Genevieve's Journeys

...possibly a refit of my entire torso. Depends on what the mechanic says.

I'm now on about day 6 of a truly grotty cough, with complementary cold and fever. I've not usually had fevers but I can't explain how I, not usually a warm-body person, can be comfortable in our flat with the heat off several days running.

The coughing makes sleeping difficult; every time I change elevation (lying down to sitting up and vv) I cough. But I can't sleep sitting up - I've tried. I don't know how the Victorians did it, and don't know how their spines survived the experience.

Haggis is enjoying having human-on-tap, and is currently assuming the heraldic pose 'cat irritant', that of a cat lying across your arms as you type. But she's not impressed by my coughing either.

Broadly she prefers Robert for laps; he probably sheds more heat, and he sits more still for longer, whereas I tend to be knitting, sewing or doing other handwork that involves shifting occasionally, interrupting feline snoozes.

The cough has scuppered my plan to take part in a demo, my first in years; I'd agreed to attend Redemption a convention in Coventry, to support the proto-incipient shire there, and the lovely folks who were running it, recent participants in SCA fencing.

I'd even worked myself up to looking forward to it, as a fencing practice with a change of scenery to boot, playing with good people, and getting an inside view of a small con up close.

I might be technically not sick by Saturday, but probably not well enough to trek a couple of hours out of town, be 'on' for several hours, and trek home again.

Once again I'm grateful for Time Team; ~2 hours of archeology relieving the tedium of rediculous people shopping for aspirational houses to 'express themselves', and truly awful reality TV, interrupted only by PPI-seekers (hasn't everyone reclaimed by now?) and 'have you been hurt in an accident that wasn't your fault?' ambulance-chasing lawyers.

There's been 2 days of really lovely sun, and I'm sorry to not be able to go running in it at lunchtime.

...is to lose weight.

It's official. We are keepers of a Fat Cat(tm), with her carrying about a kilo too much.

When your total weight is 4.6kg, that's a lot.

Haggis had her first visit to the local vet in NW London, and demonstrated some of teh worst kitteh manners I've ever seen from her: kitteh swearing, vet-dodging under the table, growling and general poor behaviour, at least til the vet got the feline Vulcan Nerve Pinch on her.

This is in contrast to her past subdued behaviour with our Hackney vet Brian.

Apparently there are no native English vets in London. Our practices appear staffed entirely with antipodeans, including our last vet, and this new one, though the nurses are English. Is Australia and NZ and ZA just breeding too many of them? Weird.

So we've been given a prescribed amount of food to feed her. Measuring it on the kitchen scales, we have certainly been giving her more than this, so this is definitely a reduction.

I think it's also the change of home: we previously lived in a house built around its stairs, and she went up and down them several times a day. Now stairs are entirely optional, though the preferred Evening Place is at the top, and her catflap is right next to her food.

She's due for a weigh-in in a month. Sigh. It's free, says the nurse, which is a blessing because it's £18 return in the cab.

...means never worrying about finding fresh produce.

Our modest high street doesn't have many chain stores, and they're concentrated at the other end of the street from us. But it's very well stocked with local shops, run by mom & pop & older brother & brother-in-law & cousins and everyone else who has moved from the home country.

On the very end is the 'Gulf bazaar' offering an Arabic-speaking barber, abayas for 60% off (any colour so long as it's black), and a fresh juice bar that also serves fresh cane juice: they crush a length of sugar cane straigth into a glass while you wait.

Our closest food shop is an Arab grocer, with fresh bread, a halal butcher, every spice you could want, 8 different kinds of olives in bulk, loads of fruit jams, syrups and sweets, and a goodly variety of fruit and veg.

The Iranian kebab shop serves the most delightful lamacun (lamazhin), and fresh bread from their huge flatbread ovens. The guys running the shop seem to know most of their customers as friends, with a warmth and cheer that is suprising in London.

The next shop is a 24 hour grocery run by Eastern Europeans - some mix of Poles, Ukranians, Romanians and Hungarians. These aren't the newly-arrived Romanians from 1 January: these folks have been here long enough to establish grocery supply chains and a market to feed.

There's a bakery upstairs, a fresh meat counter, every variety of preserved meat that a pork-loving culture could enjoy, followed closely by the cattle-loving culture for the yoghurt and fresh cheese supplies.

In fact, the yoghurt and cream cheese are hard to tell apart; the drinking yoghurt tastes cheesy, the 'yoghurt balls in oil' are much more like cream cheese to me; I'm not certain they're labelled correctly, but they're very tasty.

The busiest shop, though, is the Asian fruit and vegetable shop; there's a continuous stream of deliveries to the front and the back, perpetually clogging traffic as they unload stacks of crates. The shop is packed with customers every time I pass by, with 3 cashiers working continuously.

Quality control appears to be the Indian and Sri Lankan grannies and aunties of the neighbourhood, who look over offerings with pursed lips, and grill the attendants suspiciously, 'Is this fresh? when was it cut? has it been sitting out for hours?' God help any goober who tries to pass off yesterday's watermelon to them.

...means you're in a car-based neighbourhood. In these suburbs, 95% of the front yards have been paved over to make extra parking space for the second and third car. Clearly, the good life requires four wheels or more.

...means if you find your favourite beer in a shop, buy it all. The 'ethnic' communities here are not traditionally big drinkers. The two pubs within walking distance seem populated only with ageing Irish builders who seem happy with lager and Strongbow.

Even the pub near work, which is now run by a former Medieval Baebe, doesn't yet have a tasty beer. In this aspect, I miss Hackney a lot, where we were spoiled for choice and price.

...means the parks seem empty; there is not the same dog-owning and dog-walking community here that was in Hackney.

When I walked through a park almost anytime of day in Hackney I'd see dogs and their owners; there was a regular group of morning walkers on my commute, and I enjoyed seeing the doggy social dynamics. The dogs seemed so happy to be out and about in the morning.

Now, there's the occasional single dog walker on my way to work, and an elderly gent walking a geriatric dog outside our building - the kind of couple where you're not certain who is walking whom.

Instead, the morning run is the parents towing children to the school next to us - crossing 4 lanes of traffic with lousy traffic lights not designed for pedestrians. The options for non-car-users are just appalling. Sigh.

Robert is at May Pageant (which sadly I've begged off, because I'm just not feeling up to being 'on' for SCA and the public, particularly as a fencer).

It's spitting rain and very windy in NW London, so I suspect the same conditions apply on the edge of Epping Forest. Sigh.

Haggis is shamelessly taking advantage of the door services.

Q: How many Pelicans does it take to get a catflap installed?

A: Two, apparently, plus a glazier who returns calls.

We now have all the components, and the glazier has visited to measure our window... nearly a week ago.

At this rate we could learn glassblowing and make our own window glass faster than it's taken to do the classic British 'have a man in' to do the work.

I spent a few days with badgersandjam this week. Her flat is very conveniently located close to a train station, so it's easy to reach. While there's a bit of road noise, it's beautifully naturally lit, and there's no screaming-neighbours noise that we put up with regularly.

We watched the news of flooding carefully - some streets in the Oxford area were closed, and Oxfordshire was expecting snow this week, though I don't know if it actually appeared.

I'm still watching because I'm headed into Berkshire for a dance workshop, and staying in Wokingham, and hoping it doesn't flood.

Looking at the maps of the flooding, I think our former house in Caversham would need sandbags, if not actually be flooded this year.

Ari and I puttered on quills (with me *still* getting the cutting sequence wrong, but will sort for Scriptorium3 next month, I hope), books - her library even impressed Giano, the most dedicated bibliophile I've ever met - and making wire rings.

Her neighbourhood is home to the better sort of charity shop - in fact in Summertown (posh part of Oxford) there was the ordinary Blue Cross shop, and then the 'vintage' shop further down the street. I've never seen original art in a charity shop before, but you can buy it in the Oxfam in Summertown. I'd be very happy shopping on this strip, and fought off the temptation of buying yarn in one.

I enjoy visiting; I also enjoy getting home to my cat-fur-covered comforts, and getting kneaded and purred into cat furniture again. Haggis has stayed close while I've been home. At Ari's flat, I swear I kept seeing movement out of the corner of my eye, and expected it to be a cat.

On the new-place-to-live front, not a lot of progress. I'd hoped to spend the rest of this week viewing, but I'm not getting a lot of response from agents. I'm beginning to get a bit nervous.

Robert commented that some of the agents he phoned were surprised he was calling about places when we don't have to move til end of March - implication being it's way too early to look at what's available.

This helps a little, though I'd still much prefer the matter settled, and honestly can't remember how far in advance we booked in past househunting efforts. I don't really want to spend the coming month gambling on finding somewhere in the nick of time.

Last night's conquest: a mouse, sort of.



I'm all over it. It won't get away.

Typical explosion of unpacking in the living room, and grateful flopping all round. Robert had to head in to work today, but I booked myself a day. Seeing the drah-ma I left behind in the office, I'm glad to allow enough time for the IT fiasco to sort itself...

Also waiting for a delivery - the blessed and much anticipated operational chip-based cat flap, sent to replace the faulty one. Haggis has successfully taught herself to go in and out, which is brilliant. We now just need a flap that only allows her, rather than all her inquisitive suitors too. Spring is in the air, when a young cat's fancy turns to pilgrimage, at least into other cats' territories...

Unfortunately - at some point in the day or so before our return, there was a power cut in our neighbourhood, and our circuit breaker was tripped. So we came home to a lukewarm fridge and freezer - full of last week's shopping.

Robert was not content to return from Crown only to come down w/ botulism, so most of the contents had to go, leaving only the most robust condiments.Vexing.

Haggis is very happy to see us, campaigning for laps and loves within minutes of our return, as the novelty of having human staff on call wore off (IN! OUT! IN AGAIN! THROUGH A DOOR! MY FAVOURITE!) and she's not leaving me for more than 5 mins at a time.

Stockholm, and Sweden apparently, is dog-focused. I was really surprised at the number of dogs I saw in the centre of Stockholm, strolling about during the day on errand-bound trips with their humans - not obviously headed to the park for the necessary, but just spending the day with the pack leader.

Of course the locals who are free to stroll around the town centre during the week are at leisure, rather than headed to the office - seniors, women with kids mostly - but it was still evident it was routine to take the hund along.

I met just one cat on this trip - the resident cat at the Crown tourney site, who seemed completely relaxed and untroubled by dozens of visitors. He might have been a norwegian forest cat - med-large, longhaired, with a long face, and classic dark tabby markings,  ideally equipped for stomping through snow along a frozen lake in Sweden.

Will post more of the event and the trip soon after sorting household bumf.

The past couple of weeks have been full of company chez nous.

Nerissa and Alaric have used our space as a staging ground before their departure - appropriate as they used our flat much the same way on their arrival in Thamesreach, after wandering around the UK for a couple of months.

On Friday we also welcomed Alex Darlington and his lady to ours, passing through en route to Oxford and to TORM.

Sunday we had aryanhwy J, and walker Gwen to visit; Ary and I kept Gwen (mostly) occupied while Robert and Joel worked on creating a mould for pewter casting. The results were excellent - Robert teaches well, and Joel asked thoughtful questions, so they both had a fine afternoon and evening working together.

I had the pleasure of introducing Gwen to her first chicken and pig, at the local city farm. The catch was that it started to rain, and was quite cold, though she seemed oblivious to it...and did not want to be once more stroller-bound, and even meeting the charming goat wasn't sufficent to make up for being trapped in the stroller. Do Not Want!

Back at ours, the only consolation was meeting Haggis, who bore up with some toddler loves for awhile, then absented herself from further attentions. I was relieved she (Haggis, not Gwen!) didn't swat, scratch or bite, but simply moved out of reach as needed.

And this week Alaric and Nerissa were staging through ours again after a last-minute squeezed in trip to Cork. We caught up with Kev, Ozbeg, and Soph at dinner at the Dove, and I had the most delicious honey stout from St. Peter - it smelled like a jar of honey, it was amazing.

I love company. I also love saying good bye and having the flat back to ourselves and the puss.

Here's to home this evening!

After some discussion, we now think that our puss's name is...Haggis: Haggis of Haggerston. Or maybe 'Aggis, here in the East end.

She's round, and brown, and delightful, and she loves belly rubs, just like the, uh, native species. What's not to like?

ETA: I should clarify. She does not have legs shorter on one side than the other, to help running round hills faster like the Scots variety.

Work is taking off like a shot, and even my refreshed virus free brain is struggling to keep up.

Went on training yesterday offsite; interesting to see someone else's office culture. The geek culture has moved on since I worked in a startup, and also since I worked at Oracle - but by Internet standards Oracle is old school fuddy-duddy.

I'm not certain I could work long-term in a hot-desk office, where *noone* has a permanent seat. My impression: it's cluttered and messy. Maybe it feels young, fresh and busy (we're too busy doing exciting stuff to put things in cupboards) but it doesn't look that way to me.

OTOH it disarms the pissing matches over preferred seating - something my colleague who is assigning desks in our new office (we're moving buildings later this month) is dealing with right now.

Robert is away to Investiture this weekend, and I'm staying home for a change; mix of worry about my health (2 colds in 2 months + back stupids) and work fatigue has made me shy of another indoor winter event. Will be using the weekend to shop, read, think, knit. And of course roll on the dancing boys.

Finished my scroll assignments last night for Investiture. Not terribly happy with the guilding (consequence of feeling rushed) but overall pleased. Will post when I can.

It's rather charming that when I'm doing a piece all I can see is the mistakes; coming back a couple of hours later I think 'hey, that's not so bad for someone who doesn't know what she's doing'. I felt the same way when I wrote essays in school. :-)

Gave blood this week for the first time in 2 years - I was kicked off the donor list for a year because of anaemia, and was slow to go back to the MD to get tested again. While my MD prescribed ferrous sulphate, the nurse who explained the results in the bloodmobile said simply, 'eat 3 apricots a day. Works for everyone I know.' So I've been eating my apricots, and sure enough I'm now good to donate again. 

In shire news, I'm stepping up as seneschal for 6 months again, to bridge the time between our outgoing, and our next incoming. The latter has to finish his studies first, and I'm happy to pick up for a short period.