Jack’s Walk

Under the category of Be Careful What You Wish For, yesterday’s November blues have turned into today’s November whites. It is very pretty if you look past the mush on the road, and I do like the way the trees look with a blanket of snow, but thundering Jesus it’s made the walking hard. Most of the sidewalks haven’t been shoveled and my winter muscles for tramping are way out of shape. Suddenly it’s the season of boots and bundling up, of wiping Jack’s feet and checking them for salt and of doing the slip and slide on snowy sidewalks and wet floors. It’s also HappyJack™ season and that’s just enough to make it all tolerable.

Frosting, ©voyager, all rights reserved

Bumblebees

Courtesy of Avalus we have a rabble of bumblebees to help chase the November blues away.

All from the first week of October.

The bumblebee on my hand was nice. It was a cold morning and she just buzzed to me, sat down on my hand and seemed to enjoy the heat. My hand hat just been holding a tea mug, so it was extra warm. I improvised some sugarwater of which she drank a drop from my hand and then after about two minutes flew away again.

I love these fuzzy critters.

I love them too, Avalus and it must have been wondrous to have one sit and your hand and stay for so long. Thanks for sharing.

octobees, ©Avalus, all rights reserved

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Jack’s Walk

 

Watching the squirrels scurry, ©voyager, all rights reserved

There’s not a trace of snow left in town, but out in the country we saw highlights of white persisting in pockets here and there in the fields. In the forest, the fallen branches and trees were frosted like cupcakes and the leaves on the ground were wet and nearly silent as we padded along. All but a very few leaves are down now and the trees stand like scratchy wire sculptures against a foreboding gray and gloomy sky. Late autumn has arrived and with it has also come the November blahs and blues. Even Jack seemed tinged with ennui today.

Youtube Video: A Guide to Imperial Measurements with Matt Parker | Earth Lab

Matt Easton mentioned in one of his latest videos why he still uses and prefers imperial units to metric ones, which has completely baffled me.

I know that humans are creatures of habit, but why anyone who knows both imperial and metric units would still prefer the imperial ones is a complete mystery to me. But I do not wish to rant too much, so I let someone else to do that (content warning: razor sharp sarcasm).

Metal Magic

We’ve received a wonderful surprise from kestrel. She’s making magic and has decided to let us watch the show. This is part 1 of what may be about 5 parts and I am just as in the dark as you about what’s coming next. Kestrel will reveal all one post at a time so make sure to tune in for all the updates. That’s just the way magic should be, full of anticipation and surprises. And now… heeere’s kestrel!

A while back, Marcus posted about some mokume gane he had made, and the exciting adventures he had making it. https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2018/03/27/mokume-gane/ I know it’s properly called mokume gane, but I like to think of it as MarcusMetal. (No doubt that will trademarked soon.) Much to my surprise, it arrived at my house early one morning. I immediately leaped up to polish part of it – away from the coffee, mind you – because I knew it was going to be very beautiful and I could not wait to see it. If you look carefully, you can see a pattern of swirls of copper against the nickel in the part that I polished. When I am done and I finish a piece, I will put a patina on the metal that will make the pattern show up in greater contrast.

©kestrel, all rights reserved

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Roses!

DavidinOz has treated us to roses today and they are grand. Just look at those crisp petals, that bright colour and all that beautiful light. Why, I can almost smell them. The photos were taken at the Renmark Rose Festival and the busy bee makes them positively perfect. They’re just the tonic I needed to banish the November blues. Thanks for sharing, David.

©David Brindley, all rights reserved

©David Brindley, all rights reserved

Jack’s Walk

Today you get voyager’s walk without Jack. I was in Toronto over the weekend to visit a friend so I thought I’d share some shots of Front Street. Everywhere you look the city is gearing up for all that mindless and debt-inducing Christmas shopping and this year it looks like Union Station is going all out Lego. So far they’ve placed 3 giant Legos in the square along with a totally Lego fireplace complete with Lego stockings hung with care. The large white board is also going to be all Lego and it has mind-numbingly small numbers. Lots of numbers, each one waiting for an individual normal size Lego block. It must take a crew of several people days to put it all together. I’ll ask my friend to send me photos of the finished project and I promise to share.

Front Street, looking east, ©voyager, all rights reserved

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As It Turns out, Good Guy With a Gun Gets Shot.

So, the ammosexual’s wet dream came true, a good guy with a gun has managed to stop a mass shooting. Yet they seem to be suspiciously quiet about it, and nobody is lauding the hero, I wonder why?

Well, the problem is, he was the wrong color and was shot to death when police arrived, because they mistook him for the miscreant.

Now I am pretty sure that the fact that the poor guy was black has played a role in the police officer’s decision to shoot first and ask questions never. No doubt the murderous police officer will see no repercussions and any mention of subconscious racial bias will be ignored. But lets put that aside for now, because the whole scenario has another problem, and one that cannot be brushed aside as “political correctness gun grabbing libtards going mad” by even the staunchest NRA stooges.

That is the problem of how policing in a state where everybody has a gun is supposed to work?

The saying “Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun” was always a sham and american gun lovers know it. However I do not remember anyone ever giving an answer to the question – how are police supposed to recognise who is the good guy and who is the bad guy? Or for that matter, if a random good guy with a gun walks in on a situation of two guys guns ablaze at each other, how is he supposed to recognise who is the good guy to join and who is the baddie?

Armed society is not polite society. Armed society is dysfunctional society. The only way to stop bad guys is not allow them to get guns in the first place. Which in this case includes the police officer – one not insignificant fact about this case is that the black security guy has managed to subdue the assailant without killing him. Something the police officer did not even attempt to do.

Teacher’s Corner: I hate teachers

 

When last time I ranted against parents, it’s my esteemed colleagues this time. And sorry guys, this one’s on you. Of course #notallmaleteachers are problematic, many of my male colleagues are wonderful, dedicated people who work hard for their students, but those colleagues who are problematic are overwhelmingly male.

One issue is the sexualisation of girls. While my school is grades 5-10, my building only holds 5-7, so we’re talking about children. Some time ago one of our headteacher team asked who was teaching a certain class now, because there was a new girl here for that class. Their teacher asked, loudly, probably within earshot of a kid between 11 and 12 “is she nice and pretty?”.

A colleague at a different school told me about a male colleague who had told a primary school girl who had misbehaved “if she liked pushing? Because soon she would be pushed a lot and she would like that, too!”

In the first case, we reacted quickly with several women saying in unison that this was not OK. In the second case, my colleague, young, new at school, female, was too shocked to say anything.

Another aspect is the discipline issue. For many teachers (not just the male ones, but they’re loudest about it), kids have to obey and to function. If they don’t, well, that’s their problem. So today I had a fight with one of them. There was an incident with a kid who is totally beyond (self) control right now. I’m not going to go into details, but think your basic tragic neglected childhood that leads to aggression and delinquency. While the kid causes a lot of problems, he also has a lot of problems. But just hearing about the incident, that guy went “he needs to disappear from here, immediately!”

Not just that this isn’t possible anyway, because the school for kids with severe behavioural problems has a waiting list, we cannot just “disappear” problematic kids. I snapped that yes of course, that’s the solution to all our problems, send the kids away. He tried to argue that “we just don’t have the resources and we have to think of the other kids”. I told him we were working at it.

He later tried to make peace by telling me that it wasn’t meant as an attack on me (because I’m the special ed teacher) and I told him that this wasn’t about me, this was about how he was talking about a child. Fuck that shit. I know those kids are exhausting and draining, because I get them all. But they’re children. Children who have been told they’re good for nothing for their entire lives and thank you for adding to their sense of not being worth shit and nobody wanting them.

Thankfully our principal (also a dude, #notalldudes, eh?) is firmly on my side. Not that he was involved in that conflict, but in seeing those kids as children in need, not problems to get rid of.

Transformation

Kestrel has finally shared some of her jewellery making with us and it’s phenomenal. What starts out as a pile of horsehair becomes ordered and ultimately beautiful at the hands of a master artisan. I’ll let kestrel explain the process…

I’m working on my website and one of the things that needs to be done is to re-shoot all the photos. Since most of my work is custom (in other words, people send me hair from their own horse, and then I make stuff out of it for them) I don’t have things in inventory, and that means I had to re-make all the items in order to take new photos. One of the things I like about my work is being able to transform my materials, whatever they may be but in this case a messy pile of hair, into something orderly and worth having. 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

Some of the braiding was done before it occurred to me to take a photo, but that messy pile of hair is going to be turned into 6 bracelets: 3 that are an 8-strand braid, and 3 that are a 25-strand braid, one each of white, chestnut and black. In case you are wondering: that messy pile of hair is made up of 1,761 individual hairs. That I had to count. On purpose. I don’t usually sit down and figure out things like that, because I just really don’t want to know; it’s a little depressing. But, if one is going to braid hair, one must first count it. 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

Part way finished, you can see the 3 8-strand bracelets are done and I’ve just started on the black 25-strand bracelet. 

 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

All done! It looks very different from how it started out. Now what I have to do is take good photos of each product so that hopefully, people will want one of these made from their own horse’s hair as a keepsake or memento. Just another day (OK, actually it was about two weeks) in the life of a braider. 

Thanks for sharing, kestrel. I’m astonished at the precision and beauty of the finished product. I can’t begin to imagine the amount of work involved, especially the counting! These are surely cherished keepsakes. Why, it’s enough to make me wish for a horse of my own.