Testing, testing… is this thing on?

Yeah, so it’s been a while. But it seems that improvements have quietly been taking place with the DD site behind the scenes, and things that were broken are perhaps unbroken, and I’ve been prompted to actually write a blog post for the first time in forever.

Once again, I don’t even know where to start with getting caught up, so here’s just a random selection of news:

  • My surgery was successful, and I totally love my new improved body. There’s still a bit of swelling and lumpy scar tissue that’s slowly breaking down (and it’ll probably be a couple of years before the scars start to fade a bit), but I’m really happy. Totally worth it! (There are (of course) several videos if you want to see all the gory details: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQCyCJrez23-1jrxigUGYKZyG0k8GZoCQ)
  • This weekend marks a year since I was diagnosed with diabetes. There’s been a few ups and downs (the downs mostly being around a bit of food anxiety I developed, thanks largely to the (I now know wrong) dietary advice I was given right at the start when everyone assumed it must be Type 2. I still have the odd moment of anxiety about what I “should” be eating, but I’m slowly learning to relax and believe my dietician when she says I really can eat anything, as long as I balance my insulin appropriately.
  • At work I’m now officially the Lab’s manager (as opposed to the sort-of acting manager I’d been for the last couple of years). I’m very much finding my feet still with the new role – it’s got a lot of those kind of challenges you’re supposed to describe as “exciting” but are more accurately called “stressful”, but it also has a lot of good bits.
  • The Lab was moved into a new (well, newly refurbished, anyway – it’s been closed for a year for the last of the earthquake repairs) building last month. And in the juggling of people and resources that moving always entails, it suddenly turned out that there was an office going spare. So I now, for the first time in my entire working career, have my own office! It’s taking a bit of getting used to, after having worked in open plan and shared offices for so long (it’s a bit lonely sometimes!), but it’s also cool having a space that’s all my own – I’m looking forward to decorating it!
  • At home, I’m going to have slightly less space of my own next year, because my eldest nephew and his girlfriend are moving into a caravan in my back yard. They’re both coming up to Christchurch for tertiary study (Nephew at the university, and Niece-Out-Law at the polytech), and all the accommodation options they were looking at were horrendously expensive, so Nephew came up with a plan: for a fraction of what a year’s rent would cost, they can buy a nice, completely self-contained caravan (for my American readers, think something more like a trailer), and he asked me if he could park it in the back of my section. In return, they’re going to tidy up the back of the section for me, and pave the area where the caravan will be parked (so when they’re gone next summer I’ll have a nice outdoor area where I can set up an outdoor table and chairs), and generally help out with things like gardening and supermarket runs. They came up for a visit a few weeks ago so we could talk it all through, and I think it’s going to work out really well. Because they’ll be self-contained, they won’t need to come into the house (except for laundry, which we’ve agreed they’ll do during the week while I’m at work), so it won’t be any disruption to my life, and I’ll have all the benefits of having family nearby (like feeding the cat when I’m away!). And I get to help my nephew in a really practical way to take his first steps along his academic journey. So win-win all round 🙂

(There’s lots of craft projects to catch you up on too, but that involves sorting through photos, so they’ll have to wait for another time.)

So welcome back! And hopefully I’ll do a slightly better job of sticking round this time…

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3 Comments

  1. Yes! You are right. Steve has been hard at work fixing this and that, here and there. Some things really WERE broken and they were keeping us from staying connected. 🙂 I have been trying to rustle up old contacts and have an idea for re-commiting to my main diary and also, picking up a secondary one that I started four years ago! You can find it on the Dear Diary front page where it lists new posts. It’s called My Song of Songs. You are the first to know about it. 🙂
    Your new living arrangement sounds just peachy to me. It’s good to have other people close by, but not in your pocket if you know what I mean! 🙂

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