notes on adventures
Dec. 31st, 2018 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI am enjoying reading your reviews-of-the-Gregorian-year, so here is a contribution from me. <3
Culinary skill acquisition
Property
Health &c
Academia
Travel
Personal & other leisure
Culinary skill acquisition
- I've properly got the hang out sourdough! Only about five years after I dubiously started! I am delighted by this, and currently making & eating a lot of it. There's one aliquot in the freezer in London, and another (currently also in the freezer) in Belfast, cross-pollinating with the local yeasts there. This is largely due to Leiths How-To books.
- Again largely due to Leiths How-To books and their careful and painstaking explanations of How Things Work, I can finally semi-consistently make neat pastry. (Relatedly, I have levelled up at fancy cheese straws.)
- I have made my first ever batch of sorbet, and am tentatively hoping for more ice cream & sorbet over the year to come. (This will be aided by either finding the ice cream attachment for my Kenwood stand mixer that is probably somewhere in the cellar at the mouldering ancestral pile, or asking my baby brother to make good on his offer to buy me one as a housewarming present.)
- Green pasta! Maybe this year coming it'll even be with spinach I grew myself.
- I didn't succeed at mozzarella, but I did make progress towards learning it.
Property
- I... bought a flat, what the fuck, with the help of my parents and also my me_and.
- I took on an allotment. Foods eaten from it: raspberries, blackberries, jostaberries (probably), gooseberries (red, dessert, off the bush, in small quantities), grapes (even smaller quantities and I'm taking the vine out because it's Not Worth It and in an awkward place), pak choi, fennel, spinach, and a lot of excellent plums (nicked from a vacant lot). Bonus rhubarb and beetroot and redcurrants and tiny squash from neighbours. Foods grown: all of the above, plus butternut squash (started too late to ripen but I've learned a lot for next year), plus maybe a calabrese (it's doing its best to struggle on). Also, indirectly, globe artichokes and horseradish and theoretically Jerusalem artichokes and some cherries; I ignored all of them this year but might do more next. I am fizzing with plans and very much enjoying spending time in and with the earth.
- there was a BAT in our POSTBOX
Health &c
- This year I applied for two rounds of PIP and two rounds of ESA (by which I mean "I supported other people", ranging from "making a few quick you're-leaving-this-out notes" to "taking dictation and typing the entire thing up"). Two enhanced/standard rate PIP awards (both ways round); one ESA Support group; one ESA outstanding (<3 to you & fingers crossed). I also did a bunch of wrangling my own benefits paperwork, including a PIP appeal and a reapplication (and change-of-circs notification for ESA, and an SMI application), for all of which I'm still waiting on outcomes.
- I had top surgery. My chest is the right shape. I just... don't experience physical gender dysphoria any more. It's amazing, and that's not least because I just keep forgetting it's happened.
- I probably developed hypothyroidism. Stabilising treatment and confirming what's going wrong, exactly, is... a work in progress. It's been long enough now that I've slightly lost sight of what I think my "normal" is, which probably means it's time to readjust to where I am at the moment.
- I was involved in purchasing two wheelchairs for other people, plus sorting out my own wheelchair situation; I'm now down to three, plus one powerchair in the garage that needs some final repairs being made before I can sell it. I got the Tramper.
- I started very reluctantly going to the gym (again). For the first time ever, in combination with my other physio, it's making me obviously and unambiguously better rather than dubiously actively worse. It feels like a very slow and plodding and incremental and invisible sort of progress, but when I actually stop and think it's incredible. The endorphins are also pretty great.
- I... broke my foot. By sitting down.
Academia
- Last year, I decided I really would be okay to quit the PhD if that's where I ended up. This year, I decided I wanted to have a proper go at actually finishing it.
- My first first-author article was published!
- Significant progress on the next article.
- Learned to use a new machine (sorta).
Travel
- In January I followed A to Morzine, France, like a little lost puppy, where he spent some time skiing with friends and I spent a lot of time asleep (I hadn't started thyroid supplementation yet) and reading books and knitting and poking the internet and looking at mountains.
- A long weekend in Paris with A, where we looked at a lot of art and ate a lot of food and generally had An Adventure.
- Lots of trips to Cornwall, at various times of year, making progress on Sorting Out the mouldering ancestral pile.
- A week in the Peak District with A, and a friend I know via him, and a bunch of her friends; finally an excuse to visit the Hepworth Wakefield.
Personal & other leisure
- According to my notes, I read 53 works by 42 authors. Of those authors, 31 were female, two were non-binary, and at least one of the binary-gender folk is trans; 17 of the authors were chromatic. 24 of the works I read were by chromatic authors; 35 were by women and non-binary people. Six and a half were non-fiction; there was one poetry collection.
- I skipped out on one and a half terms of orchestra due to uncertainty about surgery and surgical recovery. I very much enjoyed the remaining term, and am looking forward to next year. (And I'm trying to get better at practising, because I'm happier when I do it.)
- My intention for the year was connection. As usual, I forgot it by about March, but apparently it was working away in the background because, well: new friends, new social skills (I can now play a new-to-me boardgame with people I don't know and not cry at all), continuing to work on and improve and settle into my relationship with A, and significantly unfucking a longstanding close relationship that's been quite fraught over the past few years.
- I got rather more into the habit of managing to actually update about Activities I Engaged With; I've therefore got an actual record of the various theatre and films I saw, and exhibitions I visited, and Cool Bat Facts I learned.
- Dreamwidth continues! Not many patches this year, and I've been a bit quiet in general, but I have been slowly plugging away and I have been excited by all the improvements we're seeing.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-01 04:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-01 11:53 am (UTC)Mouldering ancestral pile: makes it sound far grander than it actually is while also being a strictly accurate description, which I think is hilarious. It's my grandparents' (grandfather's) house; it was built in, oooh, maaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe the 50s, maybe a bit earlier? It's in a fairly large garden on a cliff overlooking the sea, and my grandfather -- Papa -- was both an engineer and, um, a hoarder.
He would do shit like go "aha, two pineapples reduced to 10p each in the bargain bin at Tesco, I'll get BOTH of them, I have no idea what to do with them nor indeed any such desire but my grandchildren will Like Them and they're A Bargain"... such that when we came to visit six weeks later there was a carrier bag containing two mouldy pineapples on the sideboard. And so on, and so forth, including an enormous washing drum full of empty six-pint milk flagons (seriously, several dozen) that Might Come In useful One Day, and tax returns going back to the fifties crammed higgledy-piggledy into a cupboard all out of order with bank statements from last year.
So: it's ancestral, it's mouldering, and it is very much one giant glorified pile.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-01 11:54 am (UTC)