helen-louise's journal

Urgh. I feel so ill. Felt like I might be going down with something on Thursday and have progressed through the various stages of a cold ever since. Made the mistake of going out for dinner on Sunday evening, and since then have also had a raging fever and severe aching as well. Not happy.

Also, my laptop charger is now so broken that it only charges if it's in one very precise orientation. (The laptop and battery are both fine, I had them checked over by the Apple Store a couple of months ago, when this first started). Since a new one costs £60, I have emailed my university Disability Office to ask whether I can just buy it from the Apple Store (10 minutes away!) and claim the cost back, or if Student Finance England are going to be wankers and expect me to wait until one of their official Disabled Students' Allowance suppliers can get one to me. I rather suspect that the latter will be the case, and it's anyone's guess whether I will actually achieve an 85W MagSafe power supply for 15" MacBook Pro made before 2010, or whether I'll be sent one of the other wattages, or an 85W MagSafe 2 power supply, or... Who knows. (Also, I think I might need to fill in a DSA form for next academic year. I can't remember if I've done one yet).

Also also, I put in a repeat prescription yesterday with a request for 5 items, and only 4 of them were dispensed. There is no indication as to why the fifth one wasn't, it hasn't run out of repeats yet, and I even wrote in large, bright blue letters on the first page "5 items on form". It's megadose folic acid, which every so often I think I don't need, stop taking for a couple of days, and then have a horrible mood crash and end up crying my eyes out for several hours whilst wishing I was dead. I have 2 days supply left, so I need to ring the doctor's surgery and say "Oy", but I have no spoons left at all.

Also cubed, one of the Important Drugs on my repeat prescription is going to run out within the next 8 days. Therefore I need to make a doctor's appointment. Currently I am too sick to leave the house, and certainly too sick to sit in a room full of other sick people and swap germs. Urgh.

Also to the power of 4, I need to talk to my next-door neighbours about smoking right outside the front door, rather than passive-aggressively closing the window whenever smoke blows in :/ That definitely requires spoons :(

In happier news, I watched Dara O Briain's Science Club on BBC iPlayer yesterday and it's amazing. They report science news in a reasonably non-patronising way, and do lots of little experiments during the programme itself, in all areas of science. I'm mildly amused because one of the presenters is someone I knew at Imperial, a guy called Alok Jha. He looks absolutely the same as he did then, which isn't bad considering he's claiming to be 37. (I don't think he can be, since I'm sure he was a third year when I was a first year, and I don't think he would have gone to uni aged 16... But maybe I'm misremembering).

Everyone say "Happy birthday" to my dear ex-girlfriend artremis tomorrow, because she's awesome, and I have failed to get a card to her due to the aforementioned sickness and blergh. She likes bunnies, knitting, coffee, and plushies, so if you can find pictures of knitted bunny plushies drinking coffee, that might work well.

Still don't have any spare brain to write commentary, and in fact today I hurt so much that even typing is an effort. So here are some links presented without comment:

Me And The Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large. A couple of years old, and triggery for me by halfway through.

Certain Propositions Concerning Callout Culture, Part Three. Parts One and Two are good too, but they mostly say things that we already know. Whereas this points out a few home truths that people May Not Like.

The battle against 'sexist' sci-fi and fantasy book covers. I'm fairly sure I've linked to Jim C. Hines' website before, but it's awesome to see a big organisation like the BBC report on it.

Studies Raise Questions About Safety Of Personal Lubricants. I take it that everyone reading this already knows that nonoxynol-9 Is Evil, but there are a few alarming surprises in the article.

Five organisms with real super powers that rival their comic book counterparts.

Crime Against Nature: an inclusive children's book. Digital version available free.

NASA finds Cookie Monster on surface of Mercury. Awesome :)

Parody of anti-gay pamphlets offers detailed, behind-the-scenes view of how liars misuse real citations. Very interesting, and Relevant To Our Interests.

Sexist bastardJames Watson on The Double Helix and his changing view of Rosalind Franklin. I still want to spit at him, but I suppose he comes across as slightly less objectionable when all the evidence is considered. Bah.

More than you maybe needed to know about the echidna. Warning: Contains echidna penis. Once seen, can never be un-seen!

Protein art. This is also Relevant to My Interests.

OMG, baby octopodes! *hyperventilates with Teh Cute!*

At some point I should write up my weekend, but given that I've been in bed for two days, who knows when that'll be? It was good, anyway. My back is less good, but this is partly my own fault for neglecting to do my physiotherapy exercises for months on end.

This Friday I'm planning to go to this event from 4-11pm - would anyone like to join me?

Wow. I am so flaky. It is nearly 7 am, and I am still awake because I haven't done anything useful today.

My brain isn't in a very good place. My "new" GP (well, okay, I've been seeing her for 9 months, but that's still new, especially as I don't go to the doctor every single month) suggested I should come off trazodone, since it has a sedating effect which could be making my chronic fatigue worse. Normally I leave medication changes until holidays or other times when I don't have work to do, but I agreed to do it right away because I didn't think trazodone was doing anything for me^*. MORE FOOL ME.

So I've spent the week getting increasingly tearful and unable to cope. I've stopped crashing out and being comatose for 12 hours on end, or having incredibly weird, vivid dreams that make me wake up exhausted from tossing and turning - but I can't stay asleep for more than 2 hours at a time either. And I feel slightly as though my head is about to fall off, all my skin is uncomfortable, and every so often I drift a few inches out of my body. Not as badly as proper, depressive depersonalisation episodes - but still not exactly pleasant.

I'm going to continue with my current trazodone dose for another couple of weeks, until either the discontinuation syndrome goes away, or I entirely lose the ability to cope. I'm not sure which will happen first. (I wish it was easier to titrate drug doses - chopping a dose from 100 mg to 50 mg is quite a big jump. Would've been easier if a smaller decrease was possible).

Also, my vitamin D level was 41 nmol/L in my most recent test. (It was 57 nmol/L in the summer, and that was still bad - 75 nmol/L or more is generally considered as the bottom end of "normal", and lately some doctors have started recommending 100 nmol/L as the minimum). The doctor started quizzing me about compliance with the 800 i.u. per day of vitamin D that she told me to take - she honestly thought I was missing it out. I pointed out that I've been taking 1250 i.u. per day because of the amount that was already in my multivitamin, and she suggested 2000 i.u. per day for the next 6 months. Blah!

Fortunately, I finally found a source for vegan vitamin D3. The different forms of vitamin D are closely-related steroid compounds, and there's some controversy about whether D2 (ergocalciferol, derived from plants) is as good as D3 (cholecalciferol) made in animal skin. Obviously, it's D3 that our bodies actually use. On the basis that everything I eat is fortified with vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) and yet I was still horribly deficient, I've been taking D3 derived from lanolin in sheep's wool for the past few months year, since there weren't any vegan forms of D3 on the market. But apparently it can be produced by lichens. GO LICHENS!

^* I haven't been on a single antidepressant in years - my old GP was a great believer in taking several different drugs on lower doses to get the best balance between positive useful effects and bad side-effects.

Yesterday my Mac suddenly lost the ability to connect to the internet. I thought this meant that our ADSL was down, or the router had crashed (we've been having fairly lousy connectivity the past few days), but rebooting the router didn't help. It later transpired that I had perfectly fine connectivity from the eeePC. After trying various sensible things myself, I waited for Richard to get home - and it turned out the Mac's keychain had randomly corrupted itself. People who know about Macs say this is a Bad Thing.

The thing is, I'm sure that usually when users go to tech support people and say "I haven't done anything to the computer, it just stopped working", usually they have changed something and forgotten about it. In this case, I hadn't done anything at all. Half an hour previously, it worked. Then suddenly, it didn't. Huh.

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I really need to clear out some of the tabs that are sitting around in my browser waiting for me to write about them. But I still don't have a lot of energy, so anything I say will be brief.

Videos:
Topless Robot: I Would Not Like to Fight 300 Naked Orcs, Personally. A load of level 1 characters in World of Warcraft teamed up to attack one of the toughest bosses in the game. The video is hilarious even if you don't know anything about WoW (as long as you're vaguely aware of video games in general, I suppose).

Sparkfun: Yarn Monster. Richard found this on Sparkfun's site and told me I should link it for all my knitting friends. It's a robot that turns messy yarn into neat balls. Awesome!

Storycorps: Q & A. Animation drawn over a real-life soundtrack of a 12 year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome interviewing his mother. May require tissues, may be triggery (e.g. if you are on the autistic spectrum and do not have such a loving, accepting parent).

Top Five Panda Cheese commercials. Very odd TV adverts for an Egyptian cheese, featuring an utterly adorable panda. Or is he?

Articles:
Fire and Ice on a Platter. I can't remember quite how I found this, but it's an article about the science behind the dessert Baked Alaska. It's very interesting for cooks and science-types alike.

Autism's First Child. Article about/interview with the first person ever to be diagnosed as autistic.

BBC News: A Real Good Samaritan and Your Good Samaritan stories. It made me cry.

Bad Science: Putting a number in its context. The rebuttal to the rather scary recent news story that 600 women had become pregnant despite the contraceptive implant. On a similar note, A new and interesting form of wrong. What's wrong with the recent Stonewall report that “the average coming out age has fallen by over 20 years”.

Silliness:
WALRUS ALLERGIES ARE A SERIOUS ISSUE. From sherlockbbc_fic.

Bacteria first species observed to use arsenic-laced DNA backbone

Evolutionary geochemist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the lead author, and her colleagues found a strain of bacterium (GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family) that can grow in a medium abundant in arsenic and lacking phosphorus. The GFAJ-1 bacterium naturally resides in the arsenic-rich waters (200 uM) of Mono Lake located in California's Eastern Sierra, and it belongs to a family of proteobacteria that is known to accumulate arsenic. It's not remarkable that GFAJ-1 survives in high concentrations of arsenic, but what is startling is that it potentially integrates arsenic into its DNA and proteins.

w00t.

I am pissed off. I am now, for the first time, reading a paper which contradicts around ten other papers that I've already read, written about, and referenced. And contradicts them in such a way as to make it obvious that this paper is correct and the others are wrong. Damnit! How DARE science change when new discoveries are made? ;)

Frivolous post, but I'm really very stressed. I'm sorta stuck with my thesis, until such time as I can get the books that I need. (Discovered late last night that I hadn't photocopied everything that I thought I had - because for copyright reasons photocopies in the British Library are 24p per A4 sheet and you're only allowed to do one page per sheet for book preservation reasons. So I try not to photocopy stuff unless it's essential, and don't always guess right). Didn't get to the library today because my back hurt. So I'm working on one of the bits that I don't understand instead of getting on with the stuff that I DO understand, and it's stressing me out.

Also, I'm also premenstrual ("again?!" says Richard), which isn't a good state to be trying to do anything difficult in.

rowan_leigh shared an excellent New Yorker article about procrastination, which may explain why I'm now struggling to write this wretched literature report in a couple of weeks instead of over a couple of months. Apparently, "Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination" - you think?! The most amusing part of it is that, apparently, "Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so he would be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing"!! If only it were warm enough for that! I'm wearing three or four layers with the heating going full blast!

Might try that method in the summer. Um, when I'm in my study at home, that is. I might scare people if I did that at college.

This evening, I am a refugee from my own study. Our neighbours are having a loud music + bonfire party, so I can't actually BREATHE in my study, let alone concentrate to work. Bah.

Some friends from PokeCharms have found that there is a me sprite in Pokemon Black & White! I am quite amused. Her shoes are wrong, but otherwise, that's me.

Congratulations to Ed Miliband on being elected new Labour leader. Commiserations to the friend of mine, who for obvious reasons will remain anonymous here, who lives in the same road as him! That's going to make your life a whole lot more interesting, eh?

From today's innocent newsletter: Green sea slug makes chlorophyll like a plant. Apparently once the super green sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, has eaten its favorite algae, Vaucheria litorea, it never needs to eat again as long as it has access to light, water and carbon dioxide! It has acquired the genes for the chemical pathway to manufacture chlorophyll A, and these genes have shown up even in unhatched slugs that have (obviously) never eaten algae.

THIS IS AWESOME! Behold our new guru and spiritual leader!