eye_of_a_cat

Now, maybe this is just me. But. If you ask to switch around your working days this week, and then ask someone who would not usually be here at 9am if they wouldn't mind being here at 9am to let you in, and you've already come in two hours later than you usually do once this week, and the someone who was, indeed, here to let you in at 9am today is unwell and would have given a great deal to stay in bed/work from home this morning... then maybe you should have turned up by 10am. Grr.

Meanwhile, I have the rest of today to start feeling better and get some significant work done, and then I'm going to see Eddie Izzard live this evening. Woo! Except I feel like death at the moment, so maybe we'll see how that goes.

Grr.


 

Back from conference in Italy. Italy pretty. Conference fine. Paper well received. Boss impressed, thinks we should co-write a book. Cool.

Less cool: life still stressful, flat still leaking, and there seems to be A Problem with one of the people I'm responsible for at work. Not a huge problem yet, but a potentially troubling one. Plus it's just weird. In vague terms: we employ a postgraduate student, 'Amelia', who has always been incredibly conscientious in the work she does for us. She's still incredibly conscientious about that. But, it turns out, she is not so incredibly conscientious about other stuff round the department, and seems to have an unofficial policy of not turning up to department stuff and then ignoring any emails sent to chase her up. I had an unofficial 'watch yourself, kid' talk with her when I thought 'stuff' was just 'department research talks', along the lines of it being a very good idea to show your face around the department every so often - but now it turns out that 'stuff' also involves things like 'mandatory teaching meetings'. Or indeed 'anything at all'. I don't get this.

Anyway, Amelia was supposed to be doing something on a course I work on recently, but after agreeing to do it, she ignored everyone's emails trying to get hold of her to make preparatory arrangements, which very nearly left us in the lurch. Amelia's explanation for this was that she is having huge problems with her university email account. But... that's very, very obviously untrue. Amelia is saying different things to different people, who know each other; Amelia is also blaming ongoing equipment issues affecting IT support, which do not exist, as we know, because we work very closely with several of the IT support people. Amelia knows that. Amelia knows we talk to each other. And yet Amelia is sticking to the excuse, despite one stern talking-to from a supervisor, because apparently Amelia was absent the day they taught everyone Basic Social Skill #526: Agreements In Which We Both Know Your Innocent Explanation Is Bullshit, But I'll Pretend To Believe You In Return For You Not Doing That Again. (I imagine her email wasn't working that day.)

Amelia is mainly hurting herself at the moment; pissing off your department is not the wisest move. But it's also starting to affect things like the course I'm teaching on, and that's not good. Plus, Amelia is not stupid, and this is quite bizarre behaviour. I don't get this, at all.

These past couple of weeks have been - well. 'Bad' does not cover it. These past couple of weeks have been absolute, unremitting hell in about fifteen different ways. I'm not going into detail - I believe Livejournal has a character limit for one thing, and dear God do I not want to talk about any of this for another - but, seriously, it's just been comically crap. I thought I'd got a break on Monday morning, and then one of the people in my office told me that the computer account we use for the student workers had been inexplicably deleted. Oh, and also, there was loads of work stored on that account even though it shouldn't have been, oops. And thus did my week resume.

[This is as far as I got typing this post a couple of hours ago, before noticing the drip, drip, drip sound coming from my cupboard. That leak in my ceiling that was fixed? Not so much. YOU SEE MY PROBLEM.]

Anyway, it's been - and apparently continues to be, thanks, ceiling! - a really stressful, horrible time, and I'm neither sleeping nor eating well. All I've eaten today is half a bean burger and two onion rings, which is probably not a great strategy in the long term. But all this has killed my appetite, and it's doing tapdancing jigs on my ability to sleep.

[This is as far as I got typing this post a few minutes ago, before checking Facebook to learn that apparently some huge hideous argument and/or disaster happened in my office when I was out this afternoon. So now I get to go in tomorrow morning to deal with whatever that is, right before a meeting with my boss.]

I started off last week telling myself three bad things had already happened, so that was it. By the start of this week, I was measuring the bad things in multiples of three; at this point, I'm planning to spend the rest of October hiding under my bed in case I get hit by a falling piano. I'm not sure what I did to offend the universe, but my God can it hold a grudge. 

If you too are having a bad week, I highly recommend this, which the Mad Scientist sent to cheer me up. It will not fix everything, but it might help.

I am working from home today because a parcel is supposed to arrive between 07.00 and 20.00. Via courier, so I can't just pick it up from the post office, and of course I can't have it redelivered to another address unless it's in the same postcode, bah. But, I have some transcription work to do and an article to work on, so there's enough work to get on with.

Speaking of articles, I am frustrated beyond frustration with the publication process. Here's the path my last article has followed:

December 2007: Article submitted to Big Swanky Journal.
June 2008: Big Swanky Journal reply with a revise-and-resubmit.
July 2008: Revise and resubmit article.
October 2008: Article accepted, subject to some revisions.
November 2008: Article re-submitted with said revisions in place.
February 2009: Journal accepts revisions, notifies me of issue article will be published in (summer '09), sends back forms to fill in, instructions for reformatting in their house style, plus a few very minor revisions to make. Gives me an early-May deadline for doing all this, which is particularly handy since February is when I started my current job.
April 2009: Return article, reformatted and corrected and with completed forms attached, to journal. Journal seem happy.
June 2009: Journal reply to say they'll send along the copyedited essay for me to read over 'within a month'. 
July 2009: Journal send back copyedited article along with a few more requests for me to make changes. Sigh, make changes, send back article.
Early August 2009: Journal reply to say, um, sorry about this, but could you re-send that image in a higher resolution? Sigh, scan, send image. Journal reply to say that article is now with the compositor, and that I'll have proofs within a month.
Late August 2009: Journal reply to say that they could actually do with the image scanned it at a lower resolution than that. Shriek at universe, sigh, send image yet again.
September 2009: Nothing.

ARGH.

I was reading a blog I like this evening, and the writer has just got engaged. Good! Excellent! May they be very happy together! Etc. And she wrote about the proposal, which was all very sweet and funny (n.b. - in a good way), and she mentioned in passing that he'd asked her father for his blessing before asking her to marry him. Because - because - they'd discussed this beforehand, as a hypothetical, and she'd said that she wouldn't want him to ask her father's permission, but he could definitely ask for his blessing, and that would be great.

Permission? Blessing? What the hell tradition is this? I ask Mad Scientist whether he has ever heard of this weird American custom. He looks at me as if I have gone very slightly mad, and says that it is not just a weird American custom. Not that it's common or anything these days, he clarifies, but it's still around as a tradition. (He also suggests it's the means by which the hopeful-groom-to-be can get a receipt, but that's another issue.) 

What? Seriously? I have honestly, truly, never even heard of this. And it seems downright bizarre to me, that this would still be a tradition today. Why would you ask someone's father permission to marry them? What? Ick.

Is it just me this came as a total shock to? Did everyone else know about it already?

Poll #1463276
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 57

People of the Internet, had you even heard of this as a contemporary tradition?

My GP surgery has two doctors, both male, and a locum who seems to have been there for quite a while. The locum is female. This is not the interesting point, although it is an interesting point for reasons what I shall explain in a second. The interesting point is that the locum Does Not Do Family Planning.

Those are her words, too: "I don't do family planning." Specifically, and a little snappily, "you'd have to make an appointment with the nurse for that, because I don't do family planning." Which I heard at the time as "the nurse deals with this stuff", which is what I thought the situation was anyway, so I didn't care apart from thinking it was a bit odd to refer to contraception as 'family planning' these days, but I've had two doctors use the words 'if you find Mr. Right' with a totally straight face over the past couple of years, so maybe not that odd in comparison, but, no. Printed on the prescription for depo-provera, under "Please read the important information below":

"Make an appointment with anyone in the practice apart from Dr. [X] locum, as she doesn't do family planning."

Oh come on. 

I don't mind doctors having a moral opt-out clause for some things. Dr. X not doing abortions, okay, fine. But if you do not want to get involved in contraception in any way - prescribing it, discussing it, giving medical advice on it, anything - 'GP' is not your ideal career path. Besides, is this for 'family planning' alone? Would she also, say, refuse to prescribe the contraceptive pill for non-contraceptive reasons? What would she have done if I'd answered 'I don't do family planning' with 'It's not for family planning'? And what would I have done to get prescribed this in the first place if I hadn't been comfortable talking to a male doctor about it? 

It is weird, the whole thing. And I don't think she works there any more (the printed 'don't make an appointment with Dr. [X]' on my prescription was scribbled out), but I am sort of retrospectively cross now.

Back when I was doing my PhD, I shared a house with another student in my year. We lived on the edge of our bit of town, and there was a path we found for walking the dog, over a hill and through some woods and back out onto a road. The whole circuit took maybe half an hour to walk; you could add on bits of wood and field path and make it longer.

I used to go running on that same route on my own. My housemate wasn't comfortable with this at all. She didn't try to stop me or anything, but she made it clear that she didn't think it was safe for me to be out running on my own in such a quiet out-of-the-way place.

I'm sort of torn on this. On the one hand, she makes a fair point: even if the odds of anything bad happening to me were fairly low, they were still considerably higher than they would be if I stayed at home and watched TV, or went to the gym instead of running outside, or found a friend who was into running to go out running with. On the other hand, I wanted to be outside on my own, dammit. And it seems like a miserable way to live, avoiding most of the world because it's quiet out there.

On the other other hand, I am more careful than I used to be. I wouldn't go out walking by myself after dark any more, though I used to do that quite often. I stick to well-lit roads at night. If I'm walking on my own, and it's quiet, I can't hear footsteps behind me without calculating how far away the other person is, and I've crossed roads or stopped to fix a shoelace before if I felt like they were too close. I know that wishing the world was a safe place won't make it so.

On the other other other hand, I still think I had a point back when I was seventeen and refusing to let people walk me home from parties. 

My flat has sprung a leak. WHAT THE HELL, UNIVERSE.

My letting agents, in a rare burst of efficiency, are sending someone round to look at it this afternoon, but I fear it's going to be one of those repairs that involves going through the factor and splitting the cost across multiple flat-owners, which can take... well. A while. Luckily the leak is leaking into a cupboard, so things could be worse.

In other news, the Devon 'pirahna' was not in fact a pirahna after all. It's probably a pacu, a vegetarian cousin of the pirahna. It's still obviously a released pet, though, and it's not surprising it died in water a lot colder than it could cope with.

Pacu are cool fish, sort of endearingly ugly. They are sold in pet shops when they're a couple of inches long. Do not buy them. They get huge and cannot be kept in most home aquaria, and then you won't be able to give them away because most people don't have tanks that big and most public aquaria have already got too many pacu that outgrew their owners' tanks. Pacu grow as big as dogs.

Irresponsible pet-shop owners will quite often not tell you how big something's going to get, or will happily sell it to you without asking if you have a tank big enough for it. If you're thinking about getting fish, here are ( some other species to be careful of. )

Mine:



The photo's one of mine, and I'm very pleased with it.

If you're interested in knowing what all the icons in the Dock are, I did a more detailed version of this on my other blog recently: here. 

I don't know if I'm more amazed or confused by the American attacks on the NHS. All right, so people don't always think clearly when politics is on the line, and sometimes actual research goes by the wayside in favour of indignation, but "Government health care means death panels"? "Nobody over 65 gets medical care in Britain"? "If Stephen Hawking was British, he'd have been left to die at birth"? Seriously? And the people claiming all this don't see their argument as shaky in any way even after it's pointed out that they're factually wrong about all of it: we don't have government death panels, people over 65 get medical care all the time, and Stephen Hawking is British, and has politely pointed out that he wouldn't be here right now without the NHS care he's received? 

Also, I am still not over hearing people coming from a system of co-pays, pre-existing conditions, work health insurance and spousal health insurance and Medicaid and COBRA, lifetime caps on coverage (good God), and insurance companies that only cover you to see particular doctors, claim that the NHS must be a terrible system because "I'd hate to have bureaucrats coming between me and my doctor."

I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child, between a series of different medical problems. Here's my experience:

Hours spent dealing with financial bureaucracy before/after/during seeing a doctor: Zero.
Number of times my parents were ever denied treatment for me because it was 'too expensive': Zero.
Number of times my parents even had to discuss whether or not the NHS would pay for my treatment: Zero.
Number of doctors present during my last six-hour-long operation at one of the world's best children's hospitals: Eight.
Number of operations, hospital stays, x-rays, tests, outpatient consultations, and other medical procedures, I had in the first twelve years of my life: Lost count, but, lots.
Total cost to me and my family: Zero.

The system isn't perfect, but death panels? Come on.

1. Hospital referral procedure round here is a bit... convoluted? Maybe? Intricate? I don't know. I don't have to do much myself - my optician told my GP to refer me to an opthalmologist, voila - but, what then happens is that the hospital sends you a letter telling you that at some point in the future they'll send you another letter, on which will be a phone number you can call to make an appointment with them. What, now?

(At any rate, appointment won't be for a while - I am not an urgent case, nor insistent that I should get treated like one. I also have very little confidence that seeing the opthalmologist will be any more use this time than it has been in the past ('Hmm, that's weird. I have no idea what's causing that. Huh. Hmm. Er. So, would you like a referral to a neurologist who'll say exactly the same thing?'), but, whatever. My eyes are hurting me, currently - intermittent stabby muscular pain - and this isn't something they've done before. It's also not, as far as I know, a typical symptom of my eye condition. Also, they're still useless in sunlight. I have no problem with doctors admitting they don't know what's causing that, but maybe we could try to find out this time, medical profession? Hmm?)

2. Work has decreed that I cannot have a new computer, for mine, with its mighty half a gig of memory, is less than five years old and therefore does not need replacing. The fact that it won't actually do some of the stuff I need it to do, and will only do the rest grindingly slowly, is irrelevant - it is less than five years old. So at the moment I'm taking my own laptop into work with me every day, which is heavy and kind of annoying but will do for now, until I get more memory for the work desktop. The faculty might pay for more memory... and also, they might not, because the faculty are under the impression that nobody in the Arts uses a computer for anything more than Word, PowerPoint and Minesweeper.

3. I should have started getting ready for karate ten minutes ago. Er. Bye!

How does your mobile phone (cellphone, etc etc) system work? I ask because Season 3 of The Wire is confusing me, and also because of a lengthy conversation this week with a colleague who wants to find a way of buying an iPhone in the US and using it over here. (I think not, but he remains optimistic.)

So over here, you can have a mobile phone on one of two systems (all providers offer both):
1) Pay-as-you-go, in which you pay a lot of money for the phone itself and top up credit as you like;
2) Contract, in which you pay less for the phone up-front and then pay X amount per month for 12/18/24/etc months.

All phones have SIM cards; no mobile numbers have area codes; phone models are typically, but not always, locked to one provider. I gather that this is not your system?

I am home. And exhausted. Three conferences in two weeks: just say no. Not that they weren't all worth going to, for reasons varying from professional development to catching up with old friends to experiencing a three-day fully immersive course in How Not To Run A Conference, but God. Travelling and more travelling and 6am starts and panels going on until after 10pm and delayed trains and the accommodation people not having a room for me and rain and heavy bags and blisters, etc, etc, etc. But, anyway, my stuff all went fine, my computer behaved itself superbly, and I sorted out AV-equipment problems in other people's sessions twice and am now seen by a section of that academic association as some sort of technology god. Swings and roundabouts.

Two videos that are excellent:

Sarah Haskins in Target Women on Dating Advice. Genius. (And I want her dress.)

Someone's video of Mitch Benn's song Doctor Who Girl. Hee!

Last Monday, I got up at oh-God-o'clock to get to the airport in time for a very early flight down south. Conference Monday to Wednesday; got back Wednesday evening. This Monday, I'm heading to the station at slightly-more-reasonable-o'clock to go to another conference, where I'll be until Thursday morning. Thursday morning, at really-this-is-getting-painful-o'clock, I'll get a train to another city for another conference, which will last until Friday afternoon. Friday evening I come home.

Sigh.

None of these conferences are things I'm dreading; the first one was interesting, the others likely will be as well, and I'll get to catch up with some people I know at the last. Plus, good for my career, whatever. But, Jesus, three conferences in two weeks - it's going to flatten me. I've only been to one and I'm fed up already.

Also! I left my debit and credit cards at home for that first conference, realising only when I was at an airport many miles away at half-past five in the morning; the friend I was going to be visiting and staying with for conference #3 won't be there after all; and in a wonderful piece of universal timing, the Mad Scientist is away for the weekend in between conferences when I'm back here. Bah.

THUNDERSTORM OMG. Fiiiiiiiinally. *goes to watch*

Hate writing abstracts. Haate. Haaaaaaaaaaate.

Weirdest problem-page letter ever: My husband hates Macs, and I can't live without mine. Is our marriage doomed? Woman wishes to buy Mac to replace existing Mac. Man hates Macs, cites 'I'm a Mac, I'm a PC' adverts as justification. Standoff! Jezebel's version features responses from Dorothy Parker, Jack Kerouac and Job ('First world problems. You haz them'), too.

(I love the griping over the Apple adverts. How dare Apple imply that its competitor's computers are a bit clunky and unattractive! Dell's designers can totally hold a candle to Jonathan Ive! And pointing out that Mac users have to worry much less about viruses is just smug! Apple really should keep quiet about such things - it just sounds like they're boasting or something.)

In her place, I would tell the husband that he might not want to make me choose given that I hadn't been in love with him since 1989, and get the Mac anyway. But, Mac people. We're odd like that.

Landlord says I can renew my lease after the 6 months is up in August - but only for three months, because she might want to move back into the flat in November.

After so many moves, most of which weren't of my own choosing, I can no longer put into words just how fed up and upset and tired I am of having to move again, of never getting to live somewhere for more than a year, and of trying to find a bright side to look on about the whole thing. If my landlord wanted her flat back only a few months later, I would at least have a better idea of what my next job would be and how much money I could afford to spend, and I could make different choices, or at least have a choice; if my landlord wanted her flat back a year later, I might have recovered enough from the financial hit I took from the last three moves to look at buying my own place, from which nobody could kick me out. But that's not what the situation is.

And yes, she only 'might' want the flat back in November. The alternative is that I'd be on a month-to-month lease waiting for her to decide when she did want it back, and knowing I'll be unlikely to ever have more than 31 days to find a new place to live and arrange yet another move. I'm sure I don't need to expand on why this isn't exactly ideal, either.

I have lived in thirteen different places in ten years. I have had enough.

(ETA: Letting agents say to e-mail them to confirm in writing that I do want those three months. E-mail address they gave me bounces. NOBODY RENT EVER.)