Today I saw a Zeppelin out the window. It was amazing and majestic and nobody noticed it because it sailed by so silently outside. I rushed to a window to take a photo but my iPhone camera badly let me down.

Me and a friend wondered what the proper name was, with him suggesting blimp. He's probably right, but a quick googling showed that this is, indeed, a a Zeppelin. As in, built by Zeppelin. It is called Stella Artois offers one-hour tours above London which would be woundrous but do cost 360 pounds.

No, in the end I didn't go to the BSFA. I was en route for it, but it was so damn hot in the tube, and I was so tired, and the more I thought about it the more I rebelled at the idea of the room at the Antelope. For some reason I intensely dislike that place. It's boiling hot, except when they switch the air conditioning on when it becomes horribly noisy. I can never properly hear the speaker. It's dark and gloomy. And too small.

In short, despite the good company and interesting guests, I spent too much time being miserable at the Antelope and today I wasn't in the right mood for physical discomfort.

Besides, I thought, if I go home I can write.

Did I? No.

However, the fact that I am thinking about writing is already I think a good step.

Write. I came home early specifically because I wanted to - in fact, I had a coffee because I felt dozy, then had dinner because I needed my strength and...

...and now it's too late.

Grrr. Maybe I can wake up early tomorrow.

Seeing as this morning only Riccardo's polite knocking on my door to ask if 9 am was late (YES IT'S MY ABSOLUTE LAST MINUTE TO GET OUT THE DOOR!) saved me from missing my shift entirely, I'm not so sure.

Oh, no....

A MOSQUITO! THERE IS A MOSQUITO IN THE ROOM!

I thought I had left them behind in Italy. I think the bloody monster bit me, too. A whole species with no redeeming features whatsoever. Extinction of the whole Culicidae family would be an unambiguously good thing.

YESS Almost painless, too, for values of painless that include "three hours' queueing"

To all the people who have left comments I would like to have answered to but didn't: sorry folks. It's just that the hours when I have access to a computer and am actually awake are reduced to very, very few every week. :-(

I had read bits of Barbara Ehrenreich's other famous book, "Nickel and dimed", which is a window, often veiled with bitter laughter, on the misery and indignity of minimum wage work, and introduced me to the idea of the poverty trap.

This one, Bait and Switch, is bitter is a different way. "Middle class Americans, like myself and my fellow job-seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of whom toils away at wages incommensurate with the level of effort required."

I can't stop thinking about it. Every time I pass alongside the banker's cubicles, with their blackberries and nice clothes and computer screens showing the luxury of Internet access, I am aware of how scandalously well paid my own work-till-you-drop position is. There are people hammering coal off a rock face who are paid a lot less than me.

And I am also, all the more so after reading this book, aware of how unlikely it is that I will ever again have the luxury of a job I love.

Walking home I was thinking again, miserably, about my inflating body. Despite all my efforts, and despite apparently subsisting exclusively on yogurt and coffee, I am steadily gaining weight, which is not so surprising because I hardly ever get off my chair for eight hours a day, and when I do, it is only to sit down on the tube and then crash on the bed at home. My rapidly changing shape feels like a violence my job is doing to my body, and no matter how much I think about it, I find no way to put a stop to it.

I know I should accept me as I am, but I am increasingly unable to do so. I can't find clothes that fit me in my usual shops, and I watch other, younger, prettier, thinner women with an incredible pain. I used to be attractive, and I derived a probably highly sinful pleasure out of buying and wearing clothes, I would peek at myself in shopping windows while I walked - I try to avoid doing so now, because what I see is a distortion of me. Even my face in the mirror is becoming that of a stranger.

Well, there is the upliting prospect of attacking the other book I bought, "Rape" by Joanna Bourke. Can't be any worse than this.

Alex hasn't even started going on holiday and I already miss him. Between reading Ehrenrich's book and going from shop to shop trying to find an iPhone I feel rejected by the whole world today.

I spent an hour this morning, instead of reading LJ or just walking to work, trying to convince The Cloud that yes, I can pay the four pounds a month for the service. No luck: despite hunting through obscure third-party payment sites, retrieving my long-lost password, and giving up on trying to understand what's wrong with my credit card and just giving the details for the new one, the system still does not recognise me.

Also, there are about 2,000 pounds missing from my accounts. That is: they used to be in my savings account. My savings account is not there any longer, so I presume they closed it, but the money hasn't yet made it to my new Halifax account. Or at least I hope so. I know I moved a thousand pounds from one account to the other, but where are the other two thousand? I can't have lost track of them, right? I can't just have spent them without realising it?

After a very nice evening at major_clanger's new flat, which boasts a totally killer workstation, we all skipped happily back to the Tube, where the rather moderate amount of alcohol I had drank staged a vicious attack on my blood-brain barrier.

The headache went on for the whole night, and when Alex went up at the crack of dawn to drive his poor sick car home, I gave in and swallowed two paracetamols.

By the time I was ready to go out the pain was blunted but not gone. I could tell it was headache and not migraine because, even if I felt miserable, I didn't really want to stay home: the lethargy and hibernation of migraine were not really there.

I was still in a lot of pain for the whole morning, and well into the afternoon. I worked very slowly, taking about twice the usual time to complete jobs, and got through another 2 + 1 pills. By the time I had escaped the office and got to Islington for sushi with chilperic and fjm and Alex I felt pain-free, if tired.

Now I'm not even tired any longer, although I know I should go to sleep.

This seems to be a pattern in my headache this time - I feel wretched in the mornings, and increasingly good as time goes by, tipically feeling ok after sundown.

In other news, I am reading an interesting but very depressing book by Barbara Ehrenrich, Bait and Switch,, have almost finished the Photoshop book which proved vastly more useful than I had thought, and resisted the lure of a whole Borders.

I am still bitterly, bitterly without iPhone.

VERY PISSED OFF WITH O2 AND APPLE.

Still no iPhone. O2 site helpfully assures me that "every customer who wants an iPhone will have one by the end of this summer."

This is supposed to be my provider?

I have half a mind to hold out and get a hacked one just because I don't want to give my money to a company who signs an exclusive deal to distribute an Apple product and FINDS OUT ON THE DAY OF THE LAUNCH THAT THE WEBSITE FOR REGISTRATION IS ONLY COMPATIBLE WITH INTERNET EXPLORER.

Yeah verily, verily, it has emerged that yesterday at the Apple Store all the machines registering the new iPhones were running VMWare.

For a lot of people this is irksome. For me, it means that I still have no access to the net for the greater part of my day, at work. No, I don't mean that Livejournal or Gmail is behind a firewall. I mean I have NO ACCESS TO THE INTERNET AT ALL.

I thought my main problem with that was going to be being cut off from my social network, but in fact, the main problem is that I can't do any of the daily things that people can do online - buy postage, check google or wikipedia, check my bank account, order groceries. Things I could easily do, for example, during my lunch break, were it not that I don't have access on my computer and can't take my laptop at work.

Bad day today. Well, it was pretty awful yesterday as well, and not fun the day before.

Today I was up and running rather well until about midday. I had still already began making mistakes at work though - one of them made me stay in longer than I had anticipated, when I had already decided to go on a break and was hungry.

Perhaps that precipitated the migraine or perhaps it was just coincidence. I started to feel very bothered by the light, then I couldn't think, I had problems speaking, and of course my head hurt.

My friend who is also my boss thought, I think, that I was just fed up and wanted to go home, but the truth was that I was in a much better mood regarding my job today, and really did not want to give in. Towards the end though I was shivering, felt dazed and spaced out, and kept getting every job wrong.

I have asked my GP to prescribe me some triptans, and I have bought them today after leaving work. So the trick now is to decide when something is a migraine and take the Maxalt soon enough. We'll see. The doctor told me that before a migraine there is a period of "hibernation", which I liked a lot as a word. Unfortunately I am hibernating pretty much all the time.

No iPhone for me today. I am really not willing to queue for hours for something that I'll be able to pick up easily in a month, and besides, I thought that it was going to be easier to buy it from the Apple Store. I then discovered that the Apple Store does not sell it, or at least it doesn't now.

Oh well. I can live without the iPhone another couple of weeks.

I ordered some prints yesterday from Photobox, which were delivered to my door this morning at ridicolous am (before eight). They are very good, although after having gazed at my friend IguanaJo photos for a while I feel rather worse about my own output.

It's Friday, right?

Came home with horrible migraine. Went to kitchen to get hot miso soup because I felt damp and chilly,

Found wanter on kitchen floor. Looked up. Ceiling dripping.

As I think I said yesterday, London has some wonderful Mays in August. Right now, it seems to have sprung a liking for an impromptu October.

To those few on my flist who still don't know the news - Tom Disch committed suicide on the 4th of July.

I had stopped reading his LJ about three years ago, because I wanted to keep his memory apart from the anger and pain of his last years. Nobody seems surprised, but I am surprised at how stricken I am. Suicide is the worst death, death by utter horror and desperation.

For all you horse lovers out there

...while it is pretty obvious that a lot of processing, including various textures, has gone into this particular image.

It may not look like it, but quite a lot of tweaking has gone into this and the last photo.

Taken, I think, around four or five August last year. I kept telling Anna, this is really nice place, we should come back in Summer.

I am contentedly tinkering with Photoshop after having swung by Borders to buy a book for alexmc yesterday and exited with several jolly titles like "Rape" by Joanne Bourke and "A Brief History of Misoginy" by somebody I don't remember - and a vastly more expensive than I wanted book on Photoshop.

I am re-processing a lot of my Northern Ireland photos.

Me and Alex also went out to do some shopping. I don't think Alex quite knew what he was getting himself into when he agreed to accompany me inside Muji. He does not suffer from the same stationery porn addiction I am afflicted with.

He did, on the other hand, give me a shiiiiiny new Apple keyboard as a present, the old one having been killed by overcleaning.

We then discovered that today was Pride day, and spent a happy time watching it go by, including my friend Paolo holding up half the banner of the Interbank LGBT Network. I was very sorry I didn't have a camera.

London was sunny, windy, cool, with wonderful little white fluffy clouds.

Over the Fourth of July somebody broke into the sorority house where Clarion West students live and work and stole four laptops and some other stuff.

This means that four people who somehow managed to find six weeks off work and pay the Clarion fee (and from my experience, these are not generally rich people) lost their tool for writing just at the moment their writing life is at its most stressful.

Please, if you can, chip in to the replacement laptop fund here. Mention that it is for the stolen laptop.

I know how I'd feel if it had happened to me. :-(

Well, not as nice a photo as I would have wanted, but gives the idea. Zip walking above my head on the headboard of my bed.