This post is a day late because I decided to have an early night last night. I regret nothing.

After hubris, nemesis. A few weeks ago, I was so proud of all the blood I’d donated (especially since mine is used for tiny babies).

A few weeks later, I have an iron deficiency. There’s nothing to indicate that anything else is seriously wrong, so with luck it doesn’t mean anything worse than the fact that I’ve donated iron faster than I’ve taken it in. In retrospect there was a warning in the fact that my copper sulphate test wasn’t conclusive and I had to be checked with the HemoCue the last few times I donated.

The treatment is to take ferrous sulphate tablets three times a day and wait and see if that does the job. They have some unpleasant side effects, but I’m not suffering too badly. It does feel weird to be taking a medicine that is also a lawn treatment agent and available in 25kg sacks of bright green crystals at about a hundredth of the pharmacy price. I also think it’s a shame that ferrous sulphate now has such a mundane name when it was once called “green vitriol”!

I turned some of the garden blackberry harvest into crème de mûre following this recipe. (In short, in case the link rots: macerate 600g of fruit in a bottle of wine for 48 hours, strain, simmer with 500g sugar for 5 minutes, cool, top up with 300mL vodka; gives two wine bottles’ worth.) It should be ready to drink in a week or so. I’m going to try making a Bramble, obviously. Crème de mûre is said to be a possible alternative to crème de cassis, so perhaps a Kir royal? Although as it comes from the garden, perhaps it should be a Kir banal.

I’ve been accumulating old hard drives for years, which now means that I have a lot of them, they’re very heavy, and I have to check that there’s nothing I need on them before I reuse or dispose of them (or dismantle them and use them as a source of extremely strong magnets).

Anyway, after putting them in a Box of Forgetting for so long, I’m now doing something about it. The SATA drives are easier, because I can just plug them into a dock. The parallel drives will require a bit more faffing with an old external enclosure. It will take some time.

Eggcorn of the week: “corn teen” for “quarantine”.