yes good day.

Sep. 26th, 2025 10:19 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

I cannot tell if it's that I'm asleep, or that I'm Not A Biologist, or just that this paragraph (from The Challenge of Pain, Melzack & Wall) is actually very, but I am... struggling to persuade it to resolve into meaning:

Embryological and anatomical studies of fish, amphibians, and reptiles reveal that, even in the lowest vertebrates, reflexes are created by internuncial cells that link the sensory input to the motor output. During embryological development in these species, behaviour becomes increasingly a function of earlier sensory inputs as a result of the memory traces they have etched into the neural connections. Behaviour, then, is not merely the expression of a response to a stimulus, but a dynamic process comprising multiple interacting factors. Coghill (1929) was the first to propound this principle, based on his brilliant neuroembryological-behavioural studies of salamanders, which has been substantially confirmed by later investigators. Given this fundamental principle -- that organisms are not passive receivers manipulated by environmental inputs but act dynamically on those inputs so that behaviour becomes variable, unique and creative -- the remainder of evolution becomes comprehensible as a gradual development of mechanisms that make each new species increasingly independent of the push-and-pull of environmental circumstances.

Other than (but also, actually, in addition to) being sufficiently puzzled by this that I should definitely Go To Bed: I have caught up (mostly) on the PD e-mail. I completed one EYB indexing project and have been happily rolling around in making a start on the next. I made pastry, and used it as a prompt to unfuck the kitchen some, and then made progress on project Cook All The Things (From This One Book). I went on a Stupid Little Walk for my Stupid Mental Health. I am very very tired, and it has been a good day.

some good things

Sep. 25th, 2025 10:00 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Discount raspberry trifle + freshly toasted flaked almonds. Excellent bonus pudding yes.
  2. Social limb-wiggle! Outside, half under the trees, interspersed with The Toddler being Delighted to see us.
  3. Some successful communication debugging, thus far of the "okay, well, we now have a better understanding of the shape of the problem" variety rather than in the "... and we've implemented a solution" sense, which is still useful progress.
  4. Successfully got a bunch of other people's stuff out of my house and headed back to its people, even though this involved both Actually Parcelling It Up and then a whole entire trip to the post office. Good Job Alex.
  5. FRIEND HAS FINISHED ORPHAN BLACK. FRIEND SCREAMED AN APPROPRIATE AMOUNT. I am thrilled she loved it & was willing to yell about it all the way through when I didn't even try to lure her. She got here by herself. I am DELIGHTED. Did I mention I'm delighted? I'm delighted and I've had some Big Feelings and I have ALSO had some brand new-to-me horror from the penultimate episode Revealed unto me! Which is a different kind of delightful!

some good things

Sep. 24th, 2025 08:40 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Today's post brought THREE of my (latest batch of) books from Oxfam, of which two were non-work-related: Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), which [personal profile] recessional mentioned when it was first published and which I am only just now managing to get to, and Chihuly at Kew, the exhibition book for the 2019 installation. I am having so many feelings about getting to flip through professional photography of all this art again. I'm so so pleased.
  2. I mentioned these books to [personal profile] simont, who promptly went "hold on, isn't that the one that has a good Wikipedia article?" Turns out it very much is.
  3. To my delight, despite the fact that I'd not been to the plot in something like two and a half weeks (between ten days away and the post-event collapse seguing immediately into A Cold that A brought home for us) all of the peppers various in the greenhouse were looking perfectly happy with themselves. HURRAH for Svaemskog terracotta watering bits + 2l drinks bottles. This is actually the happiest the chillis have been all year, given my... erratic... ability to leave the house; I am looking forward enthusiastically to the fruits of Expanding The System Further next year.
  4. The ancient spinach seed is coming up! In vast quantities! That I was expecting to be dead and thus sowed all of across half a bed! There is going to be SO much spinach and even I will get to turn some of it into seeds for saving purposes, probably, and much of the rest of which I will go "oh right, I have discovered I like adding fresh spinach to the sad emergency noodle pots" about.
  5. Brought home A Pannier Full Of Food, about which I am feeling very good given the Neglect. I am looking forward to turning a suitable array of tomatoes into part of the ongoing cooking project (at which point I will have some leftover puff pastry, so will also do the banana tarte tatin).

(I have not today achieved my Assigned Reading, by which I mean "30 pages of The Challenge of Pain, with notes", because instead I finished reading the last five pages of yesterday's thirty pages and still need to go back and Make My Notes on, like, twenty of those pages. I am learning so much neuroanatomy good grief. But there is bread, and there is yoghurt, and there is drying laundry, and I went to the plot, and I have started digging myself back out from under my pile of PD e-mails, and there was an excellent sunset.)

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

A little while ago I got Stable cortical body maps before and after amputation via an NIH press release; today it was *Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia in people with chronic disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis...

... which dovetails neatly with the bits I just got out of The Painful Truth (Monty Lyman) about the bidirectional relationship between insomnia and pain, where each worsens the other but insomnia worsens pain more. (It's bedtime, so I'm not going to pick the book back up to get you those onward references just now.) With n = 5232, and their conditions including "cancer, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and stroke", "CBT-I was associated with significantly improved outcomes" (for insomnia severity, and moderately improved outcomes for sleep efficiency and sleep onset latency).

What'll be next? WHO KNOWS.

vital functions

Sep. 21st, 2025 08:22 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

[... sorry about the template, I hit return in the title field and IT POSTED. details to appear shortly. :-p]

Reading. Ann Leckie, Monty Lyman, Ronald Melzack & Patrick D. Wall )

Writing. ... I have actually put some more notes into The Document.

So many lost property e-mails. (And at some point I'm going to need to start replying to them, too.)

Watching. On YouTube: True Facts: Bats, The Science Of The Hunt. NSFW. Definitely... An Experience.

Cooking. ... yeah no I managed to make veg spag bol on Friday but otherwise we've mostly just been feeling faintly sorry for ourselves. Okay, no, that's not quite true, I did also achieve baked potato on Wednesday.

Eating. Misc takeaway from The Field (leftover Sunday night curry for dinner on Tuesday; leftover vegetable fried rice + Szechuan tofu for breakfast on same...). I remain mildly resentful that the Wagamama menu still does not contain any of My Favourites.

Growing. The second attempt at pineapple has NEW LEAVES. The second attempt at lemongrass is maybe Going? And other than that I have no idea because I have spectacularly failed to make it to the plot this week.

Observing. BATS. A variety of excellent dahlias and passion flowers on a Trip To Town (post office, pharmacy).

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

... and doesn't quite make it.

On page 187 (of 218), we finally get this paragraph:

At this point we need to return to a crucial caveat. In most cases of persistent pain, whatever caused the initial injury has healed. Pain is now the primary disease. But there are a number of cases where there is continual damage that triggers nociceptive fibres; chronic inflammatory diseases are good examples. It is also important to point out that not every case of back pain is our brain's overreaction. A small -- but important -- minority of cases are caused by serious conditions -- cancer, some infections, spinal fractures and the nerve-compressing cauda equina syndrome -- but these can usually be ruled out by doctors, who will be on the lookout for 'red flag' symptoms. However, in the majority of cases of persistent pain (and over 90% of cases of back pain), there is no longer any identifiable tissue damage; our brain has become hypersensitive.

In a book that otherwise dedicates a lot of time to talking about gender and racial inequalities in healthcare access, including a solid half-paragraph on how common and how painful endometriosis (a chronic inflammatory condition!) is, the bit where "well this only applies to most people..." gets breezed past is certainly causing me more feelings. And yet it's still the closest anything I've read so far actually gets to engaging with the fact that the rest of us exist, so... no get-out-of-writing-essays-free card for me here, alas.

(The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, mostly pretty good and definitely got me to think constructively about a few things -- like the merits of classical vs contemporary Pilates for my specific usecase via discussion of knitting -- and introduced me to some more, like open-label placebos and "safe threats" and the impact of paracetamol on empathy. It's incomplete, but not disrecommended.)

[growth] pineapple is go!

Sep. 18th, 2025 07:19 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

A little while ago the toddler's household told me that you could turn the top of a pineapple into a whole entire pineapple plant (with the caveat that at least 60% of the time it goes mouldy). My first attempt at this had got as far as growing a whole entire root network but then suffered a Tragic Incident from which it never recovered; the second had been sat around with partially-browned but no-longer-becoming-more-browned and definitely-still-partially-green leaves for Quite Some Time. I had more or less hit the point of "... is this actually doing anything? at all?" and then upon my return from the most recent round of Adventures I rotated it in service of watering it, to discover...

a pineapple crown, growing a whole new set of leaves

... that it's growing a WHOLE NEW SET OF LEAVES. Look at it go! I am very excited!

(My understanding is that if I manage to keep it alive that long it'll take somewhere in the region of 3 years to fruit, and then in the fashion of all bromeliads will die having produced said single fruit. Happily this is about the rate at which we eat fresh pineapple...)

I have had the call

Sep. 17th, 2025 05:17 pm
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

Or rather the text message to book my covid & flu vaccinations. "For 75+ and immunosuppressed". I just double-checked and "have had a blood cancer" is still top of the NHS list of qualifying conditions, so that's my armour when the GP surgery gatekeepers are like, you're too young and you might be DEPRIVING someone of this vaccine who NEEDS it. (This has been the conversation the last three times I got invited to get vaccinated, sigh, and then they get a manager to look at my medical record, and then they grudgingly admit that maybe I can has jabs.)

Date is the Saturday when all the Cambridge undergraduates arrive, so just in time. I'll mostly be avoiding students for the first couple weeks of term to let the freshers flu play out, but I will be playing ice hockey so not entirely. Also getting in and out of the city centre that day may be entertaining, probably best done on foot.

tired. so tired.

Sep. 16th, 2025 10:24 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Have spent most of the day asleep.

  1. Attempt #2 at pineapple-from-trimmed-top has NEW LEAVES.
  2. I am also fairly sure that attempt #2 at lemongrass is taller than it was when we set off on our terrible adventures about ten days ago.
  3. Actual bed. Favourite mattress.
  4. I got to make someone's entire day by sending an "... I think I have your object" e-mail.
  5. Leftovers for dinner: curry from the crew party on Sunday night. Didn't have to think about food. Extremely grateful for this fact.

hello rabbitholes

Sep. 15th, 2025 08:00 am
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

The Kpop Demon Hunters situation has progressed past "watch a second time", through "listen to soundtrack on repeat" and is now at "find and listen to as many covers and remixes of my favourite tracks as I can".

vital functions

Sep. 14th, 2025 11:59 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Tiny bits of Solutions and Other Problems and The Painful Truth.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac.

Exploring. Chester, including Chester Zoo!

Eating. Almost all of my favourite field foods, including raspberry and lemon curd toasties, noodle pots with the addition of the prepped salad bits (spinach! red onion!), the giant lemon and sugar crepes, and flapjack. ("Almost" because the cake options CHANGED.)

Observing. The Milky Way. Something that might have been some kind of satellite or might have been some kind of shooting star. CHESTER ZOO, etc. At least one field bat.

Milestone

Sep. 14th, 2025 02:28 pm
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

Cambridge Kodiaks B played our first WNIHL game yesterday, against Invicta Dynamics in Gillingham. We had seven players making their WNIHL debut, including me. As team manager I'm delighted, as newbie player I had pre-game nerves for the first time in months, and the biggest smile on my face afterwards.

We lost, but that's almost not the point. Here's a team I didn't even think would exist three months ago, and we've made it happen, creating opportunities for players to grow and develop. One game down, 19 to go (and a playoff game against the North division next May to aim for ...)

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