I spent the weekend in Cambridge, partly socializing and partly job hunting. Apologies for not letting people know I was travelling or making arrangements; the weekend ended up so packed that I couldn't have fit anyone else in.

( take that, geography! )

While I was away, compilerbitch posted something amazing and profound. You should definitely go and read it. Seriously, if you only follow one link this month, it should be this one.

If that moves you to care about the issue, read this article about a literal Catch-22 scenario which is preventing trans folk in Oxfordshire from obtaining treatment. Thanks to oxfordgirl for pointing to that. It's a bit long, but it's very informative, and among other things it provides credible, peer-reviewed citations for the somewhat counterintuitive point that sex reassignment surgery actually works to improve quality of life for a lot of trans people, whereas counselling and psychotherapy just don't.

Then, if you are a UK citizen or resident, go and sign the petition to get this stupid situation resolved so people can access the medical care they need. I'm not always a huge fan of e-petitions, but this seems to be exactly the sort of scenario where they're most useful. It's a specific, detailed issue of local policy which needs to be changed in order to make people's lives less miserable, and can readily be changed without changing the entire constitutional philosophy of the country or spending unreasonable sums of money. And note the .gov.uk site; this is official, and people with political power actually read it, even if there is a lot of crap there too.

Wow, I almost need a holiday from this week! Lessee.

( diary )

The other awesome thing in my life is that I'm going to Florence next weekend!!!! This is mainly because cartesiandaemon is wonderful, but I have to admit he can't actually take personal credit for the fact that Florence exists. I'm almost afraid that I won't make the trip because I'll explode from squee first.

SA invited me to go shopping with her yesterday, and we had a brilliant time.

( with a bit of a assistance, I can be a girl )

Made it to shul this morning, and caught one of Eva A's typically impressive sermons, and reminded people that I exist. My plan is to spend tomorrow and Monday finally wrangling this paper into submission format so we can send the thing before my colleague and I leave for vacation.

Two reasons I love Wikipedia at the moment.

Two reasons I love my friends list at the moment.

Steampunk jewellery. I don't really buy jewellery, but I sort of want one of those watch mechanism pendants.

Also, shabbat was lovely. ( yay friends )

I can't believe it's been a year since rav_hadassah left Stockholm! Anyway, I really wanted to see her again before she disappears to California to train as a rabbi, so I organized a long weekend in Holland. And it made lots of sense for cartesiandaemon to join us; since we have geography anyway, we might as well travel to interesting exotic places to see eachother. The combination of romantic weekend, with exploring a really lovely place, with getting to see rav_hadassah, made for a lot of wonderfulness combined together, and even so, the weekend surpassed my expectations.

( yay! )

Yay lovely and cultured city! Yay seeing two of my favourite people and introducing them to eachother! Yay wheat beer! Yay snuggles uninterrupted by geography or company! I love it when my plans work to defeat geography. Oh, and cartesiandaemon's account is much more witty than mine.

cartesiandaemon was amazingly impressive this weekend. Not for doing anything silly like rescuing me from dragons, but because he agreed to come with me to Screwy's birthday party and meet my entire family at once. This in fact went brilliantly, and he even made a good impression on Granny.

In fact, everything we planned went as well as it possibly could, and it added up to an absolutely perfect weekend. There was loads of the best kind of socializing, and a good but not excessive amount of coupliness. *bounce*

( minimally nauseating, I assure you )

Now I fall over. But yay for lots and lots of geography-defying fun with lots of cool people. By the way, apologies to the people to whom I failed to make it clear that I had decided to make the trip this weekend instead of going to Eastercon next weekend. I think the decision was right, but I still regret that it meant missing out on another potentially fun thing. And I'm particularly sorry that I don't get to see lethargic_man, friend_of_tofu and other Eastercon people.

I have actually been having a life in between getting in to a new relationship!

( includes an account of the social side of the romantic weekend )

This evening I'm heading out to another embryonic Progressive community as the ambassador from the Stockholm group. Looking forward to it, I must say. JS has invited me to shabbat lunch tomorrow, and I can just see repeating a similar pattern to the one I fell into with rav_hadassah in 2006-7. I will make sure not to be clingy, though.

There was party last night. It was the most amazingly easy to organize party ever; I just told a bunch of friends to turn up at the Pembury and miraculously, many of them did, and party more or less spontaneously happened without my having to do anything. Other exciting things like cake and presents and beer and spontaneous singing and backgammon also took place, but mainly it was wonderful to see lots and lots of my friends in one place instead of scattered over most of Britain.

The other thing that was wonderful is that the combination of "my friends" and "loreid's friends" (not completely discrete groups mind you) and some plus-ones and some Pembury regulars who know other party guests so showed up even though they weren't directly invited meant that there were lots of new but slightly connected people who are always the most interesting to get to know. This post is therefore a connecting people post rather than an actual party report. It was very gratifying to see lots of connections happening between people without me having to make any particular effort as host to encourage this. And I myself met lots of cool new people and got to know some acquaintances better.

I am going to attempt a name-check, though with about 30 people I'm bound to leave someone out. Plus there are a few whose LJ names I'm not quite sure of. Please comment with any names I've left out, and also if you would like to introduce yourself with an LJ identity to me or anyone else you met at the party and want to connect with via LJ. I am leaving this post unlocked because doing anything else would defeat the object; I can't add new people to my flist until I figure out who they are! I'll likely hide it after a few days, but please don't comment with anything indiscreet without the permission of people involved. Oh, and if anyone has taken photos, please do not comment with a link to the photos, but instead mention who is in them so we can figure out who is or isn't ok with photos of them being shared.

( lots of lovely people )

Giant thank you to loreid for co-hosting and brining CAKE. And even more to timeplease for inviting us to congregate in his pub and serving us yummy food and alcohol and putting up the long distance guests in his flat and even making us tea in the morning. Proper report to follow, possibly in a locked post if people would prefer that.

The last ten days of my holiday were pretty crazy, trying to cram in seeing as many people as possible. But also a lot of fun.

( love friends, hate geography )

Annnnd this is the final part of a long series which has taken me about two months to get round to posting. I still haven't managed all the book reviews, but never mind. That was a cool holiday, and many thanks to all the lovely people who were willing to hang out with me and give me places to stay.

I've had a really lovely shabbat.

( social )

As for j4's meme, I'm doing moderately well. I have spoken to hatam_soferet and lethargic_man and ploni_bat_ploni on the phone, loreid and compilerbitch by Skype, pseudomonas and syllopsium by IM, sent emails to rysmiel and timeplease, and I made up my tenth by sending an ecard to j4 herself. Some of those were more like ongoing conversations than saying specific things, but it's an improvement on my usual over-reliance on LJ.

Now, where was I up to? Oh yes, I got back to England safely with lethargic_man. I then set off on a mad dash all round England trying to cram a year's worth of socializing into a couple of weeks.

( yay friends )

I think I'll break this here so it doesn't get too long. There's still quite a bit more account of wandering round England to report; I spent the next week and a half in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cambridge, Brighton, Cambridge, Bury St Edmunds, London and Cambridge, seeing all kinds of lovely people.

I have spent the past week rushing around seeing lots and lots of people and feeding my extrovert energies, so that by yesterday evening I was a little fireball of extremely hyper mood. I spent lots of hours chatting which a wiser person would probably have spent asleep, but never mind.

I am way behind on writing up my trip but hey, I'm going back to Sweden tomorrow. After that I will probably have a bit more internet time, though I am going to be fairly busy over the High Holy Days. Happy New Year to those celebrating it this week, anyway.

But yes. I have seen ewtikins and hobbitz and the sibs and lots of their friends and the PRI and AN and blue_mai and timeplease and a whole crowd of new and old cool people at the Pembury and syllopsium and loreid, kathrid and wychwood and the parents and the sibs again and deborah_c and karen2205 and lots of cool people she knows and doseybat and the Batparents and timeplease and ewtikins again and more cool Pembury people and the parents again... Eeeeeee!

I've really, really enjoyed MF's visit. She's someone I have liked a great deal for about a decade, but never actually spent any extended time with. So I'm particularly pleased that she actually agreed to my spontaneous invitation to come to Stockholm. We've had a lovely time, talking about everything, filling eachother in on our lives and what sort of people we are, as well as discussing books (I lent her The Armaggeddon Rag and Triton, both of which went down very well) and ideas. I am somewhat unsociable and having someone in my space for a whole week is a bit much for me (there are a very small number of exceptions to this) but the enjoyment massively outweighed the slight irritation. MF's company and wisdom are really good for me. We had fun feeding eachother too; she made me soda bread, which I'd read about loads of times but never actually eaten.

Her visit also gave me the excuse to be a bit more actively touristy than I would on my own. ( culture vulture )

Anyway, as you've probably noticed I've been pretty much offline, cos all the time I wasn't talking to MF I was working. I've done some of the planning and sorting for my trip next week, but not all of it. But I will get back to everybody soon. Further apologies if I've missed some vital news of yours.

In the last few weeks, I have actually been doing some socializing, though I haven't always posted about it. ( social diary ) Oh dear, I am so babbly. I was going to do this as bullet points, at least in part because I've hurt my finger, in a completely minor way but it makes typing rather uncomfortable. But I ended up describing everything in detail anyway. Oops.

By the way, I'm screening anon comments just in case some troll thinks it would be amusing to scatter HP spoilers on random journals. So if you don't have an LJ account, you'll have to wait for your comment to appear. I'll go back to my usual open status once Potterdämmerung has subsided a bit.

Further thoughts about Facebook: there are a lot of things horribly wrong with it, mainly involving its failure to make the transition from a virtual hangout for American college students to a general social networking site. I don't trust the site, but apart from the bits where I think they have an actually malicious business model, the way they do privacy is I think actively harmful through lack of competence; it's not transparent who sees what information, and the default state is ridiculously open while it's complicated and non-intuitive to lock things down. And there's just a lot of stuff which is barely functional, muddled and with no top down vision of how things are supposed to fit together. There's also the problem of fragmentation that Gerv mentions.

By comparison with LJ, it feels a lot more like a silly time waster, than a medium for actual conversation and socializing. And yet, there are people there who not only aren't on LJ, but who aren't really online at all, except accidentally. I can see how it's useful for a kind of virtual version of social grooming, keeping vaguely in touch with people one already knows with a lot less effort than email or blogging. The thing I absolutely love about it is that it has found me a good proportion of the people I've lost over the course of my life. I've been on the site less than a week, and it already beats both Google and FriendsReunited.

Reconnecting with childhood friends has brought on a fit of nostalgia, which I shall discuss behind the cut. I've also been scanning and uploading some of the photos I have from years ago; the instant feedback that Facebook supplies is gratifying.

( do you really want to read about my childhood? )

I had to say goodbye to ploni_bat_ploni last night. We had a very fun evening in company with her mother, and PbP gave me the leftovers from her storecupboard as well as some very cool presents that she doesn't have room to pack. I didn't cry.

Thing is, it's a good thing that PbP is leaving Sweden, cos she's off to do fun things like get married and then start her rabbinical training on the other side of the world. And we have many weapons of telecommunication to defeat the evil geography.

Mainly, I'm glad I had the chance to get to know PbP over the course of this academic year.

The last few days have been a manic social whirl.

( finally catching up )

Because of all this, I managed to miss both darcydodo's birthday, and my fourth LJ-versary. So belated happy birthday to Darcy, and I may do the retrospective of four years on LJ a few days late.

Finally, a very warm welcome to the wonderful hobbitz, a dear friend from Oxford whom I've been trying to tempt onto LJ for years. Her journal is friends only and she only wants to friend people who actually know her. But I'm so very happy that she's finally here.

Now I fall over. Splat.

Just had a phonecall from ploni_bat_ploni, she's in hospital with heart trouble. Probably minor but they need to do loads of tests to make sure. She mainly complains of boredom rather than anything worse.

She asked me to post here; our friends don't entirely overlap but it's better than nothing. She'd been feeling poorly for a while but cleverly managed to get herself admitted while she was in her Home Country, so at least her fiancé and friends can visit her and she speaks the language. (Apparently she has internet access, but the system is too old to cope with LJ or her email account, so effectively she's out of touch.)

Update 10 May: ploni_bat_ploni is now out of hospital. See her journal for more details if you know her.

(Me, I'm ok but uncommunicative for various reasons. I will update once I manage to follow through on the intention.)

Partly because she's generally a lovely person, and because we got to continue this marathon conversation that has been in progress for over a decade now. I feel surprisingly comfortable gossipping with Bat, I think because she instinctively sees everyone as people. But doseybat is a wonderful guest in more minor ways than that too; she was gratifyingly enthusiastic about every suggestion I made, but also really laid back when plans didn't quite work out. She even likes matzah! And if all that wasn't enough, she insisted on doing all the washing up.

( having a visitor was an excuse to do the touristy stuff I'd not been getting round to )

Anyway, I am so glad that doseybat made it out here! Her visit was just idyllic, relaxing and enjoyable and cultural and I feel so much better for it.

I am back in Sweden. doseybat is here, and we have been trying new and interesting food. Baby kiwis! Giant hairy lychees! Also some exciting pink and healthy stuff which Wikipedia hasn't heard of and Google has barely heard of. After some effort, we traced its origin to Korea via Belgium, meaning that most of the available information is in Dutch (that is to say, Flemish).

A machine translation informed us:

Again!
A family member of the germ of the red patches, with a beautiful rose-pink colouring and a soft, sweet patch taste.

Can anyone guess what this might be referring to?

( no peeking at the solution )

Several minor domestic crises meant that I didn't make it into town on Friday, just stayed at home chilling out with the parents. I was falling-over tired by supper time, but decided I should at least stay up to greet Screwy when he arrived. It was a good thing that I did as he'd managed to forget a small but critical part of his lifting equipment and needed several people to help lift him into bed manually. But we chatted for hours so I still didn't manage to get a full night's sleep.

Saturday we went to synagogue. The community here are so dedicated that even the weekend before Passover we had a full congregation, so it was a good opportunity to catch up with lots of cool people. Screwy didn't make it until the final hymn but managed to do his gracious celebrity thing during Kiddush. The community have moved to a new and much more suitable venue which happens to be exactly opposite pseudomonas' flat. We decided we couldn't get Screwy into the flat on the first floor with no lift, so we went into town to hang out at ground level.

Lunch at Clowns, to relive our teenage years and because a place with a convivial atmosphere and cheap, hearty food and fantastic desserts is still a good thing. Then we moved to Jesus Green to continue our convoluted philosophical debates. We were so absorbed in the discussion that we brought pseudomonas back with us to continue it.

In order to give Mum a break after she'd been cooking all day, we decided to order takeaways from the new Indian restaurant that has just opened in Shelford. This turned out to be a complete farce; they kept us waiting for over two hours, and then admitted they'd lost our order. You can give them some leeway since it was Saturday night and they're very new, but this was way beyond reasonable. We managed to finish the Times Jumbo crossword while we were waiting, at least. Ended up with someone else's order which they'd given up waiting for, which fortunately didn't contain anything obviously treif but unfortunately was an order for two or three, not six. So we bulked it out with some rice and leftovers, and we were all relaxed enough that we took the fiasco calmly.

I still didn't get the early night I was hoping for though, what with eating so late, and another long conversation with Screwy. He doesn't believe in memes!!! I'm working on getting his arguments into a form I can post here so you guys can join in this debate.

I haven't updated much because I don't have much to say at the moment. But for those who want to know what's up in my life:

( weekend )

Meanwhile, this week has not really started well. I'll mention the good things, because the negative things are dull. Happy cells, clean underwear, clean sheets and clean hair. Good conversations with pseudomonas and P'tite Soeur. j4's excellent lentil curry. (I didn't have coriander or limes, so I substituted lemon balm and lemons, but anyway, it rocks, thanks for that recipe.)

I posted something a bit meepy last week, and within a few days, I was overwhelmed by lots of lovely people being amazingly kind to me. Several people commented with sympathy and genuinely helpful advice, so thank you all so much.

( even more wonderfulness )

So I am sitting here glowing with gratitude to all of you. And remembering that I am actually a likeable enough person for such wonderful people to want to be friends with me, so I have the best motivation ever to live up to that.

I have made some progress towards plans for coming to England for Passover. I will probably be around, in the London and Cambridge vicinty, from Friday 30^th March to Thursday 5^th April. Monday 2^nd is the evening of Passover itself, so I am committed to family stuff then, but apart from that, let me know if you want to make arrangements to meet up. It helps if you live within a sensible day trip of Cambridge; I won't have time to do a lot of dashing around the country.

Reasons for watching it: Various people were ethusiastic about the film when it came out last year, particularly rysmiel.

Circumstances of watching it: I have had a very weird few days. I thought I was better from the annoying cold I had last week, and indeed I have no more specific cold symptoms, but I am very, very, very tired. Going into work Thursday and Friday was probably a mistake; by early afternoon I was really struggling to keep my eyes open, let alone concentrate. So Friday afternoon I came home early and spent most of the afternoon asleep. In spite of about 15 hours' sleep between Friday and Saturday, I was still dead tired on Saturday. I dragged myself to synagogue, just, as I'd promised to read the section from the prophets and to go to lunch with ploni_bat_ploni afterwards. PbP fed me ever so well and looked after me during the afternoon, and I was starting to think I might be getting my energy back.

That was until I tried walking a few hundred yards to a shopping centre. That short stroll left me falling over exhausted; I had to lean on ploni_bat_ploni to avoid collapsing in the street! She pointed out, quite rightly, that I was in no possible state to go to a party as I had planned that evening, and invited me instead to spend a quiet evening curled up in her bed watching a film.

Verdict: V for Vendetta is beautifully done if somewhat unsubtle.

Caveat: I've tried to keep spoilers out of my review, but the comment discussion is full of spoilery Mcspoiler spoilers of spoileriness

( detailed review )

ploni_bat_ploni is such a great host! Yesterday involved pancakes, and a girlie shopping trip, and lots of good conversation as ever. But in spite of my best intentions I didn't set off for the lab until nearly 6 o'clock. I looked after my cells, wasn't awake enough to start any actual experiments at this point. But the weather had changed overnight with the result that I had to come home in driving snow, wearing the clothes I'd put on for 10 degrees and sunshine on Saturday. That was an unpleasant experience, to say the least.

Today I simply could not wake up, finally dragged myself out of bed at around midday, and couldn't focus enough to do even half a day's work. I'm thoroughly sick of being sick, I can tell you.

I turned 28 yesterday. I was expecting a quiet, dull day, since nobody much is around on my birthday, and I had some work I was just going to get on with. But in fact my colleague RS spontaneously invited me to dinner, and I had a great evening at her place.

Also, I got birthday messages in various formats from my family (emails and ecards), lethargic_man (a physical birthday card in Arabic which actually arrived on the correct day, amazingly, as well as a text message), rysmiel (birthday card), ploni_bat_ploni (funky multi-coloured email), pseudomonas (email) and darcydodo (phonecall). lethargic_man and rysmiel even gave me bookies as well, so I've done exceedingly well this birthday. Yay for telecommunications, and yay for friends getting in touch with me.