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

The thing I couldn't talk about yet the other day is that Gary has the same problem with his eye that he did before, but worse.

D had to take him to the vet all by himself, and he put us on speakerphone while he was there. MB and I were sitting across the table from each other, trying to eat soup for lunch even though neither of us was hungry and it was almost four o'clock. She was too ill to go with Gary; I'd just gotten out of a meeting I couldn't skip or postpone because of this intense time I'm having at work. When the vet suggested referring Gary for the operation, I tried to rest my hand on hers but she grabbed mine and we just sat there clutching each other's hand for the rest of the call. It was horrible. I worried she'd blame herself for not having caught this one as early as last time, but she was just sad that Gary was suffering and worried about the future possibilities.

The possibility that isn't the operation is the eyedrops again, "but much more often," I remember the vet saying. Three different kinds now, a total of eight times a day.

Five times a day was grueling enough. This seems to have crossed some kind of threshold for Gary where he is just not okay all the rest of the time either. He's incredibly reactive: barking a lot even when no one is near him now, trying to bite sooner and harder... so it's not just when we're doing the drops, it's affecting him and thus us all the time.

The combination of him being like that and MB being in such poor health lately means I'm having Gary in my room every night, which is sometimes a trial in itself -- last night he woke up from a sound sleep to bark and lunge at me when I moved at all, even though I was just trying to get my pajamas and put them on and stuff, things that were nothing to do with him; I was not sure how I would safely get into my bed for a while, a rare moment of "I am not sure how to handle this Gary situation" for me -- and also means D and I have had to sneak in our cuddles where we can; a couple of naps and one time when I got up to pee about the time he was going to bed in the spare room, we decided I could join him (Gary was long asleep in my bed by that point and did not seem to miss me). I'm feeling even more touch-starved than usual, which is not helping with the mental and emotional toll this is taking.

And we quickly determined that D couldn't go camping next week either. It's too much to ask MB to do the eyedrops all the time for that many days. He's really sad about that and worried about letting down someone he loves, so that's no fun either. MB was sad she wasn't well enough to help with the vet visit (poor D ended up with bites on his fingers just from trying to get Gary in the car). I was completely overwhelmed with work to the point of being unable to process this, just feeling small and alone.

Thursday was also the day that an online friend had to say goodbye to her dog, another elderly terrier who was more similar to Gary than any dog I have ever known of; it's partly how me and this lady became friends, just saying "my dog does that too!" at each other. I've never cried so many tears for a dog I never met as I have for Sterling, because I do feel like I met him. So it was a sad day for me anyway, and an especially rough day to get difficult news about Gary.

Still, always, moments of grace: this morning I didn't wake up with his butt in my armpit like usual when he shares my bed, but to such photogenic snuggles, and with him being happier than usual to have my arm wrapped around him. Even when he's barking and aggressive it's so clear that he's trying so hard to be a good boy, and I am more convinced every day that he is the best boy.

I resented the interview all day until it started, at 2pm. I didn't have quite so much physical anxiety symptoms as I'm used to, but I still only ate breakfast because mother_bones gently but firmly insisted, and my hands were sweaty and shaking, and my mind was racing and unable to concentrate.

I hadn't been able to do much interview prep yesterday when I got home form work as I'd hoped to, so it all happened this morning.

I think it went okay, but gosh it was a lot. An hour's worth of interview-task -- the kind of thing that I was used to a small group of people working on and bouncing around an e-mail list over the course of a week, I had 45 minutes to do myself -- and then an hour's worth of competency-based interview is a lot. I hate "tell us a time when you..." I can never think of a time. I did okay most of the time, but had a couple of flimsy answers.

At first I thought my webcam wasn't going to work at all (turned out my anxiety about being late meant I'd tried to join the Teams meeting early enough to figure this out and have time to restart my computer, which fixed the problem). For this I put on a tie?! I told myself. I took a selfie to prove if only to myself that I had indeed dressed up.


Afterwards diffrentcolours and I decided to go for a walk to work off some of my adrenaline-crash nervous energy. Then we realized we could walk to a pub. We meant to only stay for like one drink but had three and then got takeaway dinner and then went to a differnt pub for another pint.

It was lovely, a great evening to sit out in the sunshine and just be glad that I had gotten through the day without making myself cringe.

The Minnesota Twins retired Kent Hrbek's number in 1995.

Each baseball player wears a one- or two-digit number on their jersey, and usually the number is recycled to a new player when the one who wore it retires or leaves the team. But sometimes the player is very good and with the team for a long time, so the team and the fans end up associating the number so strongly with that person that when they retire the number is retired too. This means no player for that team wears it again, and a big version of the number is displayed in the stadium so everyone at the ball game can see it. There's a ceremony for retiring the number, which takes place at some particular game.

The Minnesota Twins retired Kent Hrbek's number in 1995, which means I was thirteen years old. I don't know why we went to that game: was it intentional? We only went to a couple Twins games in my entire childhood; one to see the Mariners because Ken Griffey Jr. was my brother's favorite player (because his baseball glove had Junior's fake-signature in it, but I think really because he was always a fairweather fan who liked winning teams which the Twins certainly weren't by this point), and once I got to see Jim Abbott pitch, which it turns out was this game. Nothing else about that box score sticks in my mind, even though I got to see my beloved Kirby Puckett play.

All I remember, and I remember it distinctly, was the replica Kent hrbek jerseys being given away to "the first 10,000 kids 12 and under" which I was worried about because I was thirtee but I desperately wanted a jersey. I adored Kent Hrbek as much as I did Kirby Puckett; these two were giants in my tiny life, making me think by the time I was nine that winning the World Series was a rather unremarkable event that was going to continue to occur at regular intervals through my life, since it had already happened when I was five. (It hasn't happened once since, and I'm thirty-nine now.)

Baseball had broken my heart by going on strike the previous year. As a kid I didn't understand the specifics of the situation at all, all I knew was that one of the stalwart features of my summer could suddenly be taken away. To go to a game the next year, to be reminded of Herbie and everything he'd done that made me love him (and that this point the love was such that I truly believed he hadn't pushed Ron Gant off the base) back when I was a kid -- this is how I thought about it when I was 13, "back when I was a kid" -- back when baseball was reliable and good and exciting, was such a treat.

Turns out I needn't have worried about being too old; no one was checking non-existent kid ID to see if I was 12 or under. Walking through the turnstiles next to my little brother might have helped too; we were clearly Kids. The girl handing out the jerseys I remember as not being that much older than us, a teenager just whipping jerseys out of a box, all the same size, barely looking as she grabbed them out of a big box as crowds flowed past.

I wanted to wear the jersey over my normal t-shirt at the game, but my mom didn't allow it. She said it had to be "kept nice." I didn't know what'd happened to it after we got home that night. I was frantic about it for a while. I rooted through my closet and under the bed but everything was so neatly organized, so excruciatingly familiar, and none of it was the Hrbek jersey.

It was one of those things I'd randomly think about while I was trying to fall asleep at night:
Why had it been put away? It was special to me but it didn't have any monetary value or anything, a shirt like literally 9,999 others, with nothing special about it, the occasion of the number retirement was only connected to it in my mind. To anyone less obsessed it would've just looked like any replica t-shirt, it could've come from Shopko or Scheels like my other Twins stuff. As a kid I was used to outgrowing my clothes all the time and it hurt to think that this would join them; this thing from when I was a kid I'd one day outgrow and never be able to make use of.

Eventually I learned it was in the wicker chest, but that was no help. This collection of things my mom had decided to keep for me since I was a baby was kept in my parents' closet, no room for it in my own tiny room. And even if I did sneak in and find the shirt, amidst the piles of weird old baby stuff and things I'd made in school and clothes carefully folded in tissue paper which my mom always believes will keep clothing from getting creases in it, what could I do with it? It's not as if I could wear it without my mom seeing.

What did I want it so badly for anyway? I couldn't even articulate that to myself really. It was special because it was lost, and it was mine, and Kent Hrbek was special to my childhood, baseball was special. I just wanted to see the thing again, wanted to touch it.

But there it stayed. For years, as I grew up and moved away. It stayed there for twenty-four years and I never saw it, never touched it. But I kept thinking about it. I caught homesickness and nostalgia like a disease when I moved to the UK, and this seemed somehow emblematic of everything I was wistful for, everything it hurt to remember and do without.

Finally a couple of years ago, my mom, thinking toward eventually having to move off the farm and out of this house they'd lived in for longer than I have existed, wanted to go through the wicker chest with me, see what I wanted to keep and what could be given away or thrown away. I had little idea of what was in there and didn't remember or recognize much of it. The only thing I was absolutely sure was there, the only thing I really cared about, was the Kent Hrbek jersey.

When we unearthed it, it was covered in weird brown stains and the lettering, screenprinted with what was likely to be no special care, had faded and and flaked. It broke my heart a little to see it like that, and to think of how it'd just sat so nearby moldering when I was nearby and pining.

My mom treated the stains and washed the shirt for me. I packed it with my other clothes, the clothes I actually wore, in my suitcase and took it home as if it were a normal shirt. Not knowing what else to do with it, I put it in the drawer with my other t-shirts when I unpacked, as if it were a normal shirt. But it wasn't; I was scared to even try it on. It looked pretty big for something tossed at even a surreptitious 13-year-old, but I'm so used to being too big and too fat for everything. Anyway, would I want to wear something that was still flaky and had the lightened-but-obvious brown stains on it?

I moved it to a new drawer with my t-shirts a few months ago, and wondered again what to do with it. I always figured it was a decision I could make later. But then this morning, amidst a new and worsening depression, having already rejected my first choice of outfit and even my second choice of trousers, I was sinking into a feeling of being too big and the wrong shape for all of my clothes. Digging through the t-shirt drawer, I don't know why I thought it was suddenly the time to try on the Hrbek shirt, but it was.

I put it on and I actually loved it.

Maybe this is a story about appreciating things while you've got them, maybe it's about how they're there for you when you least expect it, but I don't really have a neat moral to tie this story up with. I just like this picture. I wore the shirt to work today and it's tight on me and I wish my body were a different shape but I still felt great.

The TV thing ended up being on today, not yesterday. I ended up being one of a few talking heads -- I'm so sad that one of them wasn't Terri from the RNIB, which it would normally have been but she just got furloughed; she's great at this kind of stuff.

As I suspected I was mostly there to walk with my cane and look weird in the shop. The cameraman was super excited about how I looked when I was looking at the shelves and I figured it was probably not how most people look while they're doing it. But then he also praised me for being a natural when I walked; he said a lot of people suddenly become unable to walk like a human as soon as they start being filmed.




P.S. Oh man I nearly forgot the best bit. Andrew's dad called to tel us he'd seen it on the news, and when Andrew got off the phone I asked what his dad had thought of it. Andrew said "His only comment was that he was surprised they didn't call you Holly Hickey."

Apparently he does know that I never changed my name, but he said he thought they'd have called her that anyway.

I'd gone to bed with a migraine by this point so I asked Andrew if that was why this didn't make any sense to me. They didn't ask about my last name at all (so, inevitably, pronounced it wrong in the piece) but they got it, like my first name, from the RNIB contacts. My brain hurt just trying to imagine the mechanism by which they could possibly have discovered that my husband has a different last name, much less used it instead.

This sparked a nice conversation between me and po8crg (who called me after he watched it on TV because seeing and hearing me made him miss me, bless him) about this idea some people have that everyone has a Real Immutable Name, and they might ask you to call them a nickname or something else but the Proper Official Name is still Out There somehow, being objectively the most correct. And I guess my father-in-law (who once nearly accidentally prevented me from going on a family holiday to Greece by booking all the plane tickets with the Hickey surname) has decided what he thinks mine is!

4 What picture is the wallpaper on the device you’re using right now?



This one (though the other way up, for some reason; it's the south pole so the jets should be at the bottom), of Enceladus, which is a little moon of Saturn and my favorite moon in the solar system (with the possible exception of the Moon, Earth's moon, but that's just provincial prejudice on my part).

It was the background picture on my old phone too, so I've been vaguely looking at it behind my app icons for at least like five years now.

"Happy birthday Christmas," Andrew told me, handing me a bag he'd just gone through the airlock we have to make to keep Gary away from delivery people.

In the bag was a Stitch onesie. I tried it on because I was worried it wouldn't fit but it's just about right! And I took pictures because one of my Mastodon friends asked for them.





TThe consensus so far seems to be that I look cute and happy.

Before I was a politics nerd...well, I always was a politics nerd (I ran the polling station for my fifth grade class's mock election in 1992) but when I was only enough of a politics nerd to notice signs in people's yards endorsing particular candidates or parties at election time, I never thought that much about how they got there.

In late 2016 in the by-election in Witney (after brave David Cameron ran away), I found out. Because I helped diffrentcolours who was tasked with driving around this rural Oxfordshire constituency to deliver and put up these stakeboards. Lib Dem ones are orange diamonds and say either the name of the candidate or just "Liberal Democrats" and then "Winning Here!" I had fun doing it and a picture that got taken of me holding the sledgehammer that we were using to get these things into the ground (a bit overkill perhaps, but it was what we had available) became one of my favorite profile pictures on Facebook (I'm using it again now that I'm helping out with another by-election).

Today we did not have a sledgehammer, a mallet designed for tent pegs has proved sufficient. We also had a regular claw hammer (the DIY shop we bought it in this morning only had a particularly teeny variety, which to my delight was labeled a "stubby hammer" on the packaging), a lot of little nails, and even more cable ties. Whereas in Witney we had stakes that were already attached to boards, here they needed to be assembled into such. So I tended to do that and then D got them driven into the ground or we cable-tied them to conventient fence posts or whatever.

We didn't take a lot of pictures last time, except for me and my sledgehammer, but this time the routine often finished with one or the us standing in front of the sign and the other taking a photo. Here's one.

I saw Em J for the first time in weeks, which is always so nice. But it was extra nice because she had such lovely birthday and Christmas presents for me!

I got a Moon nightlight, swirly space colored pencils, a planner with shiny constellations on it, and two other notebooks with constellation covers, one that's got a planisphere, a rotating paper disc so you can move it around to see what constellations are visible at different points if the year.

"I thought it might be a good thing to mess with in lectures when you're bored," she said about that, which made me giggle.

The planisphere notebook also has all different kinds of pages: ruled (nice and thin! I never see it thin enough for me), dotted, graph, even some with tessellating triangles.

The space pencils I remember seeing in Fred Aldous and being so excited about them I wondered if Em J had been the friend I was with. But then I remembered that'd been a different friend, Em J just knows me so well.

The other constellation notebook she said she was thinking might be nice if I want to do some poetry like Stuart. She got him a nice leather-covered notebook that he says he's going to read out of next time we go to Spoken Weird.

When I told Andrew I was going to a spoken-word night with Stuart, he expressed sympathy. It made me laugh but I was convinced it was unfounded.

I don't know why, because every other such thing I've been to has had some measure of terribleness in it, but I trusted Stuart to pick something good. And he was going to read a few poems himself, which he'd hardly ever done before and which I was excited to hear; I didn't know them. I've read some of the novel he's working on (it's great and this was before we were dating again so I was under no girlfriendly obligations to say so (not that I'd feel obliged anyway but it does sometimes seem that way to recipients of such praise)) but I was unfamiliar with his poetry, so I was looking forward to that.

And unsurprisingly he was great, but slightly more surprisingly the rest of the open-mic first half was fine too. A loud Canadian addressed a sweary poem to the Moon, somebody condemned pavement (sidewalk, for American readers; normally the word I use and prefer but here it loses the alliteration) parking.

And then the headliner, Ciarán Hodgers, came on for the second half. By the end of his first poem I was determined to buy the book he said he had.

The poem left me in tears because it was about being an emigrant--usually we talk as immigrants, about the lives we're moving to, not where we're from. Obviously half of the details I couldn't relate to at all because I'm not Irish but the other half was like hearing the most perfect version of my tangled, unlovely thoughts.

And then he introduced his next poem by talking about his grandpa dying and how he had to take the first flight back and then I cried more, having of course been in that position myself and knowing I will be again one day for my grandma... I was crying because it's November now and because it'd be All Souls Day the next day.

The poet said he had three copies of the book (though he was happy to take details and post one for anybody else since he considered it his own fault he hadn't brought more copies, bless him) and I was second in line to buy one. "I could feel a lot of love coming from that corner of the room," he said, which is possibly no surprise since Em J had sent Steve to be first in line.

I told him he'd made me cry because I was an immigrant too and he signed the book for me and stood up to give me a hug and a kiss on the cheek goodbye.

It was a magical night all around really.

I definitely want to go back to Spoken Weird again, and I'd recommend it to anyone who can get to Halifax on the first Thursday of a month.

...of almost everything mentioned in this entry (DW gives tiny thumbnail pictures but all can be clicked to embiggen):

Here's me and The Tiniest Kitten:


I tried to get a picture of how little he is but there were so many other kittens around.


But I had fun trying. He obligingly kept looking at me with his intense eyes.

Here's this year's two apples so far. And the teeny evergreens next to the apple trees.




And here's a picture of something I didn't mention the other day because I didn't know I'd get to do it! This is the first time I drove a tractor in about twenty years.