Mem

We had a horrible time with our wedding. Virtually nothing was how we'd pictured it and some of it (i.e. my dress, among other things of similarly massive importance) was actually quite horrible.

Whilst the honeymoon was lovely we're now finding ourselves horribly depressed about the whole ridiculous affair.

Therefore, we have decided to do the only sensible thing.

We're having another wedding next year.

Yes, really.

Watch your inboxes, folks. WEDDING TWO: THE ELECTRIC BOOGALOO is currently in early stages of being planned. And this time we're doing it right.

Wedding in precisely four weeks tomorrow.

Stress, stress, stress.

Currently: having an enormously harrowing time at work (love the job as ever, it's just we have a lot of very saddening patients at the moment), desperately trying to organise the last few details (i.e. almost everything), gradually retreating further and further into my shell.

For those who have missed my constant whining on various other social networks, my hands have recently decided that two years is the limit of its tolerance for stringent hand hygiene practices. Scaly, itchy, burning and bright red are they. Nothing seems to calm them. Lush Dreamwash is the only non-ouchie thing I can wash them in. They started bleeding yesterday. Why now? I've had one brief bout of eczema-or-something-similar in my whole life. One. Now, as I approach the one day of my life when photos of my hands more or less a certainty, they have decided to explode.

I haven't played capoeira properly in weeks. Again, it's important for the wedding. I can't make myself do it. Have become so afraid of screwing up that the thought of trying brings me out in cold sweats. Must overcome... currently lacking the energy to do so.

My new job starts in a couple of weeks. Great, but... Hockley Ward is moving over the corridor to a lovely 20-bed ward and becoming solely wound management. No more AMU dumps. No more incontinent, bedridden, violently demented oldies palmed on to us for social problems. No more bed wars and fuckwittery. If I'd only known sooner, I would have stayed.

Now this is all off my chest it will become better, that is the way of things. Give me a week and everything will be okay again.

...friends start making you puppets out of socks and speculums.

Photo to follow when I have a little more time.

Today marks the end of the hardest working week of my life. My sleeping patterns are screwed, I've done next to nothing around the home all week, and for what? The taxman takes a massive slice of the money I earn doing extra shifts. It's a damn good thing that I love my job.

My little patio garden is plodding along nicely. What started as a few little baby pea plants has turned into no less than ten terrifyingly fast-climbing pea vines, four happy little courgette plants, a pot of mixed rocket and (hopefully, if it ever sprouts) a pot of lamb's lettuce. I am getting far too much excitement from watching how fast it's all growing and can't wait to start munching my first crop of home-grown veggies! Already putting serious thought into what I can grow next year!

I recently failed to cultivate a herb garden. The main reason for this is that the herbs in question were crappy "grow herbs in a can" type affairs that I bought on a whim from the factory shop. They actually grew fairly well up until it became apparent that the cans they were in would not continue to support them as they grew bigger. They died very suddenly. I should probably have transplanted them - hindsight is a wonderful thing. I shall definitely grow my own basil again, when I have a decent windowsill, as the smell from the basil plant was utterly gorgeous.

Now. This has led to me wanting to grow edibles. Being someone who lives primarily on fresh vegetables, it seems that growing my own veg is something of a natural progression. However, I do not have a garden that I am able to dig up. Therefore, whatever I grow has to be in pots. I have not grown anything since I was much younger and grew some potatoes in massive pots assisted by my papa and advised by my nana (they were lovely spuds - sweet, firm, and waxy), therefore I would prefer to start with something simple.

Peas.

I could eat my own bodyweight in peas, and nothing beats fresh peas straight from the plant. They're easy to cultivate, I can stick them in big pots on the patio, and I can head out and pick at them if I want guilt-free sweeties.

I am making pea-babies.

This is absolutely amazing.

There are a lot of things that I seriously dislike. One of these things is misuse of the word "random".

Here's dictionary.com to tell us more:

ran⋅dom
   /ˈrændəm/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ran-duhm] Show IPA
–adjective
1. proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern: the random selection of numbers.
2. Statistics. of or characterizing a process of selection in which each item of a set has an equal probability of being chosen.
3. Building Trades.
a. (of building materials) lacking uniformity of dimensions: random shingles.
b. (of ashlar) laid without continuous courses.
c. constructed or applied without regularity: random bond.
–noun
4. Chiefly British. bank 3 (def. 7b).
–adverb
5. Building Trades. without uniformity: random-sized slates.
—Idiom
6. at random, without definite aim, purpose, method, or adherence to a prior arrangement; in a haphazard way: Contestants were chosen at random from the studio audience.

To clarify: The pattern you see on your TV set that you probably refer to as "snow" is random. The numbers drawn in the National Lottery are random.

Tandem bicycles are not random. Seeing a woman walking a cat in the same manner in which one would walk a dog is not random. The Mighty Boosh, ladies and gentlemen, is NOT RANDOM. You are not feeling random, your hair is not being random... for the love of Darwin, please stop. You're driving me bonkers.



That is all.

"Work has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a machine that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Such a machine is the 'Turbo-Encabulator'.

"The original machine had a base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible trem'e pipe to the differential girdlespring on the 'up' end of the grammeters.

"Forty-one manestically spaced grouting brushes were arranged to feed into the rotor slipstream a mixture of high S-value phenylhydrobenzamine and 5% reminative tetryliodohexamine. Both of these liquids have specific pericosities given by P = 2.5C.n^6-7 where n is the diathetical evolute of retrograde temperature phase disposition and C is Cholmondeley's annular grillage coefficient. Initially, n was measured with the aid of a metapolar refractive pilfrometer but up to the present date nothing has been found to equal the transcendental hopper dadoscope. Undoubtedly, the turbo-encabulator has now reached a very high level of technical development. It has been successfully used for operating nofer trunnions. In addition, whenever a barescent skor motion is required, it may be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocating dingle arm to reduce sinusoidal depleneration."


If you don't already understand why I want my own turbo-encabulator then you never will.

My night shifts are finally over. It's been fun (hint: it hasn't) but it's done. Tonight I get to climb into bed with Dan and I won't have to let go until the morning, or until the skin-on-skin contact ends up making us both intolerably clammy.

Today was meant to be my Staying Awake Day to force myself back into a nice simple diurnal wake/sleep pattern. It was doomed to fail, of course, because I can't stay awake even when I am getting enough sleep at nights. I ended up admitting defeat and setting an alarm to go off after four hours so that the day wouldn't be a total write-off. Now - short-to-middling spells of napping during the day seem to do something peculiar to the REM centres in m'noggin, and I had this fantastically in-depth dream in which I was an anaesthetist in charge of heavily sedating a former colleague of mine (Luke, easily my favourite from the deep dark dungeons of CSSD) during his caesarian section.

I feel my recent tentative forays into the obstetric theatre are entirely to blame for this.

On that note - next week is my last week of annual leave before it all rolls over next month. I shall be spending it working, because taking time out to properly unwind is not going to pay the bills. On the upside, I will be working on labour ward. I won't have to chase any dementia sufferers around, and the only bottoms I will have to wipe will be baby ones. Whilst I am not one to get broody over babies (baby animals, maybe, and baby footwear), I am looking forward to doing something completely different to normal and getting my foot wedged a little further in that particular door.

Plush hotel is booked for BVF '09. I am going to eat and eat and eat until I am pot-bellied and groaning.

I get a weird sense of satisfaction from shaving corpses.

Full time work in wound management unit + part time work in maternity = extremely knackered but extremely happy Mem.

Initially I took on the extra work because I need the money, but there's something very special about labour ward that just keeps calling me back there.

I am usually either at work or asleep. That's it. I have nothing more to update about.

I am ridiculously busy. It's amazing. I love it.

I'm not going to add a "comment and I'll pick five things for you" paragraph at the top of this, because I am under no illusions about the number of people who read my LJ (the names can be counted on one hand). However, I am elaborating on the five things Chilli picked for me, because I can.

Piercings and that tongue of yours!

I love piercings, as anyone who has known me for any length of time will be aware. It started with a handful of earrings and a humble navel ring (now sadly retired - I took it out for my surgery and never put it back in... might give it a go later now I'm thinking about it!) to a peak total of some 30-odd bits of metal poking out of me.

This number is now significantly reduced, mostly because of work. I was thinking just the other day about how terribly sad I am that I can't have visible piercings at work. My cheek "dimple" piercings were my favourite out of these. I'd have them all done again in a heartbeat.

I split my tongue shortly after my 21st birthday using the bind-off method. Since then I've used a blade to take the split further down my tongue three or four times. I'd like to take it further still as it is so close to my goal... Dan likes it as it is though, and since he's the one on the receiving end of it, I think it's only fair to listen to him.




Giraffes

My favourite animals always used to be cows. In fact, I still have a massive soft spot for them.

However, I have now been utterly entranced by the gawky, leggy gorgeousness of giraffes.

Seriously. They're just goddamned awesome. I don't think there's much else I can say on the matter.




Monty Python

I was raised on Monty Python. I could recite the Spanish Inquisition sketch word for word before I was ten years old. My brothers and I used to curl up and watch a crackly old video recording of "Parrot Sketch Not Included" on a regular basis (it was followed by the "Polymorph" episode from series three of Red Dwarf, and a Horizon documentary about sending little space doodads to Jupiter). It started with a spoof of the Paralympics and ended with various eye-destroying devices emerging from the top of a television set (oh, and a shot of all of the Monty Python members in a cupboard, shortly before Graham Chapman died).

Monty Python shaped the way my sense of humour developed and dictated that I was in for a life of sarcasm, satire, and sheer ridiculousless. The whole family are MP nuts - I will never forget sitting with my uncles Phil and Dave, sarcastically quipping "well you can talk", only to have them both chime back in perfect stereo "Of course I can talk - I'm a minister for overseas development!" It was a beautiful moment, and one that will stay with me forever.




Intelligence

Intelligence? What the shitting buggery am I meant to say about that?

I tend to class myself as pseudo-intellectual, really. I had such potential in my youth. I could have achieved great things. I could be halfway to becoming a doctor now.

In fairness, if I give myself adequate time to warm up I can still do a fairly good impersonation of 'clever'. Often I just keep my trap shut - having smoked the majority of my intelligence, any sort of in-depth discussion tends to lose me halfway through. I forget (and therefore repeat) what I've said, and even end up contradicting myself if I am not careful.

There was a time when I could babble endlessly about Fibonacci, cellular biology, fractals, English history, and space travel. Now I just point at planes and laugh if I see a dog in a hat.

Go, cognitive atrophy!




"Life In The Pit" = Quotes

If I put my head under there, it won't fall off.

'Nuff said.

Dan cooked an absolutely gorgeous meal for Valentine's Day that was so simple and so splendid that he made it again tonight. I think I could eat this every day and never get bored. Yum yum yum...

( Make Recipe Go Now )

Lately:

--Fortnight off work, which has been super duper. It's very hard going at the moment, as we're still in pneumonia season. I tend to think it's very unfair indeed, as by now I'm supposed to be up to my ears in massive unhealing wounds; but all we've got is spluttering oldies.

--Trip to Brighton on Feb 9th-10th, ate too much (damn you, Red Veg!), drank too much (Agwa gives you double your money's worth - it tastes the same coming back up), and made friends with some rays. Brighton Sealife Centre is amazing. Saw Ed Byrne doin stand up, which was pretty jolly. Met up with the lovely Gib and Bex for the first time in about three years. It's always a pleasure.

--Decided to start doing St. John's Ambulance, went along to my first training session and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Resussi-Annie is a tart.

--Gymming lots. Have noticed that the development in my shoulders is getting way ahead of everything else, the reason being that shoulder exercises give me all kinds of glee so I do them lots. Everything's coming together nicely now, however my former-fatty status means that I still have floppy bits under my arms and loose skin covering my (awesome, honest! even if you can't see them!) abs. Since I will never ever be able to afford surgery to fix these problems, my new goal is to pack on enough muss to fill all of the spare skin. This may possibly end with me looking like Action Man.

--I had an Unfortunate Cheesecake Accident a couple of days back which resulted in me burning my left arm on the oven whilst retreiving a tofu cheesecake (see end of post for recipe) from therein. Unfortunately, my left arm is comprised largely of scar tissue from The Bad Days, and this particular burn is approximately the same shape as many of the scars. Whilst I know it was not my doing, and that accidents happen, and all of that - I still feel compelled to wear long sleeves and otherwise keep it hidden from the general population, lest they jump to conclusions. I find myself feeling ashamed of it, which is bollocks really. I guess there are some thought patterns that take longer to shake off than I realised.

--Last night was spent getting delicious revenge on said cheesecake. I toddled off to Chilli's for a few hours. She cooked an outstanding meal that I will be raving about for weeks to come, I provided pudding, and the pair of us wittered on about life, the universe, and everything. It was glorious and a thoroughly good time was had by all.

--Today I have mostly been taking it easy. I have spent a fair amount of time online attempting to get some kind of order over my finances - I have acheived virtually nothing, save for ticking a few boxes marked "Yes! Send me my free sample of pointless gubbins NOW!"

( Mango And Passionfruit Tofu Cheesecake with Mango Coulis )

The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice for you. This offer does have some restrictions and limitations: -

I make no guarantees that you will like what I make you. But I certainly will try. - What I create will be just for you. - It will be done this year (2009) -

You have no clue what its going to be,it may be a story, it may be a painting, a drawing or I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!

The 'catch' is that you post this in your journal as well (which, of course, means making things yourself). Go on, I dare you!

Laparoscopy was a week ago. No endometriosis. No clue on what's going on in there. Several days of barely being able to move due to post-operative owwies coupled with the usual tummy pains (and a poorly-timed throat infection), and I'm no closer to an answer. Go team!

Work is horrible right now. Our ward - supposedly wound management unit by now (HA HA!) - is full of high-dependancy patients who are in with the usual winter respiratory infections, and with our current staffing level we just can't cope with that many people who are so needy. There aren't enough of us to go around. It's horrible.

On the upside, Dan and I had a nice couple of days in London on Sunday and Monday, with an overnight stay at the Hoxton Hotel which is absolutely incredible! Also: dinner at Dim T, drinks at Guanabara, and a shopping session at Whole Foods in Kensington (who sell gigantic vegan cupcakes which we enjoyed very much!).

Tomorrow night I am off to the O2 to see Madness with my Mum. Saturday is drinks in London with a load of friends we only see a couple of times a year. It's nearly Christmas and that's terrifying.

First off - buy this. You want to. Or you know somebody else who does.

It's turning out to be a bit of a surreal day. I worked my first ever night shift last night, and was woken up this morning after only a couple of hours asleep by the neighbour's screaming kids. I'm feeling somewhat dazed, to say the least. "Utterly wasted" would be a far more accurate description.

It's not all bad news. Being curled up with a fleecey blanket in front of our shiny new halogen heater with a mug of chai and an free copy of New Humanist has got to be a good thing - especially since it's so bright and toasty in here and so dark and chilly outdoors. There is a lot to be said for wintery days like today, even if only in terms of giving you a special appreciation for warm jumpers and thick socks.

In order to expand on my previous post: it is suspected that my exploding tummy problem stems from something called endometriosis, and next month I will be going for a laparoscopy that will either confirm this or hopefully shed some light on what else could be causing the pain.

Also: Ringo. He has a type of cancer called Squamous Cell Carcinoma, which has started on his tonsil and spread. At best he's got about another three comfortable months ahead of him - as soon as he starts to suffer, he will be euthanaised. I am absolutely beside myself. We've had a lot of dogs over the years but he has always been a very special one.

To end on a good note (because it is always important to do so), I am generally happy pottering through my little world as it is at the moment. I'm often busy and occasionally quite stressed, but things overall are looking up. Dan is being marvellous, as ever, which makes this whole life business infinitely more lovely. On occasion I catch myself thinking back to how things were just two short years ago, and pondering on how far I've come since then.

I like it.

My man-in-a-dog-suit is dying. I will miss you, Ringo.

I am being operated on next month in an effort to stop my tummy exploding.

This is a rubbish update, but since I have a few days off, there shall be a better one soon.

Never any time to update anymore. Here is a brief rundown of everything:

-Tummy still exploding, ultrasound was clear, gastro team say "it's a gynae problem" but are in the process of testing my blood for various other bits and pieces anyway, will go to gynae team once results are back. It currently preventing me from playing capoeira and training at the gym. I miss it. Especially capoeira.

-I am frustrated with my lack of power at work and want to train so I can do MORE STUFF. I have been playing with leg ulcers and they fill my little heart with glee.

-Wedding is booked for Saturday 26th September 2009. Deposits on various things are paid. I am about to undertake the task of hand-crafting all my own stationary and/or bringing about my own death by drowning in double-sided tape.

-Spore. That is all.

I will, I will, I WILL come back soon and resume my usual inane wittering.