An upbeat title for what’s actually been a very tough week. I’ll get back to the title but I had to cancel my “Stickelchen” class. Barely a few hours before I needed to be asleep my pain levels were ramped up and despite being also fatigued I was no where near able to sleep. Horribly I’ve needed to recover as if I actually did do the class.

It’s hard to really explain fibro pain, despite being a classic patient in that I have a very strong and vivid memory and recall. So I should be able to articulate it better.

But if you’ve ever been in a situation where heavy machinery is used all day every day for a week then you know how noise and the deeper vibrations really drain your ability to concentrate and make you more aware of the noise not less.

The hyper stimulation that’s external is I think easier to understand, and respect, than when your nerves are doing it to themselves. But the effect on said nerves is still the same. They are firing overtime and no matter the cause the effect is the sensation that the external world has seeped into your blood and bone. You can’t shake it out. You can’t walk it off, and because so many of our senses are physically in our head and close to each other you find smell overbearing. Light is that much brighter. At least it’s fairly cheap and easy to gargle with mouth wash when taste starts getting in on the act.

But I’m taking this as an opportunity to further refine what I’ve been trying to articulate.

I have a timeframe in mind. And in the days since I’ve been working to make sure I’m properly utilising the work of researchers I need to rely on. For example I’m quoting from Textiler Hausrat and I’ve already found differences in translations I did a few years back and now.

I’ve got some more documents that are really patchily OCR ready which means I need a mix of A5 notebook compactness of terms to search for manually. OMG. Had I known this when I first accessed these I’d have already worked out where we have all gone wrong.

It helps that I can read these fairly easily. And much better than translation software for modern translations.

I am really excited by the prospect of both the research and making sides of all the hats. Especially given these were worn by my ancestors! Not the super OTT gold and pearlwork obviously, but Gelderland keeps springing surprises on me by how wonderfully Dutch and NRW influenced they are.

These two pages from the Codice de Trajes really do reveal this dual influence. And I love it.