kaberett | Entries tagged with the shetland pony

My birthday present from my baby brother arrived today, and I promptly ended up--

-- okay, well, first of all I ended up trying to hunt down visual evidence of anyone having successfully used the bottle opener for anything, and actually found two baffling Americans attempting to provide reviews: exhibit A claims "scissors have a unique role in our lives - they offer more control and more precision than you could ever hope to get out of a knife when you need to cut something", and then goes on to explain that he only uses them in the workshop, on leather and carpet and suchlike; exhibit B tests them on a cucumber.

Anyway, then I moved on to this utterly charming short about Why They're So Expensive (if you would like an elderly Northern master putter-togetherer -- ! -- explaining craftsmanship to you, I can highly recommend it; it's very soothing) and, eventually, the short film about them that went viral.

There is [content notes: death by suicide and other illness] a lot of sad backstory from the last few years, but now, today, they're okay. They've got an increasing number of apprentices (who almost certainly made my set). And -- all of a sudden I find that I am very fondly inclined indeed.

NEW HORN CASE NEW HORN CASE NEW HORN CASE. I have been meaning to get one for Literally Years -- basically since I got this horn, in fact -- because my horn... doesn't actually fit... in the case that was supplied with it... such that I had to remove a slide every time I put it away, and this massively raised the barrier to doing practice at home. More recently, the zips have been gradually giving up. SO. On Saturday A accompanied me on an exciting adventure to Paxman, whose step-free entrance is hilariously locked up at weekends so Everybody Learned Something, and I now own a case that (a) my horn fits in, (b) has working zips, (c) fits on my lap much better for wheelchairing, and (c) is BLUE. Detachable-bell, space for a mute, I totally failed to spot it on the website, props to Paxman for pointing it out to me (it was actually slightly cheaper than the thing I'd gone in expecting to buy).
Because Borough Market is right there if you've visited Paxman, we had excellent fresh pasta for lunch (I had the pumpkin and ricotta tortelloni; they were brilliant). Further inspiration for the Surprise Charity-Shop Pasta Machine, etc. I just looked up how to make tortelloni.
On Sunday I finally got around to adjusting Lightweight Wheelchair: I'd extremely belatedly spotted that the pushrims were on the wider of their two settings, and if I moved them on to the narrower the chair would probably need slightly less finessing to get through the front door. However, changing the setting involved removing the tyres and inners and both layers of rim tape, so I didn't get around to it until Sunday afternoon (sat on the picnic bench on the decking in the sunshine, with the patio doors open). I only holed one of the inners, promptly remembered that set of tyre levers always does that, and added them to the charity-shop pile! The chair fits through the door comfortably! My wrists are still somewhat sore (my hand strength isn't great and these are Schwalbe Marathon Plus on 1" rims, okay), but I am pretty pleased with myself, and with finally living somewhere that all my chairs are actually trivially usable. Give or take getting another cushion so I don't gotta swap them around as much.
I absolutely adore The Ruin of Angels (the latest in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, the first five books are available as an ebook omnibus for under a tenner, highly recommended) to the point that I'm researching what the blue mineral most likely to be local to Kavekana is so I can Have A Relevant Theological Necklace. (I'm gravitating toward sodalite, but have tweeted the author to ask...) (... and he hasn't responded but I did on Etsy find an Exactly Correct pendant bead so, er, whoops? Whoops.)
I am having Feelings about the latest Check, Please! and partnership and mutual support and interaction. (Cup I - Playoffs, future Alex.)
When my baby brother got into the van at Bristol Parkway on our way down to Cornwall the other weekend, he handed me a milk chocolate trilobite that he'd picked up at a museum because it was a trilobite and obviously. Naturally I have not yet been able to bring myself to eat it, so I keep finding it when I'm shuffling things around in the kitchen and grinning again.
PASTA PASTA PROOF-OF-CONCEPT PASTA. Ricotta tortellini with sage butter; and then we ran out of ricotta, so tagliatelle with Italian Hard Cheese, pepper and Parsley From The Tub On The Patio (which is looking very cheerfully established, HURRAH). Turns out tortellini are actually easier than tagliatelle at least at the proof-of-concept who-cares-if-they're-all-the-same-size stage; I have learned Many Thing and am looking forward to trying again, and am genuinely impressed with how well the dough worked given that I arrived at it by eyeballing a Graun How To Make The Perfect... column and then fiddling with ratios to achieve a quantity I thought we could actually eat.
Having seen Night At The Museum 2 doing the rounds on Tumblr (specifically the scene with the Tuskegee Airmen and Amelia Earheart), when I stumbled upon Night At The Museum in a charity shop for £1.10 last week I jumped upon it, having got the two confused. Happily, today I discovered the sequel for £1 in a charity shop, so next time I am feeling Sad and want to Curl Up On The Sofa Watching Something I have that lined up. I will cry.
I continue Greatly Enjoying Pokemon, and am particularly smug because today I took part in a raid and ended up with a Suicune with shit IVs, so I... caught it on my second Pinap berry, for 12 candy, because double-candy event. (I will explain this in more detail if anyone is actually interested & doesn't understand!) (Also I really need to write up my Fascinating Sociological Study in Pokemon Go at some point, but for now suffice it to say that the person I've most made friends with is currently ill? And I ran into her mum outside the sorting office yesterday morning, and we had a brief chat about the world, because obviously.)
I am about to embark on a His Dark Materials reread, not least because A has acquired us tickets to An Evening Of Conversation in the relatively near future, with ticket price including a copy of The Book of Dust -- so given how hideously behind I am on new releases, I think I'm just going to do the reread and then read the new one once I have it. But AAAAAAAAH. :D

Thing that are not terrible and also do not begin with P:

1. My baby brother phoned me this evening to vent about SPSS and request tech support as an excuse for catching up with me and it was lovely.

2. I heard someone asking a member of cleaning staff how to get to Leicester Square. There was perplexity and some problem with accents. I provided assistance in the form of detailed instructions, then checked the Earl's Court Thought for the Day on my way out, and it was about unexpected kindness, and I briefly felt less like shit.

3. I'm really enjoying seeing all the Canadians I know on tumblr being dazed and tentatively hopeful about politics. There are multiple aboriginal/Native ministers. The cabinet is 50% women, because it's 2015. The Minister for Science is a scientist who's served on the IPCC. 50% female cabinet appointments lead to 5000% increase in guys who suddenly care about merit in cabinet.

4. My local bike shop has got in a replacement pump head and a new set of tyres for me, and I have in all the necessary parts to peer suspiciously over

me_and's shoulder while he applies a theoretically-straightforward fix to my power brick, whereupon taken altogether my big chair will work properly again and it will be a great relief.

5. Hot chocolate. Utterly ridiculous hot chocolate with mixed spice and condensed milk and plum brandy.

6. After having an enormous grump late last week and early this about my literature review (and massive thanks to each & every one of you who provided pep talks) I'm now feeling rather more confident about my framing and approach and am kind of enjoying working on it? Obvious sources of stress are obvious, but. Enjoying working on it. That's definitely a thing.

7. your blue-eyed boys. my e-reader.

8. I have acquired all the necessary ingredients for planned baking (bar buttermilk, which I am happy to work my way around not having). Ergo tomorrow all I have to do is Cook All The Things. (Planned: macaroni cheese, Apfelstrudel, two varieties of apple cake, as much stewed apple as I have jars for, a vat of chickpea thing, a vat of chilli, and the start of lemon meringue pie.) (Prep done tonight: loaf of bread started; fennel and garlic laid out for roasting.)

9. I picked up another bag of apples from my parents' this afternoon, and additionally liberated a jar of quince jelly made by my mother's own fair hand, an avocado, and the aforementioned fennel.

10. I'm not enjoying the shit my brain is throwing at me but I am at least recognising it as distortions, and employing coping mechanisms around it.

> So I didn't have almonds or dried fruit but I do have a slow cooker here [s]o my tagine was very soft. Thanks xx

> Oh and the ginger feminist green party veggie girl liked it too haha

(And: Indeligig last night was fab and I'm looking forward to seeing them again at the end of the month, and I am getting to rec a lot of my favourite music to people; I'm very excited about Yuletide signups, though inconveniently I am again more interested in writing than requesting; I got a phonecall this morning from the GIC, where I apparently have an appointment in mid November (!!!) (and it's with Barrett who is Known Douchey about genderqueer people, but hey); I have finished Ancillary Sword and slept on it and am percolating Thorts gently; I managed to find a close-enough approximation to a thing I was willing to eat for lunch, and have some leftover cake; I am engaging in light therapy via the magic of the tiny bulb that lives on my desk; I got some driving rain and also some sunshine; I survived navigating an unfamiliar bus with only a small anxiety spike; I successfully advocated for a friendperson at a medical appt, in which we did not get All The Things but we certainly got some of the things and a soonappointment to follow up.)

ps crispy tofu

1. TOL & TOG were just round the corner from home tonight for a show, so via Shenanigans involving me forgetting that Hammersmith isn't actually a single station they stood around in the sun with me for a bit before they vanished in to show (which twitter suggests was as good as I'd expect from Penn & Teller) and I got hugs and sunshine and stern looks about eating enough and bullshit about science and a brief discussion about the point of painting, and having left the lab it was fairly easy to pick up dinner on the way back in. (And on the way out I stopped off at one of my ridiculous corner shops and acquired stacks and stacks of emergency chocolate.) (And while on the topic of polymer chemistry and feeling vaguely contrite about the extent to which these people look after me,

sebastienne talked sense at me and I continue to feel better.)

2. We are tonight providing accommodation, as we occasionally do, for waifs & strays with appointments at Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic. Because, fundamentally, we're a trans-positive household a fifteen-minute walk from same, most of which involves walking through a rather nice cemetery, and consequently this is a concrete thing we can do that is helpful.

3. My supervisor appears to continue genuinely pleased with my labwork: we're trying a different introduction system with the mass spec this time around and the ion beam is stable and as of 11.30pm, every single data point from the past two days is usable (where with the introduction system I had been using, I was getting maaaaybe 50% usable data). Or, to put it another way, my chemistry has been fine and my tuning the machine up has been fine (she's popped in to check a couple of times while I was elsewhere, which I know about because she's told me after the fact that she had a play around and didn't change anything because it was spot on) (though I should really have retuned before putting tonight's overnight run on but if I had I'd've ended up locked into the building and that is no-one's idea of fun, and in any case the machine is pretty much rock-solid -- I've lost a tiny bit of sensitivity but nothing that should be a problem, and I'll tweak it back up when I get in tomorrow), it's just the ways in which these are fundamentally finicky beasts that are not actually under my control. Also, supervisor tends to rise early, so me leaving work at midnight means that when she gets in at 7am she can swing by the basement, have a quick poke, and make sure everything's where it should be, and set another thing going if necessary; and then by the time I rock up around 10am it's ready for me to have a poke again.

( lots! )

1. I really, really love going to concerts at the Southbank by myself, as it turns out, and then getting to wheel along the river in the dark. And I arrived late because of STRESS and DOOM, but along the way I've now visited the rooftop garden above the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and while I missed the first bit of Prokofiev, I got to listen to the second and the encore was a tiny but fantastic piece of Stravinsky and the second Prokofiev was lovely. Also, there was tolerable Sibelius. I was astonished. (Here's the concert deets.)

2. That One Gent tracked down a source of properly decaffeinated coffee that, I am told, still tastes like coffee. This means I have bought a bag of the stuff and now I get to make tiramisu it is safe for me to consume.

3. I have a huge pile of awesome books to keep me occupied over the four-day mass spec run coming up. (Courtesy of

rmc28, two Anuja Chauhan via

deepad's AC Reading Club; Ella Caria Delonia's Waterlily; Octavia Butler's Bloodchild; Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist; Malinda Lo's Huntress; S Bear Bergman's Blood, Marriage, Wine and Glitter; and then TOL asked if I'd mind fail-checking Emily Gee's The Sentinel Mage... and as and when I finish all that I've the Armitage translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I've been looking forward to reading since I bought it years ago!)

4. I finally persuaded my GP practice to agree that sodium bicarbonate ear drops were warranted, and two days in my ears are already feeling vastly better. (As people who have spent time with me recently will be aware, I have spent most of the past five weeks with massively reduced hearing. I am one of those lucky, lucky folk who occasionally get buildup of wax such as to Cause Issues. This further means that if you spend time with me - at least over the next ten days or so - and you haven't already acclimatised, I am relying on lip-reading much harder than normal.)

5. I shuffled stuff around in the freezer such that the banana-peach muffins have been tidied away into it. At some point in the next few days I'll get around to transferring them to a freezer bag, and as and when we've cleared space I'll move them from the Pit of Horrors to the smaller indoor freezer.

6. My baby brother is coming to visit me! (... and is running the Edinburgh Marathon in just over a fortnight's time; he's fundraising for Bowel Cancer UK; we know that I don't carry the family gene that results in something like an 80% lifetime chance of developing bowel cancer - it's the gene that did for my great-granddad directly, my Grossmutti indirectly, and my mum just had her five-year all-clear - but I don't think he's been tested yet.)

7. Also, he has forwarded my replacement debit card. SOON I WILL BE ABLE TO BUY THINGS AGAIN AND IT WILL BE GOOD. (I lost my wallet on Monday through staggering carelessness probably arising in part due to the meds shenanigans. I am astonished by how well I'm coping.)

8. I'm genuinely looking forward to the four solid days of teaching I have coming up - one on the GIMP, one on Inkscape, two on Python for statistics - and it's mostly not coz the money'll help.

9. My counsellor got in touch. I responded within hours. (This is really good for me, in terms of e-mail.) I am possibly going to have a session next week.

10. ELEMENTARY FINALE TOMORROW AAAAAAAAAAAH.

1. An enthusiastic carpet of bluebells in the half-light of a patch of wood near Little Hallingbury.

2. A nightingale walk in Fingringhoe: many to be heard, & the gorse out & beautiful, & the lilac out all over.

3. Oak trees are coming into leaf all over also. (I should check the cemetery over the road this week, see if we've got any oak there.)

4. Time with family-by-blood (at points 1&2), including Middle Tinycousin having made monkeybread and geeking out with me; and reiterating her desire to make art for me to keep on my walls; and dinner out and and and...

5. ... time with family-by-choice, cf previous locked post + also some stuff not mentioned in there, like "watching an Addams family film with TOL" and "dinner with a more extended subset of the polymer" and "Indelicates squee" and "Elementasquee" (curtailed on my part because I am Being Good and not watching this week's ep til I get home and can do so w/ my housemate).

6. The snake she slyly peeps; my mum's tulips various; and the hedgehog box in the back garden. (Also, the fig is coming along fantastically. Ditto the camellias.)

7. I have packed another round of stuff to go from parental home --> *?!@ House.

8. I am pleasantly sore - Spatzen - especially from 'chairing up a couple of slightly more enthusiastic hills than I normally come across.

9. More progress on the transfer report! It is slow going but it is progress.

10. Baby brother gets back to the country on Wednesday, and I am not yet convinced that Everybody Is Secretly Dead.

[This was requested for tomorrow; but I am operating on five hours' sleep and 10 hours' in-and-out-of-lab today, so I am going to leave "working out my gender identity" for tomorrow, when I am more likely to be able to do it justice. There's still a masterpost!]

I ended up explaining to

sebastienne the other evening that I distinguish the concepts of clan and of chosen family: the latter is approximately what I think family should be like, and the former is we may be unruly and fractious and liable to explosive disagreements, but by the gods you are mine and I will do my duty by you, no matter what.

I am going to restrict this post to brief discussions of people I consider clan, and people I'm dating, and the intersection; because if I started talking about everyone I would firmly & without hesitation call chosen family, this would be a very long post and I'd need to run it by about a million people to check they were okay with me describing them in those terms, and - perhaps another time. (For some examples of important-to-me relationships I'm not going to discuss further here, see my post on talking about poetry.)

So: there's my mother, and my entire maternal side of the family. I think with my mother I will leave it at: it was only in late November that I got around to explicitly telling her how important it is to me that close and long-standing friends get to meet her, get to see us interacting, because it is the best way I know to explain an enormous amount about who and why I am, and - she is important to me, and I want people to know that and recognise it and understand it. (I said this, and she went suddenly bright-eyed and abandoned her violin practice to give me a very tight hug.) I spent tens of hours every year picking redcurrants for her, and tens of hours peeling and stewing and preserving kilo upon kilo of apples, and most times I go home I make up a huge batch of shortcrust pastry, some of which gets frozen. This is important, this is right, because it is what she did for Mama when she went home, and - this is what we give each other, all the way back.

( Grandparents; WWII. )

The cousins, various. My ridiculous baby brother, with his easy grin and his strength and the guitar and bicycles he's built piece by piece, and how very, very proud of him I am.

And - the reason this came up in discussion with

sebastienne is that I was remarking that the way I feel about this ridiculous polymer I've found myself in is, increasingly, that it is clan.

( Dear polymer: please feel free to identify yourselves in comments if you want to! )

I think that's more-or-less a summary; if you've got more questions about any of them, do please feel free to ask away! Though I am going to be a bit more circumspect about answering questions about other people than about myself, obviously. But - yes, yes, this is how one builds a life.

1. Made it home in one piece, via some actually good interactions with people. I think particularly fondly of the woman who fussed at me a bit when I was attempting to get on with crossing a road, then suddenly realised that it was actually a kind of unpleasant non-light-controlled junction. Whereupon I grinned cheerfully, informed her that nobody was going to run me over, and so we crossed... and she grinned back and said, yes, okay, that was useful. Hurrah for turning the tables on that expectation. (Also there was a lovely Yorkshire lady being baffled and miserable at how to escape from King's Cross Underground to the mainline station, so I helped, and she was lovely too.)

2. When I got back in, there was trifle, and I got to eat it.

( Read more... )

+ my mother is home from a week hiking - I'd been really missing her - and she very nearly the first thing she did after getting in the door was go rummaging through her backpack to show me the rocks she'd brought back. And damn does she have good taste - in addition to a bunch of really pretty stuff, there were three that wouldn't be out of place in the reference specimens collection for second-years in my old department. (One garnet-bearing amphibolite - seriously, the whole bloody matrix was dark amphibole needles; one specimen of a unit boundary between calcareous deposits + mudstone, all heavily metamorphosed; and one staggeringly beautiful hand specimen-scale example of garnet pressure shadows - the garnet's fairly well developed, about two inches diameter, hosted in Glimmerschiefer [sorry, I've forgotten the English, it's one up from shale], with astonishing green chlorite in the pressure shadow to either side. I cannot even. Garnet pressure shadows happen because they're Really Bloody Hard and very difficult to deform, so you get little protected areas either side where the squooshier minerals have wrapped around 'em.)

+ my baby brother ran his half-marathon and finished in - I think I remember correctly - 1h52. Between them, they've raised very nearly £13.5k for the East Anglian Air Ambulance (and at least £250 of that has come in since they finished!). One of the team came in at 1h21, 19th (out of over 500 people entered)! This resulted in me giving him a foot massage at the dinner table, after dessert - he started out Deeply Sceptical, but ended up asking me to explain how I'd done it so that he could carry on with it himself...! (I get a lot out of physical contact, within certain parameters - hurrah autism, all else aside - and being able to make people feel better is a Really Big Deal to me, in this as in cooking.)

+ Papa - my maternal grandfather - phoned up specifically to ask if I knew about the big geological news this week, and to offer me the newspaper clipping on the topic. I jumped at the chance, and also at his offer to read the article to me - because he thought of me, and he phoned me, and he loves me for all that our last phone conversation degenerated into a monologue about The Awful Queers (no, I'm not out to him), and - I hadn't actually read any of the details yet, and the fact that I'd had the paper open in tabs since it went around the facebook geologists yesterday is really neither here nor there compared to the fact that he loves me. We've seventy years and a lot of life experiences and a good deal of politics between us, and yet-- and yet.

( This got long. This is good. )

My baby brother (all nineteen years and six foot something of him) dragged me out of bed this morning in order to make and feed me pancakes, in the kitchen with the back door open and the garden beautiful, and lectured me sternly about the fact that he was only doing this in order to use up the batter, and I wasn't to take away the message that he liked me. (This is how we express intense affection toward one another. My mother finds it quite distressing, bless her.)

( Read more... )

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

procrastinatory rabbit hole of the day: Ernest Wright, Sheffield

ten good things

things that are terrible that begin with P: progesterone, politics, PIP.

MY BABY BROTHER.

{your bones have been my bedframe & your flesh has been my pillow}

Getting easier again

{nur die Liebe hat sich gelohnt}

A little about the people in my important relationships

ten good things//what can't we face if we're together

ten good things//i'm sick of not taking chances any more

ten good things//never have i had a mohawk to show you how i feel

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July 2025

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