Jules Jones's Blog, page 6

vaccine - achievement unlocked

This morning I received my first armful of mRNA, courtesy of Pfizer. I also received half an hour lying down on the bed thoughtfully provided for such purpose waiting to make sure the after effects were just my body doing what my body does courtesy of medical conditions or medications or both. I was also told that they would be much much happier if I got a taxi home rather than the bus. Since I wasn't the least bit surprised to need half an hour lying down I'd already assumed I might be going home in a taxi.

I was slightly disconcerted to find out via a "here's your invitation with booking link" text that my medical history puts me in the "16-64 medium risk" group, but given that I'm commuting daily by public transport I'm not in the least bit sorry to be getting it a month or so earlier than I would going on just my age.

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Book review: Graeme Aitken - The Indignities

This is a serialized novel about a gay man in Sydney not dealing well with hitting thirty. The novel is structured so that you can read each part is an individual story, with its own closure rather than a cliffhanger.

Stephen Spear is an actor currently out of work, but having done well enough out of a stint on a soap opera to have bought a house in a good suburb, live off his savings, and avoid his thirtieth birthday with a round the world holiday with his boyfriend. Stephen’s an antihero --he’s self-absorbed, selfish, and oblivious to other people’s reactions to his behaviour. One of the joys of this book is the way Aitken’s first person narration shows the reader what’s going on around Stephen, while Stephen himself remains utterly unaware. He does eventually learn to become a better person. It just takes life hitting him over the head many times to get there.

I've reviewed each book separately.

 

Graeme Aitken - The Indignities: Time to Upsize

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Graeme Aitken - The Indignities: Private Party

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Graeme Aitken - The Indignities: Me, Myself, and Someone Else

( Read more... )

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Book review - Alan Shayne and Norman Sunshine - Double Life

This is a joint autobiography by an actor-turned-producer and an artist, from their teens before they met as young men struggling to establish their careers, through the twists and turns of those careers, and finally their legal marriage four decades later. It's a story about how gay men lived and were treated in the US over the course of decades. It's a fascinating insight into the production aspects and the internal politics of getting a film or TV show made, and the vagaries of building a career in both commercial and fine art. It's also a touching love story of a couple deeply devoted to one another. I found it slow going at first. I think this was largely because part of the appeal of the book should have been about it being about the private lives of two men who are well known in their fields, but both of them were completely unfamiliar to me. I was slowly drawn in, and then completely fascinated by the story they were telling. And yes, I did have a tear in my eye as the book closed with their quiet wedding on an almost empty beach. I started this not convinced I'd reach the end. By the time I finished it I was very glad I had. Available from lots of different vendors via https://books2read.com/u/3n8QMo - some of those are affiliate links. 

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So that was 2020, and good riddance

Well, that was a bit of a year, wasn't it?

A year ago I was sitting traumatized by the images of Australia burning, with no idea that two days earlier a doctor called Li Wenliang had tried to raise the alarm about a new type of SARS coronavirus that seemed to be spreading. A few weeks later I was looking at flights for a year later, i.e. round about now, in the belief that I might finally have my medical issues under control enough that I'd be able to get on a long haul flight. That was about two weeks before the images started coming out of Lombardy...

When it became clear the thing had arrived in the UK and nucleated in several sites, I said to kalypso that it might not be a good idea to go to Eastercon, as it would be the con crud to end all con crud. This proved to be a wise decision, even if the concom were unable to cancel the hotel conference venue booking until the announcement by the Prime Minister that all such gatherings were not happening for the foreseeable future.

kalypso lives less than half an hour's walk from me, and we have dinner together on most Saturdays. We have seen each other in person a handful of times in the last eight months. I have not seen any other people I know other than Other Half and my colleagues. I see my colleagues because I'm a key worker who can't work from home, so I've been going into the office all year. I don't much enjoy being on public transport, but I think it's better for my mental health than working from home would have been. All work that can possibly done at home with workarounds is being reserved for the clinically vulnerable people who are shielding so they can spend at least part of the day doing something useful, and even so one of them eventually came back into the office, because as he said, you can only paint the garden fence so many times.

Other Half is working from home, because his employer has shut the physical site and the staff are now living on Zoom. I could do without this on the days I'm on leave or come home early...

On the personal plus side, I only went to A&E once this year, and for reasons that were neither Covid nor my existing medical problems and/or medication for same. As for the latter, they have stabilised well enough that one outpatients department has said they don't need to see me any more and the other doesn't need to talk to me other than by telephone.

The remainder of the year was basically dealing with the Covid fallout at work, involving backlogs, trying to keep staff and customers safe, and everyone setting up and learning the new video links that were just being piloted for rollout over an extended period of time when all of sudden they were needed *right* *now*. Oh, and the elderly database that I keep muttering about on Twitter about the jam tomorrow replacement? Don't even ask.

As for how terrifying this is - quite a lot. But for some of us there is also this, slightly lengthened from my Twitter post on Christmas Eve:

A strange and unpleasant chain of thought this evening. The now traditional Christmas Eve TV offering of The Snowman often reminds me of another Raymond Briggs book. I'm old enough to remember the decommissioning of most of the UK's civil defence siren network after the end of the Cold War.

Part of the justification was that by then private telephones were so ubiquitous that in most areas any warning needed could be sent by automated telephone calls to the entire country. A telephone message could be customised to the particular warning needed. The spread of home internet and mobile phones made this an even better option.

I'm a child of the Cold War. I still sometimes have That Nightmare when woken by a thunderstorm.

I never dreamed that the first time I would see the civil defence warning system in operation would be for a pandemic.

On the whole, I think I prefer the pandemic. Or at least *this* pandemic, horrific though it is.

Thank you, Stanislav Petrov, that I am still here to be able to make such a comparison.

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Armistice Day

A few days late, because on Armistice Day itself I was busy being a key worker in an office with too much work and not enough workers. I didn't go to the Remembrance Sunday at the village cenotaph, because it would have been selfish to do so this year. Covid has changed so many things.

Busy or not, the office paused for two minutes on Wednesday. We're within earshot of the signal maroon fired at the town hall so we always have a clear start and end. In between there is silence. Time to reflect; this year also on the work the armed services do in times of peace. We're not that far from one of the Nightingale hospitals, built in part with skilled labour provided by the military. It's a reminder that they're not just there to fight other humans.

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Heather Boyd - Engaging the enemy

My Kobo is whining at me to remove some books so it has room to update its operating system. This means that there may be book logging activity. "Review" is possibly a little optimistic, as that implies thoughtful consideration rather than "I read this book and this is what it is about". First up:


Heather Boyd - Engaging the enemy

This one's part historical romance and part mystery, doing a good job of weaving them together. Leopold Randall was forced by his uncle, a very wicked duke indeed, to do his bidding with the whereabouts of Leopold's kidnapped siblings as ransom for his obedience. Now Leopold is back to look for clues after the death of his uncle. It's all he wants, but he finds his cousin's widow in need of help to protect her young son, the current Duke of Romsey - and Leopold holds no grudge against a young child.

Mercy has no good reason to have liked her father-in-law, but after his death she's at her wit's end trying to keep the estate running without help, and that's without the anonymous threats she's been receiving. Her late husband's cousin might be the help she needs. She readily gives him permission to look through the old man's papers in exchange for help sorting those papers out.

I liked this a lot, particularly the way that Leopold and Mercy have both been manipulated and used by the old duke, giving them a shared interest in working together to solve past and present mysteries. I'm not entirely convinced by Mercy chasing after Leopold quite so brazenly in a setting with serious consequences for her if she's caught, but I can certainly see why she wants him after even a short acquaintance, and why he wants her. It's a pity that the book had a very bad case of greengrocer's apostrophe - "whoops, there's an s coming up!". It was so distracting that I very nearly gave up reading a few chapters in, and it would have been a shame if I had.

The book's the first in a series, but can be read as a standlone.

Purchase links (including some affiliate links): https://books2read.com/u/bQdxgD

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Hello, I am still here

We live in interesting times and that subject line is a good deal less flippant than I would like it to be. Anyway, I am still going to work, on the bus, which is still mostly empty, which makes me feel a little better.

We had a confirmed case of Covid in the office, together with two people reporting suspicious symptoms, which meant that on Monday morning the rest of of us were told to make ourselves scarce until the building had been deep cleaned. I would prefer less interesting reasons to have an unexpected most-of-day off, but since I was hanging around the town centre long enough to make sure we weren't going to get called back in [*], I went comfort-shopping at the local discount fabric shop. I now have still more Wols, plus some nice garden print cotton fabric and autumn leaves print cotton fabric, and plain dye polycotton; masks, for the making of. I resisted the temptation to get even more fabric Just In Case, because that lot will keep me going for a while.

[*we were on one hour stand-by to get ourselves back to the office should the deep cleaning crew be available immediately, but since we were getting paid time off for the period we were turfed out this wasn't unreasonable.]

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Another week of nonsense

Two posts within seven days. Gosh. Anyway, the news is that there is no news. The database continues to fall over, the office continues to be horribly short-staffed as Covid self-isolation hits different groups (another evacuation for deep clean after someone tested positive, yay!), and I have continued to spend so much time staring at a monitor at work that I have no remaining capacity to do so when I get home.

I did manage to get a parcel of masks off to one friend and a parcel of books off to another last Saturday in spite of having arrived at the post office with only fifteen minutes left to closing time. Missed the last collection, but Monday rather than Saturday collection is fairly irrelevant, and I know at least one parcel arrived.

I've just "read" my reading page, and here "read" means "very briefly skimmed plus read a long discussion in the comments on one of james_davis_nicoll 's posts". I'm simply not physically capable of reading lots of stuff on a monitor by week's end. This is actually side-effects of my migraine meds (slight double vision when tired) on top of migraine effects, so upping the dose to suppress the migraine effects is not really going to work.

I hate Ravelry's new interface, for the reasons above...

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Your early August "still here"

It's been an interesting couple of months. I am still working in the office, because we physically can't work at home for various reasons, other than the workarounds set up for the people who are shielding - which require people physically in the office for those workarounds to be possible. Much of this is because the database can't be accessed from outside the building, again for various reasons. We were promised a New! Shiny! database before all of this kicked off, because we had problems with the old database directly traceable to it basically being the Windows XP version of what was either a Windows Me or Windows 3.1 database (I have heard different origin myths). Said New Shiny will be accessible from outside the building. We were promised that the New Shiny would be here last autumn. We are still being promised that it will be here in autumn. The more cynical amongst us have enquired "which autumn?"

Anyway. I have had aura or actual migraine all week, not serious but enough to keep me off my home computer, and aura for a couple of weeks before that, ditto, so no updates. Not many books to report either, because I put my Kobo down somewhere inside the house and kept forgetting to find it, only to find that I had nothing to read on the bus but whatever was on my phone. It turned out that I had put the Kobo down somewhere near my computer, because I'd been intending to write brief reviews of the previous couple of books I'd read...

I have at least made some masks. Not quite enough masks yet to allow for spousal unit suddenly needing some when they became mandatory in shops, but getting there - I have enough but no spares should they be forgotten on laundry day.

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Still here

It occurs to me that I should post here just to reassure those who do not follow my wittering on Twitter that I am in fact still here.

Actual content is probably not going to appear for a while, even though I have books wot I have read that I want to tell you about. Work is taking up all available clock cycles.

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