On such a day as this...

[desperance]

Well, this is odd.

I have been good today: not very odd in itself, though the quantity of goodness has surprised me a little. When I started work this morning, I was stuck; by lunchtime I had finished that chapter with a blare of trumpets and written another (uh, short chapters, 'k? But they all add to the page-count most triumphantly!).

For lunch I inaugurated my new wok (hand-hammered carbon steel, thank you) after properly seasoning it with pork fat and Chinese chives; so far, so satisfactory I am positively smug. I fried noodles with veggies and a spring-onion omelette, and nothing remotely stuck. *smugs* [You will have gathered, I have a new book, all about woks and wokking.]

After lunch a couple more pages of another project, just to keep me loose, and then I committed athletobatics. Once or twice a year I have to go up into my roofspace to keep the plumbing functional; which is harder than it sounds, because although I am tall and so is my step-ladder [gao, the Chinese would say], my ceilings are taller yet [hen gao]. So I have to stretch above my head to lift the trapdoor, then balance on the extreme highest arms of the steps and work my elbows inside the roofspace and hoist myself in with my arm-strength and nothing more. Which is easy to those who have lots of arm-strength and don't think twice about athletobatics, but for me? I put it off for weeks before I do it.

And then I do it and it's easy after all, and I crawl around in the dark (because my torch failed) and do my plumbing things and don't - quite - bump into the wasps' nest and make my way back to the trapdoor and there on the steps below is Mac, being entirely curious and cute and entirely in the way...

And I come down absolutely filthy, of course, but that's okay because I needed to change my clothes anyway, I'm going to the doctor (pauses to wonder: does everyone still do this, or am I the last of a dying generation?).

So I do that and feed the cats and trot off, and half an hour later I have an injection in each shoulder and a clinic appointment and we have run through a checklist and I am the same height as I was last time and not the same weight which is all a little odd but that's okay, I have an appointment; and now I am home again and I have opened a bottle of wine (and biffed Mac on the nose for the second time consecutively, because he has not yet worked out that it's not wise to sniff at the bottle while I am working the corkscrew in) and started a new chapter just because I can, but what's really odd is that all the screen-text that I have been seeing for years as white-on-dark-backgrounds is suddenly looking pale-green-on-dark-backgrounds, and I don't know if that's one of the injections making me see stuff funny or what, but it is really odd...

Comments

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I hope you didn't need the injections in your shoulders _because_ you'd pulled yourself up through the trapdoor on arm strength alone!

Have you ever thought about getting one of those folding loft-ladders? Even I can climb into our loft and I'm only 5' 1". Of course, it helps that Best Beloved put a floor and a light switch in there.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

The kind of highly-engineered ladder where you open a hatch and the ladder drops down? I just don't think it's worthwhile, as there really isn't a loft up there. My house is long and narrow, only one room wide, which means that the roof has no room to rise much; there's less than four foot clearance at its highest. If I put a floor in, I could use it for storage, but only if I was prepared to crawl around up there. I don't do good crawling. So basically I only go up to fiddle with the ballcock, once or twice a year.

Every time I do, I think about investing in a proper twelve-foot ladder - but again, I'd only need it once or twice a year, and the rest of the time it would just be occupying space I can't afford, and...

Nah. I shall continue with my athletobatics. Or get the ballcock fixed...

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Look at it this way - you're getting regular exercise. After all, once a year is "regular".

How is your screen looking now? Could one of the cats have fiddled with a monitor setting?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Quite so: it's what keeps me fit and bulgy...

The screen's fine this morning. I remain convinced I was in an altered state of consciousness due to drugs in my bloodstream. Which we haven't done that for a while, so I was kinda glad to be back.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Getting the ballcock fixed sounds like the best bet. Ours is an old house and we have room to stand upright in two of the lofts. (Separate lofts and - oh joy - valley gutters.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Mine is an old house too, it's just a weird shape. Sometimes I like that, sometimes it's a pain. (A loft? Would be so very, very useful. Every now and then I think about having the roof raised three feet; but if I could afford that, I could afford to move...)