Queer by Choice

For the last few weeks I've been watching an old British show, Waterloo Road, which has something like 250 episodes, so I was hoping it would keep me occupied for many more weeks. However, Amazon has now decided to remove it, so for the last few days every time I start to watch an episode I get the warning that this season will only be on Prime for x more number of days. I'm only up to season 3 so I'm very disappointed to miss out on many more seasons, and I've been binge-watching to get season 3 finishes before it disappears. Only one episode to go now, which I should be able to watch tomorrow. (This morning when I started watching, the time remaining was in hours, not days.)

Today started out fine but humid, then in the late morning it got really dark and there was thunder and very heavy rain in the early afternoon. Now it's clear and sunny again.

I almost didn't go to parkrun this morning because there was a slight chance of rain, plus the humidity was very high, plus I had a slight headache. However, I got myself into gear and went along, planning to walk the whole thing, but I ended up doing 1 minute walk/30 second run intervals and not being much slower than when I run more. Sweat was dripping off me by the end, but my headache disappeared at some point.

My sister, less than two weeks after her operation, is now up to walking 5 km/3 miles in slightly more than an hour (about half her usual pace). So much for the doctor who told her she should aim to be walking for about half an hour within 2 to 6 weeks. She is finding it hard to keep to such a slow pace.

I'm reading the book "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn Williams, and now I feel dirty if I look at Facebook. In case you haven't heard of it, the author worked at Facebook for about seven years and it's basically an expose of all the horrible behind the scenes practices, and how little any of the senior people including Zuckerberg care about the damage it does in the world. I would close my FB account except that some of my family members still post there, but it's changed so much in the last few years that I already spend a lot less time there than I used to.

LJ is still not working properly. Today it is refusing to load my friends' feed.

So far it's pleasantly cool(ish) today, but very humid. I went for a walk around 6:30 am when the humidity was in the low 90% range. Yesterday I got myself motivated to go for a run. It was similarly humid but I did it anyway. We've had loud thunderstorms with some heavy rain the last couple of evenings, but the humidity never goes down.

With the weather being so warm and humid these past couple of weeks I've been very unmotivated to do any running. I've been walking instead, and even that isn't much fun although I do feel good that I did it. Checking back in my LJ, I discovered that two years ago I was doing a lot more running in the summer than I am this year. I seem to have become less motivated this summer. I spent most of last summer in Connecticut and I didn't do much running there because there are no trails and barely any footpaths around my daughter's, plus it was very hot for most of the time I was there. I did walk most days and I did do some running; the neighbourhood streets are fairly quiet and feel safe enough but it's just not as pleasant as it is around here. I don't feel that I'm lacking energy, just motivation. (On the occasional cooler mornings I do go for a run.)

On the clearing out front, my daughter introduced me to a recycling service (trashie.com) which will accept all kinds of fabrics (including socks and underwear) as well as old phones, tablets, and laptops and associated cables/cords. The small catch is that you have to pay for bags (for fabrics) or a box (for tech), but return shipping is free. You order your bags or box/es, stuff them as full as you can, take them to UPS, and done. I've been taking unused clothes to Goodwill, but I haven't known what to do with old computers etc, so this service sounds great to me. I've ordered two boxes because I've got too many old laptops, tablets, and phones for one.

After a couple of cooler low humidity nights, it's back to more normal conditions for this time of year: stifling humid nights when the temperature doesn't fall below about 74°F/24°C. Ugh. I think we had a tiny bit of rain during the night and I know it rained lightly for a while this morning, but the rain just helped the humidity stay high.

I've been working away at flower granny squares for the last few days. I get one done every day while I'm watching a show, and I've basically got the pattern memorised now.

I seem to have a new sleep pattern lately. I have a few bad nights in a row, where I can't get to sleep or I wake up too early or I wake up often during the night, then comes a night where I can't keep my eyes open for long enough to stay up until my normal bedtime. Last night was the night for not being able to stay awake, and I slept well, but still felt slightly tired when I got up this morning.

Today's photo prompt is "urgent", so I walked over to the nearby Urgent Care place to take a photo of all their signage, then continued on to the nearest Giant supermarket to take a photo of their signage for an upcoming prompt of "giant". The walk to and from Giant turned out to be slightly longer than I had thought and I ended up covering about 8 km/5 miles. I wasn't unhappy about that but I was getting very hungry by the time I got home as I'd only had one piece of toast at around 5 am before I left.

When I got back I found my new phone had been delivered in my absence, so after breakfast I spent about an hour getting it set up. The thing that took the longest was transferring my Signal account over from my old phone, but that was essential because that's what we use for the photo challenges.

It's not extremely hot today (about 28°C/83°F) but it's cloudy and feels very oppressive and the forecast says there's a chance of showers.

My morning started off okay even though I was awake well before my alarm went off and ended up getting up early. It was a pleasantly mild morning (about 19°C/67°F) and I was very much enjoying my walk, stopping to take photos every so often for the photo challenge, until I dropped my phone getting it out of my pocket, and the screen smashed. The phone still works but there are cracks all over the screen. I'm really annoyed with myself. I do actually have a couple of other phones I could use. One is a very old cheap RCA phone I bought to try out using a smartphone, and the other is what used to be S's phone, a Samsung Galalxy-something. The RCA phone is lighter and smaller than any phone I've had since but the camera quality isn't great. The Samsung seems to be good quality but is horribly hard to use. S used to really struggle with it because the on-screen keyboard was very cramped, and I have the same problem. I don't understand how two phones which are about the same size (my now-damaged Pixel phone and the Samsung) could give such different keyboard experiences. Yes, the Pixel keyboard is small because it's on a phone, but it's definitely not as fiddly to use as the one on the Samsung. I'll probably keep using the broken Pixel until the end of the month (i.e. until the end of the current photo challenge, because everything is set up on that phone to take photos and easily share them to Signal) and then put the SIM card into one of the other phones. (Unless pieces of screen start falling out…)

I walked home past the post office and stopped to look at the sign up sheets for the Fourth of July Fun Run just because, not because I was planning to run in it. I was glad I'd made that decision, because unlike previous years when they've had a category for women over 60, this year the highest level was "Masters - Women 40+, and there's no way I want to be in a category with women more than 30 years younger than me. It's not a race, but they do note who comes first in each category and make an announcement at the lunchtime gathering. Looking at the categories, I was impressed that there was one for "Non-binary", although no age was given for that and at the time I was there, nobody had put their name in that group.

This feels like the most pleasant weather we've ever had for this holiday. Usually it's at least 90°F/30°+C; right now it's still only about 78°F/25°C. In spite of the weather, I chose not to attend the festivities this year. It's not *my* holiday.

Yesterday afternoon and into the evening we had a succession of dramatic thunderstorms and a lot of heavy rain, but today the weather seems to have cleared up and the temperature is much lower than it has been for the last few days. It's still going to be in the 80s/20s for the next few days, but not the 90s/30s we've been having, and the nights will be a lot cooler - actually around 68°F/20°C instead of in the mid 70s/mid 20s.

When we do the family photo challenge there are usually five or six people taking part - my four sisters and I, plus a niece or two. This time, so far only three of us have been posting our photos, and I was wondering why my other two sisters weren't posting. One of them doesn't always post every day, just does catch up posts every so often, but the other one normally posts every day, and usually posts several photos on the topic so it was very unusual not to see her photos. This morning I discovered she is in hospital recovering from emergency surgery for a twisted bowel. The surgery apparently went well and she is doing okay, but from what I read on the internet this could be a very serious thing to have happen.

And just like that, the year is half over.

It was another busy morning, and it started very early because I woke up about 15 minutes before my alarm and couldn't get back to sleep. This was the second short night in a row for me; the previous night I couldn't get to sleep and ended up getting up and reading for an hour or two.

This morning I went for another photo walk but was unsuccessful in my search for something artificial. I was sure I'd seen fake flowers in a yard somewhere around here but I failed to find them this morning. I did see some path lights shaped like sunflowers, but that wasn't what I was looking for.

The rest of the morning included starting some food cooking in the slow cooker, vacuuming half the house, loading up the car with stuff for Goodwill and delivering it with a stop for petrol on the way, and getting a load of washing out on the line. Hanging out the washing might have been a bit optimistic because it's getting cloudy now and there is a severe thunderstorm warning for this afternoon. I'm thinking I'll just bring the washing in and hang it on clothes airers so I don't have to be anxious about it.