Today’s otters come from carolvinzant on Flickr
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
Tomorrow, me and two friends are going to build an outdoor Turtletopia for my Eastern Box Turtle. I am looking forward to a sense of accomplishment and exhaustion afterward.
After you have recovered from your exhaustion, we want GIFs!!1!!1!
Yesterday my husband finally made an appointment to get the snip, 8 years after he first said he would do so. I’m sort of conflicted about it, because I think I’m slightly more sure about the no more kids thing than he is, so I keep asking if he’s absolutely sure he wants to even though most of my brain is saying “ABOUT BLOODY TIME!”
mimbles, better late than never so good on him. It sounds like you’ve been more than fair and patient about this for a long time already.
I had my nerve conduction study done this week (thanks for the info last week, peoples), it was pretty much what folks in last week’s thread led me to expect. Apparently the nerve entrapment is in my elbow (cubital tunnel); I haven’t seen the report yet, but the nerve conduction is pretty poor, but the doctor thinks I should go back to the physio and give it another 3 months with a night splint and conservative treatment, then retest and look at surgery if it’s not improved. Interestingly, in my job (I case manage workers’ compensation cases for an insurance company) I just approved a similar procedure for a client, so I’ll be able to get idea of how the surgery and post-op recovery can go, which is pretty fortunate for me.
My work week has been pretty eventful. My manager came back from maternity leave, which is great; I like her, even though our tech manager who’s been in her role is also great. We had someone resign unexpectedly, which is a bit sad, particularly because we’ve had a tough time with staff over the last 18 months. We lost a big client (who I manage) to one of our competitors this week, which is disappointing because they cited issues that seem to have been brewing for some time but were only raised recently, and they seem to feel we left it ‘too late’ to respond despite only being made aware of them with limited time to do so.
@Andrea: Oooh, that sounds exciting! I echo tigtog’s request for photos 😀
@mimbles: I hope it all goes well for him.
Hopefully I don’t jinx anything with this comment, but I think I’m finally getting the hang of actionscript (Adobe Flash’s programming language). Raining outside, so I have no choice but to make another hot chocolate and sit in front of the heater. Truly, life is hard.
I have *got* to stop reading about the new PM on the interwebs. It’s just a source of outrage. Particularly up my goat this afternoon (I nearly wrote this morning, which goes to show just how long I have been pfaffing on the internet for) is the confected outrage about the manner of her ascention on internet formums by people who were never going to vote for her anyway, and also a claim that she’s not really a feminist.
@Rebekka: Urgh, exactly. It’s getting me to a point where I’m worried I sound like I think Julia’s some kind of saviour, because my concerns about her are being overshadowed by the sheer frustration caused by people are being so frelling ridiculous and obnoxious about her. NGYARH.
@Jennifer, me too. I am worried I sound like I’d defend her eating kittens. But really.
Yep, I’ve been really very careful at what I’ll look at. I tend to read headlines with one eye closed and the other squinting and ready to block out whatever heinousness it knows is going to be in abundance. Yesterday there was a link to photos of Julia Gillard’s outfits, courtesy of the ‘fashion police’. The nonsense about how you ‘can’t attack a woman like that’, and then yes, the people who joined the ‘like’ Julia Gillard group going on and on about what a conniving backstabbing *&^% she is, how it’s ‘Unaustralian’ blah blah crappity crap blah. Oh yes and the one woman insisting that it’s sexist to notice that she’s a woman, because only when people don’t notice sex and race will it be ‘invisible’ and therefore we’ll live in a utopian equality…sigh.
My daughter [the human one. not hannah who is a dog, or should I say THE dog] rang Thursday night and mentioned that her work place is going to have redhead night in celebration.
She was out of her hometown and was receiving so many messages and phone calls that she had to turn the phone off.
We in this household have had a similar experience.
Lots of women ringing/e-mailing saying ‘isn’t it great!”.
I reckon there is a groundswell of women in particular who are pleased that we have a woman PM and not just any woman but this particular one.
Just so, hannah’s dad. The excitement among the netball mums this morning, including me, was palpable.
In other news… we’re moving back to New Zealand. Details here: The grass really is greener
The SMH reports (probably inaccurately, knowing their standards of science reporting) that humans can contract a parasite from cats that makes men less intelligent and women more affectionate. Regardless of its accuracy, however, I feel obliged to point out that xkcd said it first:
Toxoplasmosis? That was on the Science Show last week. The to-chief-parasite-studying-man (I don’t know what the official job title is) said that there’s a lot of speculation about what the little bugger does in human brains, but no one really knows. The idea that it makes people more cat-loving comes from studies in rats (the parasite finds itself stuck inside a rat, the parasite makes rats attracted to cats, the cats eat the friendly rats, the parasite can live happily inside a cat again). The show points out that the parasite is only adapted to work on rat brains though, and human brains are very different.
Yeah, Kim, as I said above, I very much doubted that the SMH reporting was at all accurate there. I was just amused because it reminded me of xkcd. 🙂
Just a heads-up – I’ve activated a caching plugin in the hopes that this one won’t be rubbish. If you can’t leave a comment, please let us know via @hoydenabouttown on Twitter.
More admin stuff – I’ve deactivated the autoplay for the slider on the homepage. I knew some people found it distracting etc, but I didn’t realise it could actually trigger vertigo! My profuse apologies to all for whom I’ve inadvertently caused such distress.
The previous/next arrow buttons still navigate amongst the slides. I’ll add a number counter in there too shortly.