no, you must take less drugzzz

WHY are my doctors permanently obsessed with trying to reduce my asthma meds? My asthma is good BECAUSE I'm on the dose I'm on. It's not a shockingly high dose for a person of my age and size - in fact, it's quite a low dose for an adult.

I'm annoyed because a) I went swimming on Friday for the first time in ages, and for possibly the first time since I was at school I could swim into the deep end of a chlorinated pool and not run out of air and panic, which impressed me greatly; and b) the dose I'm on is still not quite enough for me to cycle up Kingston Hill without almost dying of a snot attack. I'm especially annoyed because my doctor decided to change the drug without consulting me, so I now have an inhaler containing a drug which stopped working for me when I was 19. My asthma is very much worse than it was when I was 19, so there's no way it's going to work. Gah!

Wheee

I have, at this moment in time, 13 freaking A-level chemistry papers to mark. You'd hope that this close to the exams, I'd just be ticking stuff or writing the odd small comment, but noooo, I still need to write copious notes about mistakes on them. Some of my students are also stupid and give me 4 exam papers all at once, which means they make exactly the same mistakes on all of them. I've been handing the later ones back unmarked and telling them to fix the problems themselves before I mark them.

Richard had some small, vile luminescent yellow stickers that he was using for paintball circuit boards, but he can't find them right now (except for the ones that are already printed). This is a shame, because I still need that "Carbon only has 4 bonds!" rubber stamp, and a vile yellow sticker would do. Especially for the horrible child who managed to give me two pentavalent C atoms and a univalent C on the same paper. And then tried to make the carbon of a C=O double bond chiral. Argh argh argh!

I am also enjoying retro computing in the form of Microsoft Word 97 and Kaleidagraph version 3.02. Installing them on my current computer was rather odd, especially as the Office install disc came with a free copy of Internet Exploder version 3; but they run like lightning. I may actually keep them installed after the project has finished.

Also, some parts of my life are not crap. They're actually rather good.

Procrastination is not my friend.

So there is This Thing that I have alluded to several times recently. And everything is now in place to deal with it, and I have in fact started dealing with it?

Well, I really don't recommend procrastination. Trying to edit a 130-page document that you wrote FIVE FREAKING YEARS AGO and no longer understand is... difficult. Especially when you print it out again and discover that half the figures never got converted to GIF or PNG. And you can't simply photocopy your own bound copy because... there are pages missing from it. Whole chunks of them. (Why did I pay for it to get bound when it wasn't all there?). So you end up having to install Ye Olde Graphing Package that you used to make the original graphs. And then you discover that you have, for example, ten plots called "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites" with various filename extensions. Do I want "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites for plot", "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites FINAL", "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites for plot urban rural highlighted", or "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites colourful"? I have no clue.

And you're now not sure whether the two bound copies that you submitted also had chunks of pages missing, because the stupid University letter never told you anything that useful. So you may need to get those rebound yet again. And you've found typoes and missing figure captions from the Word document that you now want to correct, and aren't sure whether you're supposed to or not.

So you are reminded, over again, why it was that you have been procrastinating it for four years. Because you really weren't mentally well enough to deal with it when even thinking about it made you feel panicky. But it's bloody annoying that you couldn't have looked at it earlier while you still, e.g. remembered what a Hurst exponent was and whether it had anything to do with skew and kurtosis. (Figure 5.33 is about Hurst exponents, but 5.33a and b are about skew and kurtosis. Why do I have a 5.33a instead of a 5.34, anyway?!). And you curse your previous lack of mental health and all the stupid mistakes that a younger you made all the more.