A Soap Opera

I’ve wanted to make soap for a long time now. What stopped me so far was the lack of a safe work space. I am not going to handle NaOh in my kitchen with the kids running around. But with the workbench finally set up I got myself a “starting kit” for soap making and tried my first batch.

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I did everything by the book, prepared my stuff, and still managed to grab a bottle of bergamotte scent instead of lavender. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For one, my oils turned the colour pretty yellowish, the purple didn’t look that nice, and for a pure lavender soap it would have been ugly. But with bergamotte in the mix, the yellow “makes sense”. Second, while I used the amounts of essential oil specified in the recipe, the lavender does come off really strong. If I’d used 20 ml of lavender, it would have overpowered everything and probably made the soap unusable.

I let it rest for two days, and it was still too soft to take out of the moulds. Re-reading everything I came to the conclusion that the freshly made soap cooled too quickly as my work shop is quite cool. The next batch will get taken to the kitchen and wrapped thoroughly so it can cool more slowly.

My book also offered a dirty trick for dealing with too soft soap, which is to freeze it for an hour or so. That worked fine, but somehow turned the purple pink. I’m curious to see if it will turn purple again. It’s now off to drying and should be ready in time for Christmas. Yeah, this year’s Christmas presents will smell nice.

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Degupdate: A New Sand Bath

We decided to get them a different sand bath on our recent trip to Ikea, because the big round plate was less than ideal. I hoped that a higher rim would prevent “spills” but it merely slightly reduces them. Anyway, the degus really like it. They need sand baths to keep clean and prevent/get rid of parasites and they obviously also quite enjoy them. They also like digging a lot.

I decided to shoot a short video, because it’s just over-cute.

Here’s some more pics. Estelle almost dares to take treats from me, and she is now ok with putting her front paws against my leg. She will come out more quickly, at least as long as the rest of the room is quiet.

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Estelle, being unsure, deciding to wait for Candy to take the treats and bury them. Given that Estelle is the larger of the two, I’m pretty sure she gets her share of treats.

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Estelle, trying the bath

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Candy, stealing all the treats.

How’s Your Second Wave Going? Covid and the Myth of Individual Responsibility

As about everybody with the expertise to do so predicted, Covid is back with a vengeance and Europe is in the firm grip of a second wave.

I absolutely have no clue what France is doing, because their new cases are just through the roof with 27k new cases yesterday, or Spain, or what is keeping Italy relatively stable. What I do know is that currently the narrative is that the second wave is caused by irresponsible individuals. And sure, we are all fed up with the people who don’t wear their masks, and the SNP MP who took the train home despite having Covid, and the Kids who party like there was no tomorrow (well, probably they’re right). Yet, in the end, the tale of the reckless individual who endangers all of us is just that: a tale, mostly to deflect from the complete failure of our governing bodies.

The media are, of course, helping. 12 infected at an illegal party, or 25 infected at a completely legal wedding makes for good headlines. As does “most transmissions occur in the personal sector” while only mentioning in the small print that 30-50% of transmissions are unknown. Transmissions in your private life are easy to follow. Contact tracing will work well when the people you infected with Covid are your spouse and teenage kid. Contact tracing will not work at all when you infect 2 people at the grocery store and one on public transport. Our daily life will force us into close contact with many people, often with not enough protection. At school I’m in close contact with up to 200 people a day, usually with no masks, no air filters, no distance. At least so far it seems that the concept of “tracing and isolating” after a positive test is working, there have been few spreads within schools or among the families, but it shows again why the spread outside of schools and workplaces is going on and on: There’s no contact tracing and isolation for people who shopped together at the supermarket. How’s the cashier supposed to know whether they got the ‘Rona at work or in an elevator where somebody sneezed?

The current discourse is nothing but to deflect from the abysmal failure of the people in charge to implement safety standards that will really keep people safe, but as long as we’re happily blaming one another they’ll get away with it.

Degupdate: They Do Run Run Run, They Do Run, Run, Run

The new degu run is set up now and Candy just loves getting out. When we come to Degustan she’ll go downstairs and wait for the door to be opened. then she takes a longer or shorter stroll before returning. By now she has deemed me fully safe. The degus love to run, and in doing so, they slow me down, as I spend some time sitting quietly.

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We tied a few old T-shirts against the door to close the gap so no degu gets hurt falling down. Of course they#re also playthings and the string is a highly sought plaything.

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Looks like a leaf but isn’t edible! Cheating!

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Hi friends!

Estelle is coming around. Candy does actively encourage her to go outside and today she even sniffed my hand. We’re getting there.

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The obvious advantage is that it’s much easier to take pics of careful Estelle than of whirlwind Candy.

But talking about “sitting down”: As I sat crosslegged today for 45 minutes, barely moving, I managed to cut off circulation in my feet to the extend that when I got up, I fell flat on my ass again. Thankfully the degus were inside by then and all I suffered was a laughing attack at my own stupidity and a headache.

Permission to Grieve: Miscarriages and Stillbirths

Very obvious content note for death, loss, stillbirth and miscarriages.

Last week, celebrity couple Chrissy Teigen and John Legend lost their third child to a pregnancy complication, because all the fame and money in the world can sometimes not make a pregnancy safe. Teigen, who is a very outgoing person who shares lots of her personal and family life on Twitter also shared about her loss.

Accompanied by a black and white picture of herself in hospital she talks about her pain, her loss and her love for her child who couldn’t be saved. The world and the internet being what it is, she was both accused of being a hypocrite for being a staunch pro choice woman, but still mourning the loss of her child, and of milking the death of her child for cheap publicity by posting about it.

Of course you’ve got to have some deep seated hatred of women if you believe that the lady who kept tweeting about being pregnant for months, happy and proud, would just use a life threatening pregnancy complication that resulted in the loss of her child for publicity, because obviously women are heartless shallow creatures devoid of real feelings or something.

But however you would personally feel about making your loss public on social media, by doing so herself, Teigen gave others a great gift: The permission to mourn. Because miscarriages and stillbirths are still hushed in our societies. If you tell people you’re expecting, they’ll tell you you shouldn’t say anything before those critical first three months are over, because…

Well, because what exactly? It’s not like the words leaving your mouth will retroactively curse the embryo with a genetic condition incompatible with life, or suddenly make your thyroid stop working so your body won’t carry the healthiest of embryos to term. Biology doesn’t work like that. The reason you’re not supposed to talk about it is because people would like to pretend it doesn’t happen. This, ironically but not unexpectedly, rather logically, includes the very same people accusing Teigen to be a hypocrite for being pro choice. If you pretend that a fertilised egg is the same, no more important than a six years old, then you mustn’t face the reality that most fertilised eggs never even implant, and that of those that implant a large number will still not make it past the three months mark, and that of those who make it past that mark some will still not result in a living baby.

The result of this is that women and others who lose wanted pregnancies are shushed up, their feelings are denied and their need to mourn is ignored. While Germany still has some very restrictive anti abortion laws, it’s only been a couple of years since people were allowed to bury their stillborn if it weighed less than a kilogram, which included fetuses up to the eighth month of pregnancy. While the day before you were forced to carry “your unborn baby” to term whether you wanted or not, suddenly there was no baby, just clinical waste.

Emotions around pregnancies are complicated, because they are tied to so many concepts in our societies. From the idea that this is the ultimate test of femaleness (even for people who are not, you know, women), over the idea that this is your duty, to the fact that it can also be your greatest desire. For everybody who can get pregnant and who has sex that could get them pregnant, the idea of a pregnancy hangs over our heads. Depending on how you’re personally feeling, it can be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or the albatross around your neck. Being able to talk freely about all those emotions is important. This must include the ability to say “I am devastated for losing a pregnancy/not becoming pregnant” and also using terms like “baby” which denotes an emotional attachment, but also the ability to say “I will never ever again consent to being pregnant”. Because yours truly has done both, and I’ve been hurt both times by people who tried to deny the validity of my feelings and position. Occasionally by the same people. Because apparently at ten weeks it’s both a baby if you don’t want to be pregnant, and just an error of nature if you want to be pregnant but lose the pregnancy. Fuck that shit.

 

Degupdate: Snugglebeasties and DIY

Slowly, the reality of having degus is getting us. No matter how much you read, it’s never going to come close. First of all, the two remaining degus have completely different characters. Candy will come to my hand as soon as I open the door and see if there’s a treat for her. I think before long she’ll ride on our shoulders.

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As a result, Estelle is often missing out on the best treats. She still vanishes either inside the house or behind it and will not move any closer to us. Best we managed so far is that she no longer whistles in panic all the time. I try to place the treat near her while Candy is nibbling hers so she can get her nut as well.

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It’s not like I’m worried about her. She’s obviously growing and in good shape, her fur is shiny and silky, and when I sit down and just watch from a distance, she is active and interacting with Candy.

©Giliell, all rights reserved The picture quality is sadly very bad as there wasn’t much light.

I love watching them. I just sit in an armchair for 15 minutes and watch them “talk” to each other, take a sand bath, or try to destroy Degustan. It’s so relaxing. It also makes me think of Caine a lot and her ratitude.

But talking about the reality: The People Who Tell You About Degus insisted that you can let them run in your room for an hour every day. After the two escapes by Estelle and the one by Candy it’s become clear that this is not an option. The room has way too many places where a degu can vanish and even possibly hurt herself. Also capturing them before they’re totally tame would always mean extreme amounts of stress for the degus, not to mention the risk of being savaged by degu teeth. But there’s also useful ideas on the internet and one lady just built a barrier to give them a bigger run but also protect the room.

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It’s foldable and can be put away when not needed, but I’ll need to do something about the light.

Oh,a nd since the temperatures are getting lower, I bought them a “snuggle safe” heating pad. It gets heated in the microwave and then keeps the warmth for several hours. I much prefer that to a heating lamp, especially over night or when we’re not home. The degus absolutely love it and I can only recommend it if your pet could do with a how water bottle occasionally.

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Lost Identities: How White Supremacy Maintains itself

As we all know, whiteness is a social construct (because everything is, duh). It is not a concept that has been clear and stable from the dawn of time. Actually, it is even a fairly recent concept as they go, yet it is still one people have naturalised quickly. Naturalising means that people believe that something is not socially constructed but a direct reflection of the natural world, with sex being another prominent one. Because of course you can see the difference between me and Beyoncé, right?

Whiteness as a concept cannot be separated from white supremacy as it is and was tied to it from birth. The only reason to define someone’s “race” via genotype is to establish differences and hierarchies. But since “race” is of course not a natural phenomenon we merely seek to describe, it’s always been in trouble. There is no logic to it, just power, and that power has developed several strategies to maintain itself. One pretty obvious one is including groups that had previously been excluded. You can see that pretty well in how, for example, folks of Irish or Italian descent were included into the “white” category in the USA: give them a stake in white supremacy, use them as a shield against accusations of racism. See, the Irish were discriminated against as well, they overcame it, if black people are still suffering it’s because there’s actually something wrong with black people.

Another way is by folding individual people into the group, erasing their identities and heritage. They can only gain the status of “white” by denying that they were ever anything else.Wait a generation or two and nobody knows anymore that you have indeed ancestors who were not considered white.

My own family history is such an example. I am white, of German heritage, for all purposes of the law and society. My last name, passed down from my paternal grandpa literally means “person from a very boring village 20km from the place I live now”. But my paternal grandma already spoils the picture, as she grew up as a member of the German settlers in the Ukraine. After the war she was considered a “dirty Russian”, my dad had kids bully him, and they did everything to hide that “dirty family secret”. Me? I just noticed that grandma had a different accent than the rest of the family. To me, any part of that heritage and identity has been lost. My cousin’s father in law, who is a hobby genealogist researched grandma’s family and I learned more about them from his essay than from my family. The Russian German families who arrived in the 90s were pretty quickly folded into the “white” category because they are needed to uphold white supremacy against the growing Muslim community and Muslim refugees. Same with Italians. In my childhood, prejudice against Italian immigrants was on par with prejudice against Turkish immigrants, but this has shifted dramatically.

On my mother’s side it becomes even more extreme. Her grandmother’s family used to be Sinti or Roma. I suspect Sinti, because they are more likely to settle and integrate into the community at the price of giving up their identity, but I have no clue. All the family ever knew is that they were G***. They didn’t even have a name for their heritage anymore beyond the slur used by white people around them. All we can trace back is the family name that is of Hindu origin.

None of that makes me not white. I don’t claim membership of the communities. It’s not a quest to seek faux oppression because some of my ancestors had to pay a heavy price for me to be considered white and gaining white privilege (see “my great-great-great-great grandmother was a Cherokee princess, that makes me so spiritual and also you cannot call me racist”). It’s an acknowledgement of their histories. It’s an acknowledgement of how white supremacy works in subtle ways, making sure that people don’t show solidarity with each other, because they’re fighting to be included in the dominant category. It’s an acknowledgement of loss. It’s also an acknowledgement of how these very stories can once again be used to dismiss systemic racism in favour of individual accounts of success and failure.

A Painful and Exhausted Degupdate

Last night I lost it. The last two weeks were bad, bad, with both my parents having some major health issues, my aunt being an asshole and the Katja dying and right now I’m really, really  protective of the other two degus, so when last night Estelle escaped and was nowhere to be found, I really found the end of my tether. I did something I haven’t done in 21 years of relationship: I called Mr home (poor guy had just left a couple of hours before because he had to take the kid to a medical appointment). Find yourself a guy who’ll take a 200km round trip to give you a hug.

Finally I found Estelle in the Little One’s wardrobe, under the socks drawer. How she got in there? Your guess is as good as mine.

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Estelle is also generally very shy and quiet. She doesn’t yet take treats from us and cusses me out whenever I try to offer her some. And she’ll just sit motionlessly in a corner when there’s something she doesn’t like, so while the Little One came downstairs for my help, she somehow got into that wardrobe and stayed very still. After we finally found her, we had to get her back. In the end I caught her and she very much did not agree with me.

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Degu teeth are sharp. If something like a thumb piercing existed I could have inserted one, because the teeth met in the middle of my thumb. At least it bled nicely, as you can see, so there’s little risk of infection.

Today we had the big cage cleaning and both degus don’t agree with being confined to the small left side, so Estelle used the opportunity so simply jump over my head, run down my back and escape again. This time I caught her with a towel and banished her to an old wine box for the time of cleaning. Candy simply stayed inside, but we cleaned like the devil was on our tail and by the end of it I was covered in sweat and litter.

©Giliell, all rights reserved Estelle, looking very suspicious at my hand. At this point she hadn’t found out how tasty I apparently am.

 

A Very Sad Degupdate

Our sweet Katja didn’t make it. After I was ever so carefully hopeful last night, she died this morning. Apparently her intestine had been too damaged already and she died this morning in the little one’s hands. Yesterday the vet said that there was probably something wrong with her apart from the infection, because she was the runt of the litter and the difference between her and her litter mate Estelle had become ever more apparent.

In the end it was probably double bad luck: Having a birth defect and a very inexperienced Degu owner who didn’t notice her problems soon enough. We did our best. I don’t know if somebody else’s best would have been good enough, ours wasn’t.

Farewell, my sweet girl.

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I also have the sweetest kid in the world. When she cried in my arms this morning she asked me why I wasn’t crying. I told her it was because I was comforting her. She went back to cry, but stopped after a minute or so to tell me “it’s ok, mummy, you can cry now and I’ll comfort you”, at which point all floodgates were opened.

Teacher’s Corner: Talk to Me!

Today’s teacher’s corner is brought to you by the Little One, who apparently has a rough day at school. Some classmates seem to be difficult and today everything escalated, their class teacher cancelled tomorrow’s recess* and she complained bitterly that both the English and the P.E teacher had called them “a bad English/P.E. class”. Now, of course, that gets the mama bear mode activated, but luckily my brain kicked back in and I asked what exactly did the English teacher say? “Well, we were all a bit overenergetic and it was very loud and he said this had been the worst English lesson ever and he didn’t enjoy it at all.”

As you can see, that’s quite something different. The teacher hadn’t called them “bad”, he’d given them feedback about that particular lesson and let them know how he felt about it.

And what did the P.E. teacher say? “He said he had to be stricter with us than with other classes, because he knows that many of us like to do sports, but some kids always misbehave when he is talking and therefore we don’t get to do a lot of sports.”

As you can see, in both cases the teacher said something very different from what the kid reported back to me. That’s not because she was lying, but if you take the “communication model” that says that all messages have an affective component and that whatever message the sender is trying to convey may be absolutely lost by the recipient, it’s clear what happened: a pretty sensitive and ambitious kid who thrives on a teacher’s praise felt unfairly criticised and the emotional response made her unable to actually understand what was being said. We talked about what each teacher said, and that she had admitted herself that they didn’t behave during the English lesson and that the P.E. teacher was actually on her side. It made her feel a lot better. To understand the criticism, but also to understand that if the teacher talks about kids who misbehave and she didn’t misbehave, the reprimand wasn’t directed at her (funny enough, that’s so often the case: the kids who do behave are sad and upset while those who caused the trouble don’t feel like this has anything to do with them).

We also talked about how she can tell a teacher if she thinks their comments were unfair or hurt her, and how she can address that she feels it’s unfair that recess is cancelled. It’s important that she can stand up for herself, and she knows I’ll have her back when it’s justified, but from experience I also know how quickly those situations escalate when parents don’t talk these things through, but just believe their kids verbatim. Next day you have some upset parents on the phone or, even better, in school, demanding to talk to that horrible teacher NOW. The teacher in question doesn’t even know what they’re talking about, because the incident the parents are talking about bears no resemblance to what happened, the parents decide the teacher is accusing their kid of lying and before you know it you’re sitting there for an hour trying to untangle who said what, tracing back communication, doing heavy meta communication and reestablishing some goodwill, if you ever manage to calm down mama and papa bear at all.

So please, parents, if you’re reading this: talk to your kids. Find out exactly what was said, and not just what was felt. They will learn how to solve such problems from you, only while strongarming while being wrong will often work in a school setting (after all, if we give your kid detention and you decide it’s bullshit, we can’t call the cops on you, and I don’t want to, and it’s your kid to fuck up anyway), it will not work in a work setting. You can’t send mummy to your boss because you thought they were mean. No, you also can’t send your union rep, claiming that your boss called you lazy when in fact they said that the department was behind schedule.

But also, do have their back if their teacher did treat them unfairly. Assume the best at first, but I’ve been in schools for long enough and I know that some teachers are mean bullies who will take it out on the kids whose parents will always agree with the teacher.

*That’s, of course, not legal. “Collective punishment” isn’t allowed in our school system, but I guess I’m the only parent who knows that in that class and I won’t tattle. I absolutely encourage the kid to challenge the teacher, but I’m not going to be that parent either who completely undermines the teacher’s authority. They’ll live spending one recess in class. Should this be repeated, we can talk.

 

P.S. That’s also why I think the communication mantra “criticise behaviour, not people” is half bullshit. People will still understand “you are X”. At best you can have some meta communication later.

DegUpdate: Getting to know each other

I have a confession to make: I’m in love. And yes, I shamelessly used the kids to get pets. Pets have always been a great point of difference between Mr and me. I love all creatures great and small, and while he does so, too, he prefers them to be at some distance and not his responsibility. Me? I’d try to snuggle with the grizzly… So now that the degus are here, I’m smitten with them. But they are super cute and Mr also spends time watching them when he’s here, so I think they’re working their magic on him as well…

We’re currently at the “getting to know each other” stage. But we’re getting there. On Friday, when we cleaned Degustan, they hid behind their box and refused to come out for hours. Today they were running around in the side tract while we cleaned the main part and were pretty much ok with us being loud and moving next to them. We’re also using the oldest bribe that there is: food. Special treats are offered in an outstretched hand.  So far, I’m making lots of progress with Candy, who today carefully sniffed my fingers several times, getting my smell, and who even dared to put a paw on mine. Katja and Celeste are still much shyer, though Katja is getting more adventurous by the day. Celeste…, we’ll get there.

Now, enough talk, here’s your fluffballs. You can see they#re getting more comfy with us by the increase in picture quality.

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Katja, taking a peek. The picture is pretty bad, still taken with lots of magnification through the wire of the cage, but sooooo dreamy. That#s her thing: Sneak out on the left side of the wine box, then take flight to Celeste who is waiting on the other side.

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Celeste, waiting for Katja. I’m getting really good at telling them apart. At first I though “fuck it, we’ll just randomly call them a name, how is anybody supposed to tell them apart?”, but when you spend time with them, you notice the small differences. Celeste is a big girl, and her light rings around the eyes and neck are larger than those of the others.

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Find that degu. Katja and Candy sneaking out from behind the box.

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Katja and Celeste. See, I was allowed to hold the phone in their face. You can pretty clearly see the size difference here.

Welcome to Degustan

As I mentioned before, the little one passed all the requirements for owning pets, and after we spent the summer researching and finding a good breeder, as well as me spending a couple of weeks turning an old cupboard into a pet habitat, the degus finally arrived on Wednesday. They are three young females (three being the minimum size of a group) called Candy, Katja and Estelle. Katja and Estelle are siblings, while Candy comes from a different litter, but they are very close in age so they were easy to socialise (the breeder did that for us) and are a good basis for a group.

But let’s start with the habitat, nicknamed “Degustan”:

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I cut an opening into my grandma’s old kitchen cupboard, put some solid fence in front of it and added boards to get a good size habitat. I also used the leftover boards to construct a side tract which increases the habitat size, but can also be used to isolate a degu should the need arise (and currently to keep them from escaping while cleaning the cage).

What sounds pretty straightforward was a hell lot of work, usually because I had to do everything at least twice since I was figuring it out as I went along. All boards have floor tiles on them to prevent urine from soaking into the wood and allow for easy cleaning. At the first try the tile glue soaked the wood too much and my boards bent. The second time I didn’t measure the depth in the cupboard, which was already upstairs, but in the extension, not realising that I’d changed width and depth. Now there’s a gap between the boards and the door, which can be dangerous for the degus, so I have now tied old t-shirts on the door to close the gap. And that’s just one of the many things that went wrong, but now it’s more or less finished and I’m pretty proud of it.I still have to make a running wheel for them, but that’s a project for next week.

Here’s the part you’ve been waiting for: the Degus

I still don’t have very good pics, also not of all of them. They are still very shy and mostly try to hide, though there are already differences noticeable. First, meet Candy. Of course I have an earworm ever since the little one announced the name, and now you have, too.

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Candy is the bold one. She was the first to leave the pet carrier and explore the new habitat. Whenever there’s a disturbance that sends them off hiding (which currently is still mostly “us existing in proximity”) she’s the first to re-emerge and get back to whatever she’d been doing. She also already escaped once and it was quite some work to catch her, especially since we didn’t want to scare or hurt her by grabbing her. Finally we managed to shoo her unto a towel where I then lifted the sides. Once they are accustomed to us they’ll be allowed to run in the room for some time each day, but until they are comfortable with us they need to stay in the habitat.

Here’s Estelle

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She’s loud. When we fixed the shirts to the cage door she kept yelling at us. She’s also very shy and mostly snuggles with Katja. Which was our first clue on how to tell them apart. Also Estelle’s light marks around the eyes are a bit larger than Candy’s. Katja (no pics yet) is easier to tell apart (at least at the moment), because she is still smaller than the other two. As you can imagine, I’m quite in love with them. I think Caine would have loved them, too, they’re obviously her kind of people.