Black Dog Blog

Meanwhile, these things…

Local elections were last night. Now, Economists Don't Vote (which is shorthand for "your vote has a vanishingly small chance of affecting anything, so it's a waste of time", which, like many things that can be proved with maths, is true but would cause catastrophe if people actually acted on it; see also…) is very much false in our ward, which is always a close scrap between Lib Dem and Tory, turning on less than 100 votes the last couple of times IIRC.

My mother and brother both went to the vote count, separately: mother because she's been doing volunteer stuff for the Lib Dems and brother because he moonlights as a reader for a lady called Marie, who was going. The Lib Dem candidate got in, and by a bigger margin than previously. In the wider world Tories are generally gaining at Labour's expense (shock horror), Lib Dems slowly gaining as usual.

I saw a consultant neurologist at 10:00 today, having been lucky enough to score someone's cancelled appointment. My tremor, blast it, was behaving itself perfectly, and my speech was fine too, so I had to hope the doctor would believe me that the symptoms can get a LOT worse. Apparently my performance on the reflex, follow-my-finger-with-yours, now-touch-your-nose tests she got me to do was normal. (Even though I felt extremely clumsy, as ever, and my reaction times have always been inferior. It's possible that I'm a competitive perfectionist, in the way of a fat girl concluding she's anorexic because every time she looks in the mirror she sees a fat girl.)

There's nothing nasty left that it could be and she's not concerned about any of the symptoms. She seems to think they'll sort themselves out as I get further with my… other current course of treatment (speaking of which, next appointment is on the 16th). So she's prescribing beta-blockers and 100mg of wait and see.

And when she puts it like that, I'm curious to know if that'll turn out to be true. I could do with the depression lifting, anyway; been considering getting put back on an SSRI, but putting that off while all the other stuff's going on so's not to complicate things.

And, in a real BBC moment, I just saw Johnny Vegas in the canteen. Maybe they're making another series of Ideal up here. (Surreal comedy series about a drug dealer, filmed in a sorta realistic and grubby style.)

edit: Oh yes, that was the other thing. Our team here at work is moving to be part of a larger team, which is great for me because there'll be other geeks to talk to, and I've just been told that I'm going to get to shadow a CSD, get some training if needed and basically start doing something closer to what I consider real coding.

Which will be awesome. Perhaps I can finally shed my (deserved) self-image as a geek-lite with no skills and basically no clue what he's doing.

(Then I'd just have the other side of the self-image to deal with, the one that weeps a bit whenever I walk past any tall, slim man with perfect hair… yes, I'm that shallow some days.)