Out there I feel sad not to see her no more

I had a long day, full of meetings and people talking too much. The last was a focus group that went on too long because of one person talking too much and not following the very specifically stated brief: I said we're here to give recommendations to decision-makers and service providers, and this guy did what he always does which is "here's how I get around that by being Resilient and taking individual responsibility for this systemic problem! Cool story, bro.

After a day like that, with an ending like that, it was very sweet to get a message from my favorite person on my favorite team (mine). Our manager has asked her to work with me on the latest report, so this morning I asked if we could arrange a meeting and it'll be tomorrow morning. So at the very end of the day today, she sends me this:

Hi, this is just a message to tell you that I have reread [the last report, 2 of 3]. I now have an overwhelming urge to tell you that you are such a smart cookie. The report is brilliant and incredibly comprehensive. I'm quite intimidated in supporting you with [report 3 of 3]. Anyway this is me belatedly telling you that you are an awesome [our job title] and maybe you could eat a celebratory chocolate biscuit and pat yourself on the back.

A few sentences like that go a long way!

Had a fun afternoon celebrating (belatedly) the birthdays of a couple who are both among my favorite people. One asked for sourdough pizza and a wander around the market at Manchester Leather Weekend.

I bought a trans-pride earring at the market and was delighted to see, but didn't manage to determine if available in appropriate size, a t-shirt with a lot of Care-Bear-looking colorful cartoon bears with symbols on their tummies, including a rainbow which is canon in one of the bears I remember from my childhood, but this time the other bears have trans/leather/bear/pup symbols or flags. It seems the absolutely perfect thing for someone like me or A who had to live through being a girl in the 80s but are now cautiously leaning into our bear-y selves. (Like I told the other birthday boy, I, this week when he lamented Fat Bear Week coming to an end: hey, some of us are here all year!)

D bought himself a leather waistcoat too which he looks amazing in, so that's fun. I tried on one like it was that technically my size but made me feel unusually dysphoric. I'm glad the market included vendors with explicitly trans stuff but it also had a lot of very normative bodies. Or, diversity of some kinds but not others. I guess it's why I've always steered clear of such things, despite my long-term yearnings...which I used to think were (just) yearning to be with rather than (also) to be -- lots of queers have this problem.

It was great to hang out with our friends and be silly together for an afternoon/evening.

Tomorrow will be busy in a really different way so I'm going to try to get some sleep.

I enjoyed the sunset function last night -- after some faffing I managed to get the right amount of light to start from (fairly bright?) and a sound I like (crickets! I really miss crickets, they sound like summer to me and remind me of being a kid).

I fell asleep before the thing went totally dark, which to be fair could be because of the melatonin I treated myself to last night...but I haven't had great success with them lately.

Maybe it was just how tired I was, after a busy day at work, straight in to counseling, then eating dinner, then off to the local queer club where I'd agreed to turn up early and help set up, and by the time we left, about half past 9, I was so tired that I was yawning uncontrollably on the short ride home (and very glad that D had driven me, so that I didn't have to walk or try to get the bus home.

Today felt similarly intense: work, then an important and positive but also exhausting and anxiety-inducing conversation about U.S. politics, then I made dinner, and by the time I'd eaten my parents were ready to talk. I've missed them like three Sundays in a row so couldn't dodge it too much longer.

And that was a mental and emotional marathon of a conversation too: my grandma's house will be sold in two weeks, the upshot of which is my mom's horrible sister was saying horrible things about my mom at an extended-family event and when my mom asked if I wanted my share of the money from the house sale I said "Absolutely not," and she said "I knew you'd say that, but you're going to have some anyway, and I want you to use some of it to get yourself something nice..." Well okay then, I'll be a tax haven or whatever for my parents this one time.

And they talked about politics at me a bit (which again we don't disagree on but I'm so spoiled by my little bubble where people seek consent and check in during these heavy conversations that this drives me up a wall now).

And then we got on to their computer needing to be replaced because support for Windows 10 is ending and they thought they could just take their PC to Best Buy and get the Quicken transferred to a new laptop... I was trying to disabuse them of this notion gently when their iPad battery died because they believe you must always let it discharge completely and they never use the iPad while it's plugged in.

I'd wanted to go to the gym this evening, and suddenly it was bedtime. And my head was too full of things.

And actually I had to rearrange my bedroom a little for the alarm clock. I don't have a bedside table next to the bed; my room has a lot of fitted closets and drawers so there's only really one place for the bed to go and it means the door -- which is at a weird angle to the rest of the room because of the way the whole upstairs is, and the fact that almost every door up here opens the opposite way to the way that'd make the best use of space -- leaves no room on this side of the bed.

Mostly I've gotten around this by using a floor lamp as a bedside lamp, and shoving a piece of wood between the mattress and the bed frame which I use for bedside stuff: glasses, water, phone. But the piece-of-wood shelf is too low for the alarm clock: not much of the light would actually end up in my line of sight which would defeat the whole purpose of the thing. Also it wasn't easy to get plugged in.

Last night I balanced the clock on some good thick books, and I don't know if the light would have woken me up so I set it to make a normal sound. Then I woke up 45 minutes before my alarm went off this morning and leaned over to look at the clock to see when it would start lighting up, like a little kid. So I don't know any more yet about how or if that will work.

So tonight I've bodged a slightly better solution for clock placement next to my bed (and just as I'm writing this do I realize there's a better way to rearrange the things that need to be plugged in because the lamp has a long cord...always so much to think about!). And I hope the nice cricket sounds and dimming orange light do their magic!

I do wonder how well this supplementary daylight works on someone whose eyes are as bad as mine.

But I really should put my phone down now.

It occurred to me the other day that since the SAD-fighting daylight lamp I have is pretty old now, it still has a big light bulb in it that gets really hot even in the short amounts of time it's supposed to be used. And I'm not as poor as I used to be so I could get a new one.

As always when I need to purchase anything, I asked V for help because they're very good at this. They suggested I might want to try one of those sunrise alarm clocks too. Which I'd never thought about because I'm not really an alarm kind of person a lot of the time, thanks to sleep-maintenance insomnia. But when they sent me a link to what they found and I saw it does a "sunset" thing where you can have gradually-diminishing light and sounds to put on at bedtime, I thought that might be worth a try. I've had increasing trouble settling down to sleep in recent months, and I don't love the workarounds I've resorted to.

Both arrived today, so I write this with orangey light and nature sounds next to me, and the daylight lamp set up by my desk downstairs waiting for me in the morning. We'll see how they work.