unexpected colour schemes

Today D rented a van and we helped a relative of V's with clearing his mum's house. Much like my grandma she was a nice old lady who lived in the same house for a squillion years and now that she's gone the little house needs a lot of work.

I am distant enough from the lady in question that while I think of her fondly I was able to go through the kitchen pretty ruthlessly. I'm sad for the jar of Nescafe she only used half of, the kitchen equipment that clearly belonged to people who lived cooking and food, and the amazing mid-century kitchen items I kept running across. Even things that reminded me of my own childhood or my other grandma (the one who had money for this kind of stuff; the one who just died never did).

I managed to resist the urge to bring back everything I wanted, but I did take several kilner jars -- brand name! and many brand new -- a lovely set of metal measuring spoons, and corn-on-the-cob holders that are so exactly like what I grew up with that I struggle to eat corn on the cob any other way.

V assures me that Pam would be delighted to see the things getting used.

I'm sad I couldn't do this task with my own grandma's house, but I feel a lot better now that I've been able to do it for someone. I hope I was able to make the point to the relative that a lot of the work he is doing is mental and emotional, and the physical stuff we did is the least of it.

I stayed in London last night, an extremely good idea after a ten-hour work day full of travel, the last thing I wanted was almost three more hours' travel to get home.

So I worked from the London office (gosh I sound like a wanker saying things like this) for most of today -- my manager suggested yesterday that I sleep in or leave early but I couldn't do much of either because of long-planned engagement with campaigners where I'd have really been letting my team down if I wasn't around.

So when I booked this train ticket I calculated that if I left right as that meeting finished this afternoon I'd be able to get the last train before afternoon peak time (which rendered my ticket unusable) would start.

And I would've been right but of course the meeting overran. Campaigners!

I got to Euston like six minutes before my train, so I didn't have time to go ask for passenger assistance. But since they have display screens I can actually read now, I could try to run and get the train myself.

Platform 3. So far so good. I rushed there, fishing out my work phone as I did because I have an e-ticket.

I have an e-ticket because I've had problems collecting paper tickets from the inaccessible machine or the office that's staffed for two hours early in the morning...except when it's not.

Neither paper tickets nor e-tickets are actually accessible.

Normally this is better (although I couldn't charge my phone today because Apple chargers suck and also my work laptop sucks but whatever).

But the app logged me out!

It never logs me out! It was fine yesterday! There was no warning or anything.

I was at the ticket barrier freaking out, shaking so I couldn't type my email address or password.

Even when I did finally manage it, it demanded a code sent to the email address. Which Outlook hid from me (all the other many many emails I get from this benighted institution go to the Focused inbox but for some reason these went to Other, which I don't get notifications of and which are more difficult to locate. Especially when you're freaking out because your train is visible and you can't get to it yet.)

I had to ask for another code and then I had to pay attention to which was the newer one so I didn't use the older one. This website has been known to lock me out for twenty minutes when I got my password wrong twice, so I was terrified of that happening too.

I copied the code and pasted it accordingly. Only at this point did I remember that my work phone doesn't let me paste anything. Because it lets me copy things as normal, oh yeah, no problem there. But when I try to paste them, my phone instead spits out a sentence something like "Your organisation does not allow data to be copied" or something like that. It tells you off. For expecting that you might ever want to copy something even when you have logged in with the same account to Teams and Outlook and Word and SharePoint... Surely no one ever needs to copy things right? Especially not a blind person who now has to memorize a string of random numbers...

My session timed out.

I had to start over again from the beginning. The shaky typing of my email address, the concentration it took to make sure my password was right when it's just showing up as a row of black dots... Getting a new email and knowing at least to check the Other inbox for it now. Trying to paste the six digits because my panicky brain had already forgotten that I couldn't. I had to do that three times before I got it to work.

I was almost in tears by that point.

I had also gone from hoping that the staff member standing just the other side of the ticket gates would help me, to worrying that he was seeing me about to cry or scream or more obviously have a panic attack, to wondering how Euston finds its staff because they really are an extraordinarily unhelpful bunch. I tried to imagine being as physically close as he was to any living being in such obvious distress as I was and just not reacting in any way.

When I finally got logged in and could access the lovely magical QR code, I tried to line up my phone and the scanner -- which is ridiculously hard to do, two smooth featureless panes of glass, and I find it ridiculously difficult not to accidentally touch any part of my phone screen in the process of trying to hold the phone there because if I do it'll select something, close the app, do something to ensure that the QR code isn't available for the scanner...

Turns out I was trying to use the outbound part of the ticket and not the return part.

This whole time the staff member stayed so exactly on the other side of the ticket barrier from me that when it finally opened for me I almost had to shove him out of the way.

Nothing but empty space in either direction and he still didn't move.

I can't help but think he didn't expect me to actually get through and get on my fucking train. I know that kind of stuff sounds paranoid but, it's not like it'd be the first time someone was waiting to laugh at a disabled person being prevented from doing something ordinary that everyone else is managing to do.

But: fuck that guy and fuck the app and fuck Microsoft and Apple because despite them all I did get my train and now I'm happily back home.

Today hasn't been a great day in a lot of ways, but I was able to send an online pal €20, about a quarter of what the short Chinese language class costs that they want to take (and the textbook). That made the difference between them not being able to register for the class and being excited now to start it next week.

I don't like to brag about stuff like this, but on some days it's really good to have it to hold on to.

After an intensely frustrating morning for diffrentcolours which upended our plan for today, and after a stressful and frustrating evening yesterday too, I suggested he might like to go see the new Fantastic Four movie, because I know he'd been wanting to do that and it seemed like a nice treat when I really wanted a nice thing to happen for him.

It's good to see a movie about how important global cooperation on building infrastructure and sharing resources is!

The winner of today is angelofthenorth who, when I realized at the bus stop on the way to the gym that I'd forgotten to grab my headphones, lent me hers (she was going swimming and couldn't use them anyway).

The gym playing Happy Radio (which includes plodding song in minor keys with depressing lyrics!) is bad enough but today it had Smooth FM on! Who wanted to get their reps in while the Carpenters sing "every shalalalala"?!

The Calvin Harris albums on my phone did a pretty good job of drowning out them and Celine Dion and so on.

But when some guy had just swiped my kettlebell when I put down next to my foot so I could rest before my last set (my gym doesn't seem to have very high awareness of sets... or putting things back where they belong so people can find them and not trip over them -- it's a lot more about young men showing off for each other -- so I appreciate he saw someone staring into space and figured any nearby equipment had been abandoned), and just as I was finishing the final set with the next-size-up kettlebell that the universe was apparently telling me it was time for, a new song started and I thought to myself no, I draw the line at that fucking Chris Isaak song, I'm done.

I left just in time to miss both buses home and get sworn at by a scrote on an e-bike for not getting out of his way when I hadn't seen his black-clothed black-bike no-lights ass coming right at me in the dark on the sidewalk. But I still think I left at just the right time!

There's a scene in The Thick of It where someone (I think it's either Glen or Alex Macqueen's character Julius Nicholson) is looking for a radio to put the test match on, and Ollie scofffs that they should just listen online, and Glen says listening to radio online is like making coffee in the microwave.

I immediately loved this.

I can't tell you how it's perfect but it feels perfect.

Anyway my radio stopped working so I'm listening on my phone now and I think about this line all the goddam time.

As with coffee in the microwave, I'd probably rather have none at all than deal with this. It's bad because with the radio I could flip an actual tactile switch, I didn't even have to take my eyes off my work, and now I have to pick up the distraction rectangle and tap tap a bunch on its unhelpful featureless glass carapace to get the music back on, and by the time I've done that I am probably playing games or answering messages.

D had already looked up dab radios when mine started dying, but today he just sent me a link to one and said "I can buy this from Argos, we can pick it up today."

I was torn between finding this very charming and worrying that I'd become so annoying he just bought me a radio to stop my whining about it, heh.