Time to reflect! Whoa, luxury...

• I got a jacket out of the closet last weekend, and was then reminded of an incident I'm not very proud of. That's because in the jacket pocket was a pair of leather gloves that I had given up for lost. Specifically, when they went missing, I had been at a café in Dublin, while we were still living there. (Yes, I do keep a coat I'm not using that long, and since it's proved useful recently, it's got a new lease on its space in my wardrobe, rather than going to the second-hand charity/recycle people.) To my shame, when I realized the gloves had gone, I'd nearly accused the people in the café of having kept the gloves when they turned up without an owner. Not quite but close enough. Of course, no one but I was responsible, having tucked them away in a jacket like that... In a curious way, it's a touchstone for how seriously messed up I could get, even when not "officially" in a depressive episode - this incident wasn't the only time, just one of the more intense. (I also had one after we moved here - fortunately, again, I didn't get as far as making a formal accusation, and thank goodness I didn't get that chance. But I was -><- this close.) Since going on the anti-depressant, coming on two years ago, that kind of incident, that sudden and unarguable conviction that Someone Had Wronged Me has gone way, way down in frequency. Which, remembering just how deeply upset I had been before, is now a blessed relief. Apart from the shame bit, that is.
• Me and the Life With Gadgets series continues to be, as they say around the internet, "full of win." Conversation class this week included a bit of a pop-quiz on a newspaper article in Japanese, about a kind of identity fraud. Anyway, the pop-quiz is meant to check if we'd paid attention to some of the specialist vocabulary, and to that end I thought I had packed my article and vocabulary list. But... not. I muttered a curse or two under my breath, then remembered that I had brought with me the internet tablet. (That thing has saved my student-y backside more times in a month than I would ever want to remember - it was a gift for Christmas, but definitely paying back its investment hundred-fold.) The school has wi-fi, and off I was, reloading the newspaper article from the school's bulletin board, then visiting Reading Tutor, where I could cut-and-paste the article into an input window, and get a rough-and-ready vocabulary list. After that, it was simplicity itself to save the list to a text document on the internet tablet, and draw off of it the words I recognized as the key buzz-words needed to explain the news article topic. I'm just sorry I couldn't also help the fellow-student who'd come to me asking if I had my vocab sheet in the first place; but we all have our limits and trying to share the space of a small screen was more than beyond most people's.
• For some reason, post-aikido ache was especially bad, and on a day I was very busy in class, which pretty much knocked my stuffing out of me. Uhm... if you're in a place of financial or job woe at the moment, you might want to scroll past this item, because here in follows a period of unashamed self-indulgence, and it probably will make you quite pissed off at me. It started, actually, when my path took me past a sort of dry-dock connected to the trains, and - a la the television series The Wire, I began idly wondering what kinds of goodies were in those containers. I was appalled at myself, but took a minute to suss out, that probably the feeling of mischief was coming from a sense of frustrated (if still unjustified) entitlement. Right, so how to get the sorry-ass inner troll? Smother with indulgence. I got home, drew a very hot bath, got some very nice chocolates (Mr Sweetie had busily arranged some to be in the house, enough that an unscheduled use wasn't going to be a problem) and, to top off the indulgence, I opened a bottle of sparkling wine. The one concession to "be grown up, be responsible" was finding the little gizmo one can use to re-seal a bottle like that, so that I could re-seal the bottle after taking one only takes a glass or two. (That wasn't being responsible as much as being realistic: more than that and I would have felt so crap, defeating the purpose of this exercise.) Oh, yes, it was so-o-o-o indulgent. And afterward, I felt so-o-o-o-o much better.
• I got home late one evening, and realized I didn't have my keys with me. Mr Sweetie gallantly offered to fetch some take-out, but in the following flurry of text messages and quick phone calls between mobile phones, the poor man missed any bus that was on offer, and walked home with dinner in the rain. Not the idea, and he was understandably ripe afterwards.