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Nothing like a day's checklist completed.
I have:
- Called my psychiatrist's office to ask to be put on the cancellation list, and been told: "Your timing is impeccable - I just had a cancellation for 9:30 tomorrow morning." WIN. (Apart from having to get up much, much earlier than I have in months - part of why I'm seeing my psychiatrist ASAP is severe issues with sleep. The other part being medication issues.)
- Called the faculty office about seeing the student advisors.
- Called my intended travel agent and outlined my travel plans; she's going to work things out and get back to me.
Given that last night my severe shortage of emotional energy resulted in catastrophic breakdown, I'm not pushing myself today. That was my checklist.
However, because I remembered I want to, I also:
- Called my camera shop and ordered the digital video camera I'm buying. (They don't keep them in stock, so you ask them to get one in and they do; I really like my camera shop, so I want to go through them anyway.)
- Called my bank, discovered they want me to go to a branch, rolled my eyes hard.
Although last night I did realise the source trigger of a lot of my stress and emotional breakdowns lately, which is good, although it's a little frustrating that this has been a problem for, like, a month, and I only JUST worked it out.
Irksome.
Anyway, I'm somewhat excited about the camera, if only because of my plans for it. While travelling around Britain, I'm intending to visit a number of relatives, including some of my grandparents' generation. In addition to just wanting to get some video of my loved ones who live on another continent and I never get to see, I want to ask them permission to set up the camera to film them while we chat about our family. I want to invite them to tell me about their own lives, and about the family members who've passed.
If I film it, I don't have to worry about the things I'll forget. There are too many people I never got to know, or didn't get to know as well as I wanted to... and my time with any of them will never be enough.
When I was twelve, my mother, my sister and I visited South Africa, and my memories of that visit aren't enough. Nor are my memories of my grandmother visiting us, here, when I was fifteen or so. My memory just isn't good enough ever to remember as much as I want to about people I love, and sometimes you don't get another chance. I didn't get to see my grandmother in person again - she died in September 2001. There are others, who I adored less, yet still loved, like my cousin's husband, Gary, who was killed a few months after our visit.
I want to film my loved ones this time, if they're willing. Especially Mary, my grandmother's cousin, to whom she was close, and who, after my grandmother and my uncle, is perhaps the relative I have loved the most.
I also plan to use it for more general, touristy purposes, but for purely tourist use I might not have gone for a camera more advanced than the one in my compact digital camera, or even if I had, I could have spent much less if I got standard definition instead of HD. But I want external-memory-storage quality, not YouTube quality... so I'm going HD.
Like just about every Expensive thing I buy, though, that also means that I expect it to be sufficient for my needs for many years to come, if I take care of it - which I will. Unless my vaguely-desired secondary career as a photographer works out, and I do some sort of paid video work, but then it becomes a professional expense and buying an upgrade is a different action from getting one because I want one.
I'm also likely to get one of these. Because I want a tripod to take to Britain, and the thing is... the tripod I own is excellent, but it's a full size tripod of sturdy build, which means it's bulky and quite heavy... so I don't actually want to carry it on flights. Whereas spiderpods are small and quite light, and still should be sufficient. (I'm most likely, in any case, to want to use a tripod while filming relatives as mentioned, in which case a spiderpod can be set on a table or the back of a chair; for tourism purposes, I'll be fine either freehand or maaaaybe I could use a monopod.)
I have a spiderpod already, but the one I have is the smallest size, which isn't strong enough to hold a DSLR or a video camera. (t's fine for my compact camera. Which I will also be taking to Britain, if only so I have a camera I'm comfortable handing to strangers to ask them to take a picture of me at $place, which: not the case with my expensive and breakable DSLR.
If someone drops my compact, it'll probably survive, and if it doesn't, I'll be mildly sad. If someone drops my DSLR, then the body will *probably* survive, but the lens will most likely break, and they're expensive; my compact is also not really worth stealing, and it will only make me mildly sad if it is stolen, whereas my DSLR is valuable and will be painfully expensive to replace. (The price I paid for it being one I was happy to pay once, and would loathe to pay twice.) I'd be somewhat devastated if I gave it to a stranger and something happened to it.
Now I think I shall work on route planning - there are more counties in Britain than I thought, so I don't think I can really visit them all. There are a few I'm definitely going to regardless:
- Cornwall and Devon (can't do Land's End to John o'Groats ambition without going through these)
- Middlesex (that's where London is)
- Midlothianshire (Edinburgh and my cousin Mary)
- Worcestershire (my great-aunt Helen)
- Aberdeenshire (my ancestral home and my relatives there)
- Caithness (John o'Groats)
I maybe want to go to Orkney. I want to see the fjords but to get to Caithness I'll be going through Ross-shire and Cromartyshire and Inverness-shire anyway; on the way north from Midlothian I'll want to go through Perthshire, so I can go through Perth, just so I can say I've been there, and also, if asked where I'm from, be able to answer: "Perth."
... wow, you really don't have to type Perth very many times before it stops looking like a word.
Glamorgan to go to Cardiff, Caernarfonshire to go to Caernarfon, Oxfordshire to go to Oxford, Yorkshire and Lancashire because seriously, Buckinghamshire to visit the Rothschild Estate, because my great-grandfather was chief butler there, and I know pretty much nothing else about him (although I might learn more when I visit my great-aunt Helen), and it makes me want to see the place.
I think what I really need to do is get a biggish map of Britain I can put on my pinboard, and then as I work out all the major places I want to see, I can mark them with pins and then work out a rough plan for where I'm going. (Amid also being sure to get in touch with the kin I want to visit.)Current Mood:  excited
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