These Cape clawless otters were photographed on the Uitsig Peninsula in South Africa. Read more at the Zandvlei Trust, which does environmental work along the False Bay Coast wetlands, near Cape Town.
Tigtog and I are both going to be more family-focussed for the next week or two, so Hoyden About Town will be a bit quiet for a while. Please feel free to talk amongst yourselves in the Open Thread or the other current threads, but bide your time if you happen to get stuck in the autospamulator – we’ll fish you out eventually. Please also remember to vote for your favourites each day in the Weblog Awards!
Here’s this weekend’s Open Thread. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a great book? What are you doing this weekend? If you’re a parent (or a student), how are the school/university/otherinstitutionofyourchoice holidays going? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: arts & entertainment, environment, fun & hobbies, Life
Hoyden About Town 
My youngest threw up yesterday. He’s eating breakfast now and I’m holding my breath waiting to see if it was a once-off or the beginning of plague. I have visions of 3 kids with a tummy bug….
Other than that, the school holidays are going very well indeed, we seem to be a point where they’re all old enough to be civilized human beings for significant lengths of time. Also, they let us sleep in till 10:00am sometimes!
I’m very sleepy.
Has anyone heard from Ilyka lately? I saw she had taken her Twitter off her blog and made it private. I just want to know that she’s okay.
Those otters look like an illustration from a Moomintroll book!
Bless.
Hope you Hoydens have lots of fun and good times with the family!
In a fit of whimsy the local council painted ‘windows’ on the water tower that sits on top of a pretty spectacular headland near me. I dearly want to paint Moominmamma in that window and perhaps the Groke somewhere below.
Slightly dozy, slight vertigo, but I managed to blog so that’s something, I reckon.
Su, I have a Groke post in the works!
I found some gems this year when I went to spend my Christmas-gift book vouchers. I’m reading bell hooks’ Talking Back, and wondering why on earth I’ve gone so long without reading something so smart and challenging.
It’s nap time in my house now, and I’m the only entity awake. It’s peaceful.
Jet’s last blog post..Genesis of a blog
I would rather be the Groke than someone who thinks it is allright
to give people walking slow a poke or something worse
than that or even someone who says ‘I can’t be bothered
arguing or cursing against stuff that doesn’t bother me
and why it bothers you I don’t understand because I can’t be bothered’.
I am pissed off that, mere weeks after Christmas, Easter merchandise is already being put up in stores. It is pathetic.
Well yeah, my birthday’ before Easter. You think they’d put up balloons or something before the whole cross bunnies thing.
I don’t do the resolution thing. Never even considered it. But I woke up on the 1st of January knowing I was going vegan. So far it’s been great fun. Only 50 years to go!
Everyone else I know has taken the news like I’ve renounced puppies and am going into the monastery, and have done everything but send sympathy cards. Even that would be preferable to one of my work collegues, who has decided to evangelise me out of an inevitable death-by-stampede-of-suicidal-cows.
bell hooks is a great choice, by the way. I can’t go past Judith Butler for some nice chewy reading.
Wow, Kim, I can’t imagine for a moment how anyone else is affected by your decision to go Vegan.
Don’s a vegetarian, bless his wee cotton socks, and yet we eat many a meal together without any drama at all. And we share a household. Your coworkers are not being affected in any way that I can imagine, unless you were occasionally bringing in roast suckling pig to share on casual Fridays.
I’m going back to uni tomorrow, which is a bit of a relief to be honest. I miss living with people who do their own washing up.
The holidays have been good in general, very busy up til about a week ago. Since then I’ve been at home putting off revision.
Kim – Are you going from vegetarian to vegan, or straight from being omnivorous?
Anna – In all my time as a pinko rainbow greenie, I met maybe 2 or 3 vegangelicals, but plenty of omnivores who took vegetarianism as a personal affront. Even now, when I go to the teeny tiny tofu section of the supermarket, someone’s always put a steak, or packet of sausages in amongst the meat substitutes. Luckily, I keep the mind of a 12-year-old in a jar in my pocket, so a permanent marker and the ability to surreptitiously draw smiley faces is never far away…
Dinner with omnivores is always easy, because dessert’s the most important part anyway 😉
Kirsten – I was vegie for about 6 years, and haven’t eaten eggs for about 1 year. Not for any good reason, just because I couldn’t find any good free-range that wouldn’t cost half my food budget. Living fine without dairy at the moment, but if I ever wake up one day in the middle of a field, drinking from a cow with a straw, I’ll know it’s time to start on soymilk. I hear Vitasoy is pretty good.
If Hoyden had a coat of arms what would it be? An inflatable dalek rampant on a field of arsechapeaux? I’m not so much trifling with the grammar of blazonry there as throwing it to the ground and grinding it underfoot. Argent, goutty gules, Hoyden guardant, incensed would be something like “On a blue field sprinkled with red droplets, a hoyden looking you in the eye and spouting flames from mouth and ears.”
I had a vegan curry party last night, even though me and my partner were the only vegans in attendance. The only not-vegan thing to make it in to the house was the mocha someone brought to douse the flames they anticipated in their mouth. :o)
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Hmmph Argent = white, not blue .
I’ve always thought of a hoyden as a lady in late 19th century dress and a straw hat, running through a field of daisies with open arms.
But a coat of arms… well a coat is something you wear to protect yourself from the elements (like feminism), and arms symbolise how we support each other (the sisterhood). So, a hoyden coat of arms would be a literal jacket made of limbs, that’s my suggestion.
If we have a coat of arms, do we get houses like Hogwarts too?
OOh that was a bit of a problem at Hogwarts wasn’t it? Your house became almost synonymous with your identity, new members inherited old enmities – so bad for morale. I would hate to think of rampant inflatable daleks and incendiary fire breathing hoydens being prised apart by tribal loyalties. Hmmph as if education is not already hierarchical enough, the teachers have to find a way of setting student against student in a more systematic fashion (/cynicism).
Quick message to say I’m off line for a week and send a wave to everyone. Beppie, you’ll need to supply the alternative LOLdog this week to keep those cheezburgers in check.
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