*swears in disabled*

so I think part of what's currently fucking up my back is I will try to sit on the couch with the lap desk full of laptop on my lap, and I will end up lying on the couch with my spine bent weird. (it does not help that the couch cushions like to slide. the velcro did nothing.) sitting in an actual chair at an actual desk might be an improvement on that count, but (1) where? (2) I will fuck up something else that way, just watch me. (previous employment had fancy ergonomic office chairs. absolutely the most comfortable office chairs I've ever sat in. hated 'em.)

lying flat on my back in bed won't bend my spine funny while I'm not paying attention. but I can't laptop while lying flat in bed. I can tablet or phone, but those don't have a full-sized keyboard—or rather, I have a case thing for the tablet that has a keyboard in; whether the tablet realizes the keyboard is there is a different question and the usual answer is "huh?"—and if either device is loading pages faster than the laptop does, it's probably because the laptop thinks there's no internet, on account of both mobile devices load shit pretty slow. also the phone screen is bitsy, and if I try to edit a sufficiently large Dreamwidth post on my tablet (the draft of where the firelight fades hit that a while ago), it just will not load fast enough for me to both save the edits at frequent intervals and keep up my pace. and I'm pissy enough about losing the two paragraphs I mentioned yesterday; I don't want to save at infrequent intervals and risk losing more.

also, lying flat on my back in bed makes drinking out of an open-top cup impossible. or rather, I'd have to sit up to, and I dehydrate easily enough already. (my pain-in-the-ass body doesn't hold on to most of the water I drink. yes, I have been tested for diabetes.) I have a water bottle with a valve-type top, but I suspect I'd spill that trying to drink while flat too.

I still don't have my Medicaid card. asking for a replacement requires the number off the Medicaid card. emailing the people to say hey, how do I get my Medicaid card without a Medicaid card to read the number off of, has resulted in what, three weeks of silence at this point? four?

does anyone have ideas?

(no subject)

so angelofthenorth is doing a café post thing for language learners, which I can't play in real effectively because I have zero percent confidence in my ability to construct sentences in anything but English, but which has reminded me that I want to learn languages

the one language I ever did get confident in my ability to construct sentences in is Latin, which is also (for perhaps obvious reasons) the only language where the curriculum began with declination and conjugation charts instead of basic sentences sans explanation of how the words went together. (the school where I took Latin I? didn't use the Cambridge books. if I'd moved to the school I graduated from one year earlier, the foreign language graduation requirement would have been fun, by which I mean hell.) does anyone have any ideas where I could find any (ideally free) course in any of my languages of interest that I won't bounce right back off of? French is probably the easiest ask here. maybe Gaeilge.

given the above and given the different script, does anyone have any idea where I could start with Mandarin?