In which the Rodent goes for a walk and then does other things instead of going back to bed to recover.

It's been snowing, raining and beginning to blow outside, thankfully after I finished a nice hour-long walk. Bolton Primary Care Trust have come to the conclusion that more people would walk if they had someone to walk with. I filled in the questionnaire last year that helped them to come to this conclusion. The result is a set of Get Active walks, where you turn up at, in this case, a local library and all set off together to tramp around a country park, taking in the sights and keeping up a flow of inconsequential chatter as a nice distraction from the fact you're outside in the freezing cold being weathered upon.

It works. I've spent a full hour, more than, walking around. On my own, I get too tired in ten minutes. I'm looking forward to going and doing it again. This after doing two sessions of tai chi over the weekend (I seriously recommend tai chi) and various running around for a science fiction convention.

Part of the mental discipline is going to be finding something innocuous to talk about while doing it. I've got a leaflet, Zeppelins over Lancashire, from the Bolton museum, so I'll read up and be able to spout off at will with any luck. I'm having a lot of fun gathering local knowledge and putting down roots like a dandelion.

I didn't feel, somehow, that I could share my memories of a fascinating weekend learning how to deal with a Cyberman invasion. Or about the really cool person in the really cool Jack Harkness outfit who got chosen to lead a team on account of being the most smartly dressed (and most hung over and least able to wriggle out of it.) Or the fun of watching a scenario writer seeing her scenario get played out and enjoyed while all goes to happy chaos. Or the mummer in a flame costume collecting money, or the table full of body parts, or the new author hawking his book (Johnny Nexus is his name, I forget the title of his book but I'm enjoying it so far). Or how cool it is to watch someone you know run a panel next to one of their heroes and manage to look as though he does this all the time.

I did share the tale of Pol giving me a lift back to the Travel Lodge and leaving me in the Landrover to go and get something. As he was coming back, the weather suddenly came up, with literally howling winds. There was a crow trying to land in a tree and being blown back, but it managed to get a grip and, once safe, sat watching poor Pol struggling across the car park as about twenty tonnes of hail and rain were dumped upon his head and blown up his nose. I was digging hail out of his ear when he got back. Of course, as soon as he got into the car and closed the door, all the rain and hail stopped.

We went off to get Moth and the traffic was so awful I had to call my flute teacher. She postponed me until 4:30 and I got through the lesson, albeit badly. I've had two doses of cocodamol and I feel not too bad now. Headachey but it's bearable. It's definitely a migraine. I'm not getting the space between migraines I was hoping for but I am functional and I am only taking about 50mg per day, and not even every day.

In which the Rodent ably alliterates about a political porker.

Pol says it always snows on his birthday and outside it is cold enough that all the wheelie bins are frozen shut under a layer of sticky ice.

Yesterday's flute lesson didn't go very well. I got started but was only a few minutes in when migraine struck with shaking hands, loss of coordination and weird visual effects, none of which make for deft flute-playing. Poor Alex is stuck with a very slow student. I got home, dosed myself with the cocodamol Pol so kindly went out and got and was fine thereafter. Thanks to loadsadrugs, pain hasn't crept much over the 8 mark. 8 still has me confined to bed and deeply unhappy, but it's not dangerous. I ran out of cocodamol for a while and had to have 30mg codeine. It stopped the pain excellently well and I got a lot done under it's influence. Yay drugs.

My shopping has all arrived. So much! Part of the expense was a duvet for the spare room so that we can have visitors without it impacting my ability to huddle downstairs watching telly and clutching my HWB in the early hours.

Speaking of which, Moth woke me up at 4am very agitated and insisted on being in my room. She wouldn't go on the bed to her usual place but would only sit next to the bedside on the structural bodge-job that serves me as a bedside table. Coincidentally, my HWB had just started leaking and was making me damp, but luckily not too much escaped and the bed is drying out already. I'll check it in a little while but I think that the top wasn't done tightly enough and I'd been sleeping on it, and because it was cool it had been allowed to unravel from the towel it's usually wrapped in.
Moth's currently elsewhere in the house, ignoring me again.

The bulk of the shopping is food, including a few new store cupboard items like black treacle and rice wine vinegar. I have chicken defrosting from last night, ready to pretend to be the rabbit in the recipe I posted. I'll separate the skins and have them roasted as a snack, because there's nothing I like more than fresh, hot chicken crackling.

I'm not sure whether to cook the Somerset beef today as well, in the slow cooker, or gamble on having enough energy on Friday to do it then. Pol's away for a few days, so it would be nice, I think, for him to come back to a hot beef stew thing, although I don't know how much he'll like the finished result. The other point is that I'll have a few more plastic containers by then from having Chinese food. Most of all of these dishes will be frozen for my bad days.

On a food-related note, there's a rally in London today organised by the National Pig Association or NPA, to protest the falling price of pork. British pork is raised to slightly higher welfare standards than the rest of the EU, which isn't really saying much. (If you buy pork from happy pigs, they were probably doing all right.)

Corn, both maize and wheat, is more expensive just now. According to various news sources I've trawled, lots of maize is being taken to make ethanol in an attempt to green up. Because maize is now worth more, it's being planted in areas that used to be used to grow wheat. Both these grains are used in bulk to make animal feed and that's painfully pinching the purses of pork producers. Hence the protest.

I mention this partly because there's a forecast pork shortage which means fewer bacon sarnies, which is a dreadful thought, and partly because former mayoral candidate Winnie the Pig will be marching alongside the NPA to show her support. She might have been blocked from standing for London Mayor by speciesism, but that hasn't stopped her political career.

In which the Rodent plants bulbs and plays the flute.

I don't know whether this is my fourth or fifth lesson. I'd practised, but I am just not getting those eight-count blasts of noise, so that is my homework. Bizarrely, I can't read notes right after the rest, at least not when migrainous. The rest turns into an extra line or even two, and it makes it difficult to read the note straight after, especially if it's a minim. The solution turns out to be pencilling in a vertical line after the break to halt the bleeding of one mark into another.

This problem solved, we played on and I turned out to be spectacularly inept at C. This, alas, I cannot blame on my migraines. Sometimes I just am bad at something. :0) I have to be able to produce C easily too. If it's for 8 counts, this will be a bonus. Alex aims for one note per lesson and I am falling behind. I am still enjoying it. The tunes I produce may not be exciting, but they're tunes and I am sight reading them.

Since it was a nice day, I finally planted the bulbs I bought just after the January New Year. Then I rested and ate before my friend arrived. She helped me with the DLA forms, which have long ago run past their deadline because I've had no one to help me with the forms. This need for help was starkly realised within a page or two - left alone, I would have given up. As it is, I need to find a dozen pieces of paper and I am not sure I can. One page where everything was a stark YES I need help was communication. To those reading this blog, this might seem odd, but it's true. I avoid letters, forms and telephones because they hurt. Without Pol to pay the bills, I'd be sunk.

In between this, I fed her on wild boar sausages, steamed broccoli (florets and thin slices from the stem), raw carrots cut into matchsticks and thin slices of celery in crescents, with ketjap manis in a tiny little shot glass as a dip bowl.

The headache started waxing at about the time I sat down with the forms, lunchtime, which is amazingly late in the day for me. Usually I've had at least one by the time I have been up a few hours. As it is, the same headache is now pounding away at my head six hours later, which is all par for the course. I took cocodamol when it hit. I resisted taking it again just now, but I think actually I should if I am convinced that many painkillers mean fewer migraines in the long run. I have just trained myself to put up with the pain.

In which the Rodent had its second flute lesson.

I don't like being awake at 2am, but it's a step closer to normal living; it's 'morning'. Another couple of days and I'll be back on everyone else's schedule, which makes it much easier to shop. Actually, even waking at 5am isn't bad for being ready to move when the shops are open, it just makes socialising a little difficult. Ideally, I wake at about 10 or 11, breakfast at 12ish and am ready to move at around 2pm.

My second flute lesson went well. I'd apparently put in enough practice to be able to play along to the music, and Alexandra seemed pleased. Today we covered the note A and had a look at G but my fingers cramped. Next time. I like her a lot.
After two lessons so close together, the next one is not for a long time, because of the trip to London. Which reminds me, I have to either get Barclays to make my card work with lboody Visa Verify (it works for everything else), OR get to a train station and buy cards manually from a person. For now, I have no tickets and the lack of getting is going to cost me.

The cat carrier is down for the trip to Crown House Vet in Rochdale. Moth was eyeing it dubiously. She gets catnip from there, but also trips to the vet, so she is not sure whether it being around is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. She's compromised in settling down by my side in a cottage loaf shape and purring loudly to remind me that she's exactly where my hand will reach.

In which the Rodent has its first flute lesson.

It's now 19.7C in this room, or about as warm as it's been since I started taking note, but I am freezing; compare to when it was 11.2C and I was warm. Thus proving that my perception of temperature bears no relation, at all, to actual conditions. That said, I don't have a Hot Water Bottle to hand, so perhaps what it actually proves is that HWBs are magical objects of wonder.

My first flute lesson was tiring. I managed, eventually, to produce a B. One difficulty I'd had with the flute was explained by my having my right hand entirely the wrong way round, although the left was fine. I like my teacher and I like the shop that hosts the lessons. I'm booked for next week. It's £14 for a half hour lesson, one on one.

The end result of the lesson and all that brainwork was a very, very bad headache, so I am hiding upstairs nursing my 7-8 headache and hoping that pizza will make it better, since I already took some Happy Fun Cocodamol (soluble cocodamol 8/500) to get me through the lesson. Today hasn't been a good day - poor sleep led to me starting the day migrainous and it's carried on from there. Right now I want very much to throw up and cry. The good news is that even a crappy day isn't stopping me achieving something.