Today’s otter is enjoying a crunchy snack. This carrot-eating otter was photographed by William Warby.
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 great book? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: arts & entertainment, fun & hobbies
Otterday! And Open Thread 
100 books by women in 2016 
Today was a singing day 
Hoyden About Town 
I have lined up all my figurative ducks to be able to make my mother’s birthday “cake” ( custardy-almondy-cherry filo pockets, served with marscapone cream) tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it. I quite like playing with filo – my mum hates it but she loves the result – so it is an easy win when I am cooking for her 😀
I am reading the final book in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary series and already I don’t want it to end and I’m worrying about what they are going to do to it when they make it into a series of movies.
I love those books so much
I made cheesecake for the first time in my life. It was a delightfully successful exercise. Why have I not been making cheesecake on a regular basis all these years?
In particular, why have you not been making any for me?
That thing where you follow someone on FB because they are a friend and have been unwell and you want to make sure that they continue to get better but their politics really suck and their response to gun laws is just … That.
I find blocking content from the pages where politically sucky folks source their memes helps cut down on most of the dreck in those situations (I will never see another thing that Larry Pickering has put on his Facebook page, yay!), but there have been a few friends/family where I have finally had to put them on the Friends:Restricted list (they don’t see any of my Friends Only status updates any more, and I don’t see most of their stuff unless they tag me directly).
Yeah I’m busily blocking the pages but there are just so many of them.
Listening to a CD I picked up at a garage sale years ago by a band named Lenahan. Hooligans in Suits, Islands in the Sea. Excellent. Also, just finished reading an out-of-print book, The Jewel and the Key by Louise Spiegler. Amazing YA, could not put it down. Now sleep-deprived.
I’ve been following the annual War On Christmas beatup in the US, and a Nevada assemblywoman has just raised it to a new level – her Christmas Card portrays her whole family (including grandchildren) posed to display their Open Carry armaments (wearing seasonal red shirts posed in front of seasonal red sofas and sparkly tree and decorations). The babes in arms aren’t holding guns, at least. In some countries I think sending a Christmas card like that to ones neighbours and constituents would constitute a threat.
More gun-fetishist news: a new home shopping channel- GunTV – is opening in the USA next year.
I am on the last of a long series of interstate work trips – it feels like I have scarcely spent a whole week at home since mid October. This one is to a ‘Women in Leadership’ conference, which I thought was going to be a bit of an end of year junket, but has actually been really, really good.
Sounds like a pleasant surprise then, angharad! If you write it up somewhere, will you share the link here for us please?
So has anyone outside of Early Childhood Educators noticed the unions’ launch of a campaign for a living wage? The devaluation of “care” /feminised work is wholly depressing