Source: Netflix
For spoiler reasons for the first episode, the post is below the fold, being a run down of the episode, though I guess that by now y’all know the basic set up of the series.
CN: Descriptions of periods, medical procedures, etc. But hey, if half the world can deal with this, the other half should at least know about it.
I have heavy periods. And I really mean heavy. Like the bottom is falling out. An average period is 60 ml of liquid. My mens cup holds 48 ml and I can fill that three times in an hour when it’s a bad one. Add the cramps, the migraine and the iron deficiency that goes with it and I was fed up. This is clearly an issue that affects my life and my health, so I decided that something needs to be done and that the something is an IUD. IUDs have a great success rate at reducing periods, up to not having any at all (my ob gyn mentioned this as a side effect: “But then you may not hay any periods” as if I knew any cis woman who was happy having hers). Sounds like a medical solution to a medical problem, right?
Nope, nope, nope. As a side effect, the IUD also works as contraception and we can’t have the sluts having sex without at least paying heavy money for it. That would be absurd. Because people afab need to suffer for the very fact that they have a certain biology and they are not allowed to offset the suffering by having fun sexy times. As a society we’d rather have them suffer even without fun sexy times or when they’re using a different method of birth control before we help women and others with uteri to not suffer*.
So I had to pay private for my IUD. With insertion it was 350€ and from what I know this is even cheap compared to the USA. I’m not poor, I could pay, but a poor woman can’t. This would be 75% of what a person on welfare gets a month, and the fact that with any luck this will last me five years doesn’t change that. I’m still angry about it.
So to recap, I have a medical problem, there’s a highly effective therapy, but because I get birth control as a side effect, it’s not covered by health insurance. Fuck the patriarchy.
*And if you get m,ore offended by my wording than the fact that this is happening, kindly fuck off.
Here we go again. The next pattern has already arrived and I finally finished my feathered dino baby. So no, I’m not dead, I’m just very bogged down. One part is work, where we’re now “catching up” on many things that didn’t happen during the school closings. And many things are happening. so many kids who need help, so few resources. I rarely leave school at the time that I should, and of course the work that would then normally be done at home like grading and preparing classes doesn’t do itself.
On top of that I’m still dealing with the fall out from Uli’s death. Not just the emotional part, but also dealing with many of her belongings. I have hauled off stationary, I’m in contact with charities, of course her sister (legally I have nothing to do with all of this), an asshole landlord, sorting through tons of clothing and trying to find people who will take it (and you still don’t see a difference, but I cannot personally carry all of it to the appropriate places). Yeah, you can rightly ask why I’m doing this, but to me it’s important that her life not be discarded, wasted, and it’s also a way to say goodbye and find closure.
Aaaaand, if that’s not enough, I’ve been having a ton of health troubles as well as regular check ups and cancer screenings. at least my teeth are done for the moment.
But I still got my baby done. It’s such wonderful self-care, it offers instant validation and provides me with a snuggly friend every month. As usually, the pattern was amazing, but like the deer on the complicated side. I’m afraid poor Archie will remain a single kid (though he’s already been claimed by Casey the Deer as her little brother).
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As you can see, Archie is tall, and such a tall plush brings its own challenges, mostly when it comes to stability. You cannot stuff such a narrow neck to the extent that it will hold the large head, so Archie’s got a heavy (1 mm thick) wire running from his head to his tail as a “spine”. The same problem happens with the wings: they’re large, they’re heavy. I tried the same wire as for the spine, but it was too heavy and the wings would just flop down. I used some thinner wire, and while the effect was better, it still didn’t work. In order to get them to stay up I needed to attach them to the head, but I didn’t want to stitch them to the frills. This would be fine If Archie was an collector’s item, but I make friends and therefore I didn’t want to risk tearing anything apart accidentally.
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The solution was extra strong crafting magnets in the wings and the frills at the side of the head. This way they come apart easily when being pulled without any damage to sweet Archie. If you look at the feet, I hate everything about them. Not the result, but everything about making them. The claws had to be sown individually and then sown into the seams of the feet and there was a lot of cussing involved. Nevermore!
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One thing I love about NazFX’s patterns (and the fact that I have an embroidery machine) is that the faces are so expressive. This little fellow basically spells “good natured mischief” with that look, as well as “please cuddle baby”.
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Two weeks ago Mr and I went to our local woods for the first time this year. Living next to swamp and marshland has its advantages, but it also meant that for most of this year the paths were unwalkable, unless you wanted to recreate that child-traumatising scene from the Neverending Story where Ayax drowns in the moor. It was nice, apart from the fact that the mosquitos must have been starved before they got us.
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We found lots of common earthballs (though I really like the name “pigskin poison puffball”, which would make an amazing name for a band), which are nice to look at, but not good for eating if you value your survival.
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And I met a frog. I don’t think that they are poisonous.
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Autumn is sneaking in, which means that it will soon be time to say goodbye to the lush colours of the garden. But before we leave for winter, things are still growing.
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There are finally some butternut squash. they’re pretty late, but this is the second one we ate and there’s a couple more. My corn (not pictured) was a mixed success. While the regular sweetcorn was ok (but I only had four stalks), the black popcorn maize put out cobs way too late and didn’t grow tall either. I doubt that it will still ripen and I’m a bit at loss as to why that happened. Can’t be the soil or anything I did, since both varieties were planted next to each other…
I will have way more chilis than anybody can wish for…
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Somebody must have told this one a dirty joke, it’s turning red.
And last but not least: asters. They’re about the last food the bees get in autumn and aren’t they just amazing?
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The federal government decided to throw some money at schools “to make up for lost learning because of Covid”. While the higher classes who need to write their finals can have some free remedial lessons, we decided that the younger kids didn’t need more maths, but more social skills and hired a guy to do “Erlebnispädagogik”, outdoor education with us. Last week it was time for year 5, which is usually not my year, but because our school worker was sick, I got to cover for her and provide an additional adult, which was good, because in the end I was the one to bring the kids back to school.
The program for the day was a trip with donkeys and a dog.
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Meet Luna, the hyperactive border collie pup. Of course all the kids wanted to be the one to walk Luna, and they all learned that walking a pup is more work than they thought.
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Meet Bruno, the more stubborn of the two donkeys. His friend Fridolin is more docile, but also the boss. these two have the patience of a stone. The gladly took all the kisses and snuggles they could get.
The class was split up in 4 groups with rotating tasks: one for each donkey, leading them and making sure they’re not eating anything their boss didn’t declare safe, because people are assholes who throw away anything and some years back a donkey almost died after he ate something he shouldn’t have, one group walking the puppy, and one group walking in front with a map. Meet “my” happy group of rascals with Fridolin:
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Of course I obscured the faces, it goes without saying that you should never post a kid’s face without permission. Us adults told them that we’d only intervene if they did something harmful for the animals. Apart from that, they were responsible. When it was my group’s turn to lead the way, they mixed up paths and used one that wasn’t actually a path but the destruction left after heavy machinery collected wood. Incidences like that are actually a good thing. The kids have to take responsibility, come up with their own solution, work together. When the ground became difficult to walk because of all the branches left by the machines, they decided quickly to work together and clear it for the donkeys.
We made it back in time and it was such a great experience. Actually we’d need this way more often. At least once a month. Even better would be a school dog or something like that. Or maybe a school donkey? The kids handle the animals with all the care and respect they never show for each other. One boy in particular, who already has a reputation for being difficult, was so totally taken in by the donkeys that he was the most peaceful and sweet kid all day.
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Next week I get three days of donkey fun. Sometimes I love my job more than usually.
Pictures of a beautiful garden spider below the fold, video of The Cure above.
Well, maybe don’t watch the video of you are not ok with late Eighties goth getting erotically eaten by a spider.
In olden times, the fairies would come to people’s houses and clean up for them, in exchange of a little milk or some other food. But over the centuries, the fairies noticed that this created a dependency on part of the humans. Therefore they decided to help the humans to help themselves and turned into mice.
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This is the 15th time I caught a mouse in the cellar in the last two weeks. There is no way we had 15 mice in the cellar. I know what a mouse nest in the cellar looks like: tons of droppings, shredded fabric and paper, as well as the stink. I’ve been cleaning the cellar and so far I haven’t found more than a tiny bit of droppings. They ate the wax and wood barbecue lighters and the soap, but the rest of the food is rodent proof in boxes. But I also haven’t found their way in yet. We’re trying to mouse proof all the potential entrances, but no luck so far. We’re also putting them out further and further away.
But well, we are not tidy people. We are people who put things into boxes, put boxes into corners and then proceed to ignore the boxes, so in a way the mice are doing us a favour by making us clean.
EDIT: We found a small lair. Let the cleaning continue
The August pattern for the plush of the month was a borb, a combination of bird+orb. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on fabric, but wanted to use up some of my stash and found grey and orange, so I decided to go for a cockatiel, which meant I only needed to order a bit of yellow plush. Also, cockatiels are cute and we used to have them when I was a kid.
I terms of sewing, this was much easier than the dearest deer. The only downside is that I looked like I’d blown up a chinchilla.
Welcome Fluffy!
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©Giliell, all rights reserved
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The eyes are actually made from epoxy resin. When the resin was nicely sticky I put two old buttons into it so I could sew them on. By the way, fluffy is filled with what used to be three 40×40 cm Ikea cushions (Cheaper than buying filling, because everything marked as “craft supplies” gets at least a 200% price hike)
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In these pics, Fluffy is sitting where Fluffy is supposed to be: on my couch so I can lay my head against her. But you are only allowed to guess once: She got borbnapped by a smart kid who knows exactly how to make eyes at her mum.
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At least she found a friend…
This post was brought to you by my brother in law, so it might get ranty.
Let me preface this by saying that I absolutely support people being child free. Honestly, I don’t know anybody working in education and with families who isn’t a strong supporter of contraception, family planning and thinking long and hard about whether being a parent is something that you should do.
I’m also the first to admit that children are not smallish adults, but have certain characteristics beyond age and height that make them different from adults. It’s something that makes people who like working with children enjoy their company, it is something that makes parenting an amazing journey, and it’s something that makes others not enjoy either of these things.
Nevertheless, children are people, they are part of society, they should have their needs met and accommodated. There are very few spaces where children don’t belong, and those are for their own protection, say a Shisha bar. For the rest of spaces: think about how this space can be made child friendly. Many restaurants already do this: they have a children’s menu, they have play corners (one of our favourite Asian buffet places has a whole room), and if you think about it, it’s a smart move, because children will only grow up to value a sit down meal in a nice restaurant if they learn how to behave there while young.
But there’s another level of accessibility and that is for parents. We’ve talked about this before: If you organise something, say a sceptics’ conference or something like that, think about how you can provide childcare. Because if not, overwhelmingly women will be unable to attend your event. I mean, you can go full Sam Harris and blame your sciency manly vibes that scare off fragile little damsels, or you can ask yourselves: what can we do to make sure parents can attend?
Which gets me to a different level, which is private life. And of course you get to set all sorts of boundaries here, but you also have to live with the consequences. There’s a plethora of “Am I The Asshole” posts on Reddit where somebody decides to have a child free wedding and is then super offended when the parents in their lives decline, especially when it’s their siblings. Sorry, but weddings are expensive, and getting childcare on top of it costs a lot of money, the people who are usually watching your children are probably at the wedding as well (Hey mum, could you watch our kids while we go to your daughter’s wedding?), not to mention trusting some babysitter enough to leave them for several days. And, yes, let’s face it, parents do take this shit personal. Their children are pretty important people in their lives and if you frame their existence as a complete nuisance and burden to everyone who is even just in the same room, they might decide that your friendship isn’t worth it.
Which gets me to my brother in law. He is and has always been super entitled. He’s 11 years younger than my husband and didn’t grow up so much with a sibling than with a third overindulgent parent and he’s used to the whole family catering to him. The last two times he moved, my husband of course helped him, which meant driving a few hundred kilometres each time. I can’t remember even being reimbursed for the fuel, and I especially can’t remember him lifting a single finger when we moved. Because those are services he thinks his family has to provide.
Now he has invited us to his birthday. Come on, Giliell, you say. You said he was super entitled, but now he’s inviting you, that’s nice! Only… Well, remember the couple of hundred kilometres? Going there means spending the night. Spending the night means getting hotel rooms. For the great honour of being invited to his birthday he already expects us to spend a few hundred €. He lives in the Black Forest. Hotels ain’t cheap there. And well, we would have coughed that up, if not for the original subject of this post. We’re still in a raging global pandemic, the little one isn’t vaccinated yet, and sleeping in a hotel with her is totally out of the question for us. So we asked him, could the children stay with him for the night? I mean, his flat is bigger than our house, he has a guest room where his parents are staying, and a living room, and a studio, and a fucking library, but he doesn’t have space for his nieces. He really doesn’t want them to be in his space, because you never know. It’s not like we asked them to watch two toddlers who would paint the walls with his acrylics, or tear the pages from his books. They’re two well behaved teens who basically just want the Wifi password and food. Also his parents, who are watching the kids regularly, are also there. But nooooo, he’s afraid for his precious belongings. Which is totally reasonable in his eyes. Yet our fear for our kid is totally irrational, you know? Guess who’s currently being made out to be unreasonable…
I did a bit of resin crafting, finally making use of the last batch of moulds I had ordered. These require quite a bit of secondary work, painting in the details, but I absolutely love them.
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I first cast the blanks. They have all the outlines I need for later. Usually I use one colour only, but the scorbunny has the orange red ear tips. After that I paint in the details, using either acrylic paint or UV resin. Small lines like the nose are painted in with a permanent CD marker. I had to try some out to find one that doesn’t dissolve in the final layer of resin (mostly UV, epoxy only if I’m making some anyway, no use mixing up 5 ml of epoxy) . The hooks are sterling silver, the bead is some semi precious stone.
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I love Grookey. I don’t like its evolution that much, but Grookey is absolutely adorable. You can see in the top one where I didn’t wait for long enough for the acrylic paint to dry.
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And Sobble. Sobble gets the coolest evolution, but as a baby they’re just a little Emo. I love Sobble.
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I also got moulds for the original Kanto starters. If you compare Squirtle to Sobble, you can see how much more complex they got. Here it’s just eyes and mouth, done.
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Bulbasaur is the least favourite Kanto starters and I don’t know why. They’re so cute! Here I went from semi precious stones to a glass bead I had lying around.
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A bit of an anachronism: Original Game Boy design with Galar starters. Yes, making the tiny silhouettes is fiddly. I still have my Game Boy, btw.
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And because not everybody has their ears pierced, I also made some pins. Bulbasaur is missing, because my friends nicked them.
Obvious content note
About 20 years ago, a friend hung up notes around uni: Lord of the Rings Trading Cards Game, players wanted. A young woman with a head full of curls showed up, and my (now) brother in law remarked afterwards: “Well never see her again.” Rarely in the history of humankind has somebody been that wrong, and I’m glad about it. The young woman returned. We became friends, we became close friends, we became the best of friends. Society doesn’t have a word for what we were. Somebody you love dearly, though there is neither family nor romance involved. A few weeks ago she signed the contract to buy a house just three houses up the street. We were planning to grow old together. In September she would move in, we’d plan and put up the kitchen together. New Year’s Eve we’d have our traditional party at her house this year.
The Covid restrictions were hard on her, being single she was the only one of us completely alone. But spring came, the vaccine came, things were looking better. We found that house. No pandemic would ever separate us like this again. Four weeks ago she had a belly bug. After her second jab she was pretty sick. Vaccine reaction, everybody said. She got better, then it got worse again. That was a pretty severe reaction and none I’d heard of before. This went on and off for some more time, with her doctor still claiming it was a vaccine reaction, but ordering blood tests for this week. I know I was getting angry with her doctor. Her cousin speculated she might have stomach ulcers. Thursday morning her brother in law called me to tell me that she’d died that night in a hospital in Milan, where she’d gone for a holiday with her cousin. She’d suffered from undetected fallopian tube cancer. The weight she’d put on was actually the tumours growing in her belly. The “vaccine reaction” was her body finally shutting down, and now we’re left to deal with the fact that she won’t come home again.
She was a kind person, and maybe that’s the best thing to say about a human being. Wherever she went, she left her mark. Not as a “leader”. She hated to be the centre of attention. Finding pics of her was a real challenge. She’d just always be there, part of whatever community she found herself in.
She enjoyed things, with all her heart and without any shame. “Dance like nobody’s watching” is a wall tattoo for most people, for her it was a motto of life. She loved ballet and went to whatever ballet class she could find. She didn’t give a fuck about what people thought of a small fat woman in her 40s doing ballet. We always crafted together. “She was bad at it, wasn’t she?”, asked her sister and yeah, she was about the clumsiest person you can imagine. But she didn’t care. If the seams of the dress were off, they were off, and she still wore it with pride. I always tried to be like her in that respect: Do what you enjoy, not what others think you should be doing.
I miss her, terribly. And I will miss her. And I want to give a big, fat middle finger to the heteronormative patriarchal kin system. I will be forever grateful to her sister for involving us, for allowing us to participate in her funeral, but I also know that the law says we’re strangers and she didn’t even have to give us a phone call.
Goodbye, Uli. Most of the world didn’t know that you existed. Because had they known, they would feel your loss now.
Everybody in a long term relationship knows the horrors of buying furniture. You may have been together for a decade, have basically the same interests, plans in life, you combined your families and friend circles, and then you need to buy furniture. Suddenly your beloved looks like a total stranger. How can the person you love more than anybody else like that couch? If your relationship survives the first round of furniture shopping, you may survive as a couple. And then you are together for so many years that you have to do it all again. Especially when you have children. Especially when your children are alien monsters in a cute disguise.
Last year around autumn the little one managed to actually break the legs off a chair. The other ones weren’t very stable either any more, so we needed to go out and buy new ones. And the table looked horrible as well. 14 years of eating, crafting, living had taken their toll on the plates. Nevertheless, while we could agree quickly on new chairs, we could also agree quickly that the tables were not an option. Our table needs to be large and extendable. For some reason, the large tables all had a plate that is split lengthwise, and at that point (apparently they changed since) , could only extended by inserting a plate lengthwise, which doesn’t make sense, since it doesn’t sit more people, but make sitting down and getting up difficult since the table is too wide now.
The only one available at the big Swedish furniture shop that suited our needs was the exact same one we already had… so i decided to restore that one instead, which only took me about 10 month to get done.
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This is how the table looked before. The varnish has basically disappeared in the areas most used, there are big scratches and dents. I seized the opportunity to get a random orbit sander and got to work. I removed the old paint and nasty scratches at 60 grit.
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Then I did a second round at 150. In the image below one half is already sanded, the other half is not. People who work with wood can feel the image.
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Last round was done at 220 grit and off we went for varnishing.
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I used varnish for wood floors/stairs, since that is the most durable, and you saw what already happened to the table once.
I applied a total of three layers of varnish, giving them ample time to dry in between.
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A first coat of varnish. I lightly sanded in between applying the coats, but by hand and with a 800 grit. One thing about the varnish is that it doesn’t “pull even”. It keeps a bit of a structure, and if you look closely, you can see it (though not in this pic). It also hides dirt until it’s dried and it’s too late…
The legs got some repairs where needed. Down at the feet, where you stub your toes, ant the bars where you put your dirty, sweaty feet. I had to do that inside, it was not nice.
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Finally, here we are. The two plates have been sanded and painted. The middle extension isn’t done yet, but we don’t need it every day.
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©Giliell, all rights reserved With bonus husband running into the pic
Now, what does my little project have to do with capitalism? It’s easy when you think about it: Capitalism wants me to buy a new table. Capitalism needs me to buy a new table. Capitalism makes it impossible for most people to not buy a new table. A new table would have been around 300€. The materials for restoring the old one were 80 bucks for sanding discs and varnish and brushes, and 150€ for the tools (though I still have those, but they lost about half their resale value the moment I carried them out the door.) That’s 230€ with no guarantee that this would work.
It also took me almost a full week. I have an outdoor space for sanding, but of course that required the rain to stop occasionally, and an indoor space for painting and drying. Also a separate living room with a separate table we could eat on in the meantime. And most importantly: I had the time AND skills to do this and it’s actually something I enjoy. Nobody who dislikes crafting would do this to save maybe 100€. Unless you’re completely poor and have to hope that somebody else throws away their perfectly usable but pretty shabby table.
Now imagine we built our world not around consumption, but around community. Imagine community repair centres. There are tons of people, especially elderly people who can’t / don’t want to do a full work day, but who will happily work a few hours a week. Imagine such a centre where you can go and together (or without you) you can restore your furniture, repair your bike or learn how to fix your leaky sink. Imagine having the time to do so. Sounds good, doesn’t it?