I have successfully scootered to work!

T and I only have the one car between us, and since I work on campus which only has expensive and inconvenient parking, T generally takes the car. Unfortunately, that means I'm very dependent on Austin's crummy public transit, which generally doubles to triples the time any given trip takes me. I also live a mile and a half from the nearest bus stop, which doesn't help. So T and I are constantly coordinating with one another about rides add going places, and I get frustrated about that sometimes.

Also unfortunately, I have airways narrow enough to startle and horrify the ENT I visited last year, narrow enough that when I asked "what can I do to make exercise something I can engage in without constantly shorting out my breathing?" he awkwardly hemmed and hawed before suggesting I try dieting. And my balance is crappy. And I haaaaaaate bikes.

But there are little rentable electric scooters all over town right now, and buying your own is actually affordable. So I'm looking at whether or not I can train myself to use the rented kind with an eye to maybe buying one to use as a commuter vehicle.

Previous attempts to try biking have foundered on me not being strong enough to lift a bike onto the bus rack and finding bikes terrifying when I get freaked out practicing and have to stop. With the scooter, I started and stopped a lot--the ride was projected to take 10m and wound up taking 30m--but I wasn't as scared because bailing didn't feel like so much of a transition. And I did the whole ride on my own. Victory!

My ankles are bruised all to hell and I still can't breathe through the phlegm very well, but I'm cautiously going to label this a success. Hopefully I'll continue having some luck with this approach. We'll see.

T has a brilliant idea on The Good Doctor's Shaun

which is:

the man has no autistic community or friends because he can't tolerate screens with pixels. This is something of a plot point earlier, when he insists on an expensive TV for reasons, but also all his stim fiddle things are analog and he's almost never shown using any kind of screen tech.

GENIUS.

S2E3 (and a bit of S2E4), The Good Doctor

One thing I am really enjoying about this show is that it honors the anger of women. S2E3 is one of the subtlest treatments I can think of in fiction of the utter, utter frustration that sexism wreaks in the workplace, the fury of thwarted women, the cluelessness and disinterest of commanding men--and experienced women in senior-experience but junior-rank choosing to reach out and back up other women and spend limited social capital to do it.

(Which is to say: that episode focused on some of the bullshit that is expected out of a female surgeon rather than a male one, and an experienced nurse observing chose to intervene and make some very, very canny political decisions to nudge the two men who were vastly, vastly

That was the A plot. The B plot was Shaun avoiding his ex-neighbor/love interest, who had moved to Pennsylvania and had come back unexpectedly to stay with him, and who had really upset him in the first place by leaving; he blurted out to her that he was really upset she'd left, and hurt, and if she was going to leave like that he didn't want her to come back, he wanted her to just go away forever. Then he hid and refused to see her or talk to her while she was staying in his house. The beginning of the next episode is Lea--the neighbor--responding to him coming back and apologizing by saying "Wow, that sucked! You're not the only one who needed a friend, that hurt me back, you have to tell me things and you think really badly of me! I need to go find a new place to live." In context, you feel for both of them: and I respect this show so, so much more for giving her the dignity of her anger and demanding that he acknowledge her pain as well as expecting her to acknowledge his.