Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

For a day off, what a busy day!

I arranged a couple of chats today, because of the day off, for the organization I volunteer with. Mostly I'm part of a group making decisions but today I had to/got to represent those decisions and attempting to answer questions about them one-on-one. I wasn't too worried about it but it was nerve-wracking. They both went well though.

Then, my new All-Terrain Cane showed up! I hadn't really known what to expect and it helped to watch this video where, among other things, the inventor talks about how he came to do this (I gotta admire anyone who'd go into an outdoors store and say "show me your blind hiking section"!) and there's footage of him using it to like clamber over rocks and walk deftly along uneven trails. I wasn't sure how a rollerball tip would work on a weight-supporting cane but of course it does when you're on grass/sand/dirt/mud/etc. I tested it out a little this afternoon on some grass/mud nearby, which I know quite well but I still got the impression that this is a useful thing to have.

Then tonight D suddenly got the idea to make and elaborately decorate a cake for a friend tomorrow. When he was still telling me about his plan, at one point he said "Sorry, I'm just excited because I have a project." I grinned; it was good to see his I'm Excited I've Got a Project face again, it'd been a little while. I could help with the ingredient-buying and cake-baking but I know nothing about fondant icing -- but luckily, his mum does! So she got a surprise phone call from him after 9pm tonight.

It got late because we already had our usual fortnightly plan to tune in to readings of "Edwyrdian Tales," so we had a late dinner after the ingredient-buying, half way through the cake-batter-making, for some fun supernatural stories.

The cake is made, the fondant is colored, the actual decoration will happen tomorrow.

Gary has been at a few points sleepily baffled by how high-energy everyone has been after his bedtime. It has been a couple of unusually busy evenings for us, at the last minute. They have been fun but I hope tomorrow I can manage to eat my dinner before 7:30!

And somehow after all this I have to go back to work tomorrow?!

In recent weeks I came to realize that I double-booked myself catastrophically for a date coming up a couple of weeks from now.

I was so embarrassed about jumbling up two things of such importance that I didn't want to fess up to either my team at work or a board of trustees I'm on that I had done so.

So I did what I always used to do when my anxiety was even less well-managed than it is now: I ignored it, I panicked whenever I remembered this, and then I ignored harder.

But today one of those events has been moved!

Avoidance pays off!

(Not really, I hate it and it's miserable.)

But this relief feels so good. It feels better than just being on top of things in the first place would. It's also more rare and risky and completely not worth it. I do not feel rewarded, I just feel reinforced in my belief that life is better when I'm more organized.

I was talking to someone on the phone today who's chair of a thing I'm a trustee for.

I got asked to be a trustee earlier this year (which is possibly the most grown-up thing I have ever done) and today we were talking about how I got a job soon after. She's really glad about my job but also was saying she felt good about having "gotten" me first because she'd kind of recruited me herself. "I feel like I poached you! Like when you hear people talk about football players, trying to get them before another team does. I'm like 'Yeah, I got Maradona'!"

There was a little more of this, I can only paraphrase here, because I was feeling flattered even before she mentioned Maradona but at that point it just got ridiculous and my brain shut down.

What a nice thing to have happen.

I was upstairs getting ready for bed before I remembered I hadn't written a blog post today. So this might be short, both because I'm on my phone and because it's the kind of day where I was in bed with my teeth brushed and my meds taken and my pajamas on and everything by 9pm.

But I've had a good day and I wanted to say so. ( Okay this wasn't short at all but I had a lot of nice things to talk about! )

I had three volunteering meetings in the last day.

The first was last night; like I said I signed up for the first agenda-setting meeting for an RNIB LGBT+ group in the north of England. It had what the organizers considered a good turnout, seven or eight people I think, but which the person who arrived last thought was a bad idea because the north of England is way too big an area. Maybe it is but...we only had seven or eight people! If it gets huge we can split it but for now, it's worth establishing that we want such a group at all.

People apparently do, so three of us (yes I am one of the three) are going to be the "organizing committee" to plan what monthly meetings could look like. So that meeting is next week. I'm looking forward to having something Biphoria-ish to do again, and glad that this intersection of crip and queer might finally get some presence in my life because I'm bored of all my activism/socializing that's one thing being terrible about the other thing.

Then this afternoon I had a kind of interview with a couple of people from Transport for Greater Manchester about bus information and what kind would help me as a blind person. We talked about real-time information at stops/on apps, having that information on the buses in audio and visual formats like they do in London (what number bus it is, what direction, what the next stop is, etc.) and even about information about how crowded the bus is which would be a huge bonus while the pandemic is going on and rules about masking and distancing and ventilation range from unenforceable to non-existent. I found it interesting, if exhausting to just do that much thinking, and they seemed to find it really useful. And I'll get a decent amount of money in a voucher for doing it, I guess, so that's cool.

But mostly I'm just unspeakably glad to see TfGM talk about buses! They've been responsible for the trams forever but buses have been this shitty de-regulated thing where all my complaints about not enforcing covid rules, or before that when buses wouldn't stop for me, it was always like "you have to take it up with the particular bus company." Even though the problems are the same everywhere. Even when I felt like I was getting somewhere in my pre-pandemic "stop for blind people" activism, I was aware that to get any reliable progress I'd have to do the same work with First and Arriva and whoever else, and it was hard enough to do all that work with Stagecoach! And that was with sympathetic management, which there is no guarantee you'd get from the next bus operator. So I'm really glad that shitty system is coming to an end here.

Technically there was an hour and a half between that meeting and my next one today, but as usual it overran slightly and I had to do some staring into space drinking tea before I could contemplate starting dinner, but I had to do it then if we were going to eat before it got too late for me and I turned into a gremlin (we ate really late in the evenings all weekend, and last night did by accident when the takeout took much longer than planned to turn up, so I wanted to go back to getting it right for me tonight).

So I put a quiche in the oven and started work on chopping vegetables for salad and I boiled potatoes for potato salad...we have too many potatoes! mother_bones kindly finished off the green salad while I was in the meeting so I just had to add the cucumber, mint, greek yogurt and lemon juice to make potato salad (it might sound weird but it's very good, this household loves my potato salad) afterward and dinner was basically ready.

My last meeting was like a focus group for an ad coming up from the RNIB and it was surprisingly fun and great. I found myself among my people! I worried at first I'd be the only one ranting about the sighted gaze, ableism, tragedy porn or inspiration porn but I absolutely was not.

We weren't sure what the goal of the ad was but we wanted it to be more about what sighted people could learn about and indeed from blind people: from #JustAskDontGrab to why we're expected to disclose our diagnosis and potentially traumatic stories to receive support or sympathy.

We questioned things outside the scope of the individual ad, like the "see the person not the sight loss" motto they keep using, which I hate, which thanks to this group I now want to replace with "My biggest limitation is your vision." It'll never happen, but a boy can dream can't he.

Just as I put some stuff from the freezer in the oven for lunch, mother_bones said she'd like to go to Abakhan -- the big fabric store in town. (Hooray for our new better masks! She hasn't been anywhere except medical appointments since they went to Stornaway in like September.)

She was quick to say she didn't expect anyone to go with her and she was happy to get a taxi, but I love going there with her, and diffrentcolours had the excellent idea of going right then and having lunch at Koffee Pot, an old favorite. "Do they have tables outside?!" I said. He thought so. I don't know why I was so surprised; I wouldn't have had to think about such things the last time I was there, so I wouldn't have noticed.

Their menu is reduced to breakfast (English/Scottish breakfasts) and "brunch" (other breakfasty food), so I looked in vain for vegetables and instead had my delicious protein, fat and potatoes with a green smoothie. mother_bones was carefully avoiding the carbs as she intended to save all of today's metformin for the pancakes I had promised to make for dinner. It was lovely sitting outside under a beautiful blue sky; the staff member who served us even pointed out a heater that did gently warm the air around us but I was still happy in just my hoodie.

Then diffrentcolours went off to play Pokemon and we went into the shop. mother_bones and I had unrelatedly (unless this was what'd given her the idea to go today...) talked this morning about the possibility of her teaching me how to sew, after I'd said I'd always been left out of the conversations about fabric and stitches that my mom and grandma had all through my childhood; it was assumed that I was blind enough that such things would forever be off limits.

Of course mother_bones is keen on dismantling such barriers anyway, and is also interested from a pragmatic point to find out what I can actually do and how I can be helped to do the rest so I could, like, at least mend things or whatever, that'd be fabulous. It's so lovely that she's happy to mend/alter clothes for me but it'd be so badass if I didn't have to depend on someone else for stuff like that. So she spent extra time telling me about the different fabrics and how they're different and why it matters, and I asked some questions too. Mostly I was just there to touch things and compliment colors, but then so was she.

She got some cool fabric (only some of it is space stuff for me...) and I bought some very gay yarn to make a scarf for a friend (it's lace weight and I'm using a lace pattern and why are these things both happening at once; I am not good enough for this! there's so much counting! everything is so small! haha I am a victim of my own ambition here and no one can feel sorry for me). The staff were lovely, pointing out a much cheaper version of a thing she needed to buy, and we even made a friend of another shopper who asked our advice a couple of times on colors to go with something she already had to make a birthday present for her mother, aww. She also needed the thing that would've been expensive if not for the cheap version, so I'm glad she found out about that when we did!

We were all tired but happy and very ready to go home then, which unfortunately took an hour because of weirdly bad traffic! Gary was so delighted to see us though, it was cute.

After the Tesco delivery arrived this evening, I had all the ingredients (actually, the toppings) for pancakes! I thought about doing English pancakes with savory toppings for dinner and American pancakes for dessert, but we'd had a big and late lunch, and also I was tired. I didn't make the pancakes as early as I intended and having to wait for groceries in a 7-8pm slot meant it was very late (for me) by the time we ate. I've learned these last few months that I turn into a gremlin if I haven't eaten by 7, and tonight it was after 8. And close to 9 by the time I'd finished.

I got the veggie bacon bits I'd used in the carbonara last week, and threw them in a pan with some mushrooms. Mushrooms and cheese or spinach and cheese are my favorite savory pancake toppings, so I made sure we had grated cheese and baby spinach too. And it turned out we all just put all those things on all of our pancakes. There was just enough batter left for the cook to have one last one so I put lemon and sugar on that. mother_bones had a muffin for dessert instead, meaning there's only one left of the batch of blueberry banana muffins I made to use up the sad bananas, and now there are already more sad bananas! I'll make the peanut butter banana muffins tomorrow.

I was kinda grumpy that I have to miss my covid/disabled people meeting tomorrow to go to work -- every other time I've been able to skip or swap a work day for it, but this time I can't, so after almost a year and a half I really shouldn't complain too much and yet here I am -- but I actually had a really good one-to-one meeting with the chair today so I was able to vent my spleen and also hear some very, uh, interesting stuff from him that I know won't be said at the whole meeting so I'm feeling better about having to miss it now! And luckily that meeting with him, which was supposed to be at 2pm i.e. right when I'd have been eating lunch outside Koffee Pot, got moved at the last minute to this morning which ended up suiting us both a lot better.

Today has been a nice day for Things Working Out, and it has not felt like that has been true for a while.

On Tuesday evening, after a big day for both of us, I realized in a conversation with diffrentcolours that there's at least one more big thing I wanted to do this week. I have to succeed in getting a bank to do a thing I don't really understand myself and which I failed to do the last time I went there with all my paperwork.

He offered to drive me. "Yeah, the next time you have a day off..." he said. But this had just been my day off for the week. So next week? he suggested. But I have a meeting on Monday morning and I really want this done before that. It really should've been done like a month ago. It's both my fault and the bank's fault that it has taken so long. It has become a huge stressful thing, as admin tasks dragged out over months sometimes do. Especially when they involve going to a public place during a pandemic.

Yesterday I barely made it to work. Today I could hardly get out of bed before work, and only remembered once I had about this stupid errand, when I was definitely too tired to contemplate it today.

I hate it when I have a bunch of time before a deadline but still end up with only one time to do it, so I am constricted to one option anyway.

I really hope I'm up to it tomorrow!

I think I'm being punished for not like buying a day planner, or being one of those people enthusing about their bullet journals last week (I'd love to be one of those people, if I sound dismissive here it's just envy).

Normally I have an extremely part-time job, four afternoons a week. And my volunteering has a couple of regular meetings: one's the last Wednesday of the month and one's the second Thursday.

And with Christmas and covid and everything (the meetings are all online, but a meeting of the covid-specific disability group got canceled because too many of the presenters had covid), it'd been a while since I had the meetings. And I worked a bit less over Christmas too. So everything seemed really chill at the beginning of January! It lulled me into a false sense of security.

Even this week didn't seem too bad. I'd figured that, between getting the job application and the optician appointment and my early-start/long day at work out of the way by yesterday, the rest of this week would be smooth sailing. I had the first of these regular meetings for the new year today, which I enjoy and which means a day off work, and then just a normal work day tomorrow and it's the weekend.

But during that meeting this afternoon, I got an email about a meeting tomorrow morning (this is more notice than I sometimes get for those...the downside of disabled-people's organizations is sometimes everyone's too disabled to do shit! but we still have an AGM coming up!).

And then I got asked if I could come to work a little earlier tomorrow, since the other PA can't make it. I'm used to that and I'm happy to help when I'm the difference between people having showers and not, so I said yes.

But finding out about that first meeting tomorrow reminded me I had another meeting, rescheduled from Tuesday, tomorrow morning too. So I'll have to leave the first one early to make that. And the second one will take me almost right up to this new earlier time that I have to leave for work: I'll have 20 minutes to find, make and eat something for lunch. So now tomorrow is a ridiculously busy day (for my usual standards, still less than a person who works full time).

And I agreed to go to a meeting on Monday that's adjacent to my usual volunteering and looks good for the job I just applied for. So I've already swapped that for my day off next week, which means working the next four days in a row, which I know is normal but it's hard on me which is why I don't usually do it.

And the Monday after that is the AGM I was talking about, for a group I've said I'll be the secretary/treasurer for this year.

And another delightful thing, which I found out by text this morning, is that the day after that, a week on Tuesday, I have to do the PIP "consultation" for my new claim. I knew I would because I always do, but I always resent it because I will always be blind and that doesn't need me to answer a bunch of shitty questions every few years probably asked by someone who doesn't know anything about visual impairment. At least this is a phone call -- which I would have fought for otherwise, no way am I going to a place for this when I don't go to places for fun -- and mother_bones has offered to be with me for it. We can take the call in our pajamas and make obscene gestures.

I'm just relieved that that, is not a day I'm working. In theory at least! Who knows what'll happen next.

So I put all this shit in my phone calendar during the meeting I was in today, and it looks so overwhelming. But also I'm caught up on my volunteering email (which I have a terrible habit of neglecting) so I'm actually feeling pretty good.

Oh and I forgot, also during today's meeting, the chair said a couple things early on like "Erik, do you have another meeting this afternoon?" and "I've just seen that the meeting is at 3 o'clock today, are you dropping out of this one? I think the other one is really important to input into or have you set something up separately with [first name]?" I was utterly terrified at first that I'd forgotten something or overlooked something I should've RSVPed on, so I had a frantic scan of my emails. I didn't even recognize the name. At first I thought this was the Monday meeting but then it wasn't, and I was torn between "oh no I've fucked up" and "oh no I've been mistaken for someone relevant but I'm not important enough to have even been told about the meeting," which is like a volunteering version of finding out the popular high schoolers are having a party you didn't even know you weren't invited to. I think that has been sorted out now, but it'll mean another meeting sometime soon!

One of the things I love about volunteering is how random it can be.

Today's this is that I'm going to be in a comic! And so is Gary.

The comic is a training thing for GPs on reaching marginalized groups (I'm representing visually impaired people, they also are consulting a deaf person, an asylum seeker, an unhoused person, and others). Being able to explain in detail the problems I've had accessing my GP (I've needed an appointment since like July and not gotten one!) was actually kinda therapeutic. And the comic is intended to be more interesting than yet another PowerPoint, which is a clever idea, I hope it works.

They wanted an idea of me as a person, not just as An Blind, so asked how old I am, where I live, what do I do for fun, etc. For that last one I had no idea what to say (I play games on my phone and listen to podcasts!) but I mentioned having a dog and everyone perked up, the note-taking person started taking excited notes and immediately asked what his name was (and said Gary was a good name!). The other one asked if I have a photo of Gary, and I was like "do I have any photos that aren't of Gary?" So one of my chores for this evening was to email some Gary photos.

It was so funny to have a conversation that ranged from being asked "so how do screenreaders work?!" to "ooh what kind of dog have you got?!" One of those questions is a lot easier for me to answer than the other, heh.

I woke up this morning thinking it'd be a nice chill day. The last few have been so busy (including/especially Tuesday when I didn't go to work at all!), today I just had work in the afternoon and I was looking forward to that. I slept okay but I was so tired.

So I did my morning chores (dishwasher, Gary's meds, breakfast, tea) and settled down with the dog to watch some baseball. Until 9:45 when my phone told me I had a meeting at 10:00. I had no memory of this (for a while), thank goodness for calendar reminders.

It was a volunteer thing that only happens every few months, hence I said "yeah I can go" a few weeks ago and then immediately forgot. It wasn't too bad though: I found out about an interesting app called Goodmaps and another thing I forget the name of. It's weird to be at meetings about trains and stuff when going on a train still feels like such an alien idea.

At dinnertime, I opened the fridge utterly lacking in motivation, but then I saw the two ears of sweet corn I'd forgotten about! Fresh sweet corn is practically a religious experience for me now, one of those things I utterly took for granted in my rural-Minnesota childhood (we grew it so you could go into the field, pick some, husk and clean it, and have it for supper right away) that I now can hardly get at all. So I was delighted to see it in our last veg box, still in the husks and everything. There were only two ears, but diffrentcolours gallantly turned it down because he knows how much mother_bones and I love it. I made potato salad with the last of the veg box new potatoes too (Greek yogurt, lemon juice and mint from the garden).

We took Gary for the traditional walk after dinner and I used the head torch I got for camping. It's probably good for Gary as well as me. I am not ready for the days to be getting shorter like this, I feel like I haven't had a summer, I dread the cold and dark, and the mere prospect of Christmas is a heavy weight on my heart.