Tales from the Tigerfort

I meant to do this as soon as the news about the new LJ terms and conditions emerged[1], but my general slow-motion existence struck once more. Because of the appalling nature of said T&Cs, I'm not willing to log into Livejournal. This means I will no longer be able to read private posts or reply to comments there; I'd prefer not to visit the site at all, and encourage anyone who has not yet done so to join the rest of us on Dreamwidth. I'm currently intending to stop cross-posting, and probably shred my existing LJ entries using crazyscot's tool for the purpose. If you are - for whatever reason - unable or unwilling to join the exodus but would like me to continue crossposting, please comment on this post (on LJ) to let me know[2]; if you have made the move but not reconnected, I'm tigerfort there as well.

[1] If you don't know what I'm talking about, please see this post by crazyscot.

[2] Or email, if you prefer. Please don't send me an LJ message, however - having logged out forever, I can no longer read them.

Well, a year and a month and a half, or thereabouts. Since we moved here, that is. Much of the stuff we had plannedhoped to get done in our first year remains entirely not done. Sorting out the garden? Nope. Redecorating some of the tattier rooms? Not even one. Visitors for weekends of gaming fun? We do have a (single) spare bed, and have had one visitor, but we need to invite more, and it still isn't really possible to have more than one at a time. There still isn't a useable table and the other (double) extra bed remains hidden away in K's parents' house, awaiting a point where we communally have the energy to move it. The piles of boxes are somewhat reduced, but still present in most rooms.

We do have quite a lot of books out on shelves, though, and hope to get more (shelves put up, and books put on them) by Christmas. And most of the boardgame collection is sitting on shelves eagerly awaiting the chance to be played, even if there's nowhere to play them yet.

Some of that's progress in the (oops) nearly two months since I last posted. In particular, we paid a visit to Ikea('s website) and got a bunch of Billys to go along one wall of the living room, which allowed quite a few boxes to be unpacked, making more room to do other stuff in. We also finally got a water meter fitted, and we're even in the process of escaping from [insert expletives] nPower. Hopefully, once we've switched, our new supplier will be more amenable to pressure to replace the *&!@# key-meter with a standard one. (Not least because they'll know that, unlike nPower, they can't lie and tell us it isn't possible to switch supplier while you're on one.)

So progress in the 1st year and a bit, while it feels pretty slim a lot of the time, was definitely made (and our expectations of ourselves were, as always, unrealistic, even without accounting for the inevitable post-move crash and the delays and problems caused by needing to get the place rewired).

The difference a day and a huge quantity of prescription medicines make, to be more specific. (Where "huge quantity" amounts to probably less than 1/10 gram of actual drugs, but that's in quite a lot of doses of several different things.)

Relatedly, I seem to still be sucking at the more-frequent-posting thing, don't I?

( medical stuff, in case you'd not guessed )
Other than that, I have mostly spent the last week or so listening to audiobooks, for some reason. If anyone would like to recommend cheerful soothing podcasts that I can download as MP3s without having to f*ck around with iThings, I'd be very grateful.

Once more, the plan to try and write at least one post per week seems to have got off to a poor start.

( A number of things have happened over the last week or so. )

But the car passed its MOT test with no problems, so at least I can stop worrying about that. I hope. And the new is due to go in next week, and we'll be able to have real food!

OK, so that was a little more than ten days. But the fort has been successfully relocated down to Dol Amroth, even if some of the details went a little wrong, and I've now had time to turn a pile of components into a new computer.

All that's left to do is finish relocating things into the rooms we wanted the movers to put them in, redecorate a couple of rooms, unpack the remaining 90% of our stuff from boxes, and tell everyone we've moved! Oh, and check whether the other half of the things on my list of things to be done before we moved retain any relevance, having rather missed their moment.

I'll try and get a post with some pictures in it up fairly soon, but I need to re-relocate the server, first. And take some pictures of the house, come to that.

Meanwhile, if anyone really fancies spending a few days painting and moving boxes around, we have an actual spare bed. And a room it could be put in that (a) isn't the living room and (b) has proper curtains. More realistically, we should at some point have multiple spare beds, and a games table, and a house that's generally a more desirable place to visit. But that'll take a bit longer :)

ETA: the new location should be visible at the top of my journal page to anyone with access/flist status. Message me if you want to see it and can't!

As is now long traditional, I failed to find the energy to send anyone actual Christmas cards. (Sorry.) As is also traditional, I took a Tigmas photo on Christmas Eve to offer up as a substitute.

As is less traditional, I discovered that I'd not reinstalled the drivers for my camera since I last reinstalled Windows. (The fact that I've not taken enough photos to be worth transferring to the computer since spring tells you something about my energy levels this year.) After allowing Canon and Microsoft to quibble vigorously for a while about which piece of software actually got to do the updating, I started looking for my SDcard reader, last used, um, some years ago. Still got no idea where it is. Still no resolution to the driver update squabble, either.

We are now taking consolation in alcohol.

Merry Tigmas, and a Stripey New Year to you all!

My most recent post (back on the 25th of March) seems to have done something fairly fatal to my target of one per week. Oops.

I think the long gap actually is partly the fault of that post - it's an attempt at a serious subject, and it needs work (it isn't even finished, for goodness' sake), and I suffered from "but I ought to sort that out before starting anything else...".

One or two other things have happened here in the last ten weeks, though, which have contributed to the radio silence:

• I switched ISP. Sort-of twice, but that's another matter for another post


• My mother suffered a bad attack of sciatica, and stripey_cat and I decamped over to her house to look after her and the cats for a couple of weeks. This was a slight strain on everyone's nerves, but we all seem to have coped.


• Unfortunately, that meant that the following couple of weeks were spent recovering from that, rather than getting the house as ready as possible for my current condition.


• My knee operation finally happened (last Thursday). So I'm currently rather less mobile than I was a week ago, but hoping to be showing substantial improvement. It already hurts less than it did, which is good, although how much of that is directly due to the surgery and how much is that I've probably spent a total of less than five minutes per day standing up since the operation I couldn't say.

I'm going to make a serious effort to increase my posting frequency, preferably with the aid of some book-related stuff. And there should be a modest rant about ISPs - or, rather, about one particular ISP - coming up in the next day or two.

It, um, seems to be over a month since I last posted. I regret to say that I've spent pretty much all of that time either sitting or lying down. Stopping the problematic medication seems to have returned my blood potassium to non-heart-stopping levels, but hasn't made a blind bit of difference to my knee, which continues to get worse. So for the last couple of months, I've had full use of exactly one limb, considerably limiting my activities. (I can't even hop everywhere, because that would rapidly leave me with no properly functioning limbs, and probably cause me to fall over a lot and injure myself elsewhere as well.)

Odd though it may sound, the problem with my knee is actually a major factor in my not posting. A couple of years ago I rearranged my desk so that I needed to stand to type, rather than sitting. Which was better for me, under normal circumstances - I both used more calories while at the computer, and was less inclined to spend ages doing something and then notice that my arms hurt. Now that standing is painful, it's less than ideal....

I'm currently (finally) waiting to be given an appointment for a scan, which is what I wanted from the beginning. Allegedly the typical wait time is six weeks, but we'll see what happens.

Sorry, revsolutions. Normally I don't really bother with these, but lets see how these work out, OK? ( They're not exactly huge life changes in any case. )

I seem not to have posted since early July. This is, alas, not for lack of things to post about. All this time lying down is clearly not good for me (it certainly isn't good for my sleep pattern; I'm thinking about having lunch soon).

For now, however, have a quote from the demo of (the quite appealing looking indie game) Delve Deeper:
"When the only tool you have is a battleaxe, every problem looks like a Goblin."