A pleasant weekend
This weekend I went to Kadek’s birthday party and then on the Sunday I had a spontaneous barbecue with my in-laws and it was all around a very nice time. One of the best parts was getting a lift both ways, and not feeling too bad in either car, I’m just so glad I didn’t have to stress about spending a billion hours on a hot train.
For almost a couple of weeks before this, I had a fucking miserable cold. I HATE THE COMMON COLD. I hate it more than I hate dislocating something. But it’s mostly fucked off aside from a tickly throat that occasionally makes me cough.
I didn’t bring food and drink to the party so that I saved space in the car, so we went out to the shops when I got there. We had planned to go to Mexigo, who do the best nachos in the world ever (I seriously miss them so much since we’ve moved), and as it’s right next to the Tesco it seemed like destiny. But we get there and it turns out . . . there’s a ruddy great step in the doorway! Illegal as hell but nonetheless, I obviously wasn’t going to get in there.
So we decided to use Deliveroo later to get the nachos, not quite as fun as being able to just take them home, but at least we got some.
The main event of the night was sitting under a gazebo in the garden and watching a lightning storm. I managed to get a picture of a lightning strike, but I don’t think my phone camera liked it very much because the bottom of the photo just became a bright stripe.
It was interesting noting on my heart monitor that shuffling backwards up the stairs on my butt actually makes my heart rate go up to 135bpm, which is the kind of POTS consequence I would expect if I had actually tried to walk up the dang stairs. It explains why stairs are so horribly exhausting, but what the hell else am I meant to do? I can’t put a stairlift in someone else’s house (I can’t even afford one for my own house!), walking right up the stairs would be a disaster if I dislocated or fainted, plus doing anything on my legs fucking hurts anyway.
The only in-between I can think of is going up on my front on all fours like the dog, but that’s super undignified in front of other people, also hurts my knees like a bitch, and what if I’d just had a knee or wrist out? It would not happen. In summary, I hate stairs. I prefer living in a house on two floors because it allows for more space, plus there’s something nice about not being asleep on the ground floor, I understand why stairs exist, I just wish there was a better analogue solution for using them when there’s no room for a chair lift and no money for a stairlift.
I did this Politiscales thing a while ago, and it gave me a flag for my results. The site is here. More often than not the bar for being both/ neither seems to be bigger than being one or the other is, which doesn’t really surprise me.
I also have these two bars from a quiz I took ages ago and they’ve just been sitting in my downloads folder.
Frankly it horrifies me that I was ever non-interventionist. It’s a standard thing to be as a teenager, but how the hell did I ever think it was OK to let people in other countries get hacked to death by terrorist groups or their leaders, and just sit on my arse and let it happen? Because dropping a bomb on a monstrous person was more horrible to me than the people being butchered? If a group was going house to house slaughtering people in England, we’d be really fucked-off if nobody came to help us (and it might fucking happen if we don’t hurry up and climb out of Hamas‘ ass).
There’s a quote, “A neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.” Maybe I’m just old but it makes a lot of sense right now.
I can’t stretch myself so thin politically anymore and for quite a while I’ve narrowed myself down to three political priorities:
- Israel and Jewish people
- Disability access
- Free-at-the-point-of-use National Health Service for people and pets.
Other things that are important to me, things like gay marriage and crop science, just have to take a back seat. I can’t vote on those issues, because it’s the three dealbreakers listed above that affect whether I’m going to die any time soon. I have to give my vote to whichever party is the least hideous about all three (a veterinary NHS is an idea that doesn’t seem to be gathering much steam with anybody). At the moment, there is nobody to vote for. And regardless of whether they can turn themselves around, I am never voting Labour again for as long as I live, and I will have a hard time interacting with anybody who can bring themselves to do it. I’m glad we don’t have local elections coming up around here because I don’t want the stress.
But in summary, this is apparently the flag of my political brain. From looking up other people’s results it looks like there should have been an icon in the space in the top left, but I seem to have missed out on getting one because I was too dang neutral about things.
I wish the site had a gallery of all the possible flag results and what they mean, also the available icons. That would be so interesting.
Anyway, none of that is actually anything to do with this weekend because I did it like, a month ago, I just haven’t gotten around to putting it up.