Livre d'Or

I've had really not a minute to update DW since I decided that I'd post a bunch of short pointers to other content. And I'm not doing at all well about even writing my diary here. I'm going to put a brief summary here because I had a really great April this year and I want to remember it.

I sort of half mentioned a wonderful visit with angelofthenorth and gwyddno, but not that we spent Saturday evening watching the sunset over Cardigan Bay and attempting (not very successfully) to grill mackerel on the beach, or that we visited a Lavender farm.

After I got back to Cambridge ghoti made the most amazing dinner for me and jack. It had mushrooms and actual fire and beautifully plated food (which is the kind of thing that I thought only my pro chef sister thinks about). And lots of really good conversation and general wonderfulness.

And I got invited to ten-pin bowling to help celebrate a sixteenth birthday, which I enjoyed a lot. I like bowling cos it's enough of a focused activity that you're not socializing "just" to socialize, but generally leaves plenty of time for chatting between turns. Though I must admit that I find bowling alleys to be really really over-stimulating with loud music and flashing lights all over the place. (Also I was very rarely cool enough to be invited to that kind of outing when I was actually sixteen, so that's somewhat validating.)

This weekend just gone, I had a very nice evening with ghoti and cjwatson, which started out with going to church with them. That was super interesting and I'm not quite sure my reactions to it are coherent enough to put here. And we had a lovely decadent chip supper and there was a certain amount of playing draughts and proto-chess with their six-year-old. There's something very wonderful about trad games with a kid who has little experience but impressively good instincts for strategy games in general. I lost badly at draughts too, partly through making a couple of stupid mistakes but still.

I managed to time a visit to my parents' to coincide with my uncle and his partner being over from Australia. Some of you will have met him at the wedding, he was the one being incredibly sociable and gregarious. I'm fond of them, so it was good to have some time together in spite of geography, though they'd only just got in from Oz so were pretty shattered. I didn't manage to coincide with my sibs who I think were also hoping to catch our uncle at some point this week, but hopefully I will have other occasions to see them.

And then the last day of the vacation yesterday was just idyllic; we went to a Star Wars pun charity event in Milton Country Park, along with ghoti and cjwatson and their younger two. It was, well, English May weather, really, sometimes sunny and sometimes overcast and a bit cold for shirtsleeves, but warm enough to convince ourselves to enjoy (very nice) icecreams and a picnic lunch. And I had fun dressing up as Princess Leia (mostly the hair and some random white clothes, plus a borrowed toy gun). If you know me you might recognize me in some of the pics, though I'm small and in crowd scenes or shots that don't show my face.

Still, in spite of all this wonderfulness in my life, I've been feeling more or less perpetually anxious for much of the past couple of months. I think it may be partly the imminent election, for which I see basically no possible outcomes I'm going to be happy with. But it's mainly a work thing; there's not much specifically wrong, I'm just really struggling with the balance between short-term urgent stuff and long-term career goals, and I'm finding impostor syndrome feelings harder to ignore. My chest hurts pretty much all the time I'm alone and paying attention to my body rather than interacting with other people, and it doesn't quite feel like asthma and it doesn't quite feel like a cold and it doesn't quite feel like heartburn, just... sore. I have a bad feeling that this is somatizing a proto-decision I don't want to face that I don't have a future in academia. But I might actually be ill, and I might just be anxious in a way that doesn't mean much long term, dunno.

Anyway, I started the bit of the course that I'm somewhat in charge of today, and having started it feels a lot better than waiting expectantly for it and dreading that I'm not well enough prepared. So hopefully I will be busy in a positive and satisfying way for the upcoming three weeks. And at the end of that I'm going on a really really exciting trip with ceb and some other excellent people, so there's that to look forward to.