Charly,
Thanks for the dogs. They’re wonderfully silly and actually made me laugh out loud.
Oggie,
I’m pleased to hear the little ones are doing well. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to enjoy
Jazzlet,
I’m glad you’re getting used to the mouthguard. You might need to replace it in time, but it’s better than replacing teeth. I have so much pressure in my jaw that I cracked every molar in my head.
Is dental care covered by the National health plan? It isn’t here and my implants and tooth removal cost $5,000.00. The dentures will cost the same. My mother-in-law, who is fabulous, is giving me the dentures for my birthday.
Jazzletsays
Charly
The retreivers made me laugh too. I fostered one for a few months, and yes some of them will eat almost anything. Mind not as bad as the springer spaniel we had, the only thing we found that she wouldn’t eat was celery.
Voyager
Yikes! That is what my dentist is worried I would do. How lovely of your mother-in-law!
The NHS and dentistry is a bit complcated, but to a varying extent depending on your age and income yes dentistry is covered. I have to pay, but that doesn’t mean I pay the full cost of a procedure unless it’s one the NHS doesn’t cover, but even that can be complicated. So when my dentist recommended I get a crown on one of my teeth, he also gave me the option of having the NHS treatment which would have been an enormous filling with no crown, then waiting for the tooth to split -- inevitable given the size of the filling -- and only then giving me a crown. I went for the crown immediately, I had the money and didn’t fancy the alternative! If you pay there are bands depending on how much treatment you need. but none of them are the full cost of a procedure. Children, students, people on qualifying benefits and old age pensioners do not pay anything.
<b<Oggie
Yay for the growing Ogglettes. It’s a cute age, especially if you’re not the one on diaper duty at 3 am. voyager
Your mum in law is fabulous. Here dental healthcare is a mess. Basically most things are covered as long as they are the teeth you were given. Fillings, root canals, extraction. Crowns already come with a price tag and for dentures you’ll only get a small copay from health insurance. The little one has braces which are covered 80% by health insurance, but we#ll get the remaining 20% back if the treatment is successful (which means we’re bribing her with promising to split the refund with her. But she’s really good at wearing them anyway.)
StevoRsays
Convicted child rapist & 3rd highest officeholder in the Vatican Pell has lost his appeal The right decision thankfully but after too long and who knows how many other victims there were -- many of whom didn’t live to see this measure of justice :
WARNING : Sexual assault references & potentially upsetting material in article.
ANALYSIS -- As a witness at George Pell’s trial, I saw first-hand the strength of his victim
… (snip) .. It’s the ultimate David and Goliath tale of a young man who never sought fame, just wanted justice, against a well-resourced defendant who has for years cultivated and been supported by the powerful. Imagine taking on Cardinal George Pell: the third most senior person in the worldwide Catholic Church. A man supported by two former prime ministers who didn’t spend a minute in court, didn’t hear or read a word of your evidence and yet nonetheless, by implication, branded you a liar. ..
(Where you can read the full statement from survivor witness J -- who put Pell away.)
But outside court, survivors of other institutional abuse and victims’ advocates celebrated.
“Let’s just hope that this shows that no-one is above the law,” victims advocate Robert House said outside court.
He said he had not always have faith in the justice system but that had changed.
His comments were greeted with nods and words of encouragement from other victims’ advocates who faced the media with him.
Mr House thanked the complainant in Pell’s case for his courage and called him a “true hero” and a “brave, brave man”.
“It gives a stronger voice to survivors, and survivors will be believed now. We were for decades not believed and now we are believed and that is wonderful.”
Pell has yet to be stripped of all his honours, remains un-defrocked still has a diehard band of willfully blind followers including 2 “conservative” “family values” ex-PMs and the Catholic Church in Oz (& elsewhere) still hasn’t faced the reality or decided to change and even wants to fight mandatory reporting of chgildmolestinmg priests todefend the rite of the confessional.
But, this is huge news in Oz, and hey, the media and Aussie can even now speak openly and strongly about it without censorship and withthe truth now now and made clear because of the survivors, the courts and the disinfectant that is sunshine. Metaphorical and literal.
It’s been a very dry summer here, for second year in row. I do not like the effect it has on vegetation. I sympathize with plants all too much.
Over the last couple weeks, it’s been humid and often overcast, with scattered showers of rain. Typical weather for late summer, except that very little of that rain came down here in Helsinki. The forecast was always promising “possibly some showers”, but the showers mostly kept skirting away. Still, you’d need to mind your umbrella, as there were indeed some quick showers at highly unpredictable moments. It felt very teasing. Usually even after dry summers, the vegetation is given a brief respite before the growth season ends, and now the time was running short.
This morning, a weather front abruptly brought around 40 mm of rain in my neighborhood, and over 50 mm in downtown Helsinki, flooding basements and streets. Right now we’re getting a little (or perhaps substantially) more from a second front. Until yesterday, the predicted precipitation for today was “likely less than 10 mm”, and indeed, it’s been like that in many parts of southern Finland. So, hooray?
Jazzletsays
Uff, I am looking after Thorn who is in a cone as she is recovering from the removal of a lump on the inside of her right eyelid. The opthalmic vet is pretty sure it’s cancer and says it is very likely to be malignant, she did her best to get decent margins, but there wasn’t much leeway. The lump came up pretty quickly, which is apparently characteristic of the malignant ones, it’s been sent away for histology, I’m hoping it hadn’t already spread and that she was able to get an adequate margin. We had our first appointment with the opthamologist yesterday morning, and she operated that afternoon so I’m feeling a bit shocked at the speed of it all, epeciallly as the lump first showed up in July. Meanwhile Thorn needs to have tthree lots of pills evening and night (against her usual one), to have antibiotic ointment in her eye twice a day, and to be in the cone for two weeks. Oh and the first time I put the antibiotic oinment in her eye I made it bleed, not a lot, but uff. She’s just turned twelve, she’s only a baby *wails*
@Jazzlet, uff. That sucks. Lets hope for the best.
Ice Swimmersays
Jazzlet @ 11
My warm thoughts for you and Thorn.
lumipuna @ 10
I just hope there weren’t many sewage spills, the unrenovated parts of the Helsinki sewage system have combined sewage and storm drains and the overflow goes straight into the sea. The most central Metro station (Central Railway Station) is still closed.
As for umbrellas, I’ve given up on them as they seem to break when you most need them, Helsinki is too windy for an umbrella. A rain poncho is much better.
Jazzletsays
Thank you all.Thorn is extremely pissed off with us because we won’t take the cone off, but she is managing to do things like climb the stairs ok however much she dislikes it.
Jazzlet
*big hugs* I hope Thorn is recovering from the surgery and that against all odds, the vet is wrong.
+++
We had a nice but busy weekend and FINALLY our garden terrace and stairs are finished. I’ll take some pics as soon as they have cleaned up the rubbish. We had the second (!) barbecue for this year yesterday.
Jazzletsays
Thorn is doing ok physically but is being very clingy -- not wonderful for her or me, I have the collar inficted bruises on my thighs to prove it. She would like both of us to stay in the room with her, with at least one of us stroking her at all times, we are horrid only stroking her about three times more than usual and not staying in the same room all the time. She used to be like this when we first got her, I’d forgotten quite how nervous she was back then. Jake is being very good and not bothering her, though she is being mean to him, barging past him bashing him out of her way with the cone!
Tonight, I nearly had to call myself an ambulance. After over a decade of no problems, I got probably an allergic reaction to food. On Friday evening I got rash around multiple joints, it receded and then worsened again over Saturday and the night from Saturday to Sunday the rash got so big that my right hand was essentially swollen and I could not bend my fingers properly.
I already took an oral antihistamine, so my last resort before calling the ambulance was to try antihistaminic ointment. That one helped surprisingly quickly, within an hour the swelling receded and within today I was OK. That surprised me, like, a lot, I was always skeptical about that one, it is free-to-buy and rather cheap.
I am still unsure of what caused the reaction. I did not eat anything that I have not eaten before. I suspect it might be the alcohol-free beer that I drank, it is one that I did not drink for years and never drank often before that. That is the most probable suspect. I am not going to risk it and drink another one. Ever.
voyagersays
Jazzlet,
Don’t be worried about causing a bit of bleeding. Sometimes that can’t be helped post-op. I’m sure you’re a fine veterinary nurse and there’s no-one Thorn trusts more than you. Good luck hiding all those pills, though.
Hugs for you and an ear scratch for Thorn if she’s up to it. It does sound worryingly sudden, but that means that the surgeon was doing her best job on being able to get good margins. Jack and I will keep good thoughts. (Jack is 11 and he agrees that 12 is indeed very young!)
Ice Swimmersays
Charly @ 19
That’s a scary thing to happen. Hopefully that thing never comes back.
—
Today when I went to sauna and swimming, the sauna keeper and one of the customers had spotted a duck that had a fishing line around its neck. The sauna keeper phoned the Zoo and they said that they’d take the bird in their hospital if we caught it. I didn’t see the bird, it must have swum elsewhere before I was able to find it, probably somewhere nearby. The sauna keeper said that he’d check the shores nearby with his kayak after the closing time . Hopefully the bird got help.
Then there were other birds. A young, but almost adult-sized gull that demanded to be fed by an adult gull (none were nearby). Then the resident grebes (not 100 % sure, but possibly red-necked grebes) came to check their regular supper area, which they seem to have visited multiple times this week roughly at the same time in the evening. The pair (no notable sexual dimorphism) landed on the water simultaneously, with synchronized movements and dived and surfaced in perfect unison, checking the sea by the quay for any and all food in an seemingly systematic fashion.
Charly
That’s nasty, especially since you don’t know what it was. One of the things we always buy in Spain is a cortisol foam. Much cheaper and better than anything I can buy in Germany.
+++
Uff
Hopefully last heatwave of the year. And while I love my mother, I really wished she’d realise that I do have a life. I ordered some things for her that she needs to pick up before her holidays. They were scheduled to arrive today and I was supposed to call her, so she can pick them up. Which I did.
“Did we say Tuesday?”
“Yes, we did”
“Then your dad was right. But I don’t have a car tonight! Can I come on Wednesday?”
“Yes, between 3 and 4:30”
“I wanted to come later! Can’t I come later?”
“No, sorry. I won’t be home later”
“What do you mean you won’t be home??????”
Yeah. Me and my glamorous life of parent teacher nights (as a parent, not as a teacher)
Giliell, hugs and more hugs. It’s like having another child sometimes, the way parents keep pushing your boundaries.
voyagersays
Charly,
That’s very scary stuff. It might not be a food reaction -- it could be to a reaction to something you touched. Have you had allergy testing done?
It’s important to identify the cause of the reaction because the next time you’re exposed to it could be worse.
Giliell,
Your mom sounds similar to my mom. Complicated, a bit oblivious and a bit selfish. Boundaries are essential with my mom.
I’ve been spending most of my days and evenings with mom who has been slightly improving, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. She’s having a lot of pain and the nurses don’t get to her as quickly as I think they should even when I’m here to ask so I don’t have a lot of confidence that her pain is well controlled when I’m not here. It’s exhausting. And there’s no damned wifi!
Ice Swimmer
I’ve seen a gannet strangled to death with fishing line. It’s terrible stuff for wild birds.
Ice Swimmersays
voyager @ 24
I went to the sauna today and asked the sauna keeper about the bird with the fishing line around the neck and he said he didn’t find it. Hopefully somebody else found the bird and took it to the animal hospital in Korkeasaari (the island in which the Zoo is). There were multiple people kayaking (or in other slow-moving, small vessels) out there on Sunday.
Today’s high point in dinosaur watching while swimming was seeing a wagtail walking/hopping on the crest of a floating breakwater (basically a hollow concrete beam anchored near the quay to attenuate the waves and to keep the shore stable), from one end to the other. Maybe there were some tasty insects there.
Jazzletsays
Charly
Glad you are ok, but it sounds scary.
Giliell
*hugs*
—
I am very happy, I had the best birthday present possible, Thorn’s lump was not malignant and there was a good margin so it is extremely unlikely to grow back again!! *huge grin*
Happy Birthday Jazzlett, and huzzah for Thorn! Charly, I’m very glad you are okay.
I’m having a bit of a weird time right now -- I dream about going to my parents’ house,which isn’t theirs anymore anyway. Then I wake up and obsess about all the ways I failed, like, we never did find their wedding rings, and I should have brought more stuff home and tried harder and on and on. I suspect the wedding rings got thrown out with the garbage -- I found a couple of bags of yucky trash with valuables in the bottom as it was. It’s complicated, there were roaches, lots of things just got tossed into bags.
But anyway, it’s all weird and distressing. I think I’m transferring worries about Emily going to Scotland (next week!). I don’t want to stress her out more than she is, but the whole Brexit mess is very scary.
Thanks for letting me rant. Hugs to all of you, and one of these days, I have some more old book art to share if you want.
StevoRsays
@ Jazzlet : Yikes, phew & happy birthday! Wishing you and Thorn the best. Give her a pat from me please.
***
Heard this classic old song on the radio, the other day & had to track it down -- a real slow burner so listen all the way to those powerful last verses :
Steve Shives says it so well here & speaks for me too. It’s from a USA perspective but applies so much to us here in Oz too.
Where there’s now this latest round of brutal mistreatment and evil against refugees who have done nothing wrong -- and are even loved and wanted and have jobs in their local (Aussie) Biloela community :
David Coleman MP is the cowardly bigot in charge of carrying out Dutton and Pezzullo’s vindictive 17 month persecution of the family from Biloela. Folks can ring his staff and let them know what you think of his complicity: tel:(02) 62777770 though that answering machine is full now apparently.
Jazzletsays
Thank you all!
Anne
If it would help ask one of the Affinity team to give you my email, Stockport is in the north of England, not Scotland, but still nearer than you will be, if anything did go wrong I would be more than happy to help. If it would be helpful email me and I’ll give you my phone number, you are welcome to pass both on to Emily.
Jazzlet, thank you, I’ll keep you in mind. I think she’ll be okay, I’m just worrying because it’s all new and weird for both of us. Emily’s best friend and his family live near Edinburgh, and she’s already met several of her colleagues in the department including the professor she’ll be working with. She and her friend have never actually met in person, but they’ve been friends for years via the internet.
I’ll be better once she gets there, it’s the uncertainty that gets to me.
Our evil disgusting fascist excuse for a govt flew this poor family out in the middle of the night to our concentration camp for innocent refugees on Christmads island. No words. No printable ones anyhow.
StevoRsays
^ Update : There’s going to be protests against the deportation and mistreatment of the Biloela refugee family tomorrow. Apparently these will be held Australia-wide but certainly on in Adelaide with details here :
Urgent peaceful Adelaide vigil for Priya, Nades and the girls
Public · Hosted by Bring Priya, Nades and their girls home to Biloela (facebook page / group)
Tomorrow (Sun 1st Sept -ed.) at 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Victoria Square Tarntanyangga (near Gouger/Angas Sts)
since I know at least one other Adelaide resident reads here. Senator Hansen-Young fromtheGreens party willbe presnet apparently too. Sorry about theshort notice.
Incidentally, the regular vigil for refugees is still happening every Friday night too -- up to over 150 weeks now :
In other news some Climate reality Deniers have apparently been making a lot out of a delay / dismissal in the Mike Mann Vs Tim Ball legal case which they are claiming to have won but in fact have not at all. See Mike Mann’s statements and is lawyers here :
Heya.
We got a mouse. Yay. Not a pet mouse, mind you, but a field mouse that has moved in during our holiday. Now we’re spending all the time cleaning, closing holes and putting up (live catch) mouse traps.
Jazzletsays
Anne
Oh uncertainty is horrid and when it’s about someone you love it’s all too easy for it to run wild. I hope you can manage it so it doesn’t take over your dreams completely.
Giliell
I hope your mouse is caught soon. They like chocolate a lot, more than anything else even cheese. I don’t want to depress you, but the odds are if you have evidence of one mouse you have more than one, so set the traps again after you have caught what I hope is just one. We have found that the most effective thing to stop them getting in small holes is that expending foam that sets solid, it’s not lovely but mice, and in our case rats, are fucking good at chewing through most things, with a long nozzle you can make the foam deep enough that they give up.
We had once field mice nesting under the floorboards. It took multiple traps (the killing kind) to get them all. Over the course of several days. I am disinclined to care too much for lives of little rodents, since they can, and do, wreak havoc in the garden. It used to be less of a problem when an owl nested on a spruce tree in our neighbor’s garden, but that tree had to be felled for safety reasons and the owl went somewhere else. And this year voles and mice are in fact overabundant and buzzards and kestrels do not manage to keep up with them. About 30% of the small trees that I planted in my coppice fell victim to them already :-(
Yeah, floorboards and straw ceilings* seem to be the problem here, too. We’ll use foam in that one big hole where I suspect the mice use to get upstairs. I absolutely don’t mind them outdoors since we don’t have much of a vegetables garden and the neighbourhood cats seem to control the population as well, though they leave the decapitated corpses lying around, of course.
Oh, and we got some rain, yay. It started just the moment Mr and I went outside to have a gin tonic on our new terrace, but it was soooo needed, it’s OK.
*Dunno how common this was in other countries, but here, in order to get the plaster stick, people would nail straw mats against the ceiling and then put plaster on those straw mats. They’d also round the corners since they couldn’t get sharp angles and everybody who ever put up wallpaper hates them.
Ice Swimmersays
Giliell @ 38
G&T rain magic. Almost as good as forgetting to take an umbrella or rain poncho.
Jazzletsays
We don’t need rain, our potatoes are mostly slug.*sigh*
In the UK they originally used wattle (thin whippy branches woven through stout branches -- like a hurdle) then moved onto laths (thin strips of wood fairly closely spaced and in both cases ‘threw’ on a coarse plaster with hair/fur/straw in it, then put a layer of finer plaster on top to finish. Laths have their own problems, not the least being that if someone has put wallpaper on it the odds are very high that if you try to remove the wallpaper you will end up taking off most of the plaster too. Which is why the bathroom in our Sheffield house ended up smaller by the thickness of a sheet of plaster board on two walls.
Thorn is doing very well, her wound looks as if it’s healed up, but we are being good and keeping the cne on until the vet checks it (next Monday). She hates us and we are all bruised, but we’ll live :-)
Here it is supposed to rain tomorrow, and finally a rain-rain, not just a light shower-rain. The front that rains on Giliell right now should reach us by tomorrow evening We shall see what comes of it, weather forecasts are not as reliable as they used to be, the weather is just too unpredictable nowadays.
What has reached me already is the fall gloom. Today it was extremely hard to get out of bed and do something, anything, up to and including going to the loo. One of these days I will probably have to ask my doctor for prescription antidepressants.
lumipunasays
Feeling the same as Charly. I also need to get some treatment for my seasonal depression, before it really hits.
Jazzletsays
Both of you go and talk to your doctors at the very least *shakes finger at you* Doctors have a lot of different ways they can help with depression, not just prescribing antidepressants, though there is nothing wrong with them -- I’m on two different ones (one is partly for the pain as well as being an antidepressant) so I’m certainly not against them. You have both talked about how badly the drawing in to wintter affects you, you know it is happening, but the fact that it is happening makes doing anything about it hard and it will only get harder, so this is a caring nag to make that doctor’s appointment tomorrow -- don’t wait until you are feeling worse.
I hope you get proper rain Charly. We have another sunny day which is lovely as we’ve not had many recentlly.
Ice Swimmersays
Charly and lumipuna
I’m hoping for the rain for Charly as well. It’s been sort of rainy here. I’m mildly encouraging you to take the step you need to take with the doc, if you see the need for it.
I’m off to sauna and swimming to get my type of self-care.
voyagersays
Jazzlet,
A very belated Happy Birthday.
Jack and I couldn’t be happier about Thorn’s good news. Give her a cookie and some love from us.
Charly and Lumapuna
It’s probably best to make an appointment with your Dr. soon. Antidepressants can take up to 6 weeks to start working and sometimes the first antidepressant doesn’t work and another type must be used and that takes another 6 weeks to figure out. Seasonal Affective Disorder is treatable and not just with drugs. Have you ever tried any kind of light therapy?
Ice Swimmer,
Sauna followed by swimming in the cold, cold sea seems extreme to me, but I’m glad it works for you.
Jazzletsays
Thorn is a naughty bitch. She has smashed her cone up. It was suppposed to stay on until the vet sees her tomorrow. Mind she’s not bothering her eye at all, but she is bothering her leg where it was shaved for IV access, only a bit at the moment so I just hope that she doesn’t keep at it over night.I honestly can’t blame her, when I have had bits shaved for operations the regrowth has been unbelieveably itchy.
Ice Swimmersays
voyager @ 50
We’re not there yet on almost-freezing water, but I believe it is cold by some definitions. As the weather had been been unseasonably warm until this week, the sea is still 17 °C (down from 20 °C last week). The way people react to that kind of water temperature seems quite diverse.
I swam 1 km altogether, split in four stints and went to sauna between the stints and got my muscles in the lower back to relax significantly in the process. Also, I got to exchange a few words with my sauna friends (people who I mostly see in sauna*).
__
* = Once I was seeing the new exhibition in the Ateneum Art Museum and one of the people who I see in the sauna often spotted me and quipped: “It seems you also exist outside the sauna as well.”
chigau (違う)says
It’s 12°C ouside.
I put the furnace on.
Ice Swimmersays
chigau @ 53
That’s just to compensate that the temperatures here should be summery tomorrow (21 °C). I wonder, at which point the switchover will come and we get the cold air from the polar cap.
..
Sometimes things just work out. One of the courses I took has turned out to be so popular that there’s no lecture hall big enough for it, so the lectures will be videoed and can be watched afterwards. So that means that I can attend lectures of another course that would otherwise collide with one of the lectures of the popular course. It remains to be seen, how will the TAs be able to handle checking the homework of the course…
lumipunasays
Ice Swimmer:
We’re not there yet on almost-freezing water, but I believe it is cold by some definitions
Hah, well said.
My only swim this summer consisted of a very brief dip from sauna in late August. I rarely bother to swim because I’m sensitive to cold and usually have no quick access to a beach (esp. one with sauna). At this age, I increasingly feel like when it’s warm enough for swimming, it’s too hot to travel to the beach and back. Plus, this year my favorite beach was ridden with blue algae just when it was really warm.
Ice Swimmersays
lumipuna @ 55
The problem with beaches is also that you have to leave your stuff on the beach when you swim, unattended, or you have to take turns in guarding your “camp”.
There was a long time that I didn’t swim very much, but for the last few years, I’ve gone back to my childhood in that respect. We didn’t have a summer cottage by a lake but there was a small river in the village in which our cottage was and I’d go swimming alone in the river as a tween, taking my time and getting yelled at afterwards for being there for two hours and coming back with white toes.
Converts of a Pentecostal cult destroying Australian Indigneous culture and artefacts that have lasted for millennia claiming Indigenous culture is “demonic” -- just criminally vile. What an ugly, intolerant Dark Age mentality these Penetcostalist cult members have! Oh & yay, our current &utterly hypocritical and sociopathic Prime Minister Scott “”refugee torturing coal fondler” Morrison is a variety of Pentecostal too. THis current govt inspired by the recent acceptance of equal marraige is currently trying to pass “religious freedom”laws protetcing homophobic bigots. Wonder, what the “freedom of religion” for the Indigenous people here who haven’t converted to this Pentecostal cult and wish to keep their culture alive gets eh?
Incidentally, the headline now is “The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred Aboriginal objects” when the original headline was “That’s all from the Devil” A Pentecostal missionary who believes Aboriginal Culture is witchcraft” Hmm .. Second time today Ive seen that happen on “my” ABC and both shifts to more conservative, arguably more pro-govt titles. The first was this story :
Which went from the neutral “National School Strike for Climate sees students across the country planning to skip school” to the anti-Climate action “Students risk failing exams if they skip school to attend today’s climate strikes” with the article related how one particular “academically selective”* Perth Modern School punished one young person for wanting to have a decent future enough to act.
Oh & if you’re wondering how the School Climate Strike action has been going :
NB. Cross-posted (modified form) from Marcus Ranum’s Stderr blog.
FWIW Greta Thunberg herself has responded on facebook to some familar reichwing talking point – the claim that she’s been brain-washed and being exploited or directed by her parents and other, usually unspecified, groups.
Excerpt :
When I told my parents about my plans they weren’t very fond of it. They did not support the idea of school striking and they said that if I were to do this I would have to do it completely by myself and with no support from them.
On the 20 of august I sat down outside the Swedish Parliament. I handed out fliers with a long list of facts about the climate crisis and explanations on why I was striking. The first thing I did was to post on Twitter and Instagram what I was doing and it soon went viral. Then journalists and newspapers started to come. A ..
& another excerpt from the same long post on her page :
Many people love to spread rumors saying that I have people ”behind me” or that I’m being ”paid” or ”used” to do what I’m doing. But there is no one ”behind” me except for myself. My parents were as far from climate activists as possible before I made them aware of the situation.
I am not part of any organization. I sometimes support and cooperate with several NGOs that work with the climate and environment. But I am absolutely independent and I only represent myself. And I do what I do completely for free, I have not received any money or any promise of future payments in any form at all. And nor has anyone linked to me or my family done so.
And of course it will stay this way. I have not met one single climate activist who is fighting for the climate for money. That idea is completely absurd.
Furthermore I only travel with permission from my school and my parents pay for tickets and accommodations.
My family has written a book together about our family and how me and my sister Beata have influenced my parents way of thinking and seeing the world, especially when it comes to the climate. And about our diagnoses.
Plus :
And yes, I write my own speeches. But since I know that what I say is going to reach many, many people I often ask for input. I also have a few scientists that I frequently ask for help on how to express certain complicated matters. I want everything to be absolutely correct so that I don’t spread incorrect facts, or things that can be misunderstood.
If anyone’s really keen to challenge that, well, I think Greta herself may have 3 more words for them – “how dare you.”
Are you really denying her agency, her choice and intelligence / wishes here?
***
Incidentally on the reichwing attacks on her see :
StevoR,
Thanks for the cross posting about Greta Thunberg.
Anne,
Thanks for the link to Emily’s blog. The robin photos are adorable. They remind me a cat playing with a mouse.
Also, I love your packet project. It’s a great idea and you chose a beautiful cover.
Chigau,
Congratulations on your new digs. I wish you many happy years of pleasing yourself.
Jazzlet,
How is Thorn doing?
StevoRsays
^ No worries & thanks Voyager.
Congrats and best wishes chigau (違う) & thanks to all here.
***
A short, fun and clever clip I stumbled on a day or so ago here :
Old but has some practical advice and useful good debunking by Rebvecca Watson. Which hopefully won’t be needed but is worth bearing in mind if anyone does ever need to deal with tear gas. I.e. : Don’t use liquid nitrogen -- do use mud in a bottle that doesn’t become a major inadverant problem.
chigau (違う)says
Thanks all.
Tomorrow …
I will buy a bed
and maybe some storage thingies
Ice Swimmersays
There was a stabbing/slashing incident in a vocational school (which is situated in a shopping mall) Kuopio, Finland. AFAIK, none of the victims were my acquaintances or relatives (my sympathies to survivors). The suspected perpetrator was a local male student of the vocational school. May his name be forgotten forever.
lumipunasays
Amidst getting politically raked over hot coals, Donald Trump also gets briefly raked over forest autumn litter…
Aussies are losing their right to protest it seems as the sociopathic scum in charge here continue to make my nation and the world vastly crueler and worse. As Global Overheating continues with its droughts and fires, floods and heatwaves and storms getting ever more frequent and severe the coal fondling, fossil fuel puppet govt here is only attacking those trying to get them to actually act on the issue instead of , well, y’know, acting on the issue itself..
Oddly, our ABC is awfully quiet on this huge story so far. :-(
Heya. I’m finally home again, since the only reason to stay at the hospital was pain so bad it couldn’t be managed with ordinary oral painkillers and since thar is no longer tge case I ran (haha) as fast as I could.
I’m still bored, but not as bored as before.
Come Monday all the relatives who promised to help will have to put up, but thankfully it’s the autumn holidays anyway, so no school run.
Ice Swimmersays
I’ve been hugely busy with deadlines and promises to meatspace people (though promising to go to sauna with my friend and fulfilling the promise has probably helped me cope with the stress), so I’m a bit late. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling a bit better, Giliell!
Oggie, great news about the grandbabies!
Reminded me of this yuotub channel
https://www.youtube.com/cookingwithdog
No dogs are cooked. Francis the poodle was the narrator.
Charly,
Thanks for the dogs. They’re wonderfully silly and actually made me laugh out loud.
Oggie,
I’m pleased to hear the little ones are doing well. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to enjoy
Jazzlet,
I’m glad you’re getting used to the mouthguard. You might need to replace it in time, but it’s better than replacing teeth. I have so much pressure in my jaw that I cracked every molar in my head.
Is dental care covered by the National health plan? It isn’t here and my implants and tooth removal cost $5,000.00. The dentures will cost the same. My mother-in-law, who is fabulous, is giving me the dentures for my birthday.
Charly
The retreivers made me laugh too. I fostered one for a few months, and yes some of them will eat almost anything. Mind not as bad as the springer spaniel we had, the only thing we found that she wouldn’t eat was celery.
Voyager
Yikes! That is what my dentist is worried I would do. How lovely of your mother-in-law!
The NHS and dentistry is a bit complcated, but to a varying extent depending on your age and income yes dentistry is covered. I have to pay, but that doesn’t mean I pay the full cost of a procedure unless it’s one the NHS doesn’t cover, but even that can be complicated. So when my dentist recommended I get a crown on one of my teeth, he also gave me the option of having the NHS treatment which would have been an enormous filling with no crown, then waiting for the tooth to split -- inevitable given the size of the filling -- and only then giving me a crown. I went for the crown immediately, I had the money and didn’t fancy the alternative! If you pay there are bands depending on how much treatment you need. but none of them are the full cost of a procedure. Children, students, people on qualifying benefits and old age pensioners do not pay anything.
<b<Oggie
Yay for the growing Ogglettes. It’s a cute age, especially if you’re not the one on diaper duty at 3 am.
voyager
Your mum in law is fabulous. Here dental healthcare is a mess. Basically most things are covered as long as they are the teeth you were given. Fillings, root canals, extraction. Crowns already come with a price tag and for dentures you’ll only get a small copay from health insurance. The little one has braces which are covered 80% by health insurance, but we#ll get the remaining 20% back if the treatment is successful (which means we’re bribing her with promising to split the refund with her. But she’s really good at wearing them anyway.)
Convicted child rapist & 3rd highest officeholder in the Vatican Pell has lost his appeal The right decision thankfully but after too long and who knows how many other victims there were -- many of whom didn’t live to see this measure of justice :
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/a-glorious-day-for-survivors-everywhere-australia-reacts-to-george-pell-appeal-decision
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-21/cardinal-george-pell-child-sex-abuse-convictions-appeal-decision/11432066
& https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-26/george-pell-guilty-child-sexual-abuse-court-trial/10837564
TV report said the local / national (?) Church now has tocnfront what this verdict means. Now?! FFS!
^WARNING : Last link contains confronting material, descruiption of sexual abuse.
As Magda Szubanski says : Truth prevailed over power for once.
StevoR
thanks for the links
are they reporting when is the sentencing?
@ 8. chigau (違う) : Pell was already sentenced and is back serving out his jail time of six years witha non-parole period of 3 years & 8 months.
Twelve jurors and two judges have finally after a semingless endless set of trials and appeals confirmed that the victims were telling the truth.
More on this case and its hero surviviors here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-21/george-pell-appeal-failure-no-surprise/11435046
WARNING : Sexual assault references & potentially upsetting material in article.
& see also :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-21/george-pells-surviving-victim-reacts-to-appeal-dismissal/11434894
(Where you can read the full statement from survivor witness J -- who put Pell away.)
Pell has yet to be stripped of all his honours, remains un-defrocked still has a diehard band of willfully blind followers including 2 “conservative” “family values” ex-PMs and the Catholic Church in Oz (& elsewhere) still hasn’t faced the reality or decided to change and even wants to fight mandatory reporting of chgildmolestinmg priests todefend the rite of the confessional.
But, this is huge news in Oz, and hey, the media and Aussie can even now speak openly and strongly about it without censorship and withthe truth now now and made clear because of the survivors, the courts and the disinfectant that is sunshine. Metaphorical and literal.
Oh and, yes, this was of course this Pell :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtHOmforqxk
Who Tim Minchin brilliantly sang about.
It’s been a very dry summer here, for second year in row. I do not like the effect it has on vegetation. I sympathize with plants all too much.
Over the last couple weeks, it’s been humid and often overcast, with scattered showers of rain. Typical weather for late summer, except that very little of that rain came down here in Helsinki. The forecast was always promising “possibly some showers”, but the showers mostly kept skirting away. Still, you’d need to mind your umbrella, as there were indeed some quick showers at highly unpredictable moments. It felt very teasing. Usually even after dry summers, the vegetation is given a brief respite before the growth season ends, and now the time was running short.
This morning, a weather front abruptly brought around 40 mm of rain in my neighborhood, and over 50 mm in downtown Helsinki, flooding basements and streets. Right now we’re getting a little (or perhaps substantially) more from a second front. Until yesterday, the predicted precipitation for today was “likely less than 10 mm”, and indeed, it’s been like that in many parts of southern Finland. So, hooray?
Uff, I am looking after Thorn who is in a cone as she is recovering from the removal of a lump on the inside of her right eyelid. The opthalmic vet is pretty sure it’s cancer and says it is very likely to be malignant, she did her best to get decent margins, but there wasn’t much leeway. The lump came up pretty quickly, which is apparently characteristic of the malignant ones, it’s been sent away for histology, I’m hoping it hadn’t already spread and that she was able to get an adequate margin. We had our first appointment with the opthamologist yesterday morning, and she operated that afternoon so I’m feeling a bit shocked at the speed of it all, epeciallly as the lump first showed up in July. Meanwhile Thorn needs to have tthree lots of pills evening and night (against her usual one), to have antibiotic ointment in her eye twice a day, and to be in the cone for two weeks. Oh and the first time I put the antibiotic oinment in her eye I made it bleed, not a lot, but uff. She’s just turned twelve, she’s only a baby *wails*
Jazzlet #11
got not much
just
**hugs**
@Jazzlet, uff. That sucks. Lets hope for the best.
Jazzlet @ 11
My warm thoughts for you and Thorn.
lumipuna @ 10
I just hope there weren’t many sewage spills, the unrenovated parts of the Helsinki sewage system have combined sewage and storm drains and the overflow goes straight into the sea. The most central Metro station (Central Railway Station) is still closed.
As for umbrellas, I’ve given up on them as they seem to break when you most need them, Helsinki is too windy for an umbrella. A rain poncho is much better.
Thank you all.Thorn is extremely pissed off with us because we won’t take the cone off, but she is managing to do things like climb the stairs ok however much she dislikes it.
Jazzlett, hugs for you and good thoughts for Thorn.
Jazzlet
*big hugs* I hope Thorn is recovering from the surgery and that against all odds, the vet is wrong.
+++
We had a nice but busy weekend and FINALLY our garden terrace and stairs are finished. I’ll take some pics as soon as they have cleaned up the rubbish. We had the second (!) barbecue for this year yesterday.
Thorn is doing ok physically but is being very clingy -- not wonderful for her or me, I have the collar inficted bruises on my thighs to prove it. She would like both of us to stay in the room with her, with at least one of us stroking her at all times, we are horrid only stroking her about three times more than usual and not staying in the same room all the time. She used to be like this when we first got her, I’d forgotten quite how nervous she was back then. Jake is being very good and not bothering her, though she is being mean to him, barging past him bashing him out of her way with the cone!
Tonight, I nearly had to call myself an ambulance. After over a decade of no problems, I got probably an allergic reaction to food. On Friday evening I got rash around multiple joints, it receded and then worsened again over Saturday and the night from Saturday to Sunday the rash got so big that my right hand was essentially swollen and I could not bend my fingers properly.
I already took an oral antihistamine, so my last resort before calling the ambulance was to try antihistaminic ointment. That one helped surprisingly quickly, within an hour the swelling receded and within today I was OK. That surprised me, like, a lot, I was always skeptical about that one, it is free-to-buy and rather cheap.
I am still unsure of what caused the reaction. I did not eat anything that I have not eaten before. I suspect it might be the alcohol-free beer that I drank, it is one that I did not drink for years and never drank often before that. That is the most probable suspect. I am not going to risk it and drink another one. Ever.
Jazzlet,
Don’t be worried about causing a bit of bleeding. Sometimes that can’t be helped post-op. I’m sure you’re a fine veterinary nurse and there’s no-one Thorn trusts more than you. Good luck hiding all those pills, though.
Hugs for you and an ear scratch for Thorn if she’s up to it. It does sound worryingly sudden, but that means that the surgeon was doing her best job on being able to get good margins. Jack and I will keep good thoughts. (Jack is 11 and he agrees that 12 is indeed very young!)
Charly @ 19
That’s a scary thing to happen. Hopefully that thing never comes back.
—
Today when I went to sauna and swimming, the sauna keeper and one of the customers had spotted a duck that had a fishing line around its neck. The sauna keeper phoned the Zoo and they said that they’d take the bird in their hospital if we caught it. I didn’t see the bird, it must have swum elsewhere before I was able to find it, probably somewhere nearby. The sauna keeper said that he’d check the shores nearby with his kayak after the closing time . Hopefully the bird got help.
Then there were other birds. A young, but almost adult-sized gull that demanded to be fed by an adult gull (none were nearby). Then the resident grebes (not 100 % sure, but possibly red-necked grebes) came to check their regular supper area, which they seem to have visited multiple times this week roughly at the same time in the evening. The pair (no notable sexual dimorphism) landed on the water simultaneously, with synchronized movements and dived and surfaced in perfect unison, checking the sea by the quay for any and all food in an seemingly systematic fashion.
Charly
That’s nasty, especially since you don’t know what it was. One of the things we always buy in Spain is a cortisol foam. Much cheaper and better than anything I can buy in Germany.
+++
Uff
Hopefully last heatwave of the year. And while I love my mother, I really wished she’d realise that I do have a life. I ordered some things for her that she needs to pick up before her holidays. They were scheduled to arrive today and I was supposed to call her, so she can pick them up. Which I did.
“Did we say Tuesday?”
“Yes, we did”
“Then your dad was right. But I don’t have a car tonight! Can I come on Wednesday?”
“Yes, between 3 and 4:30”
“I wanted to come later! Can’t I come later?”
“No, sorry. I won’t be home later”
“What do you mean you won’t be home??????”
Yeah. Me and my glamorous life of parent teacher nights (as a parent, not as a teacher)
Giliell, hugs and more hugs. It’s like having another child sometimes, the way parents keep pushing your boundaries.
Charly,
That’s very scary stuff. It might not be a food reaction -- it could be to a reaction to something you touched. Have you had allergy testing done?
It’s important to identify the cause of the reaction because the next time you’re exposed to it could be worse.
Giliell,
Your mom sounds similar to my mom. Complicated, a bit oblivious and a bit selfish. Boundaries are essential with my mom.
I’ve been spending most of my days and evenings with mom who has been slightly improving, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. She’s having a lot of pain and the nurses don’t get to her as quickly as I think they should even when I’m here to ask so I don’t have a lot of confidence that her pain is well controlled when I’m not here. It’s exhausting. And there’s no damned wifi!
Ice Swimmer
I’ve seen a gannet strangled to death with fishing line. It’s terrible stuff for wild birds.
voyager @ 24
I went to the sauna today and asked the sauna keeper about the bird with the fishing line around the neck and he said he didn’t find it. Hopefully somebody else found the bird and took it to the animal hospital in Korkeasaari (the island in which the Zoo is). There were multiple people kayaking (or in other slow-moving, small vessels) out there on Sunday.
Today’s high point in dinosaur watching while swimming was seeing a wagtail walking/hopping on the crest of a floating breakwater (basically a hollow concrete beam anchored near the quay to attenuate the waves and to keep the shore stable), from one end to the other. Maybe there were some tasty insects there.
Charly
Glad you are ok, but it sounds scary.
Giliell
*hugs*
—
I am very happy, I had the best birthday present possible, Thorn’s lump was not malignant and there was a good margin so it is extremely unlikely to grow back again!! *huge grin*
@Jazzlet, happy birthday :-). Yay for Thorn.
Yay for Jazzlet and Thorn. That was a good present for sure.
Happy Birthday Jazzlett, and huzzah for Thorn! Charly, I’m very glad you are okay.
I’m having a bit of a weird time right now -- I dream about going to my parents’ house,which isn’t theirs anymore anyway. Then I wake up and obsess about all the ways I failed, like, we never did find their wedding rings, and I should have brought more stuff home and tried harder and on and on. I suspect the wedding rings got thrown out with the garbage -- I found a couple of bags of yucky trash with valuables in the bottom as it was. It’s complicated, there were roaches, lots of things just got tossed into bags.
But anyway, it’s all weird and distressing. I think I’m transferring worries about Emily going to Scotland (next week!). I don’t want to stress her out more than she is, but the whole Brexit mess is very scary.
Thanks for letting me rant. Hugs to all of you, and one of these days, I have some more old book art to share if you want.
@ Jazzlet : Yikes, phew & happy birthday! Wishing you and Thorn the best. Give her a pat from me please.
***
Heard this classic old song on the radio, the other day & had to track it down -- a real slow burner so listen all the way to those powerful last verses :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeVOzaDBEmc
WARNING : Potentially confronting & depressing music and lyrics..
I second this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwqFylmfSOg
Steve Shives says it so well here & speaks for me too. It’s from a USA perspective but applies so much to us here in Oz too.
Where there’s now this latest round of brutal mistreatment and evil against refugees who have done nothing wrong -- and are even loved and wanted and have jobs in their local (Aussie) Biloela community :
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/deportation-of-biloela-family-a-heartbreaking-blow-for-other-tamil-refugees-advocates
David Coleman MP is the cowardly bigot in charge of carrying out Dutton and Pezzullo’s vindictive 17 month persecution of the family from Biloela. Folks can ring his staff and let them know what you think of his complicity: tel:(02) 62777770 though that answering machine is full now apparently.
Thank you all!
Anne
If it would help ask one of the Affinity team to give you my email, Stockport is in the north of England, not Scotland, but still nearer than you will be, if anything did go wrong I would be more than happy to help. If it would be helpful email me and I’ll give you my phone number, you are welcome to pass both on to Emily.
Jazzlet, thank you, I’ll keep you in mind. I think she’ll be okay, I’m just worrying because it’s all new and weird for both of us. Emily’s best friend and his family live near Edinburgh, and she’s already met several of her colleagues in the department including the professor she’ll be working with. She and her friend have never actually met in person, but they’ve been friends for years via the internet.
I’ll be better once she gets there, it’s the uncertainty that gets to me.
@ Update to my 30 :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-31/tamil-asylum-seeker-family-taken-to-christmas-island-lawyer-says/11467312
Our evil disgusting fascist excuse for a govt flew this poor family out in the middle of the night to our concentration camp for innocent refugees on Christmads island. No words. No printable ones anyhow.
^ Update : There’s going to be protests against the deportation and mistreatment of the Biloela refugee family tomorrow. Apparently these will be held Australia-wide but certainly on in Adelaide with details here :
https://www.facebook.com/events/394112977961415/
since I know at least one other Adelaide resident reads here. Senator Hansen-Young fromtheGreens party willbe presnet apparently too. Sorry about theshort notice.
Incidentally, the regular vigil for refugees is still happening every Friday night too -- up to over 150 weeks now :
https://adelaidevigil.com/
***
In other news some Climate reality Deniers have apparently been making a lot out of a delay / dismissal in the Mike Mann Vs Tim Ball legal case which they are claiming to have won but in fact have not at all. See Mike Mann’s statements and is lawyers here :
https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1164910044414189568?fbclid=IwAR1-qDcJjjdfjxe4SSUG1fN1CWUcfMXxSX5L3kYMuBijRo5TNQRaSSQ_kKQ
the case was apparently dismissed for delay and Mann may be resuming it depending on circumstances / legal advice.
Heya.
We got a mouse. Yay. Not a pet mouse, mind you, but a field mouse that has moved in during our holiday. Now we’re spending all the time cleaning, closing holes and putting up (live catch) mouse traps.
Anne
Oh uncertainty is horrid and when it’s about someone you love it’s all too easy for it to run wild. I hope you can manage it so it doesn’t take over your dreams completely.
Giliell
I hope your mouse is caught soon. They like chocolate a lot, more than anything else even cheese. I don’t want to depress you, but the odds are if you have evidence of one mouse you have more than one, so set the traps again after you have caught what I hope is just one. We have found that the most effective thing to stop them getting in small holes is that expending foam that sets solid, it’s not lovely but mice, and in our case rats, are fucking good at chewing through most things, with a long nozzle you can make the foam deep enough that they give up.
We had once field mice nesting under the floorboards. It took multiple traps (the killing kind) to get them all. Over the course of several days. I am disinclined to care too much for lives of little rodents, since they can, and do, wreak havoc in the garden. It used to be less of a problem when an owl nested on a spruce tree in our neighbor’s garden, but that tree had to be felled for safety reasons and the owl went somewhere else. And this year voles and mice are in fact overabundant and buzzards and kestrels do not manage to keep up with them. About 30% of the small trees that I planted in my coppice fell victim to them already :-(
Yeah, floorboards and straw ceilings* seem to be the problem here, too. We’ll use foam in that one big hole where I suspect the mice use to get upstairs. I absolutely don’t mind them outdoors since we don’t have much of a vegetables garden and the neighbourhood cats seem to control the population as well, though they leave the decapitated corpses lying around, of course.
Oh, and we got some rain, yay. It started just the moment Mr and I went outside to have a gin tonic on our new terrace, but it was soooo needed, it’s OK.
*Dunno how common this was in other countries, but here, in order to get the plaster stick, people would nail straw mats against the ceiling and then put plaster on those straw mats. They’d also round the corners since they couldn’t get sharp angles and everybody who ever put up wallpaper hates them.
Giliell @ 38
G&T rain magic. Almost as good as forgetting to take an umbrella or rain poncho.
We don’t need rain, our potatoes are mostly slug.*sigh*
In the UK they originally used wattle (thin whippy branches woven through stout branches -- like a hurdle) then moved onto laths (thin strips of wood fairly closely spaced and in both cases ‘threw’ on a coarse plaster with hair/fur/straw in it, then put a layer of finer plaster on top to finish. Laths have their own problems, not the least being that if someone has put wallpaper on it the odds are very high that if you try to remove the wallpaper you will end up taking off most of the plaster too. Which is why the bathroom in our Sheffield house ended up smaller by the thickness of a sheet of plaster board on two walls.
Thorn is doing very well, her wound looks as if it’s healed up, but we are being good and keeping the cne on until the vet checks it (next Monday). She hates us and we are all bruised, but we’ll live :-)
Emily’s in Edinburgh, and she has already seen English robins and magpies. My firstborn has really left the nest this time.
@Anne, I hope she will like our European birds as much as she does the American ones :)
Some of your comments got stuck in the spam purgatory. I do not know why. I freed them.
Thanks, Charly. I figured the spam filter was the problem!
Emily loves all birds. She’s been looking forward to meeting new ones.
Yay, it’s raining!
I hope Emily takes some pictures of hooded crows, they are just the best gothic bird around, way cooler than their all black cousins.
We actually have blue sky which is making a pleasant change from showers.
Here it is supposed to rain tomorrow, and finally a rain-rain, not just a light shower-rain. The front that rains on Giliell right now should reach us by tomorrow evening We shall see what comes of it, weather forecasts are not as reliable as they used to be, the weather is just too unpredictable nowadays.
What has reached me already is the fall gloom. Today it was extremely hard to get out of bed and do something, anything, up to and including going to the loo. One of these days I will probably have to ask my doctor for prescription antidepressants.
Feeling the same as Charly. I also need to get some treatment for my seasonal depression, before it really hits.
Both of you go and talk to your doctors at the very least *shakes finger at you* Doctors have a lot of different ways they can help with depression, not just prescribing antidepressants, though there is nothing wrong with them -- I’m on two different ones (one is partly for the pain as well as being an antidepressant) so I’m certainly not against them. You have both talked about how badly the drawing in to wintter affects you, you know it is happening, but the fact that it is happening makes doing anything about it hard and it will only get harder, so this is a caring nag to make that doctor’s appointment tomorrow -- don’t wait until you are feeling worse.
I hope you get proper rain Charly. We have another sunny day which is lovely as we’ve not had many recentlly.
Charly and lumipuna
I’m hoping for the rain for Charly as well. It’s been sort of rainy here. I’m mildly encouraging you to take the step you need to take with the doc, if you see the need for it.
I’m off to sauna and swimming to get my type of self-care.
Jazzlet,
A very belated Happy Birthday.
Jack and I couldn’t be happier about Thorn’s good news. Give her a cookie and some love from us.
Charly and Lumapuna
It’s probably best to make an appointment with your Dr. soon. Antidepressants can take up to 6 weeks to start working and sometimes the first antidepressant doesn’t work and another type must be used and that takes another 6 weeks to figure out. Seasonal Affective Disorder is treatable and not just with drugs. Have you ever tried any kind of light therapy?
Ice Swimmer,
Sauna followed by swimming in the cold, cold sea seems extreme to me, but I’m glad it works for you.
Thorn is a naughty bitch. She has smashed her cone up. It was suppposed to stay on until the vet sees her tomorrow. Mind she’s not bothering her eye at all, but she is bothering her leg where it was shaved for IV access, only a bit at the moment so I just hope that she doesn’t keep at it over night.I honestly can’t blame her, when I have had bits shaved for operations the regrowth has been unbelieveably itchy.
voyager @ 50
We’re not there yet on almost-freezing water, but I believe it is cold by some definitions. As the weather had been been unseasonably warm until this week, the sea is still 17 °C (down from 20 °C last week). The way people react to that kind of water temperature seems quite diverse.
I swam 1 km altogether, split in four stints and went to sauna between the stints and got my muscles in the lower back to relax significantly in the process. Also, I got to exchange a few words with my sauna friends (people who I mostly see in sauna*).
__
* = Once I was seeing the new exhibition in the Ateneum Art Museum and one of the people who I see in the sauna often spotted me and quipped: “It seems you also exist outside the sauna as well.”
It’s 12°C ouside.
I put the furnace on.
chigau @ 53
That’s just to compensate that the temperatures here should be summery tomorrow (21 °C). I wonder, at which point the switchover will come and we get the cold air from the polar cap.
..
Sometimes things just work out. One of the courses I took has turned out to be so popular that there’s no lecture hall big enough for it, so the lectures will be videoed and can be watched afterwards. So that means that I can attend lectures of another course that would otherwise collide with one of the lectures of the popular course. It remains to be seen, how will the TAs be able to handle checking the homework of the course…
Ice Swimmer:
Hah, well said.
My only swim this summer consisted of a very brief dip from sauna in late August. I rarely bother to swim because I’m sensitive to cold and usually have no quick access to a beach (esp. one with sauna). At this age, I increasingly feel like when it’s warm enough for swimming, it’s too hot to travel to the beach and back. Plus, this year my favorite beach was ridden with blue algae just when it was really warm.
lumipuna @ 55
The problem with beaches is also that you have to leave your stuff on the beach when you swim, unattended, or you have to take turns in guarding your “camp”.
There was a long time that I didn’t swim very much, but for the last few years, I’ve gone back to my childhood in that respect. We didn’t have a summer cottage by a lake but there was a small river in the village in which our cottage was and I’d go swimming alone in the river as a tween, taking my time and getting yelled at afterwards for being there for two hours and coming back with white toes.
Heya
Sorry for not being here much, but I’ve been very busy at home and at work
Emily’s updated her blog! Robin vs earthworm.
http://emilyd47.blogspot.com/2019/09/predator.html
In today’s news :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-converts-who-are-setting-fire-to-sacred-aboriginal/11527402
Converts of a Pentecostal cult destroying Australian Indigneous culture and artefacts that have lasted for millennia claiming Indigenous culture is “demonic” -- just criminally vile. What an ugly, intolerant Dark Age mentality these Penetcostalist cult members have! Oh & yay, our current &utterly hypocritical and sociopathic Prime Minister Scott “”refugee torturing coal fondler” Morrison is a variety of Pentecostal too. THis current govt inspired by the recent acceptance of equal marraige is currently trying to pass “religious freedom”laws protetcing homophobic bigots. Wonder, what the “freedom of religion” for the Indigenous people here who haven’t converted to this Pentecostal cult and wish to keep their culture alive gets eh?
Incidentally, the headline now is “The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred Aboriginal objects” when the original headline was “That’s all from the Devil” A Pentecostal missionary who believes Aboriginal Culture is witchcraft” Hmm .. Second time today Ive seen that happen on “my” ABC and both shifts to more conservative, arguably more pro-govt titles. The first was this story :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/national-climate-strike-students-across-australia-skip-school/11528100
Which went from the neutral “National School Strike for Climate sees students across the country planning to skip school” to the anti-Climate action “Students risk failing exams if they skip school to attend today’s climate strikes” with the article related how one particular “academically selective”* Perth Modern School punished one young person for wanting to have a decent future enough to act.
Oh & if you’re wondering how the School Climate Strike action has been going :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/school-strike-for-climate-draws-thousands-to-australian-rallies/11531612
It seems the answer is pretty well and very impressively.
* Meaning what? I don’t precisely know either but am guessing elite and private i.e. for the wealthy / religious with vested interests maybe?
Vale Penny Whetton -- a remarkable and good life lived, wish I’d known her :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-17/penny-whetton-climate-scientist-and-wife-of-janet-rice-dies/11519308
At theopposite end of tehmoral spectrum -- Samantha Bee is spot on about the Koch bros and their evil here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Rdo3jmjTk
& in middle of that spectrum arguably :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BniojL2CAdo
From Sam Bee again in case folks missed it.
NB. Cross-posted (modified form) from Marcus Ranum’s Stderr blog.
FWIW Greta Thunberg herself has responded on facebook to some familar reichwing talking point – the claim that she’s been brain-washed and being exploited or directed by her parents and other, usually unspecified, groups.
Excerpt :
& another excerpt from the same long post on her page :
Plus :
If anyone’s really keen to challenge that, well, I think Greta herself may have 3 more words for them – “how dare you.”
Are you really denying her agency, her choice and intelligence / wishes here?
***
Incidentally on the reichwing attacks on her see :
https://newrepublic.com/article/154879/misogyny-climate-deniers
By Martin Gelin published on 29th August 2019 – before her iconic speech but still pretty relevant here.
Plus Greta’s response to Trump’s sarcastic trolling here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-25/greta-thunberg-donald-trump-twitter-response-climate-change/11545204
See as well as what our disgusting coal-fondling shonky excuse for a PM said here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-25/scott-morrison-warns-climate-change-anxiety-young-people/11546846
Of course, claiming to not want kids to be anxious might be vaguely convincing if he actaully proved it by acting on the issue and listened to them..
I finished a little project.
https://anne-d.dreamwidth.org/343887.html
Anne
That is very nifty!
I have moved.
I am living in an apartment (alone) for the first time in 30+ years.
I think I kinda like it.
Anne, that’s a cute idea
chigau
Have some bread and salt!
Chigau
I hope you are happy in your new home.
StevoR,
Thanks for the cross posting about Greta Thunberg.
Anne,
Thanks for the link to Emily’s blog. The robin photos are adorable. They remind me a cat playing with a mouse.
Also, I love your packet project. It’s a great idea and you chose a beautiful cover.
Chigau,
Congratulations on your new digs. I wish you many happy years of pleasing yourself.
Jazzlet,
How is Thorn doing?
^ No worries & thanks Voyager.
Congrats and best wishes chigau (違う) & thanks to all here.
***
A short, fun and clever clip I stumbled on a day or so ago here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uywdkkEnTNc
NB. Contains some possibly problematic but accurately cited language.
Literally just heard this song now :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLQ4by3lUJo
& then found this :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtG_0MIv4dM
and, on totally different subject, also stumbled over this tonight too :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KW9LgShN_0
Old but has some practical advice and useful good debunking by Rebvecca Watson. Which hopefully won’t be needed but is worth bearing in mind if anyone does ever need to deal with tear gas. I.e. : Don’t use liquid nitrogen -- do use mud in a bottle that doesn’t become a major inadverant problem.
Thanks all.
Tomorrow …
I will buy a bed
and maybe some storage thingies
There was a stabbing/slashing incident in a vocational school (which is situated in a shopping mall) Kuopio, Finland. AFAIK, none of the victims were my acquaintances or relatives (my sympathies to survivors). The suspected perpetrator was a local male student of the vocational school. May his name be forgotten forever.
Amidst getting politically raked over hot coals, Donald Trump also gets briefly raked over forest autumn litter…
https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1179464852995227648
Aussie LNP Minister for utter sadism and far reichwing thuggery Dutton is going full fascist against Climate activists now :
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/03/peter-dutton-accused-dictator-urging-welfare-cuts-protesters
WARNING: Contains Dutton imagery and references.
Aussies are losing their right to protest it seems as the sociopathic scum in charge here continue to make my nation and the world vastly crueler and worse. As Global Overheating continues with its droughts and fires, floods and heatwaves and storms getting ever more frequent and severe the coal fondling, fossil fuel puppet govt here is only attacking those trying to get them to actually act on the issue instead of , well, y’know, acting on the issue itself..
Oddly, our ABC is awfully quiet on this huge story so far. :-(
Heya. I’m finally home again, since the only reason to stay at the hospital was pain so bad it couldn’t be managed with ordinary oral painkillers and since thar is no longer tge case I ran (haha) as fast as I could.
I’m still bored, but not as bored as before.
Come Monday all the relatives who promised to help will have to put up, but thankfully it’s the autumn holidays anyway, so no school run.
I’ve been hugely busy with deadlines and promises to meatspace people (though promising to go to sauna with my friend and fulfilling the promise has probably helped me cope with the stress), so I’m a bit late. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling a bit better, Giliell!
I have spent a few evenings in bed, some virus was trying to eat me again. I still feel a bit under the weather, but I cannot stay in bed anymore.
The fall gloom is in full swing, and the current prospect of yet another genocide and war does not help.
Charly @ 76
While the bed is a nice place for a night, it starts to suck if, you have be in it for too long, so I quite understand you.
Why is it that the world leaders have become so vicious, or have they always been such? They live off the blood, fear and suffering of others.
-new thread-