An update at last, including some important decisions
Hello to all my readers, if I still have any! It's more than seven months
since I last ventured into LJ Land, as the site was already getting far less
usable last January, in fact I'm posting this entry by email, as I did in
January 2015, to avoid using the LJ site. I just hope anyone who finds this
entry can actually read it! Anyway, that's enough opening waffle, I'll
settle down to writing this entry now, so read on if you're interested! By
the way, the important decisions mentioned in the subject line will become
clear during this entry.
Fear not, I have not had any bad health problems which would prevent me
writing here! Admittedly I had one of my worst colds ever in February 2015,
which led to almost a whole day in bed which is very unusual for me, and in
early March I had pain and swelling in the bottom half of my right leg, the
cause of which two doctors couldn't agree on, but plenty of rest helped to
cure my bad cold, and two different treatments from the two doctors who
looked at my painful swollen leg in March got rid of that problem although I
may never know what caused it. As for my head, it is now totally healed
after the operation to secure two aneurysms in my brain: after a one-off
epileptic seizure in August 2014, I took tablets to prevent any further
seizures and they definitely worked, so I stopped taking them in July 2015,
and a recent EEG shows no signs of epilepsy even if my brain is
understandably a little bit sensitive around the place where it was operated
on. From now on, as long as I have no problems, I should only need detailed
scans of my brain every two or three years, to be sure that everything's
still all right. The decision of the surgen who operated on me to take me
off the anti-epilepsy pills was a good one for me, not just because I hadn't
had any more seizures anyway, but also because I hadn't realized how much
taking those pills had slowed me down till I stopped them, tiredness being a
known side-effect: I definitely have plenty more energy these days.
Since my health has been mostly good over the past eight months or so, my
life is continuing in its normal way, with plenty to keep me occupied. My
occupations do not include a paid job, in fact I'm pretty much resigned to
the fact that I'm pretty unlikely to get one: however, I resisted the
temptation to give up and say I'll never do any job-hunting again, instead I
have decided to slow down my job-hunting, currently taking a break from it
but not ruling out getting back to reading job offers again in the future,
nor would I refuse to consider a suitable job if someone ever offers me one.
One reason I haven't looked at job offers lately is that over the last few
months I've often been busy working on a long project for an email friend,
who has sent poems, true stories and articles to me and other friends of
hers by email for years, but who lost the older texts in her own collection
after moving house: luckily I had kept everything she had sent me, so I
could go through all the older poems, stories and articles of hers and email
them back to her, so that she now has her own full collection again. Church
has continued to keep me busy too, playing hymns regularly, not just in the
Anglican church in Calais where I usually play two Sundays per month, but
also for ordinary and special services I have been invited to play for: for
example, I played the hymns at special services for the Week of prayer for
Christian unity, for the Women's world day of prayer and for Good Friday,
and I've been invited to play in ordinary services for the Anglicans in
Boulogne and the French Protestant church in Calais from time to time. I
also played a couple of hymns at the AGM of a French association my parents
and I belong to which encourages members of different churches in the Calais
area to work together: I was re-elected on to the committee of that
association, where I don't have a particularly important role, but I enjoy
being part of that, and I enjoy being part of the association too, which
visited the Mormon church in Calais in February, and was involved not only
in the Good Friday service I played hymns at this year but also in an Easter
Sunday service on the beach at Wissant, between Calais and Boulogne, which
my parents and I attended. My parents and I also celebrated Easter in a
non-religious way with Easter eggs as usual, even though we're adults: in
fact, it just occurred to me that we often celebrate special occasions with
eating, as we went to a restaurant near here which serves simple but
delicious food on my birthday in January, and tried out a brand-new Indian
restaurant in Calais to celebrate my Mum's birthday in July. Neither of my
choirs have done any concerts this year, as a concert planned for my Calais
choir on 21 June was cancelled att the last minute, but now both choirs are
rehearsing for concerts later this year: in fact, the next two concerts by
my Calais choir and the first concert in what will hopefully be a long
series for my regional choir all take place during the same weekend at the
end of November, so I will have to decide which choir I will sing with that
weekend. In early July I had the luxury of being in the audience at a choir
concert again without singing a note: actually, it was a small vocal group,
invited for an outdoor musical evening in the gardens of a big country house
not far from here, and this group pretended to deliver song requests like
others would deliver pizzas, doing comical sketches between the songs to
explain the request they'd received, and singing songs in every possible
style, from r&b to classical, in fact one song was a mixture of the styles I
just mentioned, words of a modern French r&b song to a very classical
arrangement. This musical evening was the second interesting local
performance where my parents and I had been in the audience in 2015: in May
we went to a play, or rather a show, about Leonardo Da Vinci, known as a
painter and inventor but apparently also a magician, and in this show they
had two stages so we audience members had to stand in the middle of the hall
and turn to the correct stage for each scene. We've already had two visits
from family members this year. In February my brother flew over from Taiwan
and came with his two French daughters to spend a week or so with my parents
and me: beforehand we had talked about a second Christmas celebration, but
the nearest we got to that was giving each other a few presents and eating
Christmas cake which my brother loves, and instead of a second Christmas
dinner in February we invited a French family we all know over to our house
for a typical English meal, some kind of roast and some kind of crumble if I
remember rightly. My French nieces were here again in July, visiting my
parents and me for a week before they flew to Taiwan, unaccompanied by any
family members this time: during the girls' visit we took them out several
times, including to a historical village and to a sand sculpture exhibition
where the theme was Walt Disney, both very visual so I was glad that my Mum
made use of her excellent description skills. My parents and I have not yet
decided whether we're going on holiday anywhere later this year, either
going to see family in the UK or visiting some other part of France, but,
besides the activities reported above, I still have my own activities at
home, including reading, listening to the radio and to music, playing games
on the PC and the iPhone, and keeping in touch with friends in different
ways. As far as games go, I think I've only added one completely new one to
my collection on the PC this year, namely Audio Rally Racing, where you can
use different cars to race round different tracks with varying terrains and
weather conditions but instead of beating others you tried to improve your
times going round the different tracks with as little damage as possible and
win points that way, but I did get hole of an old Blind Gamers game I hadn't
heard of till this year, called Blind Gamers LAP, where you have to guess
the colours of tiles in an eight-by-eight grid and you get less points the
more colours you guess right while gaining penalty points for hints and
wrong guesses, the colours being spoken for those of us who can't see them.
I have also got several new games for my iPhone during this year: these
include True Or False (a ttrivia game), Blindfold Hopper (where you try to
jump from lily-pad to lily-pad as they drift past you), Blindfold Pong (a
ping-pong game where you play against the computer but more like the
old-fashioned electronic games of that kind than like a real table-tennis
game), and Video poker (where you play poker hands and try to win as many
virtual coins as possible depending on what hand you play and how many such
coins you bet). I still continue to play old favourites too, such as Super
Egg hunt on the PC and Trivia Crack and DiceWorld on the iPhone. As you can
see from all this news, my life is far from boring, and I expect it will
stay that way.
But now I think I've told you my most important news, so, as usual, I send
my best wishes out to anyone reading this, whether their lives are good or
bad right now;
However, don't be surprised if I don't post from here again, for the
foreseeable future anyway. Given the problems that I and others have had
with the LJ site, me only since early 2015 but others much longer, I have
thought carefully about what to do with this Lj, since I'm now limited as to
what ways I can write it and I can't be sure that others will be able to
access the site to read it. After much thought, I have decided to stop
posting to this blog, especially as there are so many other ways of
communicating with friends and keeping them up-to-date with my news which
work far better than LJ does these days. Much as I enjoyed posting here, I
know that everything has to end sometime, so I'm unlikely to post to my LJ
any more, unless by some miracle the site improves, and even then I might
still not feel like blogging anyway, something I can't predict right now.
So bye bye to this mixed bouquet, which it was nice to have blooming for
just over six years, but which for practical reasons has probably reached
the end of its life!
since I last ventured into LJ Land, as the site was already getting far less
usable last January, in fact I'm posting this entry by email, as I did in
January 2015, to avoid using the LJ site. I just hope anyone who finds this
entry can actually read it! Anyway, that's enough opening waffle, I'll
settle down to writing this entry now, so read on if you're interested! By
the way, the important decisions mentioned in the subject line will become
clear during this entry.
Fear not, I have not had any bad health problems which would prevent me
writing here! Admittedly I had one of my worst colds ever in February 2015,
which led to almost a whole day in bed which is very unusual for me, and in
early March I had pain and swelling in the bottom half of my right leg, the
cause of which two doctors couldn't agree on, but plenty of rest helped to
cure my bad cold, and two different treatments from the two doctors who
looked at my painful swollen leg in March got rid of that problem although I
may never know what caused it. As for my head, it is now totally healed
after the operation to secure two aneurysms in my brain: after a one-off
epileptic seizure in August 2014, I took tablets to prevent any further
seizures and they definitely worked, so I stopped taking them in July 2015,
and a recent EEG shows no signs of epilepsy even if my brain is
understandably a little bit sensitive around the place where it was operated
on. From now on, as long as I have no problems, I should only need detailed
scans of my brain every two or three years, to be sure that everything's
still all right. The decision of the surgen who operated on me to take me
off the anti-epilepsy pills was a good one for me, not just because I hadn't
had any more seizures anyway, but also because I hadn't realized how much
taking those pills had slowed me down till I stopped them, tiredness being a
known side-effect: I definitely have plenty more energy these days.
Since my health has been mostly good over the past eight months or so, my
life is continuing in its normal way, with plenty to keep me occupied. My
occupations do not include a paid job, in fact I'm pretty much resigned to
the fact that I'm pretty unlikely to get one: however, I resisted the
temptation to give up and say I'll never do any job-hunting again, instead I
have decided to slow down my job-hunting, currently taking a break from it
but not ruling out getting back to reading job offers again in the future,
nor would I refuse to consider a suitable job if someone ever offers me one.
One reason I haven't looked at job offers lately is that over the last few
months I've often been busy working on a long project for an email friend,
who has sent poems, true stories and articles to me and other friends of
hers by email for years, but who lost the older texts in her own collection
after moving house: luckily I had kept everything she had sent me, so I
could go through all the older poems, stories and articles of hers and email
them back to her, so that she now has her own full collection again. Church
has continued to keep me busy too, playing hymns regularly, not just in the
Anglican church in Calais where I usually play two Sundays per month, but
also for ordinary and special services I have been invited to play for: for
example, I played the hymns at special services for the Week of prayer for
Christian unity, for the Women's world day of prayer and for Good Friday,
and I've been invited to play in ordinary services for the Anglicans in
Boulogne and the French Protestant church in Calais from time to time. I
also played a couple of hymns at the AGM of a French association my parents
and I belong to which encourages members of different churches in the Calais
area to work together: I was re-elected on to the committee of that
association, where I don't have a particularly important role, but I enjoy
being part of that, and I enjoy being part of the association too, which
visited the Mormon church in Calais in February, and was involved not only
in the Good Friday service I played hymns at this year but also in an Easter
Sunday service on the beach at Wissant, between Calais and Boulogne, which
my parents and I attended. My parents and I also celebrated Easter in a
non-religious way with Easter eggs as usual, even though we're adults: in
fact, it just occurred to me that we often celebrate special occasions with
eating, as we went to a restaurant near here which serves simple but
delicious food on my birthday in January, and tried out a brand-new Indian
restaurant in Calais to celebrate my Mum's birthday in July. Neither of my
choirs have done any concerts this year, as a concert planned for my Calais
choir on 21 June was cancelled att the last minute, but now both choirs are
rehearsing for concerts later this year: in fact, the next two concerts by
my Calais choir and the first concert in what will hopefully be a long
series for my regional choir all take place during the same weekend at the
end of November, so I will have to decide which choir I will sing with that
weekend. In early July I had the luxury of being in the audience at a choir
concert again without singing a note: actually, it was a small vocal group,
invited for an outdoor musical evening in the gardens of a big country house
not far from here, and this group pretended to deliver song requests like
others would deliver pizzas, doing comical sketches between the songs to
explain the request they'd received, and singing songs in every possible
style, from r&b to classical, in fact one song was a mixture of the styles I
just mentioned, words of a modern French r&b song to a very classical
arrangement. This musical evening was the second interesting local
performance where my parents and I had been in the audience in 2015: in May
we went to a play, or rather a show, about Leonardo Da Vinci, known as a
painter and inventor but apparently also a magician, and in this show they
had two stages so we audience members had to stand in the middle of the hall
and turn to the correct stage for each scene. We've already had two visits
from family members this year. In February my brother flew over from Taiwan
and came with his two French daughters to spend a week or so with my parents
and me: beforehand we had talked about a second Christmas celebration, but
the nearest we got to that was giving each other a few presents and eating
Christmas cake which my brother loves, and instead of a second Christmas
dinner in February we invited a French family we all know over to our house
for a typical English meal, some kind of roast and some kind of crumble if I
remember rightly. My French nieces were here again in July, visiting my
parents and me for a week before they flew to Taiwan, unaccompanied by any
family members this time: during the girls' visit we took them out several
times, including to a historical village and to a sand sculpture exhibition
where the theme was Walt Disney, both very visual so I was glad that my Mum
made use of her excellent description skills. My parents and I have not yet
decided whether we're going on holiday anywhere later this year, either
going to see family in the UK or visiting some other part of France, but,
besides the activities reported above, I still have my own activities at
home, including reading, listening to the radio and to music, playing games
on the PC and the iPhone, and keeping in touch with friends in different
ways. As far as games go, I think I've only added one completely new one to
my collection on the PC this year, namely Audio Rally Racing, where you can
use different cars to race round different tracks with varying terrains and
weather conditions but instead of beating others you tried to improve your
times going round the different tracks with as little damage as possible and
win points that way, but I did get hole of an old Blind Gamers game I hadn't
heard of till this year, called Blind Gamers LAP, where you have to guess
the colours of tiles in an eight-by-eight grid and you get less points the
more colours you guess right while gaining penalty points for hints and
wrong guesses, the colours being spoken for those of us who can't see them.
I have also got several new games for my iPhone during this year: these
include True Or False (a ttrivia game), Blindfold Hopper (where you try to
jump from lily-pad to lily-pad as they drift past you), Blindfold Pong (a
ping-pong game where you play against the computer but more like the
old-fashioned electronic games of that kind than like a real table-tennis
game), and Video poker (where you play poker hands and try to win as many
virtual coins as possible depending on what hand you play and how many such
coins you bet). I still continue to play old favourites too, such as Super
Egg hunt on the PC and Trivia Crack and DiceWorld on the iPhone. As you can
see from all this news, my life is far from boring, and I expect it will
stay that way.
But now I think I've told you my most important news, so, as usual, I send
my best wishes out to anyone reading this, whether their lives are good or
bad right now;
However, don't be surprised if I don't post from here again, for the
foreseeable future anyway. Given the problems that I and others have had
with the LJ site, me only since early 2015 but others much longer, I have
thought carefully about what to do with this Lj, since I'm now limited as to
what ways I can write it and I can't be sure that others will be able to
access the site to read it. After much thought, I have decided to stop
posting to this blog, especially as there are so many other ways of
communicating with friends and keeping them up-to-date with my news which
work far better than LJ does these days. Much as I enjoyed posting here, I
know that everything has to end sometime, so I'm unlikely to post to my LJ
any more, unless by some miracle the site improves, and even then I might
still not feel like blogging anyway, something I can't predict right now.
So bye bye to this mixed bouquet, which it was nice to have blooming for
just over six years, but which for practical reasons has probably reached
the end of its life!