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

D was teasing me on our way to see the Lil Nas X documentary this evening that the attempts to include other people in the outing had failed (P's coming down with something, V had a bad night and it'd mean leaving Gary alone until his bedtime which is unfair on the little doofus) so it was just us two.

"Oh no, the worst," I said, because this is what we always say to each other at the prospect of the other's company.

But it gave him a chance to tell me he'd booked a two-seater sofa as our cinema tickets, "so we can snuggle." And we did!

Afterwards we went to eat and had some Wagamama-fancy cocktails (I really liked my "pad thai sour," rum, passionfruit, lemongrass, lime, and tamarind), nice salads, chili mushrooms, and "Korean vegan corn dogs," which were veggie dogs with crispy noodle crumb where the, uh, corn would be. Drizzled with red sriracha and some kind of yellow turmeric-y sauce, they looked exactly like they would with ketchup and mustard which was amusing.

We had a very nice server but when we asked to pay the bill another member of staff came out and she chatted to us while I was failing to work the card machine (sorry nice dude, you deserved a tip, I just fucked it up!) about Pride and similar. She went back inside and we got ourselves and our stuff ready to go. And then she came back outside with a tote bag for each of us, Pride-related things that Wagamama give out in some kind of event -- she said she has the tote bag for International Women's Day and all sorts. She also said they're normally just for staff! I don't know what compelled her to share them with us like that on such short and mundane acquaintance, but we were both delighted and touched at the gesture.

As we were leaving, I said that between this and Lil Nas X I felt like I'd done enough (Manchester) Pride-related stuff already. And since it was sorta accidentally a date-like activity, that fit too.

"What a nice day it's been," I mused as we held hands and strolled through the sunset towards a pub we'd decided to go to.

"What a nice gay," D said.

We walked through Lincoln Square and he said "Gaybraham Lincoln."

We had our pints under cover, and after we'd been summoned home by reports of a dog who'd been very good but now that it was getting to bedtime he was wound up, we suddenly could hear rain pelting down just as we were having to contemplate going to the bus stop.

As we stood up and prepared ourselves for the deluge, the rain stopped!

We figured this was just another part of our charmed gay evening. "After we've had our pint of gayle [gay ale]," D said, "and...la-gay..."

It was a nice gay.

After work, D and I biked to the vet to pick up Gary's meds.

It's the first time I'd been further than a pub that's handily nearby and connected to an off-road path for us. The vet is actually on the same path which made this a feasible next step for me and my ankle recovery after we've made a couple trips to that pub so far this late spring/early summer. I think the pub is about a mile away, the vet is about two.

And since the pub is on the way, we stopped on the way back and had a couple of drinks. I had a pale ale I actually liked! D had an alcohol-free beer that seemed as good as any alcoholic one.

On a day when I've been trying to articulate all the problems my ankle has caused me for the purpose of the PIP review, it was a relief that my ankle has mostly behaved itself and let me do a bike ride without much consequence. It's a little twinge-y now at bedtime, but lately it's been worse on days when I've done less!

I'm finding the PIP/ankle stuff really difficult on my mental health. I'm not going into huge amounts of detail and I'm not expecting any more points from it. But I'll be damned if I'm not going to answer their questions fully. It has had a big effect on my mobility and a compounding effect on my pre-existing disabilities.

Also even my testosterone is a new medication since the last time I did the form, so I've gotten to talk about that too, heh.

The weather gradually changed from mostly cloudy to mostly sunny as the day went on, and I wasn't too spoonless after work, and the combination of these two things made D suggest that we go for a bike ride.

It was my first one since before I broke my ankle so we took it very easy. About a mile each way, stopping in the middle for a couple of pints (I had a nice pilsner, perfect in the sunshine).

Pedaling is fine for my ankle but there are other things: for some reason I can only get on the bike by standing on the left side and throwing my right leg over it (so, all my weight is on my weak leg). It does not work the other way around. I have no idea why. Also, a thing I never noticed until today is that when I'm coasting, my legs always stop in the position where my left is the one that's extended: again, holding most of my weight. This I did try to change but it was always a matter of noticing how my legs reflexively ended up and then trying to alter their position once it'd made my leg twinge. Not ideal.

But the short ride was okay. I can tell I've Done Something, but my ankle isn't particularly sore or swollen. So I think I struck the right balance.

I slept until 12:30 this afternoon, and didn't get out of bed until 3.

It was just what I needed.

diffrentcolours had looked in to check on me and tell me it was 12:30, and mother_bones soon after offered to bring me breakfast.

They've done such a good job of looking after me.

Lasf night when I got read for bed, it was so lovely to pick clean pajamas off of a literal stack of fresh laundry that MB had washed, dried and folded for me while I was away. And I got into my bed that D changed the sheets on right before he came to meet me at the train station. (I'd have changed them before I left but I knew that a) Gary would like the smell of his humans on the sheets and b) Gary would wriggle over the clean sheets while I was away so they'd only have to be changed again anyway.)

Before I lived here, I'd go on these trips to see my family and come home exhausted to a house where almost no chores had been done since I left. I'd have to brace myself to do dishes/sweep/vaccum/scrub, starting immediately, at a time when I had all the emotional and physical resilience of a piece of lint.

I'm still not used to how different things are now (because I've been able to make so many fewer trips like this thanks to the ongoing pandemic). I never want to take those two for granted, I'm so grateful for them and feel so lucky to live with them.

This evening, D helped me buy a train ticket for Monday, and then his usual Pokémon Go-motivated walk inspired us to go near our local so we had a pint. We're now sharing more booze -- that blueberry maple stout I love, and now Aardbeg -- while he watches DS9.

It's been a lovely chill day.

I started my day off well: I stayed in bed all morning.

Well, a bed. D still can't sleep in my room but sometimes sleeps in the spare room so I can crawl in with him when I wake up in the early hours. I got up for a pee, it actually wasn't until 7:30, but still went to join him and since he was lying on his side I got to be the little spoon, perfect.

We are trying to catch up on the snuggles backlog of him not being able to sleep in my bedroom for a month or whatever it is now.

My phone still binged with reminders for the work meetings I have every morning at 9, and it was so delicious to ignore that noise and doze off again!

I didn't get out of bed until after hunger had driven him to get up and dressed. A real role reversal for us: he called me lazybones with such exuberance, it delighted us both.

I could've quite happily stayed in bed all day, I've been so exhausted. But instead of that, and instead of our plan to go see Barbie, the nice weather and the fact that MB wasn't well enough to go today and it'd be way more fun to see with her as well, meant D and I decided to go for a bike ride. I still wanted to go back to bed, which had been the case ever since I got out of it, but instead I biked twelve miles and had two and a half pints in the middle of them. The beer was so good! Seven Brothers Honeycomb Pale Ale, actually tasted sorta like honey and not just like a million hops. And I had a halloumi burger and some tasty fries. And we got home and I sensibly had a shower before I tried to sit down (my legs were already stuff and sore!), so I was in my pajamas by 8. Excellent Friday.

I'm grateful to purplecat for writing about Hardys Well, its history and the sad photos of its present.

I knew Hardys Well mostly as the gathering point for Currybeer back in the day, a monthly geek meet-up loosely based on a group of Linux users. diffrentcolours invited me along. I liked the curry and beer and most of the company, but what I remember most fondly was the walks and bike rides to and from that he and I would often make together.

The group always met in Hardys Well, and the nights often ended there too. Of course that era ended what feels like a long time before this, and the closed-up pub was a sorry sight even with its Lemn Sissay poem still there on the wall. But it's weird to think of such a landmark not being there at all.

Our plan for today was "meet a friend for lunch, maybe do something with him after."

It turned into a spectacular day of

• D buying rum-filled dark chocolate truffles for me
• a stranger striking up a conversation in HMV about my mask and eventually about being bisexual
• going to the Jewish museum (where I hadn't been since before its vast and impressive renovation and D never had)
• stumbling across a baseball-themed bar, of all the things, with batting cages and chairs with backs made of old bats and punny cocktail names (I had a Home Rum and D had a Circus Catcher; they came in red Solo cups and we ended up tipsily watching a video of circus catch highlights to illustrate what they were for D
• a nice cheap dinner in a café when I realized I'd only eaten half my lunch all day
• sharing a table with strangers at another pub, one of whom was from San Francisco and another one who talked to D about old computer games
• finally a drink in the Molly House where yet another stranger struck up a conversation with us -- it was the day for that!

A few minutes after midnight, but for the good reason that diffrentcolours and I just got home from a delightful evening of booze and good conversations and trying to go to a gig in a covid-cautious way -- which meant asking the venue about their ventilation, being assured that the air conditioner runs all the time during gigs, and then finding our CO2 monitor registering levels unacceptable to stay in for long even with a mask. So we sat in the beer garden, and there the sound levels were actually fine for me and my delicate ears but I feel for D, who missed the immersion that's part of the point of going to live music.

It's been a big day for appreciating my lovely boyfriend. This morning I heard snippets of his job interview via video call in the next room: I could hear his voice but not the words, so all I got was the general impression of him being competent and confident. It just reminded me that amazing.

And also he looked really cute. "I love guys in smart shirts and glasses," mother_bones said when she saw him in the kitchen just before the interview, and I agreed that he looked great.

I had a great weekend away, it turned out to be a chance to celebrate my divorce with an old friend whose divorce came through just before mine (this isn't as much a coincidence as it might seem; it's because we both took advantage of no-fault divorce starting to be a thing in England on a particular date this April).

He'd asked me a little while ago, when we were comparing notes on where the process was up to at that point, how long I had been married for. I had to do some math to figure it out: just short of seventeen years. Would've been seventeen in January.

He said his was something similar. And that he wanted to get a bottle of 18-year-old whisky to commemorate the occasion. We had some over the weekend, and he sent me home with my own bottle as a birthday present.

I really liked the idea of something that has been around longer than all of the time I was married. I was a much more sad and overwhelmed person at the time this was put into casks. I wouldn't swap places with them. But I wouldn't be (in metaphorical senses as well as the literal sense) where I am now without the choices my younger self made.

I'm so happy where I am now that I am grateful to them and very fond of them despite or because of their loneliness and their uncertainty.

My friend told me Friday evening that he'd gotten the email confirming his divorce had been finalized mere hours after he'd confirmed the desire to do so. I was a little worried that, having been told that it'd happen within two days unless there was some reason not to, I hadn't heard anything and Friday was the second of those two days.

It turned out though that I got the email almost exactly when I got home (after a prolonged journey!). As if to just round off the weekend nicely.

I was back at work today, I'm off again the next two days.

I chose today to stay at work rather than any other this week because I had a meeting I was looking forward to. And then it got canceled because the person running it was off sick today. Sod's law!

I still had an okay day at work and got enough stuff done that I won't worry while I'm away for a couple more days. I had counseling too so I got to talk about All the Stuff that's happened in the last week...starting about an hour after I talked to the counselor last week.

After work I told diffrentcolours I wanted to go for a walk, he said he'd come too, and we ended up walking more than five miles, with a stop for coffee and sweets and then another for dinner and a drink. We had veggie curry (so nice to see lentils again! which we don't get at home because mother_bones can't eat them) and I had a vegan hot chocolate made with coconut milk, and coconut rum. It was great.

I was feeling all restless and tense before, I'm much better for the exercise and the company I like best.