Jenny with the Axe

I have had such a wonderful day today!

My riding club had arranged a Pay&Jump. That's essentially a non-competition jumping meet - there is no placement list or winner, you don't get any rosettes or anything, but you do get to jump a proper set of fences in a new environment, so for many people it's good training before the season begins. The rules are a bit more lax too, in a regular competition you aren't allowed to continue if the horse has refused a fence more than three times but at the P&J it's up to the judge how long they can be allowed to try. Also you can get help to get the horse across (e.g. by someone leading the horse or egging it on), or get a fence lowered a little. Since quite a few horses have learned to count to three, knowing that after the third stop they get to go out and won't have to jump anymore, it's very useful to let them continue on. Some of them looked very surprised indeed...

There was one incident with a horse that kept baulking at the fences, where the rider got frustrated and started using her whip too much. You're allowed to use the whip as an aid; that is, to indicate with a light touch that the horse should do something. This rider got frustrated and unhappy when her horse refused fence after fence and gave him a sharp touch with the whip after he'd refused. I told her to use the whip only as an aid and not as a punishment, and she got over the fence on the fourth try. When she rode up to the next fence she started whipping the horse on the way up to the fence, and as she did it without switching the reins to one hand, she was also pulling on the rein on the side where she held the whip. The horse, unsurprisingly, refused, and she used the whip again. At that point I had to tell her that since she kept using the whip in the wrong way I was excluding her. I let her jump one more fence - without using the whip - so they wouldn't end with a refusal, since that is a bad memory to leave the horse. She was of course very unhappy, but I feel very sure that I ddi the right thing. After all, she will want to go to actual competitions later, and that sort of thing will get her thrown out of those, too - better to learn early and in a non-competitive environment!

When it was all finished, I got a ride back to our own stables (the event was held in an arena several kms off). I got to meet my darling Diamond again. I wasn't sure he'd remember me, after all he's still young and it's been five months since I saw him. When I came to his stall and opened the door, he walked up and put his head against me and demanded to be skritched behind the ears and on the throat, just as I've been doing since he was a few days old. He kept bumping me with his nose and wanting more skritches and seemed very happy to see me again. So was Skutt, by the way. He was at the P&J, and while he and gnapp were in the collecting ring he heard my voice, and immediately turned towards me. That was nice.

The horse I fell off of five months ago also remembered me. When I went to her stall, at first she came up and was all "oh, there you are, cuddles now plz!" After a few minutes of that she decided that no, she didn't like me because I'd abandoned her, and went off to the other corner of the stall to sulk. I do look forward to being able to work with her again - so, I suspect, do most other people in the stables as she's been getting to be difficult to handle due to her being bored from not getting to work. Her owners have started working her a little, but they really don't have enough time to give her the attention she wants, so it'll be nice for everyone when I get back.

After that, I went with gnapp and her husband to have dinner at one of our favourite hamburger places. One of the staff also rides and she came over to talk about horses and accidents. Then they drove me home and I got back shortly after 8 pm, having been gone for twelve hours.

In all, it was a lovely, lovely day!

There's this thing called "Geek Women Unite". It's something I'd very much want to be a part of, given that I'm a geek woman. And the Stockholm group has planned a meet-up tomorrow.

The event is booked into a restaurant. I asked at the facebook discussion thingy whether anyone knew if the place is wheelchair accessible. Got the reply (not from the organiser) that "there are stairs, I suppose there are elevators but you'd better call and ask them." I check the web page of the restaurant; they have pretty pictures of the different rooms and they keep mentioning staircases.

Go down the stairs to this room. Go up the stairs to that one.

There is no mention of elevators. There isn't the slightest note aobut how accessible the place is.

I've written to the restaurant, asking them about accessibility and suggesting that they put some information about it on their web site - that is, if they are at all interested in welcoming those guests.

I can't say I feel very welcome at the Stockholm GWU either, considering how and where this meeting was arranged.

True, if I wait a couple of months I'll probably be able to negotiate any stairs using crutches, or maybe even just the cane - but I won't be comfortable in an environment that excludes other geek women because the organisers can't be bothered to consider accessibility when choosing a venue.

I am so, so tired.

This time it's Torchwood. You'll need to have seen 1x10, "Out of Time", for it to make sense.

I've just been watching ep 6x07. If you've not seen it, this drabble isn't going to make much sense.

Last Sunday, the 11th, I was booked to have a jumping lesson on Melanie at the stables at 9 am. I think there were six riders in all, and Eva, the owner, was holding the lesson. I got there in time to help carry out the fences. Melanie had a small wound on her left shoulder but Eva said it didn't seem bad and she wasn't lame.

I took her out, and she felt very good. For once there was no problem keeping her at a collected trot, she responded very well to my hands when I asked her not to rush on. gnapp showed up to take pictures and I asked her to hold my new iPhone so I wouldn't risk it falling out of my pocket or something. When we were all warmed up, I started trotting towards the end of the paddock to make a turn and come up to the first fence.

That's when it happened. Melanie stumbled and was almost down on her left knee. I was sure she'd go over and I'd get her over me, so I let go of the stirrups so I could get away if I needed. Instead, she righted herself with a jerk - and I flew off, landing on my left foot. It broke. Or, rather, the leg broke close to the foot. People were asking me how I was, and I remember yelling that this was Not Good. Gnapp came running up and I told her to get the shoe off quickly before the foot would swell up. She did. Eva came up and they both agreed that the leg looked really broken. Eva got a bale of hay to put my foot on (by this time I was lying on my back - fortunately it wasn't raining, as it had been when we were carrying the fences out) and Gnapp called an ambulance. They took turns staying with me and fetching blankets and things to pile all around me. I borrowed a phone and called Calle to tell him what had happened.

The ambulance showed up within ten minutes I think - it felt a lotlonger, but I don't think it really was. One of them gave me morphine and I was ready to marry him on the spot. Gnapp went with me in the ambulance because I really didn't want to be alone. Once we'd gotten to the hospital they put on a plaster cast and took some X-rays. Gnapp had told Calle where I was and he came shortly after I'd gotten back from the X-rays. They had had to cut my riding trousers off of me, so it was a really good thing that I'd made Gnapp take the boot off at once - it would probably have been very painful to have it cut off, not to mention a waste of a good boot.

I got a bed at the orthopaedic ward and was scheduled for surgery during the afternoon. This turned out to be the hospital term for evening - I got into surgery around 8.30 pm and they weren't finished until it was past 10. I got a spinal block instead of general anaesthesia so I was more or less awake during the procedure. Then I had to stay in the post-op ward for several hours while they made sure I got the feeling back in my leg (while I wished I didn't), so I wasn't back in my ward until it was almost 4 am.

On Monday I was allowed to eat again, but we also found that one of the fast-working painkillers (Oxynorm) makes me throw up, so I didn't actually get all that much food down. I had to keep my foot elevated and it's really hard to eat when you're in that position.

On Tuesday they took some more X-rays and a CT scan and then there was a second operation. This time they took off the plaster cast and put on a Hoffman's brace, like the one I had on my arm a few years back. They also adjusted one of the plates that had been put in on Sunday. I got back up to the ward around 5 am.

On Wednesday they told me that they needed to make one more operation but that the foot was so swollen they couldn't do it at once. They said I would have to wait for 7-10 days and I would not be allowed to go home in the meantime, they didn't want to risk my being without medical attention and maybe the swelling getting worse without my noticing.

Thursday was uneventful. On Friday I was told I would be sent to a rehab home for a few days while waiting for the swelling to go down. I called Calle who rushed over with some clothes for me, and the transport people showed up around 2pm. The rehab home, Furuhöjden (www.furuhojden.com) turned out to be a very nice place. Everyone has their own room, the food is cooked there and not transported from somewhere then heated in a microwave, the furniture looks more like a nice hotel than a hospital, and it's all very comfortable. I got a wheel chair that I can use to go down to the dining room, and I can get into and out of it without help. There should be wireless internet access to all rooms, but on my floor it's broken and the people who can fix it aren't back until Monday, so I've still only used the iphone for net access.

Yesterday I got a lovely bouquet of flowers and some very nice chocolate from my brother in the U.S. I have the bouquet in my window where it looks very beautiful with the autumn colours of the bouquet set against the yellow leaves of the birch outside and the blue-grey of the sky.

As I type, it's almost exactly one week since I broke the leg. I was very lucky - it might have been the back, or the head, that hit the ground first, or Melanie might have gone down and rolled over me in which case my rib cage and other stuff would have been crushed or broken. A broken leg is just a mechanical problem; broken back or neck or head is bad.

Anyone who's on facebook can read my updates there - it's easier to post a small update there from the iphone than it is to write a livejournal post, so that's where the day-to-day stuff will be while I don't have net to the laptop. My gmail account also works to get in touch with me.

Now I shall get into the wheel chair and drive around the hospital until I find a spot where the wireless net works, and then post this. Oh, and the wheel chair is a metallic purple - how cool is that? And I've learned how to steer it by turning the wheels in opposite directions to make a neat turn, feeling like a pro wheelchair driver :-)

The cats have now been free of symptoms for about 36 hours. artela said that rowan berries may cause these symptoms - I really hope that's it, because then this is over. It might also be something in the dry food they've been having, so we've got a new bag of another brand waiting.

We're still keeping them to only my bedroom and the living room. Arthas is busy trying to dig through the glass of the living room door.

I did go riding yesterday. Melanie now shows no lameness at all. She doesn't like to gallop on the right lead, so we'll have to work on that, but she's very happy to be ridden at all. I was very nice to not have to clean out stalls - I'd spent the night waking up every time one of the cats made any noise at all, or moved around on the bed...

Bad stuff: Tusse had a seizure like the ones Zeta has had. We called the vet, she said that this really looks like they have eaten something toxic to them. At this point I agree - it has to be either environmental or contagious, and they can't think of anything contagious that gives these symptoms. We went over all that we know they've eaten, and decided to restrict them to a small area in the flat and only feed them boiled fish. And not much of that, either.

I went through my bedroom, making sure that anything they might be tempted to get into was removed or put in cat-safe tins or otherwise unreachable for them. Then we brought all three of them into my bedroom (which is now equipped with a litterbox). At this point Zeta had already had a sort of half-seizure, where she didn't fall down spasming but was shaking a lot whiile standing up.

Shortly after we went down, Zeta got up and started chewing on the spiderplant that I'd also brought in - it's the only plant in the room; if I'm isolating them I'll do my best to do it well! Shortly thereafter she started making unhappy noises. But instead of following it up with shaking and seizing, she ran in under the bed and puked. I don't think I've ever been actually happy to have a cat puke under the bed, but this... it's the first time since she started getting ill that she's actually gotten rid of her nausea in the normal cat manner!

A few minutes ago, Calle brought some small portions of boiled fish down for them. We'll see how that works out. They were all hungry, they were begging for more, but we don't dare give them any bigger portions just yet.

If they do get better while restricted to this bedroom, we'll let them out into the living room tomorrow and see what happens. We'll basically have to let them into one room at a time, after we've done our best to clear it of anything they may have gotten into. But at least now that we know it's environmental, we have some way of dealing with it.

Well, at least, half done. I've been fixing up the sewing room. It was seriously overcrowded in there - my plan to have an IKEA Ivar shelving system for fabrics was about as stupid as a very stupid thing. It's been replaced with a wire basket system instead, and the books have been moved into my bedroom. I've now got ample space for loom, cutting table, sewing table and computer table (because you totally need a computer in the sewing room, if nothing else you might need an urgent dose of <a href="http://www.ravelry.com>Ravelry</a> while crafting. When I did all the moving around, I also finally got the floor washed. There are still some stacked junk boxes under the cutting table; once I get those dealt with, I think it'll be a very nice room to work in. And a side effect of getting this stuff done is that I moved the computer table out of my bedroom so I can now get at all the drawers in my chest of drawers. All bonuses. Now I just need the energy to empty the remaining shelf in the computer room so it gets usable, and probably moving some crafting books up here, and throwing out the old ugly closet, and bringing down my closet from the upstairs bedroom, and moving the sofabed to the GFs apartment, and fixing up the living room, and... But still, it's a start. It's nice to have something a little better today than it was yesterday.

I recently reread "Grass" by Sheri S. Tepper. It's set in the future, and the Earth is severely over populated - so much so that on Earth, nobody is allowed to have more than two children. If they have more than that, they have to emigrate to a colony planet. And any third child still on Earth is not allowed to reproduce. Marjorie, the protagonist, visits "Breedertown", where the supernumerary women and children live while waiting for transport to a colony. She helps a teenager, who is a third and therefore illegal child, get an illegal abortion. Marjorie explains that if the teenager had had her child, it would have been taken from her and sold to a colony world, and the teenager would have been picked up by the population police. Certainly she would not have been allowed to be a mother, either way.

Then I started thinking about international adoption. On the whole, I'm glad we gave that idea up. It's one thing to want to have a child, and to choose a child that already exists and needs a home, rather than to have treatments to try to bear one that my body isn't capable of on its own... but what about the mothers of those children? The ones who have to hide their pregnancy, the ones who have no way of supporting themselves and their child, the ones who already have too many children to feed but who will continue longing for and wondering about the one they gave up... and the ones who are dead, the ones who were raped and had no way of getting an abortion, the ones who have no choice at all, neither reproductive or otherwise... Is their life improved by our taking their children? If they did have a choice, would they choose to have their children sent away to the other side of the world? Then there are those who never wanted to give up their children, those who had their children stolen and sold to adoptive parents. There is trafficking in children just as there is in women, except in the case of children it's legalised and called international adoption.

This is not to say that international adoption is always wrong or bad. But merely looking at what areas the adoptive parents come from compared to the areas the children come from should tell us a lot about the economic and power structure of our world, as well as about how women and children are valued.

As I wrote on Sunday, I had a bit of a discussion with Makan Afshinnejad, press secretary for the Liberal frontrunner Marit Paulsen's, on election day. First a bit of background for those of you who aren't very well versed in Swedish politics:

During the past couple of years there have been two new laws which threaten our rights and privacy as citizens.

One of the laws is IPRED. That's the one that gives the film and record companies the right to request identifying information from ISPs without having to prove that the person has broken a law. That's information that our police can only get when they are investigating a crime that carries a prison sentence of 2 years - but the record companies can get it whenever they like.

The other is known as the FRA law. It says that the defense radio analysis agency is allowed to search through any Internet traffic going to or from a foreign country. And, given how the Internet works, that means that they can also search through a lot of the traffic between Swedish citizens within Sweden. In other words, the agency that is supposed to spy on other countries is now also going to spy on us. Both these laws have been widely discussed and criticized, not least in the Swedish blogosphere.

Both of these laws are highly problematic from a privacy and integrity standpoint. As for IPRED, I find it ludicrous that record companies should have greater investigative powers than the police. If I have broken a law, it's the job of the police to investigate and charge me. Those powers should not be given to another interested party!

And as for FRA, it's even worse. It's simply not possible for them to restrict their surveillance to packets to and from foreigners. If I use Google mail, and my mother uses Hotmail, then according to FRA we are using foreign sites and thus they are allowed to monitor our emails! And even supposing that we both use mail servers physically placed in Sweden, and owned by Swedish companies/people, the traffic may still be routed via the international routers. That is simply the way Internet works. Even if the law says they are not allowed to look at that traffic, there is no way to reliably exclude it from their filters.

That was what I tried to explaine to Makan Afshinnejad. His response was that I must be wrong, because all the instances that were invited to express opinions on the FRA law said it wouldn't be a problem, including the Data Inspection Board. And, he said, they wouldn't have approved of the proposal if there were an integrity problem.

At that point I wasn't certain of what the DI had said in their opinion, so I didn't respond directly. Now, however, I have had time to check things up. I went to their website and looked at their opinions. Interestingly enough, what I found was that they had not approved of the law. In fact, they had brought up the very same points that I did.

So I sent an email off to Mr Afshinnejad:


Hello!

I'm the one who was giving out Piratpartiet ballots on Sunday. I was thinking over the conversation we had afterwards. I remember you saying that all opinions, including the one from the Data Inspection Board, approved of the law. As I at that point wasn't sure of what the DI had said I didn't argue; I don't like making a claim unless I have all the facts, so I just talked about what I know about how the Internet works and why it doesn't work to restrict the surveillance to one "carrier".

Now I have looked at the opinion from Datainspektionen. To my amazement, they have exactly the same arguments as I do! On page 5 it says "It is the opinion of the Data Inspection Board reasonable to suppose that the signal surveillance agency will still to a large extent have technical access to traffic that is not covered by the judicial access", and "The proposition may thus mean that signals between senders and recpients in Sweden will be routinely gathered despite the standard prohibition."

The DI had several more reservations, and I really recommend that you read their opinion. I myself will gladly take back any less than positive statements I made about them."


(In Swedish: Hej! Det var jag som stod och delade ut valsedlar för Piratpartiet i söndags. Jag funderade en del efteråt på samtalet vi hade. Jag minns att du sade att alla remissinstanser, inklusive Datainspektionen, hade godkänt FRA-lagen. Eftersom jag själv då var osäker på vad just DI hade sagt ville jag inte säga emot; jag tycker inte om att uttala mig i frågor där jag inte är säker på fakta, så jag nöjde mig med att förklara vad jag själv vet om hur Internet fungerar och varför det inte fungerar att begränsa spaningen till en "signalbärare".

Nu har jag tittat på Datainspektionens remissvar. Hör och häpna, de har exakt samma invändningar som jag har! Det står på sidan 5 "Det är enligt Datainspektionens mening rimligt att anta att signalspaningsmyndigheten fortfarande i rätt stor utsträckning kan komma att ha teknisk tillgång till trafik som inte omfattas av den rättsliga åtkomsten", och "Den föreslagna bestämmelsen kan alltså komma att innebära att signaler mellan sändare och mottagare i Sverige regelmässigt hämtas in trots det principiella förbudet."

DI hade en hel del ytterligare invändningar, och jag kan verkligen rekommendera dig att läsa igenom deras remissvar. Själv tar jag gladeligen tillbaka mina mindre positiva uttalanden om dem.)


It will be interesting to see if I ever get a response. I don't really think I will...

And I can't help finding it very interesting that the press secretary of their major candidate for the EU would argue without knowing the facts. I certainly got the feeling that he was convinced of the truth of his own words, so I don't think he was deliberately lying to me. But the truth is so very easy to find in this case that I still find it a bit strange that he would take the debate without having a basic grasp of the facts. And he did give it as a well-established fact - according to him, the DI had approved of the law. Which they didn't.

I don't really think I'll get an answer from him.