I enjoyed the sunset function last night -- after some faffing I managed to get the right amount of light to start from (fairly bright?) and a sound I like (crickets! I really miss crickets, they sound like summer to me and remind me of being a kid).

I fell asleep before the thing went totally dark, which to be fair could be because of the melatonin I treated myself to last night...but I haven't had great success with them lately.

Maybe it was just how tired I was, after a busy day at work, straight in to counseling, then eating dinner, then off to the local queer club where I'd agreed to turn up early and help set up, and by the time we left, about half past 9, I was so tired that I was yawning uncontrollably on the short ride home (and very glad that D had driven me, so that I didn't have to walk or try to get the bus home.

Today felt similarly intense: work, then an important and positive but also exhausting and anxiety-inducing conversation about U.S. politics, then I made dinner, and by the time I'd eaten my parents were ready to talk. I've missed them like three Sundays in a row so couldn't dodge it too much longer.

And that was a mental and emotional marathon of a conversation too: my grandma's house will be sold in two weeks, the upshot of which is my mom's horrible sister was saying horrible things about my mom at an extended-family event and when my mom asked if I wanted my share of the money from the house sale I said "Absolutely not," and she said "I knew you'd say that, but you're going to have some anyway, and I want you to use some of it to get yourself something nice..." Well okay then, I'll be a tax haven or whatever for my parents this one time.

And they talked about politics at me a bit (which again we don't disagree on but I'm so spoiled by my little bubble where people seek consent and check in during these heavy conversations that this drives me up a wall now).

And then we got on to their computer needing to be replaced because support for Windows 10 is ending and they thought they could just take their PC to Best Buy and get the Quicken transferred to a new laptop... I was trying to disabuse them of this notion gently when their iPad battery died because they believe you must always let it discharge completely and they never use the iPad while it's plugged in.

I'd wanted to go to the gym this evening, and suddenly it was bedtime. And my head was too full of things.

And actually I had to rearrange my bedroom a little for the alarm clock. I don't have a bedside table next to the bed; my room has a lot of fitted closets and drawers so there's only really one place for the bed to go and it means the door -- which is at a weird angle to the rest of the room because of the way the whole upstairs is, and the fact that almost every door up here opens the opposite way to the way that'd make the best use of space -- leaves no room on this side of the bed.

Mostly I've gotten around this by using a floor lamp as a bedside lamp, and shoving a piece of wood between the mattress and the bed frame which I use for bedside stuff: glasses, water, phone. But the piece-of-wood shelf is too low for the alarm clock: not much of the light would actually end up in my line of sight which would defeat the whole purpose of the thing. Also it wasn't easy to get plugged in.

Last night I balanced the clock on some good thick books, and I don't know if the light would have woken me up so I set it to make a normal sound. Then I woke up 45 minutes before my alarm went off this morning and leaned over to look at the clock to see when it would start lighting up, like a little kid. So I don't know any more yet about how or if that will work.

So tonight I've bodged a slightly better solution for clock placement next to my bed (and just as I'm writing this do I realize there's a better way to rearrange the things that need to be plugged in because the lamp has a long cord...always so much to think about!). And I hope the nice cricket sounds and dimming orange light do their magic!

I do wonder how well this supplementary daylight works on someone whose eyes are as bad as mine.

But I really should put my phone down now.

It occurred to me the other day that since the SAD-fighting daylight lamp I have is pretty old now, it still has a big light bulb in it that gets really hot even in the short amounts of time it's supposed to be used. And I'm not as poor as I used to be so I could get a new one.

As always when I need to purchase anything, I asked V for help because they're very good at this. They suggested I might want to try one of those sunrise alarm clocks too. Which I'd never thought about because I'm not really an alarm kind of person a lot of the time, thanks to sleep-maintenance insomnia. But when they sent me a link to what they found and I saw it does a "sunset" thing where you can have gradually-diminishing light and sounds to put on at bedtime, I thought that might be worth a try. I've had increasing trouble settling down to sleep in recent months, and I don't love the workarounds I've resorted to.

Both arrived today, so I write this with orangey light and nature sounds next to me, and the daylight lamp set up by my desk downstairs waiting for me in the morning. We'll see how they work.

I did a photoshoot for the local LGBT charity a few years ago when they were looking for disabled people to photograph. And the other day, while I was in the car somewhere between Ullapool and Avimore, I got an e-mail with what looks like a similar photoshoot, this time for LGBT+ men (and non-binary people "and their allies"). And it's today and I forgot about it, but Thursday night I did try to look at the form they asked us to fill in. I could do the page of demographics stuff: age, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. But I stopped at the next page which asks

What does being a man (or being seen as a man) mean to you, and how do you express that in your own way?

What changes would you like to see in how society understands masculinity, and how do you think men can better support each other and their communities?

I had no idea what to do with these. I wandered away from the computer and promptly forgot about it until now. The photoshoot is today, it's going on now, so obviously that's not happening. And I never thought it was likely because of that timing; we're all about as exhausted and low on spoons as I thought we'd be. And that's a shame; with a cis man, a trans man, and a non-binary person who had femininity forced upon them and has only recently been able to reject that, I feel like my little family potentially is a great example of different relationships to manhood/masculinity.

Reminded of it now when I opened Firefox to look at something else, I see there's a couple more questions on the page that I didn't even get as far as reading the other day:

What message would you give to someone exploring their gender or identity — at any age — who might be looking for a role model?

What do you see as the biggest challenges or issues facing men in 2025, and what support or resources do you think men — and their loved ones — need to navigate these challenges and thrive?

Interesting questions. On the way home from the gym, D gave our local pal, another D, home and we got talking about driving and the behavior of strangers in their own cars. We talked about how toxic masculinity extends its tentacles even there, with young men on a speed awareness course talking about being overtaken as a personal insult, and me sharing a couple of quotes I've seen from blind people talking about the appeal of self-driving cars for them being about feeling like a man because they can be the family taxi again.

Last night I brushed my teeth, flossed and had another try at trimming my beard. I felt so good, clean and ready for bed.

In one way I'm like man I've added another body-maintenance chore?! but it's totally worth it because the feeling of my neck being smooth because I just shaved it is so so much nicer than it being smooth because hair never grew there in the first place. Somehow this is about being a man (even though facial hair is not necessary or sufficient to be one).

I laid awake a long time after I went to bed, but I spent some of that time smelling the remnant of shaving cream my brain still associates with D, and grinning. As I lay there and thought about it more, about how negatively I'm used to hearing shaving being talked about because almost everyone I know who talks about it is transfem, has skin or other attributes which are particularly sensitive to the physical necessities of shaving, or both. And just the sentence that society expects men not to care/try/whatever when it comes to appearance or grooming (that's why a whole word had to be invented for metrosexuals!) But it only now occurs to me that I was actually much more likely to be scruffy/smelly/whatever as a girl or woman, because I was so uncomfortable in my body, mentally detaching myself from it as much as possible, and extremely put off by all of the options for appearance or grooming that were available to me in that gender role. Now I feel like I'm more successful at being well-groomed just because it's more fun or appealing, more satisfying or soothing. Somehow this is about being a man too.

While we were in Stornoway, I noticed that my phone wasn't getting text messages when I expected them for 2FA.

Again. This happened a few months ago and the phone company's suggestion was to try my sim card in another phone. Which D (who can see these tiny things) was obliging enough to do by swapping it in to his phone.

And (with a lot of me running up and down stairs between where V was and where he was asking people to text each other and letting them know when the other had so we could check if the text went through) that actually worked!

But then (with a lot of me running up and down stairs asking people to text each other and letting them know...) it turned out that his phone/sim card was now having the same problem! Only worse! I felt so bad for having "infected" him with this, a version so bad it wasn't fixed for a few days when he got a whole new sim card in the mail... Even though I didn't actually do anything and it isn't like Independence Day where you can infect a gadget with techno-gremlins like this.

I didn't want any of this to happen to any of us again, and I figured I could put it off until we were home anyway because it's rare that I actually get SMSes (other than for automated stuff I mostly ignore and the 2FA; I could use other options for that) and besides D needed his little phone-takey-aparty kit with the tiny pokey stick for the sim card which of course he didn't have with him so that settled it.

And I forgot about this entirely (because I never think about SMSes) until this morning. The ongoing dregs of the restructure at work have taken another fabulous colleague from me; she had sent me a message saying goodbye with her personal email and phone number. So without thinking much of it I sent her a text...and then I got a reply text a minute later!

Which is a good thing, because I soon after got a text from the pharmacy saying my meds are ready for collection and I'm about to run out, but then even more importantly I got one from the gender clinic telling me I have finally made it near the top of the waiting list for Voice and Communication Therapy.

Only fifteen months after I was told I'm near the top of the waiting list for voice therapy, only three months after I was assured that I really am near the top of the list, I've been sent a form asking me when I'm free and stuff shout accessing the sessions.

The form also asked me why I want voice therapy, which feels so much less urgent than it was when I was referred for this 3+ years ago. Then, my reason could have been described as "I can carefully sculpt my appearance to avoid most misgenderings, especially online, but I'm sick of being misgendered by everyone who can hear but not see me and I work with a lot of blind people." Two years of planned manitizer has mostly taken care of that problem.

But I am if anything even more interested in voice therapy now because I feel like I've been given by the 2+ years of testosterone a...tool? weapon?...that I don't really know how to operate properly. And, nothing against YouTube videos and the other online DIY resources, but I've never felt good about steering my (post-)transition life by them. To say the least (I still have to write about how the whole top surgery thing is going... I can't just now but let's just say that the two big headings will be Medical Anti-Fatness and Why are Healthcare Professionals Telling Me I Have to Go on Facebook and Reddit).

But anyway, the SMS with the link to the form also included a boilerplate NHS thing:

If we do not hear from you within 7 days, we will assume you do not want to access VCT, and you will be discharged from the VCT service. You can re-refer at a later date by contacting...

I was gone for longer than seven days, imagine that had been in the U.S. where I wouldn't have access to my SMSes, or imagine my phone hadn't fixed itself this time. I had no other indication of this information, no email or attempt at a phone call or anything.

It's maddening when a referral I've been waiting three years for depends on my phone working properly (and a bunch of other aspects of my life working properly!) during any given one-week period.

We're halfway(ish) home.

Fun fact: I didn't know there was a Perth besides the one in Australia until a few years ago. Possibly when the other two started breaking this journey here.

The trip was uneventful if hard on poor D, who hates driving and is exhausted. I'm glad he got a little nap on the ferry. The weather was beautiful: fluffy clouds, sun glittering in the blue water of the Minch as we crossed it. I didn't doze this time but listened to podcasts about baseball and had lots of feelings (I'm having so many baseball feelings lately!).

We've just been in so many places lately; all I wanted from this one is for there not to be too many weird stairs and there weren't any! Our room is cute and cozy. I also hope the shower isn't too haunted but I'm not awake enough or stinky enough to try that tonight.

Wild to think we'll be home tomorrow night. I am not excited to go back to work but I'm excited to know where everything is and how the shower works.

"There's a wee step here," D told me as we made our way out of the cemetery where we'd gone looking for the pyramid monument that he'd been alerted to on Pokémon Go.

He's often warning me of little things, potential hazards, like this as we're walking around so that wasn't remarkable at all.

What I remarked upon was the language. "Do we all get to say 'wee' now that we're in Scotland?" I asked. "I noticed V saying it earlier but didn't know if it applied to us too."

D had a ready answer. "Yes." It sounded very authoritative!

Stirling has been great. The trip here took an hour and a half longer than it should've thanks to spending that time at a standstill on the M6, thirteen miles back from something that'd happened near Tebay. So by the time we got here, checked in, and found some food, it was 8:30 and I was thinning about going to bed soon when D asked if I wanted to join him for a walk. We could walk down to the lively studenty area or uphill to the "Old Town," with things like the castle, a bunch of statues of old dudes with extravagantly Scottish names, and other touristy landmarks that were all closed and in the dark. But I've still enjoyed it a lot, I was introduced to the concept of a paneer burrito which I'm sad I can't have again in a hurry, and we did find a pub (a hotel bar actually) near the castle -- so close to it that it's called The Portcullis, because it was in the castle's portcullis.

And now I can use Scottish words for things, apparently! So that's nice.