I am the Kat that Walks By Itself

We live in a mad world, in which the actions of one person caused a cascade where not one single person considered the possible consequences of their actions. I don't know who the original person was, but there must have been one; the very first person to post on social media about the miracle weight-loss drug, Ozempic. (They didn't mention, or bother to find out, that its primary purpose was to treat diabetes.)

Wow, everyone said, this is amazing, I'm gonna tell everyone I know.

Wow, the newsmedia said, this would make a great story. It won't do any harm, and heck, we don't give a damn if it does any harm, that would make another great story.

Wow, many people said, I'm gonna bug my doctor to prescribe it to me "off-label" (that is, a prescription for a medicine which uses it for something other than what its official purpose is).

Sure, many doctors said, it won't do any harm, it's only for one (two, three, five) of my patients.

Worldwide shortage of Ozempic ensues.

Oh, many doctors said, I'll prescribe Trulicity to my diabetic patients instead.

Worldwide shortage of Trulicity ensues.

And that affects me. Which makes me mad.

This morning I ventured out into the Outside to get a Flu shot from my doctor, and bought some delicious take-away Special Fried Rice for lunch on the way back. It was nice to get out into the lovely sunshine.

However, now, hours later, working on the computer, I started wondering why I'd overdone things with my left arm, when it's usually my right shoulder (the mouse hand) which complains... and then I realised: flu shot. Which was in my left arm. Which is now aching, and my shoulder muscles feel so stiff and hard it makes me think of lockjaw. And speaking of jaws, the left side of my jaw and neck are aching too. Ugh. A not-unusual side-effect of a flu shot. Alas, I think I will not be sleeping well tonight.

So.
Today was Boxing Day. This year my family had decided to spread the Christmas celebration over two days, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Christmas Day was purely for food and talk. Boxing Day was for presents and games. And quite a few of the presents turned out to be games. Ah, my family. My eldest brother is so enamoured of Terraforming Mars that he keeps on buying me extensions for it.

And my slightly-improved-recipe Christmas Pudding Ice Cream (must update the recipe on the website) was a hit, yay.

So the new game I played was Azul, which was rather different from any other game I'd played. In a way, it's like a puzzle game where you try to maximize your points, but you're also playing with other people, and that can affect what resources you can use, because someone else may have picked them up first. So I played two games of that, then I went out to the veranda/deck (this was my eldest brother's place, they usually host family gatherings) to see what the other groups of people were doing. There were four groups of games going at once, two inside, and two outside on the veranda (it's a big deck kind of veranda, with room for a barbeque and a couple of tables... and a hammock). One group were playing Munchkin, and the other were playing Terraforming Mars. I sat down looking at the Terraforming Mars folks for a bit, but then I noticed the hammock and thought it would be nice to relax in.

( Bad move. )

In ten days I will be having new glasses! I finally, finally went to a new occulist (my old one moved) and she made me look at charts and changed around lenses and stuff, and then she looked at my eyes and shone bright lights at them and took photos of the backs of my eyes and all that stuff. She was a cheerful person with a sense of humour.

She let me look at the photos of the back of my eye and pointed out my optic nerve and the nerves going in to it, which she said were looking healthy and that she now had a reference to compare against in future in case anything changed (for the worse). She said my eyes were healthy - yay!

She also said that my long-distance vision was about the same, but my mid and short had changed, and I need multi-focal glasses, which I had pretty much expected, because I have reached the point where I have to take off my glasses to do fine close-up work. So that will take some getting used to. The occulist said it would take me about three days to adjust, so that's not so bad.

So then it was back to the main part of the practice, to look at frames with the Optical Dispenser, an older man who had worked his way up from lens grinder to optical dispenser way back when. They were pleased that I was very quick in deciding what not to put on the short list of frames - some people would still have half the store out in the same amount of time I had whittled it down to five. But there was one which called to me above the others, even though it was very expensive, because it was cute and fun and funky. It has little flowers in the corners, y'see. So that is the one I chose in the end. The occulist liked it because it was "the right shape" (though I'm not sure what the "wrong shape" was). The secretary liked it because it was high quality and would last. The optical dispenser liked it too, though I can't remember if he said why. So we were ALL happy. 8-)

And I get my new glasses in ten days!

On Wednesday morning, I groaned, "I'm going to have to eat porridge." In the interests of having a breakfast which was more solid and sustaining and able to suppress hunger pangs for a longer time, so I could survive until lunch-time. Not that I loathe porridge, it can be quite yummy, but it can also be like eating glue, so my heart sank at the thought.

On Wednesday afternoon, I stumbled across a pin on Pinterest that declared itself to be a recipe for a "Cinnamon Roll Breakfast Smoothie". This was odd, because I was perusing "Hobbies & Crafts" at the time. Mind you, while most of the things in the "Hobbies & Crafts" section are, indeed, hobbies and crafts, there is a certain percentage which have wandered out of their appropriate categories and into this one. Recipes, escaped from "Food & Drink"; party games and party plans (Celebrations & Events); wedding decorations, plans and dresses (Weddings); tattoos (Tattoos - yes, there is a section on Pinterest dedicated solely to tattoos); how to pack for college, decorate your dorm room, pay off your student loans (Education); faaaabulous makeup tips and hairstyles (Hair & Beauty); exercises which will flatten your belly, give you great abs, help you sleep, and home-made remedies to cure everything (Health & Fitness); how to control your screaming toddler, entertain your kids, and what to eat when you're breastfeeding (Kids & Parenting); the best shortcuts on your smartphone, cool gadgets (Technology); gun porn (Sports); and some things which don't really have a category, such as "How To Make $1000 A Month As A Stay At Home Mom"...

Anyway, so I looked at the breakfast smoothie recipe, because, hey, who wouldn't like a smoothie that tasted like a cinnamon roll? And I found that it not only had cinnamon in it, but rolled oats (and yoghurt, and banana, and pecan nuts, and almond milk, and brown sugar...). Could this be a way of having my porridge without having to have porridge? So I then searched for more cinnamon breakfast smoothies to see if there was a recipe which didn't have nuts in it, and there were a few, and I figured the general pattern of the recipes enough that I reckoned I could give it a go without having to slavishly follow one particular recipe. The idea for many of the recipes is to toss rolled oats, natural yoghurt, some sort of fruit, some sort of milk, and optional other things into a container and put it in the fridge overnight, and then blend it together into a smoothie the next morning, and drink it for breakfast. The soaking overnight is presumably to soften up the oats so that it isn't like eating sawdust.

So that very night, I made up my first overnight smoothie, and had it on Thursday morning. It was yummy. So I did it again. Today is the third day, and it seems to be going nicely. Hereby follows the ingredients I chucked in my lidded jug for my smoothies on each day. Amounts? You expect me to remember amounts? Nope.

( here be ingredients )

I am really really really behind on everything. And I should just resign myself to not being able to catch up. I still have to go through the sshg_giftfest and answer emails and read the rest of the ones I missed out on. And fandom_stocking. And whatever else you folk tell me I need to catch up on. But otherwise... (sigh)

First, I was away over Christmas (and have reported about same).
Then, just a couple of days after I got back, I came down with a horrible cold, which has progressed to different phases of horribleness. I suspected something was wrong when, on Sunday, when we were celebrating my father's first anniversary with M, at the end of the afternoon, my voice started getting hoarse. Next day, still hoarse, with a tickle in my throat. My lovely nieces plied me with lemon drinks. And I slept from time to time. More coughing. More croaking. Throat becoming more sore. Worse at night when I tried to sleep because when I was awake I could stop myself from coughing by sheer willpower. One night I read "Redshirts" from cover to cover, which was fun, but did not give me sleep. Yesterday I had to stay awake because (a) my nieces were leaving, so I wanted to enjoy the last bit with them and say goodbye, and then I had to stay awake because of grocery delivery (and the annoying people have changed the delivery window from two hours to three hours). And today I had to stay awake just in case my computer was delivered, but I expect it won't be until Monday now.

Right now, I am aching all over, blowing my nose, coughing, sneezing, and being exhausted.

In the midst of it all, I did actually work on my Severus-fest item (I had already asked for an extension before I went away). After about five times ripping it up and starting again from scratch, I have the first half of it done. I also started the second half, but the design didn't suit, so I'll have to throw that away and try something else. Tomorrow, hopefully.

Alas, I'm going to have to bow out of the M.A.I.L. challenge this time around, there's no way I would complete a headdress in 20 days unless they were all days off (which they aren't).

I'm wondering whether I should just forget about doing ANYTHING which has deadlines this year. Why do I keep on over-committing myself? If it isn't fests, it's Christmas presents. (sigh)

So, peoples, tell me what has happened while I was away, and/or tell me stuff to cheer me up. Please?

Though I expect some of you didn't know I was gone.

I am behind on Doctor Who - I haven't seen "Into the Dalek" or "Robot of Sherwood" yet, so I am trying to avoid spoilers.
I am behind on Twitter, I will not attempt to catch up that.
I am behind on LJ and DW - if there's anything interesting you want me to look at, please comment with a link.

I will write a Breathless TMI post, but it will be locked to my access list. Because, like, TMI, y'know?

Okay. I've reached a point where I shatter under stress. So as a matter of survival, I need defences against stress. And one stress-defence is happy-making things.

So, please, peoples, can you give me recs? Recs for fic, recs for music, recs for novels. Ones which are uplifting, happy, cheering. Maybe even fluffy.

I was listening to my randomplay this morning, and was inspired with an awesome SSHG prompt. A completely new one. So maybe there's hope of participating in the sshg_promptfest after all, if I can come up with four more(*). The really difficult ones are the art ones, since I want to make art prompts that I myself would want to do, which means something more emotional/symbolic than representational. Wish me luck?

In other news, I have a horrible sore throat. (sigh)

(*) Note that it isn't a requirement of the fest to provide prompts, it's just that I find it less fun if I don't, because I want to inspire as well as be inspired.

Because settiai put it better than me:
If you haven't seen it yet, you might want to read The City Boy, the Peasant Women, and the Dragon in the Tower - A Fable. (Basically, it's an amusing summary of the whole Keith Mander, Lord of the Rings, fanfiction archive for profit mess. If you've somehow missed that story until now, I congratulate you. And point you toward Fandom Wank.)

In other news, yes, I still have a wretched cold.