Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

After I finally finished work (our theory-of-change meetings are getting existential, this one gave me such a headache), I went outside to sit outside in perfect weather, barefoot, listening to the radio, reading my library book, and enjoying the smell of the neighbors' lilacs.

Then I made an easy dinner, and then D and I cycled to a nearby pub for a pint. A big trip for him! It's lovely that he's feeling up to doing stuff now that the weather is making it so much more fun to do things.

Today is brought to you by diffrentcolours, who rescued me from missing lift club by offering to drive me there when I slept through my alarm and woke up ten minutes before we'd have had to leave the house.

(This also means that we could deliver the outdoor cat shelter, which is no longer needed by our neighborhood cat, to a friend who's in the process of being adopted by what had been his next-door neighbor's cat.)

And then this afternoon he drove V and me to the garden center to buy compost to re-pot a giant houseplant and straw mulch (it's called Strulch!) for the outdoor gardening season. And then to B&M to buy a bag of rocks. V is working on making a barrel pond for the backyard, which leads to some funny purchases -- last time I bought three random biggish rocks, called "rustic slate."

And then sadly D was too wiped out to go to a gig tonight that we'd been kinda planning to, which is a shame but probably would've meant that if we hadn't done errands this afternoon we wouldn't have gotten much further than the bus into town before he was wiped out. Still calibrating as recovery goes on.

And I was pretty tired too, having lifted all the bags around. The rocks were tricky because we couldn't get a shopping cart so I just had to fireman-carry the bag around the store. It wasn't super heavy but it was really awkward, and I was worried about tearing the bag. Plus the rocks were cold, seeping the body heat out of me. The bag was labeled "North Sea cobbles" and I feel like they remembered their chilly home while pressed to my shoulder.

So I made easy dinner (bangers and mash) and we watched the Twins second game. Which they won! But I was so pessimistic the whole time, D made fun of me. The bullpen didn't collapse! Royce Lewis had a great game! It was weird but I hope this happens every day!

It was a nice day. And tomorrow we have D&D -- the DM spun up a character for me last time, but we ended up just watching the movie (sadly without audio description this time!), but I offered to come along this week as a couple of the usuals won't be there because they're sick. I'm a fighter, my favorite thing to be, and the DM described the niche as Utility Himbo so that's basically his name. Bo, for short! So I'm looking forward to that tomorrow.

I need to go to bed, but I wanted to say -- particularly for our mutual friends here -- that D had his operation today; it all went just as planned (in his family group chat, his mum his back-on-the-ward selfie looked a bit woozy, and yes, but also he looked just like that before the op because he had to be there at 7 this morning!) and smoothly. He's home, tired and sore but able to watch TV, play video games, eat dinner, watch baseball with me. It's been a nice evening.

( Boring )

I didn't get as much done today as I might have hoped, but I did a good job of prioritizing what needed to happen today vs. what can wait until tomorrow. Really hoping I get better sleep tonight; it's been kinda shitty for a couple weeks and that takes its toll on everything else; I've had a low-grade headache most of the day and I think it's largely the broken sleep and weird dreams.

diffrentcolours has been on a mission to find more fun/novel things to do: it's kinda been the upshot of both our therapy lately that we should do this.

So tonight we went to see a Noel Coward play, Private Lives, at Hope Mill Theatre which was new to me. It was a great venue, though I'm glad I didn't have to try to find it on my own because that never would've worked.

And the play was great too: very cleverly staged, with occasional video projection and really good use of (mostly diagetic) music, well-acted, and the darkest the-straights-are-not-okay underbelly beneath that Noel Coward wit: it was sweet and even sexy but also made me think about what we do or don't learn from relationships that have ended. The seats weren't wide enough for our hench shoulders, but that just meant we had to snuggle up and that was such a nice way to watch it.

The theater's independent, gets no external funding, so definitely worth supporting if you get the chance. I was glad to see it pretty busy on this random weekday evening.

I had really intense, involved dreams last night; the kind where you feel like you spent days or weeks in your dream world and wake up disoriented as hell.

There have been lots about pets or small children in my care -- this time, a clever adorable toddler I was joining on vacation with her family, looking after the kid at some kind of kid-focused theme park. I had a great time, and woke up with no idea where I was or what day it was.

Luckily, D snuggled up to me as the big spoon, wrapped his legs around mine, and promptly fell back asleep, snoring gently in my ear. It is very grounding. (Sunday is the one day I don't have to get up early and I love it when I can spend Sunday morning like this.)

Occasionally he woke up enough to give me a few little kisses on the back of my shoulder, and his soft beard gently tickled my skin, and it's the best thing ever.

Despite having technically finished work yesterday, I did log on for one meeting today because it looked so incredibly useful, and it was. And it was done at noon so I still had time to help pack and get stuff ready and we got going on time.

We had a pretty smooth journey to Birmingham and a delightful time visiting barakta and Kim and seeing their new house before we got here.

Now we're at D's sister's. Her husband and son arranged to get her a sourdough starter from a from a friend of the kid's.

Of course the first thing they have to do with it is name it.

I joked that it should be called Joe Ryan of course. Or Pablo López. (They are starters for my baseball team, you see.)

So now it's called Pablo.

The kid once called it Pablo Escobar and now its full name is Pablo Escojar.

What a busy day!

I got up for trans gym this morning, which should be normal for a Saturday but I missed it last week thanks to trainfail, and I didn't make it to the gym at all this week and my mental health suffered accordingly. So it was really nice to be back even if everything felt difficult!

Sadly D wasn't feeling well enough to do gym, but he was feeling well enough to give me a lift to and from and do some shopping for treats from the grocery store in between, which was welcome. It also meant we got a tinfoil-wrapped packet of our friend I's homemade pancakes, still warm when he handed them to D, which was really lovely.

Then this afternoon we had a doggy date! Thanks to Borrow My Doggy, a neighbor found us, said she thought she recognized us from the photos I put on the website, and indeed she was right. She and her husband are retired and dealing with various health issues that mean they need help walking their sweet adorable poodle/Irish setter cross, Teddy. He immediately loved V and I (again D was not feeling up to joining us, he needed a nap), demanded pets from us both and fell asleep pressed up against V while we talked with his humans. We all got along and it seems like we can help each other which is lovely.

Soon after V and I got home, angelofthenorth's friend came over, who soon said "I feel like I've found my people, even though I've never met you two before!" V was delighted at this of course, and I know it's something they and D have always aspired to.

We had a great conversation until D and I had to leave to go see Beowulf at Park in the Past. It was really fun to get to enjoy Beowulf in something approaching its original setting: In a dirt floored, wood-beamed, wool-thatched hut, listening to a bard recite it from memory and in between "acts" some talented musicians play a variety of folk music. We drank mead and D got to eat a wild boar burger. We snuggled up to stay warm and to enjoy each other's company. It was a great evening. Great day.

After how much I thought about car headlights being too bright yesterday, I helped D with the problems of some of the lights on his car -- mostly tail-lights but also headlights -- not working. I helped by putting the car in reverse (but not moving of course) so he could stand behind the car and see which wasn't working, by hitting the brake pedal when asked, by keeping him company on two trips to the auto parts store, and by giving him various kinds of surprising feedback on which lights were or were not working.

I also failed to help by abandoning him to get a much-needed haircut, oops. My head is less uncomfortable now! But it did mean V had to stand outside holding a torch(/flashlight) instead.

I have learned so much about how car lights work! What I still think of as high-beams and dims (which of course have different names here because everything does, which is even more confusing) are complicated! Made up of multiple bulbs, including the ones that when I was trying to identify them to D in the car I called "the sad little one" and "the big shiny one." Big Shiny turns out to be the full-beams/high beam one. Sad Little is for dims/side-lights.

Also I learned that I do not remember what order the pedals (accelerator, brake, clutch) go in on cars in the U.S. (because I've only driven my dad's car a couple times on his own land when he was convinced I could learn to drive even though when he said "put it in drive, that's the D and I said "which one's the D?" because I couldn't see the letters on the dashboard, he still said, like "third one along" or whatever it was instead of "get out of there, no one who can't tell that those are letters should be driving" which is what I thought) or on the tractors I used to drive.

Mostly what I remember about the clutch on tractors is I have to practically stand up to press down on sufficiently. And the same is kinda true with D's car because I didn't want to move the seat and he's a foot taller than me. When I had to press down the clutch for a while, or when I had to do that and the brake, I was just leaning forward in a weird gymnast-like way that I'm sure makes good use of the core exercises I was doing at lift club this morning.

Handily, the car was safe to drive at night by the time it was dark so we went to get stuff for other DIY projects (plumbers tape and some fittings to allow us to fasten brackets for our bikes to hang them on the wall). On the way to and from, we of course couldn't help but notice everyone else's car lights: many too-bright ones, but someone else who had a headlight out. D could by that point identify the technical name for the bulb in question.

Recently D sent me the link to a 2019 Dreamwidth entry of his about an outing to Anderton Boat Lift that stands out in our minds for two reasons: one is that it's the day before we ended up dating and we had no idea but the other is that he mentions that we, he and I, had been on about going to Anderton Boat Lift for ages by that point.

And the other feat of canal engineering we always talked about wanting to visit is the Falkirk Wheel.

But unlike the Anderton Boat Lift which I could rush my work day to finish a bit early and be picked up in time to get there for a late lunch, or the Barton Swing Bridge which is so close we biked to it last summer (or maybe two summers ago), Falkirk is very far away so we'd never found an excuse to be in the vicinity.

Until this Stornoway trip. D has a complicated spreadsheet with all the moving parts for such a trip and realized that if we stayed at the further of their two usual spots after the ferry back to the mainland, it would leave us with little enough driving to do on the second day that we could spend some time in Falkirk.

We saw the Kelpies first, which I'd heard about as motorway landmarks from haggis but never thought about as a destination. We had so much fun there though that we stayed past the time D had expected our visit there to last and got home at 8pm instead of 7pm. The weather was beautiful, there were good dogs everywhere, the visitor centre had a very good video explaining the history of Falkirk and was full of excellent tactile models: the kelpies made of Legos, little models of them to scale with world landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, the Sphinx, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil...

Then it was on to the main event. First we had lunch at the kind of place where we'd have wanted to sit outside even if we weren't always doing that now anyway, we ate in the literal shadow of the wheel. I was sitting across from D who when the wheel was moving was just smiling at it in a way that reminded me of icons of saints gazing upon some heavenly scene, full of proper awe and joy. So I got to see the Falkirk Wheel and I got to see how happy it made him, and I can't decide which I enjoyed more.

We finished eating just in time for D and I to take the next tour, where you get in a boat, go up to the aqueduct and along the canal a little while you listen to a local do their spiel (ours was called Gary! and he complimented my #TeamGary t-shirt which I happened to be wearing that day).

Sadly V wasn't feeling up to it: this was Day 9 of traveling and being so much busier than usual was already catching up with them. But they made the right decision; they know so much about narrowboats and canals anyway and the tour was very audio-based and they'd have struggled to get much out of it. They had a nice time in the sunshine watching ducks and moorhens and more good dogs, and buying the cutest fridge magnet in the gift shop, a little abstract model of the wheel that you can spin like a fidget toy, which is delightful.

For a few years now I've been desperate to show him the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, and this has only deepened my desire to make this happen. It doesn't seem overly likely any time soon, but then the Falkirk Wheel has only existed for 23 years and we must have spent at least half of that talking about wanting to go see it, so I'm okay to wait a while.

I woke up in the early hours of this morning from an intense bad dream. But when I described it to D this morning as "my usual 2025 nightmare...my friends and I fighting in the streets," he made a perfectly understandable but inaccurate assumption: "what, like a fight club?"

No, I said, not fighting each other. Fighting nazis.

But being very silly about which of our friends we could best in physical fights ("well P's out, she has a broken leg" "...do we have to fight each other?"), while snuggling in bed on the one morning a week I don't have to get up as soon as I'm awake, did a great job of dispelling the visceral misery the dream left me with.

Saved from angst by silliness, this feels like the story of my life these days heh.