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

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.

Trans Pride Manchester today.

I took photos of signs saying:

• "Pride was a riot started by us" (held by a dark-skinned person
• "New chair, new arse, same shit!" (with both "EHRC" and "TERF" on it and crossed out)
• "I bite TERFs" (on a blåhaj)
• "Corgis for trans rights" (accompanied by two adorable corgis)
• "Making trans boring since 1983" (held by a trans man)

I didn't manage to get photos of the signs that said:

• "You made toilets weird, not us"
• "Tough year, tougher community"
• "I went to Athens and all I got was this stupid top surgery"

I particularly love the concept of making trans boring -- it can be complicated because trans men/mascs are invisibilized as the flipside of trans women/fems hypervisibility and I don't think it's inherently better to pass as cis or fit in, but also there's a screenshot of a tumblr post that goes around every so often with a photo of a few standard white guys in t-shirts and jeans, completely unremarkable hair and stuff, walking with an "FTM" banner (it might have more words on it too, presumably whatever group they actually were, but this is what I remember of it), and some commentary about how great it is that they just look like Some Guys.

D's sign, tailored to be dual-purpose since we planned to do the trans march and then go counter-protest a UKIP demo in town, ended up giving us cause to illustrate an entirely different way to make trans boring. By the time we got to Piccadilly Gardens, the fash had marched off. So we went for a drink with a friend. But on our way back through there on our way to the bus home, D spotted that a couple of fash had returned. His placard suddenly had a few white guys swarming around us, phones already held up as if videoing, asking him to be "interviewed" for their "citizen journalism."

Their attempts to shock him with language about "men cutting their dicks off" didn't work even after repeated applications, and when asked loaded questions he blandly responded "Well, I don't think that's happening" and then said sensible stuff like "I think kids should learn about all the kinds of humans that there are." His standing-for-political-office skills might be dormant these days but they were undiminished! Another guy -- absolutely stereotypical British racist, down to the bad teeth -- accosted me with "if trans people end up coming out anyway, kids don't need to hear about it in school," an extremely straightforward stance for me to bat away like a fly.

Very quickly they realized that they weren't going to catch D saying anything damning or even interesting for their YouTube channels or whatever, and lost interest, and we strolled away.

This, too, is an advantage of making trans boring.

it has been a minute since my insomnia was this bad.

It was bad that I woke up at 6am after woefully inadequate sleep and could not fall asleep again even though I was so tired I felt like I'd been poisoned.

It was bad when I slept for like 3 hours this afternoon to make up for that, thereby deciding for me whether or not D and I were going to the Midsommars gig today.

And then I felt bad for "not doing anything" today, even though I was up and dressed by 7, had breakfast and coffee, emptied the dishwasher, walked with yrieithydd to meet angelofthenorth, tidied away the bedding they'd used on the sofa last night, started the laundry, fetched and carried things for D while he looked at doing some car DIY, heated up some leftovers for him for dinner, talked to my parents...

I think it felt like "nothing," despite all that, because it didn't feel like enough to prepare me for another week of work. I felt so good about meeting a deadline for getting the first draft of a report done by the end of Friday, but now there's a ton more work to do on it -- the first task being to constructively accept the feedback of the four managers I've sent the first draft to, even though I'm so acutely aware of its failings that the only feedback I can cope with the prospect of receiving is one-dimensional gushing praise. And I can't even have my emotional-support circuits class that normally makes Mondays bearable, not unless someone who's currently booked can't go, unbooks themselves, and I can book beforehand.

My insomnia felt worst this evening. I had a terrible case of the Sunday night morbs: I'm dreading work tomorrow like I said, I felt so lonesome, and I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep. I can usually tell by 8 or 9 at night whether I'll be able to get to sleep without too much difficulty or not. I can't explain how, but it's weirdly reliable. And everything about today was telling me there will be no sleep.

I walked up next to D after having a snack and told him I was going to bed, something I almost always do. He asked me how I was and I said my brain was being a jerk. He said that I should go make a rum and coke and join him on the sofa. And make him one too (heh). It was such an unusual thing for him to request -- he never argues with me saying I'm going to bed -- that I couldn't resist.

He put something on the TV and we ended up watching the first half of When Springsteen Came to Britain, which he told me he'd found and downloaded a while ago, but I'd forgotten about it since. It was a really nice treat, seeing the footage of the Boss and the Big Man when they were impossibly young men, singing along, letting the instrumental parts of "Backstreets" knit up the raveled sleeve of care like it always does...

It hasn't made it any easier for me to get to sleep of course. But it at least gave me some nicer things to think about while I've been awake. I felt very cared for (which sometimes helps with the loneliness too).

D came along to lift club this morning! It's so much more fun when he's there.

This afternoon we had a snuggly nap.

When I woke up this evening, angelofthenorth was making amazing delicious food. It smelled so good. What a treat.

This evening, D and I had a couple beers and watched the Twins actually win a game! And explained things to angelofthenorth as they came up.

I didn't get as far as Sparkle on its first day today but I did go to the Village for a meal with a local disabled group (moat of whom are also queer/trans) which I'm adjacent to, with a friend who needed a PA.

(I was glad to learn that I can still queer this friend/PA binary; it used to make up my whole employment for like five years.)

I got to my friend's house before we went out. They had glitter on their face and offered me some. I love glitter but it was the kind of hot day where I started sweating as soon as I got out of the shower. After having to hustle over to their house, my face was so sweaty I told them not to bother putting it on my face because I'd just sweat it off. Of course I had a sleeveless t-shirt on (the one D bought me at last year's Sparkle!) so they offered to put it on my shoulders. Pretty soon both my upper arms were covered in pink, purple and blue glitter, it was great.

When I got home, D saw me and pointed this out of course (as well as my "painted for the first time in five years" fingernails (chrome with rainbow sparkles over them).

I said it'd be the perfect time to flex my biceps, now that they're extra gay.

"Guy-ceps!" he said. "Guy for guy-ceps."

I had a fun time tonight watching D play a very silly round of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, which then got surprisingly stressful and harrowing for a game about taking spaceships apart, and then had an eventful and actually sweet cutscene.