the holiday, and I can't activate it until places are open again at 10 o'clock Wednesday morning. I have food in the storecupboard, so I won't starve, and I have a season ticket for transport, so I don't have to stay at home. But the number of fun things I can actually do in a strange city with no money is rather limited!

The second problem is that my phone chose the extremely inconvenient time of Friday afternoon just before the holiday to die. So I can't phone my friends here and suggest hanging out together, nor can I occupy my time by phoning my friends in other countries, which is one thing I was hoping to do with the bonus free time. And of course I can't even start the process of getting it fixed until Wednesday...

However, in spite of these annoyances, the weekend started well. Some work colleagues invited me to a pubmeet held by a largely virtual group of English-speakers living in Sweden. I had a very enjoyable evening, because even though pubbing isn't really my scene, it was outdoors so not smoky and the background music was ignorable, and because I suddenly got to meet 70 new people at once. Social contact is very, very good, and they seem an extremely pleasant, and pleasingly mixed crowd.

The downside was paying over £7 for a shot and mixer (which I wouldn't have ordered if I'd known!) and over £5 for a beer. Apparently this is normal for Sweden, but eek! And that ate up my entire "budget" (the cash I happened to be carrying in my purse when I realized I was not going to be able to get any more late on Friday) for the weekend.

Now, imagine for a moment that you are the IT department supporting a sizeable medical faculty. You have several hundred medical and research students relying on your server. You decide to move everyone to a new server, implying quite a bit of downtime and a change in the login path. What do you do to minimize the consequent disruption?

A) Send a circular email informing people that they need to change their login in order to be able to check email

B) Wait until sufficient chaos ensues that angry students storm your office demanding to know why they can't check their email, access their files, or even access desktops on most computers in the department (because obviously it's really important for security reasons that no-one should be able to use computers at all when the network server is down). Then tell the angry students to "spread the word" about the changed login

C) Refuse to tell departmental sysadmins what's going on, because after all they're not directly employed by the university, so obviously they're the scum of the earth

D) Actually take some sensible steps to inform people what's going on. Like, maybe, print out a notice and display it in a prominent place

Guess which our lovely department chose? Oh yes, got it in one: a mixture of A, B and C. Grrr!