Better

 

Today's been better.* My chief task for what's left of the week is not to re-destroy myself by trying to catch up.** I may not have adhered too well to this plan today, due to circumstances (mostly) beyond my control: today was Peter's Falling Down Clinic. Finally. The first thing that went wrong was that I remembered, most of the way back to the mews to pick Peter up, that I'd set the alarm at the cottage with the hellhounds there. Oops.*** So if Peter ever had meltdowns he'd've had a meltdown by the time I did pick him up, but fortunately he doesn't.† We were still about five minutes late, pedal to the metal or no.

This was an evaluation rather than a practical session, and I was thinking, as Professional Medical Person with a Speciality in Falling Down #1 went through her list of questions, that Peter and I together are such a pair of crocks. I'm the only one still driving, for example, but I have ME, so I can't guarantee to drive very far—I have ME and I'm menopausal, which means I have no memory††. On the way to the hospital Peter and I had been working out when things happened—so, did the man with the green cape swing through the window before or after the giant anaconda got next door's daughter-in-law and the dog she used to let crap all over the courtyard?—and I'm not at all sure I'd've passed that basic memory test hospital admin always give you before they assign you a sticking plaster or let you use the loo†††.  But fortunately I didn't have to take it so I sort of hummed to myself and tried to look blithe.

Prof Med Per with a Spec in Fall D #2 is the physio who will come to the mews in a few weeks [sic, sigh, more waiting] to teach Peter some postural and core-strengthening exercises, and after I got back from feeding more money into the car park meter‡ I finally remembered that I'd brought my knitting. So the three and a half hours we were at the hospital weren't a total waste. And I really liked the doctor. She had great shoes. Okay, so did I. I had felt that I needed particularly great shoes today‡‡

The doctor's sense of time, however, is similar to mine, so when I asked her if she could give me a guess about how much longer, she told me ten minutes, which proved to mean forty. I did not get a ticket for being nearly fifteen minutes over in the car park‡‡‡ . . . but I couldn't get a phone signal in the hospital, outdoors still couldn't pick up Colin's mobile at all, and (we figured out later) was leaving a message for Niall while he was listening to his messages and had not, of course, thought to check for messages coming in while he was checking his messages (AAAAAUGH) . . . and so I got back to the cottage twenty minutes late to two blokes sitting on my steps and, astonishingly, smiling. Colin had remembered that you can't get a signal at the hospital, and had therefore figured out what had happened.

So we still rang handbells. Late. We even had a go at Cambridge, which was not amazing or anything, except in terms of its not being amazing it wasn't worse. And I am going to sing tonight, because in theory I'm taking my music around with me to the lion's . . . I mean, to nice kindly Oisin tomorrow. Supposing I'm upright again tomorrow. Which would be nice. I also have more little mail-order green things to plant out/pot on. I don't have time to have ME. Um. . . .

* * *

* My recovery was set back dramatically by that frelling cover. BELLE LA CATIN^ ET LE THING THAT LIVES UNDER THE STAIRS. Sous l'escalier. Something. And for those of you who prefer Mlle A un Décolleté Plongeant to the blue-feather girl . . . not me, guys. I'd rather look like some publisher's bad idea of Joanna Russ or James Tiptree Jr than some publisher's bad idea of a bodice-ripper with added bestiality.

^ Maren or Julia or someone, how rude is 'catin'? I'm looking for something like 'trollop' or 'strumpet'.+ Not something to give Tante Gladys palpitations.

+ I did take French in school, not that anyone could tell now, but it didn't cover strumpets.

** I do feel that another bat in the house last night was an unamicable spur toward necessary functionality. We got back to the cottage what passes in our case for early and as soon as I took the hellhounds' harnesses off they shot over to the garden door and stood pointing at something and wagging their tails. Uh oh. But when I followed them there didn't seem to be anything . . . except for a rather squishy looking brown lump of the sort that my hellhounds wouldn't dream of leaving indoors. I looked at the lump. Nervously. I then shooed hellhounds upstairs, knelt by the (motionless) lump and touched it^ ever-so-delicately with a finger. OH GODS IT'S SOFT AND WARM AND FURRY. Funny how clearly even a self-squashed lump under a door sill isn't a mouse. It's way too dark, but it's also the wrong shape: wing-folded bats—at least little pipistrelles—are square. At this point it tried to press itself even farther under the door sill, but there wasn't room. I don't know why it wasn't bouncing off the walls like the last one, but given that human functionality was at a low ebb, I was grateful. I would have been more grateful for an absence of bat, but that wasn't one of the options.

At this rate I'm going to have to start keeping a pair of gardening gloves indoors, for dealing with small uninvited visitors.^^ I thought about it—hastily, in case it decided to go for wall-bouncing after all—and fetched the dustpan and a dustcloth, dropped the latter over it^^^, scooped it into the dustpan^^^^, opened the kitchen door, and tipped it gently out. It wasn't there an hour later when hellhounds went out for the last time, so I'm assuming it flew away. May it have needed to eat twice as many mosquitoes and midges to recover from its adventure.

^ See how completely I trust my hellhounds not to leave squishy brown lumps about the place. If they're in trouble, they howl to be let out.

^^ First however I am going to consult the Bat Squad again. Where are my visitors getting in? The screens over my open windows are undisturbed, and I no longer leave unscreened windows open, because I got tired of the mosquitoes, flies, wasps, bees, and giant spiders, although I'm afraid giant spiders will just laser a hole in my screen and come in anyway.

^^^ I tweeted this, and hamaker88 tweeted back, you'd hiss at someone who dropped a dustcloth over you. My response, with dignity, is, I would not, I would yell. And it was a clean dustcloth.

^^^^ If small bat jaws are too weak to bite through human skin successfully, there has to be some other reason America, for example, is quite so hysterical about rabid bats? Is this because you don't want to deal with a potentially rabid critter at all, and a very sensible attitude that is too, or that rabid bats bite other things that are large enough to bite humans?

*** I have a house alarm because almost everyone in this town does, and you don't want to be the only one who doesn't. And I have the Delete the Room with the Animals in It option, but I have to remember to use it.

† What happened? he said calmly. Gibber gibber gibber gibber gibber, I said.

†† See: set house alarm with hellhounds in house.

††† Although may I say that 'who is the current monarch' with that woman with the terrible taste in hats having been it for pushing sixty years is a lot less testing than 'who is the president of the United States' which is the one I used to be used to.

‡ Where I found a harried- and forlorn-looking young woman with a tiny in a pushchair standing in the middle of the road, who said to me hopelessly, I don't suppose you have change for a five? I did, for a wonder. I don't generally. And while yes, you should think of these things before you get to the car park, you're less likely to be thinking clearly if you need to be parking in a hospital car park in the first place.

‡‡ Tiger stripes. Sequins. They don't photo all that well, but I can give it a try if you like.

‡‡‡ Either because of that good karma I acquired by giving the young woman change for her fiver, or because the car park attendants know about doctors' sense of time.