DC

Hope everyone has been enjoying whichever midwinter festival they celebrate, even if it's just the chance to not work and slob out in front of the TV. I ended with with more in the way of presents than I expected, including something I wanted but wouldn't have bought for myself, and four Doctor Who DVDs (Colony in Space, Day of the Daleks, The Sun Makers, and The Two Doctors). That's not a bad haul. Oh, and not forgetting the M*A*S*H box set and Castle S3... It's nice to be able to slob out in front of TV without being dependent on the vagaries of the broadcasters. The special edition of Day of the Daleks is pretty well done, by the way.

Cooking dinner yesterday for mother and me went basically OK — it was the first time I'd used that oven, so its idiosyncracies were an unknown quantity. The roast was 80% perfect despite that. Mother's quite tired, but she seemed to enjoy it, and she did have a good appetite. I suspect I will be spending New Year with mother, too.

After the other day's post, I was checking up bus times in the city centre and I noticed another weird street renaming. Glaswegians, take a look on Google Maps at what you and I know as Nelson Mandela Place (and, for that matter, the bit of W. George St. just west of Nelson Mandela Place).

One of the things which made Eastercon go very smoothly for me was not having to worry too much about what I ate. I did have to be wary of anything with too much fibre, which to be honest isn't that difficult in a hotel like that, but I picked up some lactase pills in Birmingham and made good use of them over the weekend. It made a huge difference to how well I felt over the course of the weekend, since getting completely lactose-free food in a hotel is not usually easy. This is something I shall do again at future cons.

I think I mentioned before that Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London was a good read, urban fantasy with a very well-presented London sense of humour (in particular, he's nailed the way policemen talk, it's beautifully done); the sequel, Moon Over Soho, is just as good. Can't wait for the next book in the series, which I think should be published in November, if I recall correctly.

I am not sure whether I should be excited or nervous about the discovery that a film of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is in the works. On the whole, I think nervous, especially since it's apparently going to star George Clooney (I am assuming as Napoleon Solo, though I don't know for sure; wonder who would be Ilya Kuryakin...).

Back to books, and another rather good read is S.M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers. It's 2025, and a dastardly plot is under way to destabilise the British Raj... which is ruled from Delhi. In this world, a cometary impact took out chunks of the northern hemisphere and caused major climatic upsets. The Raj is the major power in the world, its main competitors Greater Nippon and a deeply unpleasant Russian Empire. France outre-mer is a potential ally. There's no real surprises in the way the story is resolved, it is pretty much a straightforward, old-fashioned adventure with no pretensions to being deeply thought provoking, but it is well-told (in particular, the action sequences are well-done). Plus, analytical engines and dirigibles!

There's just been an ad on TV mentioning a luxury weekend break in a converted jail... I don't think I've eaten any strange mushrooms...

Just tried to do an update... and accidentally hit backspace; navigated back to update page and text was gone, restore from draft restored... a blank page. It seems (judging by the "Autosaved draft at..." note) that Dreamwidth backed up the blank page as soon as I went back to the update page, before asking if I wanted to restore from draft, so that was what was restored rather than the fairly large amount of text I had entered (and which I had thought was backed up).

Pah.

Within the past six hours, Amazon has changed the layout of its order confirmation page. *WAHHHH* I am too tired for this...

Earlier, at my mother's getting my stuff together after accidentally staying overnight (sounds better than saying I fell asleep in the chair and woke up at 4a.m.), she had the TV on while they were getting ready for the Grand National. (She wasn't watching it, in fact she was asleep, I think, which is pretty common these days). There was a list of all the runners; my eye ran down the list and when I read Bellabriggs (actually, I think it's Ballabriggs, but I misread it at the time) I thought, That'll be the winner, then. I left before the race started.

Why do I never get thoughts like that when I am near a betting shop or otherwise able to do something about it?

My mother should be getting out of hospital today. She's much improved. The leg problem seems to be cellulitis which is responding to antibiotics. The lung problem seems to have been a small pulmonary embolus and she is being started on subcut heparin.

The slight worry is the incidental finding of a very small nodule in the other lung. The concern is obviously that this might be cancer, so she's going to be seen as an out-patient to have that investigated. If it is neoplastic, then it's really a bit of luck it has been found so early.

She is looking a lot better and, obviously, jumping at the bit to get home.

A fairly relaxed, leisurely afternoon/evening out has been curtailed by my muscles, namely some of my leg muscles which were just giving up on me (one tiny little group of them, but enough to throw me off balance) and a chunk of back muscles which decided to go into spasm. So I have cut the day short and returned home to rest. Still, at least I managed to get some constructive stuff done, including picking up my new glasses — varifocals, the first time I have had a pair.  They seem to be just fine, less disorientating than I had feared, and it is very useful to have the option of sight correction which handles near and far vision well. Not having expected to be in tonight I have no plans... I shall find something fun to watch, and relax with some tea, I think.

I don't know how long it is since I posted anything. Since my father's death I have been a little... antisocial, you could say. I thought I did quite well at Eastercon, but actually, I think I was a bit stunned. It was good, though, the odd negative effort of the hotel notwithstanding. Even knowing he probably wouldn't survive the year, the speedy deterioration and sudden death — it took me by surprise and was a heavier blow than I had expected. At times, I still don't believe it. 

As well as being a bit hermitty, my ability to make sentences was not brilliant. Twitter was ace for this — when all you can write is 140 characters, complex sentences are not on the agenda. Wasn't really up to dealing with anything like blogging. Or email. Or pretty much anything else.

Just recently things have been looking up, a bit. I am still spending a lot of my time making sure my mother (whose mobility is poor) is OK, and I haven't really got back into having much of a social life as such, but I am feeling a bit more like being social, for certain values of social. I was down south about the time of my birthday, and I had an OK time, but I dread to think how boring I was for the people I saw then. Maybe I'd be a bit better now. Maybe.

I want to try to get back into the habit of blogging at least semi-regularly. Not sure how that will go, but we'll see.

Before I go just now, have you seen this story? Everything about it is a delight: Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future.