A freak accident
26 January 2018 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeApparently I managed to burn my leg on my hot water bottle last night; at any rate I woke up with a sore leg and a blister an inch in diameter that wasn't there when I went to bed. I really don't have the faintest idea how that happened, since the bottle went into the bed some time before I did, it has a thick fuzzy cover which appears undamaged, I was wearing pyjama trousers (though it's possible they pulled up while I was asleep), and I've been using the same bottle all winter with no ill effects. Indeed, I've never had this happen to me or anyone I know in my entire life. It's probably the biggest burn I've ever had... bizarre.
Still struggling to write Erik and Christine. Having written a scene in which Christine considers an escape attempt but realises it would be stupid to try it, I thought I'd had a brilliant idea when I decided to reverse this so that she does escape briefly (but gets caught, because it was a stupid idea) and this is the prompt for Erik to chain her up in the cowshed, which is seeming a bit of an arbitrary act at the moment. (Unfortunately my entire future plot pretty much depends on it...)
But having Christine make the attempt not only makes her look stupid, it makes Erik look stupid as well for failing to take elementary precautions to stop her (such as those which frustrated her previous escape attempt in this chapter). And because I'd already written an earlier failed attempt it just comes across as repetition.
So now I have to come up with some kind of dialogue that will give him an excuse to get angry enough to drag her into the cowshed (instead of the log cabin which is their ostensible destination) and start hammering away at ironwork, presumably while she struggles. Actually writing this stuff to sound plausible is rather more difficult then the general idea of "Before she realises what is happening Christine finds herself hobbled and chained up by the waist in the cow-byre beside the hut" :-(
Andf I'm still having trouble writing Christine/Erik dialogue... and the chapter is getting rather long, although it's got so much crossing-out in it that it's hard to be certain!
After the initial honeymoon period I've been having quite a lot of trouble with my new Brooks saddle, which I hope I've now finally sorted out; it suddenly came loose and tilted right back when I was cycling over a road-hump, and I had the greatest of difficulty in tightening it up enough to hold a consistent angle, never mind getting it back to the right position first. (There are supposed to be some kind of teeth under there which ensure that the saddle has a fixed range of positions from which it can't wander, but if so it wasn't engaging.) I took it to a bike shop and learnt that I needed to use two spanners rather than one, although it turned out that the guesswork position I'd asked him to fix it in was wrong...
At least that meant that I'd now learnt how to adjust the thing effectively myself and could do some fiddling. (Everywhere on the Internet seems to advise that you set a bicycle saddle dead level to avoid problems, but if I do that with this one it's very uncomfortable -- the nose needs to come up quite a long way in order for my seat bones to lie parallel to the 'hard as a rock' leather rather than digging into it! Interestingly, mentions of Brooks saddles are the sole ones that seem to advocate tilting the position up...)
Having got what I thought was the right seat angle, I then came to the conclusion that I'd managed to twist it off-centre in the process and kept getting off and wrenching it from one side to the other! I think I've got it right now.
To add insult to injury, my cycle computer suddenly stopped working (probably flat battery) and of course all the odometer and wheel setting data was wiped. Again.
Wheel size
Still struggling to write Erik and Christine. Having written a scene in which Christine considers an escape attempt but realises it would be stupid to try it, I thought I'd had a brilliant idea when I decided to reverse this so that she does escape briefly (but gets caught, because it was a stupid idea) and this is the prompt for Erik to chain her up in the cowshed, which is seeming a bit of an arbitrary act at the moment. (Unfortunately my entire future plot pretty much depends on it...)
But having Christine make the attempt not only makes her look stupid, it makes Erik look stupid as well for failing to take elementary precautions to stop her (such as those which frustrated her previous escape attempt in this chapter). And because I'd already written an earlier failed attempt it just comes across as repetition.
So now I have to come up with some kind of dialogue that will give him an excuse to get angry enough to drag her into the cowshed (instead of the log cabin which is their ostensible destination) and start hammering away at ironwork, presumably while she struggles. Actually writing this stuff to sound plausible is rather more difficult then the general idea of "Before she realises what is happening Christine finds herself hobbled and chained up by the waist in the cow-byre beside the hut" :-(
Andf I'm still having trouble writing Christine/Erik dialogue... and the chapter is getting rather long, although it's got so much crossing-out in it that it's hard to be certain!
After the initial honeymoon period I've been having quite a lot of trouble with my new Brooks saddle, which I hope I've now finally sorted out; it suddenly came loose and tilted right back when I was cycling over a road-hump, and I had the greatest of difficulty in tightening it up enough to hold a consistent angle, never mind getting it back to the right position first. (There are supposed to be some kind of teeth under there which ensure that the saddle has a fixed range of positions from which it can't wander, but if so it wasn't engaging.) I took it to a bike shop and learnt that I needed to use two spanners rather than one, although it turned out that the guesswork position I'd asked him to fix it in was wrong...
At least that meant that I'd now learnt how to adjust the thing effectively myself and could do some fiddling. (Everywhere on the Internet seems to advise that you set a bicycle saddle dead level to avoid problems, but if I do that with this one it's very uncomfortable -- the nose needs to come up quite a long way in order for my seat bones to lie parallel to the 'hard as a rock' leather rather than digging into it! Interestingly, mentions of Brooks saddles are the sole ones that seem to advocate tilting the position up...)
Having got what I thought was the right seat angle, I then came to the conclusion that I'd managed to twist it off-centre in the process and kept getting off and wrenching it from one side to the other! I think I've got it right now.
To add insult to injury, my cycle computer suddenly stopped working (probably flat battery) and of course all the odometer and wheel setting data was wiped. Again.
Wheel size
no subject
Date: 2018-01-27 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-27 12:32 am (UTC)I was assured it was 'probably cellulitis' and I ought to get a doctor's emergency appointment straight away, but I popped in to see the nearest pharmacist, who agreed with me that it is in fact a simple burn that will heal up by itself provided it doesn't get infected.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-27 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-27 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-27 12:34 am (UTC)I cycled ten miles with no ill-effects today; if anything, the redness round the burn had decreased afterwards.