Children, Accessibility, and being an entitled ass

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…

Gotta Resin Some More: Pokémon Earrings and Pins

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.

Head of Galar fire starter, next to a 1€ coin

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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.

Head of galar plant starter

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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.

Head of the Galar water starter

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And Sobble. Sobble gets the coolest evolution, but as a baby they’re just a little Emo. I love Sobble.

Squirtle head earrings

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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.

Bulbasaur earrings

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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.

Original Game Boy silhouettes with Galar Starters as earrings

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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.

Pins of the Pokémon

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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.

 

In Memoriam: Uli

 

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.

Restorating the Kitchen Table and why “Sustainability” Can’t Work Within Capitalism

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.

Table legs in the kitchen

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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?

My Dearest Deer (plush of the month)

I made another plush from NazFX Studios, just in time before the next project is looming around the corner (yay for holidays).

This one is a cute little fawn, with true Bambi vibes.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

I changed my deer a bit from the original version. I used tan instead of white, left off the antlers, and moved the ears to a more natural position. Isn’t she cute? And I’m never going to make another one. Really. You’d have to pay me serious money, but this won’t become a “you remember it’s my birthday” pattern. It’s a good pattern, and it’s a lovely plush, but it’s also a hell lot of work. But I’m glad I finished her and she’s already been adopted by the other plushies.

 

Tummy Thursday: It’s Pokémon Birthday Cake Time

The kid’s birthday was already at the start of the month, but of course with my body being an asshole again I couldn’t make a cake for her actual party. Thank goodness teenagers mostly require insane amounts of food and not attention, so she could have her friends over for a small party.

Last weekend we celebrated with our friends and she got her cake for that day. She went for her favourite Eevilution, Leafeon.

©Giliell, all rights reserved      The eyes are not my best work.

©Giliell, all rights reserved Yes, that’s a ton of individually cut and applied grass blades

The inside of the cake is a standard vanilla cake with a cream cheese and cream filling. The filling was really easy and tasty: I used a packet of lemon flavour jello to mix with the cheese and the whipped cream, added some lime zest and cut canned peaches. The only problem that I had was cooling it down quickly enough for the jello to work so it wouldn’t run all out on me. I then covered the whole thing in a thin layer of buttercream before adding the fondant.

Because a German buttercream (butter with custard) has too much liquid for fondant and an Italian meringue buttercream (my usual go to buttercream) was too much work for the state of my recovery, I made an American buttercream. I usually consider American buttercream the symbol of everything that is wrong with American cake making: It’s just butter and sugar, too heavy and too sweet. I love watching cake videos, but quite often the American ones leave me a bit puzzled: Yes, this looks amazing, but all you have in there is cake and buttercream. Where’s the flavour? Do Americans really spend 200 bucks on a cake that looks great but doesn’t taste of anything but butter and sugar? Please do tell me.

It did work well here, btw, because it was only a small layer to get the surfaces even and it contrasted nicely with the tart lemony filling.

Goldfinches Come for a Visit

This year I planted some cornflowers that grew in front of the window. They were planned as degu treats, but with one thing and another, I didn’t get around to harvesting and drying them. They do look pretty sad to human eyes now, but they look damn delicious to the goldfinches. I rarely get to see them, so I was all the more surprised to find them within 30 cm of my nose, happily munching the seeds.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved This one’s grainy because I took it with my phone

The USA are burning, Germany is drowning

Well, how to write this post? First and foremost: I’m fine, in case anybody was worried, I thankfully live about 100 to 300km away from where this is happening. I don’t know about or other German regulars. If you see this, please check in.

Maybe you heard it on the news, but the Southwest of Germany is currently experiencing extreme flooding. So extreme that even the climate scientists who expected something like this to happen are shocked by its scale. The effects are dramatic. There are over 100 confirmed deaths so far, with thousands still being unaccounted for, though authorities are hoping that they’ve been merely cut off.

The worst happened in two states: Rhineland Palatine and Northrhine Westphalia. In Rhineland Palatine the river Ahr, usually a small meandering river that runs between vinyards, has swollen dramatically. The catastrophe there isn’t a result of sealing large parts of the ground or straightening the river. That region is usually one of those brother Grimm fairy tale landscapes: middle high mountains with wine on the slopes, forests ion the heights, a castle at the top, and a nice medieval town in the valley. After weeks and weeks of heavy rain, the ground was soaked and couldn’t take any water anymore. It all rushed down into the Ahr. And now there are places that basically no longer extist.

Description: muddy brown water with half a bridge. The other half has been destroyed .

Description: Pictures of the town Dernau. You can see the muddy brown water in the whole town.

In Northrhine Westphalia it was flooded dams that could no longer hold the water. They tried to prevent the worst by causing smaller floods beforehand, but no avail. The Wupper, usually a small river, flooded town and completely destroyed neighbourhoods.

Description: cars buried to the windshield in rubble and water

I’ll spare you my thoughts on our politicians, climate change and so on. I’m preaching to the choir anyway.

Most Boring Game of “Find That Lizard”

In case you don’t already know, “Find that lizard” is a fun game Dr. Earyn McGee is hosting on Twitter, where you get a photo of a yard or something with a lizard hidden somewhere, often showing how well these creatures blend with their environment. Well, my own lizards are lazy, which is why I got to take this shot:

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As you can see, the little fellow lost its tail and is currently regrowing it. You sure deserve a break, buddy!

Have some Flowers

While we took a look at the cultivated garden yesterday, today it’s time to look at the wilder side with some flowers.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

These poppies are just amazing. Too bad the rain ruined them all.

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Here’s some simpler ones.

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Last year I threw some cheap flower seeds on one area. They turned put top be white mustard, which bloomed last year, and alfalfa, which is growing like mad this year. The bees love it, the degus love it, I’ll let it flower so it can seed next year’s crop as well.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

And a colourful beetle. It was somewhat shy and I only had the mobile, so the pic isn’t great.

Garden Update: The Big Growing

The heavy rains with nice temperatures basically made the garden explode.

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What I thought was squash were actually the two courgette seeds I had planted. Turns out they are more resistant to frost. We’ll, have a lot of them over summer…

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One of the three sisters beds with the monster squash/pumpkin/whatever. I bought a small, withering plant for cheap and gave it soil and water and it is a very grateful plant.

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I planted two different breeds of corn and it’s very noticeable.

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Look at my tomatoes! By now I have to put in multiple sticks to support the whole plant. The first fruit are visible and they made it through both storm and rain alike.

 

Salads are bad for your health

At least if you manage to cut your finger half off.

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Last night we wanted to make salad for dinner, cutting up a lettuce and tons of veggies and somewhere in this process I cut myself badly. The most likely culprit is the avocado, since they often lead to bad cuts, and the fact that I wasn’t using my usual knife, but acting like I did. Honestly, I can’t tell. The family says the avocado was still on the cutting board. Mr drove me to the hospital, almost threw a temper tantrum because he was not allowed to stay with me due to Covid restrictions, and picked me up again later. A nice doc sewed me up with three stitches and gave me dire warnings about not letting it get infected because though I thankfully missed the sinew, I was close to it.

Well, so much about finally having put up the pool. No swimming for me for the next week at least.

Tummy Thursday: Making Saitan

I think I mentioned before that I’ve reduced our meat consumption drastically over the last year or so. I’m not trying to become vegan or vegetarian (and no, I don’t want to hear why I should or how I should. This is not your post. Go somewhere else), but I think that meat should be a special treat.This is also possible since meat replacements have become so good that the family will eat them, when a few years ago they still tasted like underseasoned cardboard. One problem remains, though, and that is that many alternatives are based on soy and I’m allergic to soy. But I can totally eat gluten, so I tried making saitan.

You can just buy gluten by the pound, but you can also make saitan from scratch. add one part water to two parts flour and knead for 5 minutes. Let it rest for 30 minutes and then wash out the starch, This is messy and will lose you most of your mass. There are apparently people who then try to recover the starch from the washwater but not me.

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This is the gluten left from 2 kgs of flour and yes, it looks like a pig’s stomach used for wrapping roasts. At this point you can add seasoning and some salt and then you have to cook it. It can be baked or steamed, but I like to cook it in a mason jar with spices in a salty brine.

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Each jar contains about 500 ml in total, so you see that it’s not much, but one is also a good size serving for us. It needs to cool completely to get to the meat like consistency. This time I made pinchos. They were nice, I just used a little too much salt.

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It is pretty neutral in taste, which is why it’s often compared to chicken, so you can season it to your heart’s desire. Enjoy your meal.