Teacher’s Corner: Can I Go to the Toilet, Please?

Periodically I come across post and articles on social media where schools have punished kids for going to the toilet, especially girls on their period. And while in all the cases I came across outrage is more than warranted, there are always people who think that all rules about bathroom visits are bad, and surely, if you look at it from the outside, this seems reasonable. After al, we all have to pee and we rightfully class it as a human rights abuse if people are denied sanitary breaks. So why do schools still need at least some rules?

The first and major issue is safety. When you send your kids to school, you expect them to be safe there. You would object if we let strangers into the school yard and talk to your kids, or let them just run out into traffic. That’s why some of us always spend our breaks in the school yard, supervising breaks. If a kid leaves during lessons, we cannot guarantee safety. I once posted about a kid who went to the toilet and came back with dog shit on his shoes. That kid had definitely left the school premises. And even a simple accident could go unnoticed for quite a while. If there’s something all teachers dread it’s a kid getting hurt and then you having to justify yourself as to why this could happen on your watch.

The second one is that it simply disrupts class. Even very quiet systems where kids just get up, pick up the “toilet pass” and leave, create noise and disturbances. Doors are opened and closed. the kid misses part of the lesson and then comes back and needs to ask others or can no longer follow your explanation because they missed the start.

Number three is linked with number one: vandalism. It’s not unusual that toilets get damaged, walls get smeared, stalls get flooded, it’s a huge mess, somebody has to clean it, somebody has to pay, and the culprit is never found. Everybody suffers. Including the idiot who damaged the toilets.

In the end, it’s also not unreasonable to ask kids above primary school to use the breaks. Exceptions can and will always be made (nobody here will ever deny a bathroom break. But if it happens too often we’ll ask your parents to take you to a doctor), but in the end, 45 minutes is not that long a time. They manage to play video games 4 hours straight, travel for an hour or more, and of course they can hold it for an entire lesson plus the entire break, just to ask you the very moment you start teaching.

 

Why Grow up When you Can Be an Axolotl Instead?

Axolotls aren’t just every cool animals, they are also extremely cute, so when the author Seanan McGuire posted the current project of a Patreon creator whose monthly pattern was an axolotl, I couldn’t resist. Also, 7,50 each month for a sewing pattern including machine embroidery files is dirt cheap. I know I’ve paid three times that money for some. I also like the idea of having a new small project every month. So please meet Seanan, named after the lady whose fault it is.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved Bulbasaur approves!

I’ll have to make a second one for my sister, but not in black, because tracing a pattern on black minky is a job for people who murdered mother and father. If your sewing fingers are itching, give NazFX Studios a try.

Teacher’s Corner: And suddenly you’re dealing with sexual child abuse

Very obvious, very big CN for this post, but no graphic descriptions

A long, long time ago, I decided to study two foreign languages in order to become a teacher and teach those languages to children. And I learned how to structure a lesson and got graded on how well I worded my questions and I almost got failed and nothing in that whole time prepared me for the reality of school. No lesson ever mentioned “and then there might be the day you accidentally discover that there might be a video of a former student being sexually abused that is making the rounds amongst year 7”. And of course nobody told me what to do. Or how to deal with it myself, especially when the supposed victim and the kids passing it around are the same age as your daughter.

What happened? Well, a girl in grade 7 complained that the boys were spreading a rumour about there being a sex video of her, so we talked to the boys, who then said “oh no, we don’t know anything about a sex video of her, we only know the video of K”, which was the point when the week collapsed to a single point. K is a former pupil. She was originally from Hungary, lived with her mum in Germany in very difficult circumstances, and then went back to Hungary with her dad in a rushed move which left all of us powerless and with a very bad feeling, but she kept in contact with a few of the girls. And apparently she’d kept sending one of them increasingly sexualised content. From dick pics grown men had sent her via social media, to a video that she claimed showed her having sex with an adult man. Which then got passed around…

At this point I needed to update my ideas about “child pornography”. Because when you hear the term, what you think of are men raping young children and then passing those videos around. What you don’t think of is teenagers filming their own sexual activities and then passing the video around to other teenagers, all still under the earliest age of consent. And you just. don’t. know. what. to. do.

We do have a “crisis team” and I’m a member of it, so this was our first “test” as a team and damn, it was a hard one. One thing was that we were very unsure about what we had to do, and what we mustn’t do. Basically we were left with the feeling that we were with one foot in jail in all directions. That we were liable for doing things, but also for not doing things. The rules about mandatory reporting in Germany are difficult and essentially for teachers they are “it depends”, which leaves you exactly as clueless as before, especially since the stupid guidelines from 2020(!) don’t cover anything about internet and social media.

What kind of “saved our necks” was the fact that the kids passing around the video are under 14 as well. That makes them children who are victims of sexual abuse as well (because showing pornographic material to children is sexual abuse), and talking to the kids, you could see how some of them were harmed by something they didn’t want to see, they didn’t consent to, they knew was wrong. The police watched the video, saved it on their devices and removed it from the phones, thus covering the legal aspects.

We are still left with the social aspects. How to deal with the kids who watched it, who sent it. How to prevent such things in the future. How to deal with the parents and how to get help. The police say the face of the girl/woman in the video wasn’t clearly visible, thus they can neither verify nor rule out that is was our former student. They also say it wasn’t a girl under 14, they have experts who can tell that. Yes, I’m just as confused about these statements in combination as you are. We still informed social services who can possibly get a track on her in Hungary, because whatever the matter with the video, that kid is in danger of sexual abuse/being sexually abused. I think it entirely possible that this was her way of calling for help. We also informed the school psychologist and will contact organisations that can help us doing workshops etc. to prevent such things from happening in the future.

What left me pretty shocked and clueless was the reaction of the parents. We had to call 4 parents to inform them about what had happened, about the fact that the police was involved and what was happening / going to happen. Out of those 4, exactly one reacted the way you would expect, with shock and worry about their own child. One was: “OK, never mind, actually I wanted to talk with you about whether my kid can go to the advanced courses” (no, the kid can’t, the kid is getting regular Fs for refusing to work). The other one was: “I really don’t agree with her not having her mobile. She needs to have her mobile, when is she getting her mobile back???” (this is why we sealed the mobiles in envelopes and handed them to the police without touching them. Sadly the police returned the mobile the same day). The third one laughed about the whole story. Were there any legal consequences? No? Oh, and which kids had sent the video to their kid? (No, we don’t give out names of other kids and this is why). It also shows one of the big problems we’re having: school is supposed to deal with issues we have no control over. Apparently it was our fault that we didn’t know what was going on, but of course we’re also not supposed to touch the children’s mobiles (and no, I don’t want to touch them anyway) because that’s private? I mean, how about the parents taking some responsibility for their children’s social media activities?

I just hope you had a better week, I could do with a refund on this one…

What HAVE you been doing: an update

First of all, a profound sorry for being such a bad blog host recently. During the week I mostly just crash after coming home and then I put in some hours for chores and lesson planning and then I watch some senseless TV and then I crash again.

I also need to apologise to the people whose mail i still have here, all ready to go if only I could drag my ass to the post office…

School’s crazy right now. We were closed for a week on short notice, kids going missing, kids being found again, spending hours on the phone, exams, tests, colleagues collapsing in the staff room (it’s that time of the year. For some reason, that colleague always collapses in late spring, but is unable to just stay the fuck at home and call a doctor)… And now we get a week of break for pentecost and then  all kids are coming back and we all hate it.

At the weekends Mr and I have been very busy in the garden, which is my current delight, or would be, if the weather wasn’t what it is. It’s currently 7°C and raining, and it has been like this for weeks and it’s supposed to last for at least another two weeks. The cats tail is having a party… So yeah, I’m not a fun person right now…

Anyway, at least we finished the big project and I could now start the planting if I wasn’t at risk of drowning on dry land. But I’m really proud of what we built and it will look great once I do manage to plant stuff.

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That’s the whole slope finished, still with the plastic bags on top of the last row so it won’t wash away the concrete. The thing on the left is our to be torn down garage, I just hope they won’t completely ruin the garden when they do (in a couple of years). Those three windows you see at the top are my office, btw, so all your posts are coming from there.

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That’s just the top part. The lower terrace is already prepared for planting, by doing a good dig and mixing our sandy soil with (peat free) planting soil. The top part is still trampled flat. No wonder the cats tail is having a party: Nutrition poor compressed soil and the two weathers of “it’s raining” and “it’s about to rain”. I also did some first planting. The two top terraces will be a three sisters planting. The corn is ready and my mum promised me some more squash.

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Here’s a view downwards. Just for scale: each stone is about 20cm high, so you can get an idea about the height difference. Of all the squash I already planted only three survived and only one survived well..

I did manage to finish one small resin project. The problem is that it’s still too cold to work with epoxy, and it’s too light to work with the UV resin, as it cures before I can use it.

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A little fairy garden. And I made some new friends:

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Let’s just hope that summer will come, even though spring got cancelled and we can spend some time in the pool with them…

 

When your neighbour knows you too well…

 

New Pokémon Snap, Source: Nintendo

The end of last month saw the release of a new Pokémon game for the Switch. #1 had asked for that game for Easter and was damn happy when it was released. And, to be honest, it’s a really nice game. No hard storylines, fights, tournaments… You travel on a fixed course and take pics of Pokémon, like on a Legoland Safari.

Anyway, my neighbour, who’s just as massive a nerd as I am, asked me how the game was, and if I had taken nice pics and if it was worth the money. We chatted a while and I offered him to come over and try it out. Inside again I asked #1 if she’d talked with B about the game, since he knew that we had it.

“Mum, do you really think I’d voluntarily talk to other people???”

Seems like our neighbour knows us quite well by now….

Baby, it’s cold outside

In one of Pratchett’s best novels, Nightwatch, Sam Vimes travels back in time and takes part in the “Glorious Revolution” (twice, actually), with its motto of Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard Boiled Egg, and its symbol of lilac in bloom, which happens on the 25th of April. I remember Caine being very fond of that day, posting pics of lilac. For me, living in a place where spring comes earlier than North Dakota and wherever Pratchett lived in the UK, by that time, the lilac had already bloomed, taking its sweet perfume with it.

Except this year, with its extraordinarily cold April. This year, the lilac has not yet dared to open its flowers.

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Most nights still had freezing temperatures and lots of plants are four weeks behind their usual schedule, which creates a problem for your dedicated hobby gardener: I planted the seeds according to the usual timeline, and most beds are also ready, only that it’s way too cold to plant anything outside:

©Giliell, all rights reserved The garden as o two weeks ago. The lower terraces are ready for planting, but the weather isn’t.

This means everything is still inside, although I usually carry about 50 plants outside in the morning and carry them back inside in the evening. Say hello to the cocktail tomatoes.

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I’m also running out of pots, because most of them have now been replanted three times and had to ask my mum for planting pots. What I really couldn’t keep inside for longer is the squash, so I planted it outside, hoping it would survive. By now, none of the plants look happy, some of them also don’t look alive:

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I can only hope that it will regrow those leaves, otherwise the squash will be entirely shop bought this season. As they were last year, when all my plants insisted on having male flowers only.

In the meantime I’m taking joy in the growth of my corn. Intellectually I knew that in order to get that high, it had to grow like mad, but knowing and seeing are two different things.

The two upper terraces in the garden will become “milpa” beds, also known as the “three sisters planting”, an old central American planting technique where you plant corn, beans and squash in the same area (hopefully the squash will survive…). The corn provides stability for the beans to grow on, the beans provide nutrition for the ground, and the squash protect the soil from drying out and being washed away. This was the little one’s idea and I must say, the idea of fresh corn on the cob is intriguing. So, cross your fingers for warmer weather and surviving squash (also the fucking slugs have been at it already. There’s a whole garden for them to eat, they can’t tell me they need to eat my squash).

Teacher’s Corner: Sacrificing our kids to Covid

Remember when last year large parts of Europe, who thanks to quick and strict measures got relatively well through the first Covid wave shook their heads in horror at Trump’s science denial and his complete refusal to act? Well, now it’s time for the rest of you to have some pity on us. Germany has been on varying stages of pseudo-lockdown since October. With the second wave peaking around Christmas and over 1.000 deaths a day ion January, it happened exactly what scientists said would happen: the second wave hit hard, in all areas, and since our politicians refused to act quickly, it got a lot worse than it had to be. From that point on we’ve been in an unbearable state: Our private life is severely restricted. At some part it was illegal for Mr and me to enter my parents’ house at the same time when bringing them groceries. But there are zero restrictions on workplaces, and schools reopened three weeks before the Easter holidays, but at least only with half size classes and rotation. And we keep going…

One of the ways we’re measuring the spread of Covid is the 7 days incidence value. I’m not sure if that is used everywhere, so let me quickly explain: It tells you how many people on average got Covid during the last 7 days out of 100.000 and is seen as a key value, together with the R-value (how many people does one person infect). Last year, an incidence above 50 meant that an area was a high risk area. With the new mutants, especially the highly contagious British variant B117, some time in February our politicians decided that we needed to get below 35, which was a goal supported by scientists. then they noticed that we won’t reach 35 until we implement some really strict measures, especially in offices and factories, and they abandoned the goal. and much like in the USA, each Ministerpräsident*in decided they knew better, usually by implementing less measures than they actually agreed on.

Schools and daycare have always been central in these discussions. under the guise of “child welfare” they are kept open to the last possible minute, when actually the issue is that we provide “free” childcare so mum and dad can go working and catch Covid in an open plan office. Don’t get me wrong, this school year basically didn’t happen in terms of learning. I’m fully aware of the many issues that come with closing down schools, in terms of learning, in terms of providing structure, in terms of child welfare. I’m also fully aware of the alternatives and they are worse. they are literally killing our children and their parents.

At the start of the pandemic we saw huge infection rates and deaths among the elderly, and people, mostly politicians, claimed that children didn’t get Covid, and if they did, they weren’t infectious. Once they could no longer deny that children do get Covid, the next lies were that it’s harmless for children (7% get Long Covid!) and that they also didn’t catch it in school, but at home. I don’t know how this must have felt for the two of my colleagues whose children did catch it at school and one of whom infected his mum who has been in  hospital or a couple of months now. It makes me fucking angry. All those bullshit lies are crumbling down, of course, so the new idea is to simply ignore children and families.

The new plan of the federal government is that the “all is well” incidence is 100, which is already three times the number we agreed on at the start of the year. But for schools to close down completely, the number must be 200. If you now say “that’s horrible, that’ll kill people”, I’m afraid I haven’t even hit you with the worst of it. As said before, that number is calculated on 100.000 inhabitants, but 100.000 regardless of how many people are already vaccinated. Even those who only received one shot are largely removed from the battle field as long as they keep up with the rest of the measures. This means that currently the number in Germany is actually per 80.000 unvaccinated people. Therefore an incidence of 100 is actually more like 120. With vaccination finally progressing, this will shift more and more. Now, who’s the largest group that currently has a zero percent vaccination rate and has to meet many people every day? Yep, children and adolescents, and it’s already showing:

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This shows the incidence of kids between 5 and 14, the deeper the blue, the higher the incidence value. In my county, that incidence is 421, while the overall incidence is “just” 183 and doesn’t trigger any measures now and will not trigger any measures should the federal “emergency break*” be enacted. By the end of summer, an incidence just below hundred over all age groups could mean 600-800 among school kids. Of course they carry the virus home and many parents will also be in the last group to be vaccinated as they tend to be younger and healthier. With the wild type, isolation within the home was often good enough to protect the other family members. With B117, if one person gets it, everybody in the family gets it, thus putting kids and parents at risk. Some of those parents will die, just like it happened in New York, where thousands of kids lost a parent. And all of this is done in the name of “child welfare”.

Oh, and our government has asked us all to put a candle in the window to honour the Covid deaths. maybe they shouldn’t ask us to set things on fire right now?

The Gardening

As you may remember, we had some (did I say “some”) work done on our garden two years ago, which left the slopes left and right to the stairs in shambles. The effort I’d made towards terracing the left hand side (seen from the garden) was undone. Last year we spent spring with building a small plateau on the right hand side where we want to put up a lamp, a project that got mostly postponed due to the fact that our friend couldn’t come over to help us due to Covid restrictions. Also, getting the area ready to put up a pool took several weeks, so all in all the gardening season was mostly cancelled.

This year, we’re working on the left hand side which is my vegetable garden. Terracing the slope means working with those nice planting stones and I must say, by now I’m pretty good at it. This is how the project looks right now:

View of a garden slope with red planting stones in rows

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You can see several things here. Number one, our ground is pretty sandy. One year I tried to plant carrots and they simply didn’t manage to grow downwards. the good thing is that it keeps moisture in the depth really well (although the surface quickly resembles the Sahara). I’ll put a layer of gardening soil on top for the young plants. The lowest terrace will be planted with chillis. The second terrace, which you can only guess from this pic is between stone rows 3 and 4. That will be for sweet peppers. the rectangular stones at the side are for flowers. We need to put them there so the side with our to be demolished one day garage doesn’t slide into the veggie patches, as there is little growth there. Now for the bigger problem:

View of a garden and a house with stairs separating two slopes

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The garden is actually a two way slope, being much higher on the left hand side than the right hand side. the perspective of the image is a bit misleading. The terraces created so far are 2/3 of the depth, but only half of the height. After the next two rows of stones we’ll run into a problem: the terrain grows wider, the stairs turn to the right, creating a triangle that sits much lower than the left hand side, which is causing us a lot of headache. Our current idea is to keep the terraces six planting stones wide, and to create a drystone wall in that nasty triangle. If you have a better one, feel free to tell me. While it all looks pretty gloomy right now, it will be wonderful and a habitat for many little critters once we’re finished and the planting has begun. On the right you can see last year’s project. That side will remain “wild”, although I always throw flower seeds there because otherwise I#m ending up with a monoculture of goldenrod.

Speaking about critters: The wild bees are alternately very happy with us and very upset. Each time we move some earth they go “ohhhhhhh, loose earth, let’s go burrowing”, only for us to destroy it again. They still got the entire right hand side where whatever loose earth we put here stays put. Here’s an ashy mining bee for you:

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And, last, but not least, some of the residents to be. Sadly we’re having a really cold spell with solid frost overnight, which doesn’t allow to plant even the more robust plants outside, so my windowsills are being overgrown…

©Giliell, all rights reserved Butternut squash, already showing flower buds

©Giliell, all rights reserved Nasturtiums and sunflowers

©Giliell, all rights reserved Hokaido squash, Mexican Honey tomatoes, orange cocktail tomatoes, and on the left some sweet peppers

I also keep carrying some plants outside in the morning and inside at night. Hopefully we’ll have left the worst of the cold behind us, but it’s supposed to stay grey and cool throughout the next week.

“The silent majority agrees with me”, gender critical edition

Open letters are a time honoured form of activism. They allow individuals to connect over a single and very specific issue and raise awareness for that cause. They are, of course, also problematic in a way, since they usually are initiated by people who already have some influence and publicity, because nobody publishes an open letter signed by 40 noobs with a blog and a 50 people Twitter account, so they’re usually a tool of academia, authors, or various kinds of celebrities. At least you need a couple of celebrities to boost your idea.

The latest round of “gender critical”, aka transphobic open letter seems to have suffered from a certain lack of celebrity endorsement, which is why they decided to simply sign the names of dead women to their cause. “Come on, Giliell”, I hear you say, “nobody would be that dishonest”. But go, look for yourselves: Here it is.

The letter itself is the usual transphobic whining about trans women taking things from cis women, like all those shiny Olympic medals trans women have so far failed to win. The novel “Detransition, Baby”, by Torres Peters, has been listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The usual suspects are all up in arms because a literary prize that was founded to celebrate women’s often  undervalued contributions to fiction has dared to list a novel by a trans woman, and this is of course another instance of a “trans identified male” taking things from “biological women”, just like in sports. Only that of course they always try to base their bigotry on biology, claiming that anybody amab has intrinsic and immutable advantages over anybody afab. Does this mean they’re indirectly claiming that women cannot write and therefore need some protected prizes where they don’t have to compete with men?*

But let’s not get sidetracked from the incredible dishonesty of “the dead agree with me via ouija board”. Among the “supporters” of the letter you’ll find Emily Dickinson, Daphne du Maurier and Mary Anne Evans, aka George Elliot. Why they couldn’t get the Transphobe in Chief, the woman writer who publishes under her initials, a male pseudonym of a guy who tortured gay people, and who singlehandedly invented women back in the 1990s to sign their letter, I don’t know. Now, we all like to claim great woman of the past as our forbearers, brand ourselves as their heirs, but a simple fact is that we have no idea what their opinion on many things was or would have been. Who knows what Rosa Luxemburg would have thought about gay marriage? For a couple of other issues we do know their positions and they are horrible, especially with regards to race. Is it possible that these people would have agreed with them? Sure. Does that mean anything? Not unless you declare them infallible. Now, given that many transphobes are also terribly racist and homophobe, they probably consider that a feature, not a bug, since they happily outsource critical thinking.

It is, of course, also possible that those women would have told them to stuff it. It happens time again with modern authors who they suppose agree with their bigotry, like Margret Atwood. And after all, it is pretty unimportant. Those women are long dead, and while celebrities sure can help or hinder a cause, their opinion does not magically make a position right or wrong. Human rights are not determined by Grammy nominations or book prizes. There’s a hell lot of horrible people with book prizes or Nobel prizes. In the end that’s just an argument from second hand authority and you learn back in grade 10 that those are not actually arguments at all. By the end of the day it’s just another episode of transphobes (if you read the list you will indeed find familiar names) being terrible, and none of them sees any issue with this.

*Just to make this clear: I’m very fond of things like Women’s Prize for Fiction. We don’t have a level playing field and authors don’t get published by sole merit of their writing. Until we have a level playing field we do need Women’s Prizes, Black Literature Prizes, Queer Literature Prizes etc.

Resin Art: No Drama Llama

I’ve been slowing down a little, needing some more inspiration on the one hand, and also being too damn tired on the other, but I did get some things done and started a new batch heading in the “cute” direction. I also <i>almost</i> managed to get your stuff shipped. Then the automatic post station refused to accept one of the parcels and I noticed at literally the last second that I had mixed up the labels on two other envelopes… Next try on Tuesday…

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I got some new pigments and used them to stencil flowers on a black blank. I like it very much and attached an elastic.

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Part of a straw flower set on brass bezels.

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This one’s rather large and set into wire. it glitters nicely in the sunlight with its back being crinkled tinfoil.

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Same technique as above, with crinkled tinfoil, but it looked a bit boring, so I put a lot of plastic “gems” on top to refracture light.

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Some stuff I’d ordered finally arrived. 2021, when the most exciting thing is watching a parcel with llama moulds travel all the way from China.

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I need to finish the matching necklace, though.

And last but not least, my upcoming project:

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You gotta resin them all… Whoever owns the rights to Pokémon seems a lot more relaxed about trademarks than Disney, because you can get a lot of Pokémon themed craft supplies. There’s this guy in Thailand who makes excellent Pokémon themed moulds, so when I saw the heads and tails Eeevie moulds I had to get them. Shipping from Thailand was extremely fast, btw.

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This is what they look like, ready to be painted, only that painting is a pain (ting) in the ass, because it’s so tiny and I’m no good with a brush. the Eevies got too dark, so I had to recast them.

Bumblebee Rescue!

The weather has been a rollercoaster these last weeks, with 20° four weeks ago and light snow over the last few days. What’s more, the weather changes every 10 minutes and 500 metres. And all of this while the first bumblebees are out, seeking nectar from the first flowers. Then they get hit by the snow and almost freeze to death. If I find them, I take them in for a snack and some warmth. They are gentle creatures and will snuggle in your hand.

Click for cute!

Look at that tongue! Like a flying ant eater.

Resin Art: Pokémon! Gotta Wear Them All! Also: Paging Hekuni Cat

Hekuni Cat, I don’t have your address. Please sent it to the Affinity address linked in the sidebar.

 

Some fun with Pokémon. the kids in school always love my Pokémon themed attire, be it the mask, the pencil case or the T-shirts.

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Umbreon and Espeon. I made matching earrings, just simple studs, but they do have a tendency to get lost in bed…

The next set will go out to a friend as a belated birthday present. We’ll meet in a park today to go for a walk. Distance and sunshine and fresh air…

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These are two brass rings separated by rhinestones. The top one has flowers in it, the bottom one gold leaf.

The next ones are fairly simple, but I do love them. All unicorny and shiny.

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And last but not least:

People, miracles do happen! As you may remember, my relationship with my mother is best described as “difficult”. To not put too fine a point to it, she was abusive. One of her tactics was to be never satisfied with what I did. I got an A-, best grade in class? Why isn’t it an A+? We were recently talking about the kids and she mentioned that while #1 was smart as me and also chaos incarnate like me, she wasn’t ambitious like me. I later thought “well, maybe that’s because you only loved me when I was the best”. This tactic extended to my hobbies. She’d never have a kind word or even praise, just a lot of non-constructive criticism.

Well, last week I gave my sister a set of Strawberry earrings and necklace and she asked me for a pair of earrings in brown with a bit of gold and when I gave them to her yesterday she actually liked them and thanked me and I was like “Lady, I don’t know who you are and what you did to my mum, but I really like you and you can stay.” Apparently an old dog can learn new tricks…

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