Just One Thing (03 July 2025)
Jul. 3rd, 2025 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
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ten. good. things.
Jul. 2nd, 2025 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
(Yeah I'm struggling with the ukpol news at the moment, and feeling especially bleak about this FOI response in particular. Maybe I will manage to pull together a post of useful "please write to your MP about the UC/PIP bill" tomorrow, given I've got them all open in tabs to do so anyway.)
( Read more... )
Just One Thing (02 July 2025)
Jul. 2nd, 2025 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
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Just one thing: 01 July 2025
Jun. 30th, 2025 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
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Rebuilding journal search again
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
Just one thing: 30 June 2025
Jun. 29th, 2025 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
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vital functions
Jun. 29th, 2025 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Reading. ( Scalzi, Wells, Gordon + Ziv, Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster )
I have also done a bunch of variably directed online reading about models and theories of pain, and will happily recommend the British Psychological Society's Story of pain should this be relevant to your interests!
Writing. I am several thousand words and 18 (of 52) questions into the consultation on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. The deadline is in a little under 24 hours. Approximately two thirds of the questions appear to be very simple and straightforward tickboxes. I am not super enjoying the free-text responses, and especially did not enjoy that despite the total lack of any indicator of a word limit there is in fact a word limit and it's 1000 words. I discovered this having written 2511 of the damn things.
More cheerfully I am also, as mentioned, enjoying playing with my pens for the purposes of notes about pain. I am increasingly convinced (cannot remember if I mentioned?) that I have Solved the Problem of one of my fancy pens having an unwelcome tendency to dry up when looked at funny, via the method of "giving the cap a bonus little wiggle once it's on". (It's the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age which, second hand, was a PhD completion present from A, because -- for those of you who aren't massive fountain pen nerds -- it's made out of a resin that's got crushed Etna basalt mixed in with it; I spent a while going "is it just because red-family inks are typically quite dry???" but nope, the effectiveness of the extra little wiggle suggests quite strongly that the spring for the inner cap isn't quiiite activating when I'd ideally like it to. This isn't necessarily a huge surprise given how sticky it was when I first got the pen, but it still took me... a while... to catch on.
Watching. Up to date with Murderbot. Remain grumbly about Decisions including "how little time the poor thing spends with its helmet up" and "how bad people are at poly" and also, fundamentally, the word "throuple" (I AM TOO OLD AND CRANKY FOR THIS NONSENSE, APPARENTLY), but am also mildly peeved that we've run out of episodes.
Listening. An Indelicates gig, which I almost could not make myself leave the house for but was very very glad I did. Not having yet managed to scrape together the brain to listen to Avenue QAnon significantly increased the proportion of new-to-me songs!
Cooking. Bread? Bread.
Eating. The branch of Tonkotsu a short way from the Indeligig venue turned out to have outside seating! And an updated menu since last time we made it to them, so we both delightedly consumed the chilli tofu ramen and also shared the cauliflower 'wings' and some edamame and the very pleasant yuzu lemonade and also also I tried A's Smoked Hibiscus Margarita and it was great. (I mildly regretted not being in fit state to actually want an entire cocktail of my own.)
Growing. I... harvested and processed 1.7 kg of redcurrants! And ate several handfuls of raspberries! Depending on how badly my neglect since Wednesday has damaged everything given The Heat there's at least as much again to come off the redcurrant bush, and the jostaberry and gooseberry were also both looking extremely promising. AND the second sowing of kohlrabi has started to come up.
Just one thing: 29 June 2025
Jun. 28th, 2025 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
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Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
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much yelling
Jun. 28th, 2025 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
There has been A Great Squawking audible through the open windows for much of the last week. Yesterday A got to witness the source and then this morning so did I.
You see. There is a slightly scruffy, slightly scrawny magpie, which we wouldn't even necessarily have clocked as a juvenile if we'd seen it by itself? But we didn't. What we saw was it being attended by two actually filled-out adult magpies... up to and including it sitting back on its haunches and raising its mouth to the sky and continuing to yell until food was placed in it.
We have also got to watch it hop around in important little circles, intermittently pecking disconsolately at the ground, because apparently this is how the grown-ups make food appear!!! and it has not yet quite managed to work out why It's Not Working for baby, who is a Good Brave Baby who is doing All The Right Things and yet??? no food?????
And now that we have matched the yelling up with the culprit, I am grinning every time I can hear it, not just when it's visible. :)
Just One Thing (28 June 2025)
Jun. 28th, 2025 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
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some good things!
Jun. 27th, 2025 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
- Went on an Adventure to post a lost item back to someone (hopefully in time for the next thing they want it for...), and was rewarded with DUCKLINGS.
- Not too warm to achieve fallback dinner of I Don't Know, Bake A Potato, with the result that we finished the lurking salad leaves and also stuck some of the cook-from-frozen pasteis de nata into the oven once potatoes were done.
- Ridiculous organic greengrocer had an option on sending us rainbow chard this week, which means I might actually manage to cook one whole new recipe this month (!), which was otherwise... not looking likely. (I have been comprehensively failing to sow any, but there we go.)
- Went fossicking in sofa to try to at least rationalise my horrid piles. Found one (1) of the two (2) fancy watch chargers I own, and not the one I was expecting to turn up (because I thought I'd probably mislaid it in a field), which hopefully means that given a leeeetle bit more fossicking I might even find the second.
- Really enjoying playing with pens for the purposes of making notes on the pain reading. (Today has been Mindfulness for Health, with detours to read up more on the gate control and [neuromatrix] theories of pain; I was surprised that Model First Proposed In The 1960s is still apparently more-or-less the best we've got for "how the fuck does psychology and emotional affect and other sensory input actually affect how pain is experienced?")
Just One Thing (27 June 2025)
Jun. 27th, 2025 08:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
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(Apologies for missing yesterday's post!)
pain-related articulation of the past 24h
Jun. 26th, 2025 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
If you have had long-term pain, of any kind, for any reason, a component of your pain is neuroplastic. Neurons that fire together wire together: you've had lots of practice at being in pain. This comes down, fundamentally, to how we learn.
Which means that while neuroplastic pain management approaches may very well not solve all of your problems, they'll treat a component of them, and that's worth having -- in exactly the same way that we don't want to e.g. give up painkillers that "take the edge off" but don't solve the whole problem.
(None of this is actually novel except insofar as most education about chronic pain blithely asserts that "most" healing has completed within 3-6 months, so pain persisting beyond that timescale Is Neuroplastic unless you've got cancer we suppose. So in the context of My Project, the framing of "this is an approximately unavoidable complication of your underlying condition that requires active management in its own right" strikes me as important.)
[bats] today's brilliant idea
Jun. 25th, 2025 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
It is warm. We have the bedroom window open at night. Dusk is currently around when we are heading to bed.
... I realised I could prop the bat detector up in the open window while we went about our Bed Things and it worked. (Alas A missed most of the activity on account of being in the bathroom, but Proof Of Concept still valuable.)
Other achievements of the day include "1.7 kg of redcurrants picked, processed, and in the freezer" and "finished All Systems Red: the reread" and also "almost finished The Way Out reread".
(I am so so pleased about the redcurrants; turns out that mulching and pruning heavily and watering... works?! Who knew.)
Just One Thing (25 June 2025)
Jun. 25th, 2025 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
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today's questionable research hole was the sex ratio of adult zebra populations
Jun. 24th, 2025 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I was trivially able to dig out an example of a documented 5:1 female:male ratio.
Why yes I am rereading The Way Out (previous commentary) for the purposes of making notes on content and structure.
Just one thing: 24 June 2025
Jun. 23rd, 2025 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
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Just one thing: 23 June 2025
Jun. 23rd, 2025 06:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!