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Pfizered today. While I was waiting in the pharmacy an elderly gentleman came in and was telling one of the staff all about how he wasn't going to have his Covid vaccine because he'd seen the reports in Parliament about heart problems and excess deaths...
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Note: possibly TMI. :-)

Read more... )
So worse than the Pfizer was, but still not terrible,

And I get to do it all over again next weekend, when I have my annual flu jab...


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 Had a bivalent Moderna jab this morning for my autumn Covid booster. The jab itself was barely noticeable. They weren't telling people to sit down for observation afterwards, but I did anyway because I'd felt distinctly wobbly during the observation period the first time round and had to have an extended observation period lying down in a dim room - almost certainly migraine aura after nearly an hour under fluorescent lights, but they weren't taking any chances. This time I had a noticeable slight ache after a few minutes, but this is normal for me because the RSI magnifies any muscle ache. Arm's getting a bit sore now, with accompanying ache in the RSI damaged muscles and tendons down that arm, but not at a level that needs a pain killer. I might take some aspirin anyway as a preventative, because my damaged tendons are likely to hurt quite a bit once the inflammation gets going.

Also getting a lot of typos. Not sure how much of that is the RSI kicking in, and how much mild aura, but I'm glad I took today off work.

I stopped in the charity shop across the road when I got out, and have returned home with £19 worth of craft materials, including a folding work basket that had some wool in it, a boxful of bits and pieces for "take the lot for £10", and a rather nice necklace of big beads that I will probably take apart for beads on a twiddlemuff. I don't actually want all the bits and pieces, but as the person behind the till said, craft people usually have craft friends they can pass the unwanted bits to. They often can't sell individual items, but put a batch of them together in a basket and the job lot will go. He was also telling me that they'd been seeing a lot of younger people looking for craft things, mostly witchy things like embroidery with black cats. The other thing the young people are into is making rugs with cartoon characters, such as detailed reproductions of scenes from the Simpsons, some of which they sell. Knitting books and patterns are selling well. Interesting bit of gossip about some of the effects of lockdown.
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 Had my Covid booster on Thursday - Pfizer for me, which is what I had for the original two jabs. I was a bit wobbly afterwards, but um, yes, needle phobic... My arm was tender for a couple of days, started improving yesterday, and this morning I can tell I've had a jab but it's almost gone. I did feel a little cold a couple of times, and there was an episode where I suddenly became very tired over the course of two or three minutes, but in general it's been a typical post-vaccine feeling a little washed out if I thought about it. I could have gone to work if I'd had to, although I'd booked a couple of days leave just in case. Biggest problem for me is that any tenderness and swelling in that area always aggravates my RSI, which is the actual reason I'm glad I wasn't going in to work. That lymph node has come up again, even if not as enthusiastically as the first time, so presumably that's going to be an ongoing feature of this vaccine.

Overall, I've felt a lot worse after a bad session at the dentist. This is not a flippant comparison; I often have to sit in the waiting room for half an hour to an hour afterwards because a full dose of anaesthetic can make me very wobbly.

Ow

Jul. 2nd, 2021 09:59 pm
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 So this morning's accidental experiment demonstrated that a) I can get almost as far as the bus stop without noticing that I've forgotten my walking stick, b) I really don't want to go back to fetch it without then having a little rest before venturing out again and would rather just get on the bus for a nice sit-down, especially when I'll be late for work if I don't. (Boss would understand, but it would still be embarrassing.)

I don't need it for walking for less half an hour, and haven't for at least a year now. What I *do* need it for is support if I have to stand in one spot for too long, where "too long" is a couple of minutes. Standing hurts in a way that walking doesn't. I also need it to stand or for balance when there is a reason to suddenly stop walking, such as my weak ankle suddenly deciding that walking without rolling is too much like hard work, a sudden stab of pain from the various places that did need a stick for so many years, and migraine dizzy spells. The walk from the bus station to the office and then back in the evening reminded me of just how often that happens when I'm walking on a cobbled pedestrianised area.

At least the bus was sufficiently quiet going home that I didn't have to explain to anyone that I did really need the mobility impaired seat, could they please move their shopping, but I did feel bad this morning when someone else who could probably also have done with one got on when both seats were already occupied.

I should really go to the gym now I'm fully vaccinated, but my area is seeing cases spike again, and vaccination isn't 100%, it just makes your risk a lot, lot lower.
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Had my second dose on Wednesday, and once again had migraine aura, although this time it improved enough after getting to the observation room that it was clear that it was just aura. The vaccination centre has fluorescent lights and lots of people talking, even if not loudly, so not a surprise I was feeling a bit bleaurgh.

I was fine for the rest of the day, and got a good night's sleep, but started feeling feverish and achy yesterday afternoon. I could have dragged myself into work yesterday and this morning, but am glad I didn't have to.
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This morning I received my first armful of mRNA, courtesy of Pfizer. I also received half an hour lying down on the bed thoughtfully provided for such purpose waiting to make sure the after effects were just my body doing what my body does courtesy of medical conditions or medications or both. I was also told that they would be much much happier if I got a taxi home rather than the bus. Since I wasn't the least bit surprised to need half an hour lying down I'd already assumed I might be going home in a taxi.

I was slightly disconcerted to find out via a "here's your invitation with booking link" text that my medical history puts me in the "16-64 medium risk" group, but given that I'm commuting daily by public transport I'm not in the least bit sorry to be getting it a month or so earlier than I would going on just my age.
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Well, that was a bit of a year, wasn't it?

A year ago I was sitting traumatized by the images of Australia burning, with no idea that two days earlier a doctor called Li Wenliang had tried to raise the alarm about a new type of SARS coronavirus that seemed to be spreading. A few weeks later I was looking at flights for a year later, i.e. round about now, in the belief that I might finally have my medical issues under control enough that I'd be able to get on a long haul flight. That was about two weeks before the images started coming out of Lombardy...

When it became clear the thing had arrived in the UK and nucleated in several sites, I said to [personal profile] kalypso that it might not be a good idea to go to Eastercon, as it would be the con crud to end all con crud. This proved to be a wise decision, even if the concom were unable to cancel the hotel conference venue booking until the announcement by the Prime Minister that all such gatherings were not happening for the foreseeable future.

[personal profile] kalypso lives less than half an hour's walk from me, and we have dinner together on most Saturdays. We have seen each other in person a handful of times in the last eight months. I have not seen any other people I know other than Other Half and my colleagues. I see my colleagues because I'm a key worker who can't work from home, so I've been going into the office all year. I don't much enjoy being on public transport, but I think it's better for my mental health than working from home would have been. All work that can possibly done at home with workarounds is being reserved for the clinically vulnerable people who are shielding so they can spend at least part of the day doing something useful, and even so one of them eventually came back into the office, because as he said, you can only paint the garden fence so many times.

Other Half is working from home, because his employer has shut the physical site and the staff are now living on Zoom. I could do without this on the days I'm on leave or come home early...

On the personal plus side, I only went to A&E once this year, and for reasons that were neither Covid nor my existing medical problems and/or medication for same. As for the latter, they have stabilised well enough that one outpatients department has said they don't need to see me any more and the other doesn't need to talk to me other than by telephone.

The remainder of the year was basically dealing with the Covid fallout at work, involving backlogs, trying to keep staff and customers safe, and everyone setting up and learning the new video links that were just being piloted for rollout over an extended period of time when all of sudden they were needed *right* *now*. Oh, and the elderly database that I keep muttering about on Twitter about the jam tomorrow replacement? Don't even ask.

As for how terrifying this is - quite a lot. But for some of us there is also this, slightly lengthened from my Twitter post on Christmas Eve:

A strange and unpleasant chain of thought this evening. The now traditional Christmas Eve TV offering of The Snowman often reminds me of another Raymond Briggs book. I'm old enough to remember the decommissioning of most of the UK's civil defence siren network after the end of the Cold War.

Part of the justification was that by then private telephones were so ubiquitous that in most areas any warning needed could be sent by automated telephone calls to the entire country. A telephone message could be customised to the particular warning needed. The spread of home internet and mobile phones made this an even better option.

I'm a child of the Cold War. I still sometimes have That Nightmare when woken by a thunderstorm.

I never dreamed that the first time I would see the civil defence warning system in operation would be for a pandemic.

On the whole, I think I prefer the pandemic. Or at least *this* pandemic, horrific though it is.

Thank you, Stanislav Petrov, that I am still here to be able to make such a comparison.
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 Yes. Well. I'm not entirely sure what I did do over the last month, other than it didn't include even looking at DreamWidth. It did include multiple visits to various medical-vicinity people, fortunately for nothing more exciting than "Ow, how the hell did I do that, text physio to see if he has any emergency appointments available in the next couple of days." Neurology is pleased with my progress and made some suggestions on fiddling with my meds. A certain amount of "hello trees, hello sky" resulted. This is not a bad thing as such, but it did mean that I have some interesting things to add to the WiP but have not written them down yet. I should probably do that tomorrow.
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Since it was three weeks since I'd last seen the inside of A&E and the "Oh **** I need to get off this med right now" side effect had tailed off a week after that, I decided at the weekend that it's safe to go to Eastercon. I've been on the current second med before in combination with the primary migraine med (although not at the current high dose of primary) so I know what it normally does by way of side-effects, and while they can be unpleasant after a while they have never made me feel like A&E would be A Really Good Idea. So I should be there after lunch tomorrow.
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The first quarter of 2019 has been "may you live in interesting times" for me. It's involved quite a lot of interesting side effects from trying to adjust my migraine medication. We are now convinced that they were merely side-effects, for values of "merely" including "at least we now know that I have not had a stroke or heart attack". We also know that I definitely have a brain, and that it is the right size and shape, because it has been scanned twice.

All of which is to say why there have been no public posts for a while. I've been *busy*.
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2018 wasn't a lot of fun, for reasons given at length in a locked post, but which can be summarised as I spent it being not well. I'm still not well, but things are slowly getting better.

On the writing front, Loose Id closed its doors after 14 years, leaving many of my titles without a home. My titles at NineStar Press are fine and I'm not having any problems writing new material, but I have to stay off the computer as much as possible for now, which means self-publishing the out of print works won't be practical for a while.

In summary: 2018 sucked, and I am grateful to my immediate management at my day job who did their best to make it suck a little less.

Hello World

Dec. 8th, 2018 03:31 pm
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 Hello World. I am not dead. I do have a new and exciting medical problem, details in a locked post. I am still failing to keep up with Dreamwidth, although for slightly less unpleasant reasons than "looking at a screen bigger than my phone hurts my brain". Ditto doing something about my profic website, ditto any of my WiP that were progressing on electrons rather than dead tree. Even dead tree has been not happening over the last month, which is annoying because The Words Want Out; but some of that is because as has previously been mentioned I get a bit shy about writing the smutty bits when there are small children sitting next to me on the bus and I have run out of not-smutty bits to write, or at least lost track of which not-smutty bits are left to write.

"Screen hurts my brain" is actually still a bit of an issue in that my capacity for looking at a full size screen doesn't greatly exceed my working hours at the day job, but it's slowly getting better and there are workarounds. Unfortunately it's chewing up all the bandwidth I have, which means I have read lots of interesting books and they are not going to get reviewed or logged, not even to my usual lackadaisical standards.

I gather Tumblr has gone the "thanks for building our readership, now take your dirty, dirty porn away from our advertisers" route. This does not affect me because I never managed to wrap my elderly brain around the concept of Tumblr anyway - probably because I'm not a terribly visual person. I suppose my erotica alter ego ought to dig out their Tumblr password for the first time in several months and see if the account still exists. Not quite sure why I grok Twitter but not Tumblr, but there you go.

As anyone who follows my Twitter account has probably realised, I'm still spending too much of my limited screen time on the Cult Pens website. The "but I need it for professional writing purposes!" excuse is wearing a bit thin now, even if there's genuinely a lot of truth in it. I'd better get on and justify it...
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I haven't posted since mid-May. Apparently I haven't read Dreamwidth since shortly after that, since I missed the news about a friend's new job. (Congratulations to that friend. :-)

There are a number of factors in this, not least the ongoing migraine issues which chew up quite a lot of bandwidth and don't leave much for things other than day job. Also, at one point one of the side-effects of the meds and/or migraine was a bout of something close to hypergraphia, which is how I come to have a completed short story, a large chunk of a different short story draft, a bunch of random jottings on story ideas, and an outline and substantial chunk of something that is probably going to be at least novella length, all as a result of the #cockygate nonsense. This lot was mostly written by hand, with fountain pen and ink, and needed/will need to be transcribed onto electrons.

And that was before my Firefox install fell over multiple times, on one occasion taking Edge with it. Those things that require the big screen on the laptop plus a proper keyboard were not happening, and that includes Dreamwidth, both reading and writing. Actually fixing [expletive deleted] Firefox seems to involve removing every trace of it and then doing a fresh install, then waiting for the next time it falls over, so the only two reasons I use it at this point are Containers and NoScript. It makes Edge look stable by comparison.

And at some point I have to face the task of updating my website, so that will consume such spare clock cycles as I have. I shall endeavour to post slightly more frequently than I have of late, but am not making any promises.
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Yes, that means I have a migraine aura and have taken some codeine. Aren't you lucky I'm still sufficiently in contact with reality to be able to make some effort at proof-reading this post? Anyway, this means tonight's word count will be whatever I can write in my little dead tree notebook before I fall over. That may or may not include a review of Writing Faster FTW by LA Witt of the many pseuds. It is good advice, and it is written entertainingly, and even though I already know all the advice in it, I read it all the way through today and found it well worth the £1.26 I paid for it last night.
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Started putting together a market list. Got some very useful preliminary notes back from beta-reader. Still haven't done anything with them yet because I've had a migraine aura on and off all week. Long hours at the day job are not helping.

Not a *bad* migraine. Just right at the level where it's obvious why I will continue to carry around an e-ink Kobo device to read on the bus even though I have both Kobo and Kindle apps on the TFT smartphone. Off to read a book in non-backlit format...
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I've been more or less off the air for the last three months, for a variety of reasons. Those reasons include the purchase and setting up of a shiny new computer, all the better with which to run Dragon. Which is a good thing, because having finally come to the end of a long run of reasons why I don't have time to play with my new toy... my shoulder's gone again. I've been reliant on Dragon to type more than a sentence or two for the last couple of days. I'm also now on enough codeine to be in "hello world, hello sky" mode, which does *wonders* for the concentration needed to use Dragon, let me tell you. This is because without codeine I will be on not enough sleep, ditto.

List of stuff To Do, for triage tomorrow, because PicoWrimo starts tomorrow:
--private commission
--review of Being Small (sorry, Chaz, really wanted to get this done earlier, but wasn't up to it)
--review of feminist historical romance series (is brilliant, lots of you will love it and need to know about it)
--book log
--revise novelette originally written for Dreamspinner anthology, then check current markets it might suit.
--work on one of the novel WIPs
--one or more of the ideas for porn short stories lying around in the ideas file

Any of the above to count towards 150 words a day for PicoWrimo, because it may be entirely random as to what I can focus on well enough to dictate. I suspect mostly porn shorts because I can dump snippets into a text file for later revision without worrying too much if they link up with an existing story.

Also need to
--update website
--check current calls
--send W9 forms to Smashwords
--trawl trunk for stuff to put on Smashwords
--put profic pseud and free pieces on AO3 (per discussion at Absolute Write)
--look over possible story for current Dreamspinner anthology call
--contemplate present to leave under the Gauda Prime tree farm this year
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The last couple of weeks have been a reminder of just how disabled I actually am, because my Dragon headset at work died and it's taken a lot longer than it should to get a replacement. I trundled off to the gym this morning for my regular session trying to rebuild some muscle strength and flexibility (I can shoulder press 5 kg regularly now, yay!), and spent the time on the first machine thinking about my now-urgent need to replace my home computer so it can run Dragon without falling over, and the state of my bank account.

And then on the way to the next machine, thinking about how nice it is to finally be able to regularly walk the length of the gym without hurting, I walked past a guy on one of the cardio machines. It wasn't obvious at first, because it was one with stirrups that cover most of your foot, but then I realised why it looked a little odd. The guy was a blade runner. Double amputee with the running blades we've seen so much of at the last couple of Paralympics.

I'm well aware of just how well off I am compared with some people. But that really does put it into perspective.
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Yes, the last time I posted was last week's picowrimo report. I'm sure I had something vaguely interesting to post last week, but I didn't post it and now I've forgotten what it was. Also, I woke up early yesterday with a bad headache, and while I do not feel wretched right now thanks to the miracle of codeine, you can tell I have migraine by the typos I will edit out of this before posting. Thank god for spoolchuckers.

Anyway... Progress of the total word count is as follows:

Monday, 9133, Tue 9746, Wed 10051, Thur 10402, Fri 11,000 *exactly*, Sat 11361, Sun 12198. I've added another couple of hundred so far this evening, and hope to achieve a few more before my typing ability shuts down completely for the night. I have also spent a lot of time over the last few days reading articles on how to shave *properly*, on account of the other protagonist likes watching his guy shave. Yes, they have his-n-his "getting properly ready to face the day" voyeurism kinks. :-> I'm sure my Google history for the last week must make *fascinating* reading.

bleurgh

Oct. 10th, 2012 09:56 pm
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Well, that's the word count shot for the next few days. This morning's wooziness turned out to be migraine and not lack of sleep. I don't feel that bad as long as I don't have to deal with loud noise, but my typing has gone to pot and holding a train of thought long enough to write the next scene is beyond me at the moment.

And apparently I can't control the mouse. Good thing Dreamwidth has a restore from draft, because I somehow managed to close the DW tab on my browser...

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