helen-louise's journal

I haven't been posting more than comments because it's been too hot to switch my computer on. My laptop is "built for extreme gaming" and therefore has two heavy-duty fans, one for the CPU and the other for the GPU. Unsurprisingly, it belches out A LOT of heat. Given that it's been over 30 degrees C during the day and even over 25 at night, I haven't had much desire to add to the house temperature. I've been playing Dragon Quest VII on my 3DS instead of Elder Scrolls Online on my computer, and just checking in with my Guild for 30-60 minutes at 3 am when it's as cool as it's going to get.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I shall be 41, which is quite shocking. I don't FEEL like I should be middle-aged yet - even if extended life expectancy means we now have "early" middle-age from 40 to 55 and "late" middle-age from 56 to 70 or 75, and you don't become "elderly" until you're properly decrepit. One of my birthday presents will be a visiting Grant, which means I am now attempting to do battle with entropy such that there will be enough space in the house for him to stay.

( To do... )

Yesterday, when I went to bed, it was grey and drizzling, and I thought "hooray, that's my birthday rain". I've had less than 10 dry birthdays in 36 years. There's an actual reason for it, too, but I can't share it with you because it's from an old copy of The Times and they now want a login for it - even though it's from before they started charging for online content! You'll have to make do with my summary from the time.

Today I have received the best birthday present ever, which is a drawing from stellarwind. Everything in the picture is a reference to something in my life, and I don't actually EXPECT anyone to get all of the references, unless they're me :) It's still pretty awesome to share, though. I need an emergency spoon dispenser in real life, and the "thirty-six impossible hydrogen bonds" is both a double pun AND based on an actual problem that I've been having with my work.

I don't expect to get any more birthday presents until I have time to use them, which is fine by me. Work is being awful, and doing that thing it does of expanding to more-than-fill the time available. I've spent three whole days trying to get a program to work with certain files, and if my supervisors can't come up with a magical solution today, I'm going to throw them out, because I can't afford to waste any more time on this part of the project. I'll just write about the files which did work.

I hate being under an impossible time pressure.

'Cos three things make a post, right? (This is actually four).

[21:41] My ovary (or whatever) is really flippin' hurting again. I want to know when i'm supposed to be getting it scanned.

[22:53] I used the Hyperbole & a Half Pain Scale to determine if I needed to take my ovary to hospital. I decided it was about a "5", as in "Why is this happening to me??". It's not time to get it prodded in A&E until it's up to a 6 or 7 (I'm pretty sure I have to be crying with pain before it's worth going to the hospital in the middle of the night). I seriously need to chase up that scan though.

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[01:49] I don't mind molecules with a whole load of different names, but it gets positively insulting when there are a whole load of NUMBERING schemes. Geldanamycin is case in point - what IUPAC thinks is carbon 19 is what people using the old/ biochemistry/ natural product name think is carbon 17. Given that the IUPAC name is hideous then referring to it as geldanamycin makes sense - but it gets ever so confusing when you have names of derivatives based on adding and removing groups from carbon 17 - when the "official" name calls that carbon 19!

And I've just found a molecule (Radicicol) that can be numbered from 1-18 consecutively OR from 1-6 (round the benzene ring) and then from 1' to 12' (round the rest of it).

Mind you, if you ever want to have a fit of the vapours, try looking up the official IUPAC name for plain old glucose.

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[04:25] Gods, the weather here has been VILE for HOURS. Driving wind and rain non-stop since about 9pm (it's now nearly 4.30 am)

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[04:39] Did I mention that I'm wearing a pair of Richard's socks? The stupid boy was supposed to get my socks out of the washing machine & pair them & hang them on the line on FRIDAY. Today, I went downstairs with a load of dirty sheets and found them all still in the machine, smelling really revolting since they'd been damp since Friday. So I've had to rewash them, which meant I was completely out of clean socks.

Richard's socks are horrible & scratchy, & make my feet itch.

HOLY CRAP, IT'S SNOWING!

And the snow's settling :)

I hope this'll get some of the wretched humidity out of the air, so those of us with joint problems will be in a bit less pain. My back would really appreciate that.

Today I have been suffering from being so flippin' freezing that I can't think. Currently I am wearing underwear, a thick short-sleeved t-shirt, an average thickness long-sleeved t-shirt, thick corduroy trousers, a belt (reducing the air gap around my middle), thick socks, slippers, a long tunic-style cardigan with a hood, and over the top of that I've put on my new super-thick wolfy-coloured dressing gown and pulled the hood up. The heating is on and I'm sitting with a warm laptop drinking hot herbal tea. And I'm STILL COLD.

The temperature inside the house is allegedly 18.3 °C while the temperature outside is only 2.1 °C. That's cold, but not VERY cold - I mean, my friends in Canada will be laughing right now at the mental image of me all bundled up in my own portable blanket when they're at minus something °C. Nonetheless, I FEEL COLD. And I badly need to get my hair washed because it's at the lank, sticking-to-my-head stage, which is just nasty. But the thought of getting naked just isn't happening right now. Even if a hot shower heats my body, the sitting around for several hours with damp hair part will make me freeze again.

I should write about Christmas at some point soon because I got some rather awesome presents, but coursework is eating my life. All I have time for is moaning! Heh.

Last Thursday was my birthday. The day was spectacularly quiet, but in the evening 8 of us (me, wuzzie, alexa_robinson, artremis, meeping, gerwinium, hatter & bfo) went to 222. Dinner was perfect, and it was just the right number of people - so most of the time there were no more than two separate conversations on the table, and everyone could talk to everyone else. I did feel a bit sorry for Ludy, though, sitting between Richard & Marcus, as they've been co-conspirators since 1994 but haven't actually lived together these past 9 years. So they were getting louder and louder and louder, and Ludy had forgotten her earplugs. Oh well.

I got some nice presents, including a Wii plus the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess from Richard, and Eledees from Tim & Peter, and an octopus t-shirt from Richard's sister A. Ludy bought me Montezuma's chocolate and the foulest-smelling Lush product EVER! Fortunately, it's supposed to smell that bad, and it may turn out to be a useful natural replacement for the evil green seborrhoeic dermatitis shampoo that I'm forced to use to get my hair clean.

As is typical for my birthday, it was grey and cloudy for half the day, chucking it down with rain for a quarter, and reasonably warm and sunny for the rest of it. I always thought the fact I've only had three or four dry birthdays in my life was me being paranoid or misremembering, but apparently there's a great deal of historical precedent. Apparently there is actual scientific reasoning for why the end of June is so rotten weather-wise! You have to wonder why they insist on holding Wimbledon and Glastonbury at this time of year when the meteorologists consider it "monsoon season".