There were all the cocktails. I came home in the snow with Marcus. I feel very very sicky now. Oh dear.

Also, I did this before I went, and there were responses, and now I'm up late being all over Katie West's blog like a bad rash because she wants to have a debate. Sobering up first might have been goodly.

Oh god, my whole brain tastes of rotten gin. I am a terrible humourless feminazi who should just go away and have sex with some gin. But in my experiences that endeth BADWISE. There is ALWAYS more gin.

Does anyone think that as a cohort, this generation of young people has been particularly screwed over? For the purposes of definition, I'm defining 'young people' as 'people born between 1982 and 1992', not that that means that everyone else is old.

Because I think we have, and I've become ever more convinced of this the further I get through Malcolm Gladwell*'s book 'Outliers'. There are good times to be born and there are bad times to be born. There is such a thing as demographic luck. We haven't had it. We've had tuition fees, escalating debt, massively raised expectations, and graduating in the teeth of a recession. Even if we hadn't, there's no room at the top or middle of most professions for young people at the moment. The opportunities for us to get ahead are massively reduced compared to our mothers and fathers.

EG, my mum and dad are from, respectively, a lower-middle class London Jewish background, and from a bottom-rung working-class immigrant irish/catholic background. Neither of them would have been able to afford university if they were young today; as it was, they both got into grammar schools, then got fully funded places at university with A-level grades that  most of us today would consider poor (AEF and CDE). They both walked out of uni into jobs in law, and are now well-paid members of the upper middle class who own property. They worked hard, but not *exceptionally* hard, to get here. That sort of thing just does not happen anymore; where it does it's the exception, not the rule.

I think part of the problem is that our parents' generation expects it to be as easy for us as it was for them, when in many respects that generation, the baby boomers, was an anomaly. Generation X has done moderately well - especially those who were lucky enough to surf the dot com bubble - but has its share of drifters and people who haven't been able to find work. Generation Y is looking thoroughly screwed. And that's WITHOUT the political dissilusion, the fucking awful popular culture, the sense of displacement and isolation, the massive social inequality. There's not the same sense of hope that there was for people walking out of college 10-15 years ago.

I'm meant to write about this, today, in fact. What do you guys think? Not for quoting, I'm just interested to see how many people see it my way....

It's technically the 5th today, so I guess I missed this. Yesterday, being the 4th of January, was 4 years to the day since I took my first HRT pill and 3 years to the day since I went to sleep with a penis and woke up without one (very careless really, losing something that's attached to you like that). I guess the fact that I missed the significance of the day suggests I've mostly got it out of my system now, which is nice.

Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/220269.html - you can comment here or there.

 Mary Daly is worm food, wasted, dead, a ground plug, six feet under, and yes, still reanimated in women's studies classes around the globe, along with the reptiles who think like she does.

Sadly, many people are eulogizing her, and dismissing her brutal hatred of trans women and others. Feel free to use this space to write an appropriate goodbye (or Adios, motherfucker) to this hateful shitbag.

 A set of new dial gauges for my shop. I use these to measure accurately to 0.0005 inch for making precision parts.



I am so happy! They are wonderful! ¡Besitos, amor!

Have been feeling anxious and wobbly for the past few days. Woke at 12 to find I'd missed an email from a Guardian editor saying yes to a pitch by half an hour- allowing her time to change her mind. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

You cannot imagine the guilt I feel at this moment. It was a good piece, too, all about mental health and politics, and she's made up her mind now. Probably would have changed her mind anyway but I'll never know.

And I'm now all anxious and paralysed, I haven't blogged for days, I have a book review and an interview for One In Four this week and two major deadlines for the 19th. I can't write at all today. Can. Not. Do eet. My head is full of thick soupy panic and it's aching like a bastard.

*Slaps self*. Captain Monday, please turn this ship around. Important buts of my brain are still floating back in dreamland.

0. Take these predictions as being pulled out of thin air; I am not at liberty to provide direct sources, as that would imperil our business arrangements. Predictions mainly offered for the amusement of The Main Squeeze (via wildheart ) and of solarbird ; others may treat these as the chew-toy that they are.

1. USD will be worth $0.87 CDN on 1 June 2010, and $0.89 (a slight improvement) on 1 Dec 2010.

2. Benchmark price of Arabian light sweet crude oil in world (i.e. non CANUKUSA) trade will be $790 RMB yuan/barrel. World natural gas prices will also be denominated in renminbi. North American (WTI, AECO) and UK (Brent) prices will more or less float against the RMB benechmark, except that WTI (West Texas Intermediate crude oil) will consistently trade at a 10-15 percent premium, owing to its locational advantage. AECO equivalent price, adjusted for standard oil/gas conversion ratio, will be slightly depressed owing to oversupply of Marcellus gas in the Northeast.

3. Consumer price of plasticwares and filmstock (think Saran Wrap, etc.) will roughly double within North America, owing to decreasing economic returns of onshore (i.e. domestic NAFTAsphere) polymer plants.

4. Bank of Canada prime rate will be 6.25% on 1 June 2010, and 9.50% on 1 Dec 2010, declining thereafter. Expect first noteworthy upward movement on interest rates in April 2010, as Bank of Canada will be under considerable pressure to hold the line on rates during the Olympics.

5. Canadian GDP will decline by 2.1% in 2010, with the bulk of the decline occurring in the fourth quarter.

6. S. stared into his beer on the subject of the American economy; he asked me to describe him thusly. He's not sanguine about the stability of the NAFTAsphere in general, and argues that the upcoming American elections will substantially paralyse public decision-making between June and December of 2010. I'd wager he's right on that account.

7. Buy us a cuppa tea sometime and we might have more to say, but not here, and probably not via e-mail or telephone either; understanding the shape of things to come is a substantial advantage in business. Read the Economist, if you are not doing so already; I find it significantly disappointing that only two other people in this village subscribe to that worthy paper.

---------
Thanks to our friend S. the economist who offered us what he calls "Briefing Lite" in exchange for a glass of Bud Lite. A good trade. Also thanks to World OIl and Hart's E&P for providing some other hints along these lines. Yay for free subscriptions to both journals; World Oil in particular is a tough nut to comp, and we owe our subscription to having done certain noteworthy expat work over the years.

We're always open to a cup of good tea (myself in particular); you know where and how to find us.

-elane
who hopes that some of these oracular utterances are just plain wrong.

Back when Death of a Ghost (a title I disliked) was published, HarperCollins insisted on printing a film-style shout-line on the cover: “Birth of a Nightmare”. I disliked that even more, but shout-lines were obligatory for all their children’s books at the time. Not only that, they printed it in such a large font that many people took it to be part of the title, and the book is listed as Death of a Ghost: Birth of a Nightmare in quite a few places. This still rankles. (Part of me wishes I’d held out for The Runaway Swain.)

Anyway, turning awkwardly to Shakespeare, I note that he had only a few subtitles, and I get the impression that he wasn’t really trying too hard with them. What you Will and All is True aren’t exactly evocative. If he’d been writing today, though, he might have had them foisted on him by Burbage’s Marketing Dept. So, as a New Year divertissement, what subtitle/shout-lines might be appropriate for the Shakespeare canon?

Here are a few suggestions...

Romeo and Juliet; or, Thicker than Blood

As You Like It; or, If you Go Down to the Woods Today

King Lear; or, Tell Me if I Start to Wander

The Tempest; or, Daddy Knows Best

Timon of Athens; or, Life’s a Beach

Henry V; or, The Lancastrians Unplugged Tour 1415

Titus Andronicus; or, You're Looking a Bit Pasty

and, of course...

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; or, I Know What you Did Two Months Ago; or, Shit or Get off the Pot; or, Brains Aren’t Everything (Not by a Long Chalk)

Anyone else want to play? Feel free to improve on those above, or give titles for other plays.

I couldn't put it off any longer. Don't get me wrong, it's not a chore or anything. It's actually quite the opposite; I love spending a few hours there and regard it as quite a treat. However, I've had to cut back as a concession to the recession, so when I walked into the hairdresser's a few days ago and asked to make an appointment, the lady who normally does my hair greeted me almost with the surprise reserved for seeing someone you thought dead suddenly walk into the room.

I was quite, and pleasantly surprised to see her too. Last time she cut my hair her pregnancy was sufficiently advanced to be announced and while I'd not kept a precise note of how many months had elapsed, I did half expect her to be on maternity leave. Turns out that she's got a few weeks left at work, which was nice because she does my hair really well and she's a fun lady.

The appointment was very necessary. I'd managed to skip the last one by topping up my colour with some red dye from the supermarket, but by now the process whereby my hair overcomes the last visible signs of human cultivation and reverts to wilderness was almost complete. If I'd dyed it again myself then all I'd have likely achieved would be to look like cro-magnon woman with bright red hair. Something more radical, involving multiple shades of red and scissors was definitely required.

My hairdresser, in a self-admitted act of bad commercial self-interest, suggested that topping up every other time in the way I had was a good idea, only she'd recommend Schwarzkoff Live dye instead of the L'Oreal Feria which I'd used last time. As she's clearly a genius with hair, I'll most likely take that advice.

And so it came to pass that I spent a very pleasant afternoon sitting there having my hair painted, wrapped in foil like a Christmas turkey, left to soak in for an hour, washed, blow dried and cut. During this I consumed vast quantities of tea, gossiped about how awesome it was that Rage Against The Machine made the Christmas number one, played games on my iPhone, and various other things. I also took along the photo album from our civil partnership, because my hairdresser did our hair there and features in the first section of the album, where we spent a few hours behind the scenes getting ready in an almost entirely male-free (the photographer was the only real exception) environment of champagne-fuelled femininity (it was very awesome). The photographer did an amazing job putting the album together (it has a brushed aluminium cover and everything!), and it always seems to be quite the crowd pleaser.

My hair seems to have faired very well since I last had it done. I've gone to my current hairdresser most of the time I've been transitioned, and she's noticed that my hair is now distinctly thicker, stronger and in better condition than when she started cutting it, so yay for oestrogen.

Eventually, over 3 hours after I walked in with a dull red and brown haystack with grey streaks at the sides and a feral fringe attacking my ability to see anything, I left with neatly trimmed, creatively dyed hair that I no-longer felt the need to keep in a ponytail to save embarrassment.

It's a shame that now we're living in the future (where's my flying car, eh?) science hasn't managed to solve the curse of red hair dye though; it still fades to sort-of-ginger within a few microseconds (this may be an exaggeration, but not by much). I don't help this process by my semi aquatic nature. As those close to me know, I take at least one shower a day, regard a long soak in a warm bath as the epitome of "me time" and my water and gas bills are items of pure terror. I really did try to shower today without wetting my hair, but I like my shower slightly hotter than body temperature, and this has the unfortunate side effect of making me sweat. Once I feel the sweat on my scalp, it's all over - I have to rinse it, and if I rinse it I have to at least condition it.

So yeah, the water went down the plughole in a manner that would likely have been instantly recognisable to Norman Bates or Elizabeth Bathory, and the process of fading to the colour of copper wire (which is admittedly still quite a nice colour) has begun in earnest.

Still, it was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/220075.html - you can comment here or there.

 Just some eye candy from earlier this afternoon. Since then, a few more inches have fallen, and covered all the roads. I'll probably stop metal work until I can make a proper pair of snowshoes, since getting to the shop is a real pain in thigh high snow.

Enjoy.

Unfiltered, because, frankly, my two creepy stalkazoids can have fantasies about our cooking-pots all they want. ^_^

     The kitchen stove here has a wooden mantel-shelf above it, into which are screwed cup-hooks, from which in turn depend five pots, two skillets, and a big commercial-weight pipe-handled frypan. The pots and the skillets are stamped as being Revere Ware: they are made of heavy stainless steel, to which is plated copper across their bottoms and a short distance up their sides. Revere Ware goes way back as an American brand-label of kitchen-ware (although of course if such-branded pots are being sold nowadays, they probably were made in Shenyang or Wuhan or Hubei); the lineage of these pots stems all the way to the Revere Copper Company, founded in Massachusetts by none other than Paul Revere.

     The copper-clad pots are a relatively recent innovation, dating back a little more than eighty years. Judging by the manufacturing stamps on the bottoms of our pots, they were made between 1957 and 1979. The older pots came from Aunt Betty, who is no blood relation of mine at all, but whose memory remains warmly in my heart -- she was a good person, and her pots were among the treasured things that I inherited from her about ten years ago. Of her pots, I had three: the '3-quart', '2-quart' and '1-quart' sizes (all of these, presumably, being the tiny little American quarts of local volumetric measure); since then, I acquired the other pots and the skillets by haunting Goodwill stores in and around Sea Atoll, as a form of a polite and practical treasure hunt. None of the purchased items cost more than two dollars, a far cry from what an equivalent new pot would cost.

     Knowing what we know about organic and organohalogen chemistry, we've never trusted Teflon (DuPont's trademarked name for polytetrafluoroethylene, a very slippery compound used as a friction-reducing coating on cookware) in our kitchen. That stuff flakes off into food, and it bioaccumulates to unknown (and very likely unpleasant) effect within natural ecosystems. It possibly also bioaccumulates within the bodies of its hominid users; to that end, I would never feed children food prepared in a Teflon pot. I myself durst not take the chance: from the get-go I have understood that my metabolism is shaky and unpredictably fey as regards tolerance of atypical food chemistries. Revere Ware pots, to my knowledge, have not ever contained Teflon or similar linings: they simply present a shiny surface of stainless steel to the food or beverages borne within their interiors.

     Simply put, I adore those pots. Their copper bottoms make them easy to heat on the stove; their stainless-steel interiors makes them easy to clean, without the inevitable darkening one obtains from mild-steel pots.

     One of the year-end practices around here is the Scrubbing Of The Pots, above and beyond what one would normally do. Today I have been a veritable Betty Crocker of domesticity, pouring Brasso onto the bottoms of the pots, and then scrubbing and polishing off the dried, oxide-laden residue. Brassoing of pots is busywork, needing no brains of particular magnitude, but it has always amazed and amused me that just when one is despairing of ever seeing shiny metal again, the clouds of goop part away and one sees streaks of bright, shiny, vaguely waxy-covered copper.

     The end result is not perfect: the pots would need  lot more scrubbing, but they certainly look better than they did at the end of last year, and I may now conscionably stow away my Betty Crocker apron and revert to my typical tomboyish norms, mission accomplished.

     As an aside, I wonder whether anyone collects these pots, or whether there's ever been a listing of all the sizes made. My largest one is barely large enough to cook pasta for one person; I'd have been quite happy to find larger ones, such as could contain corn, or allow the making of boiled critter soup of some sort.

Doffing my apron, now, I remain
very truly yours,

--elane

postscript to herself: yes, I did find the can of Brasso, up on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard, next the floor-wax and the Dubbin. Saved a trip down the hill, I did!

standard disclaimer for the benefit of those living in that Other Country: I did not receive any compensation, directly or indirectly, for mentioning any brand-names or trademarks; in fact, I do not warrant that anything mentioned here would in fact be worth spending the coin to buy, unless you yourself were in the mood for it; the best alternative purchase is almost always no purchase. Read Adbusters, if you wish to learn more on that subject. All links point directly to Wikipedia.

Chill casting is metal casting done in a thermally conductive mold. It cools the metal fast for a finer grain structure, and better properties. It isn't usually done because of the expense of the mold making, but it's worth the effort for small, critical parts like the upgraded crosslide bearing nut I'm making for my lathe. Here's a few pics of me using some scrap steel to make the mold for the bronze bearing. It is 0.750 inch by one inch by one inch in rough dimension. More to come later, including the finished mold!

              

... I was singing to the ducks on the lake behind the back porch of the Fir-Garden, and admiring the way they kept appearing and disappearing in the swirls of fog that rose from the lake, it being considerably warmer than the ambient air-temperature that day.

... Kathie and I had just scraped kittie-barf off the dining-room carpet for the third time in two days. A certain Nameless Miscreant was yowling and glaring at us from through the bathroom door.

... The previous night, the fireworks on the Space Needle has malfunctioned. At least I think that was the year that happened......

... We still had the Faithful Grey Car, Mari Lloyd the immortal 1989 Tercel with seventy-leven zillion kilometres on her clock, and growing patches of body rust. Floor pan did not yet leak, though, and we were only on her second engine (she ended up with her fourth engine when she finally disintegrated on the Hope-Princeton Highway -- thankfully, going downhill at Coppermine Corner.)

... I was working as Exploration Manager for an oil company, mirabile dictu, for the staggering sum of $450/day all-in. Paycheques had not yet started to bounce; that came next year, after the War started up again in earnest. Oh, let's be fair, the Exploration Department consisted of only three people; it really was an Oklahoma Crude sort of outfit.

... I was in line for my majority, and had just had my picture taken for that purpose. Hair cut short, above the collar, of course. Silver ball ear-studs no larger than 6 mm (gold would have been okay, too, but nobody was stupid enough to wear gold into bad places). Two weekends a month, and one month per summer, hardly a demanding duty rota. Chimo!

... We had new kitchen cabinets at Akai Sopoye, made by hand out of planed-cedar boards and bright iron bolts; I had stained them with Diamond Crystal Varathane, with the kitchen door open to -25C air; the fumes were worse than the cold temperature in the house. At the same time, I was working on a new ship's-ladder to the upstairs bedloft, made of solid 2x6 red-cedar joists that my ex had given to me just to get them out from underfoot in her garage.

.... I turned all those stair-screws by hand, which probably did not help my joint issues anyway. 3"x14 screws, square-headed, Robertson No.3 sockets. I must have been mad to undertake that project, although the stairs and the cabinets looked nice afterwards.

.... I was still keeping my hair blackest-black, with liberal touch-ups of Miss Clairol. My roots had given up being grey and had settled in for white, so it was important to keep the hair-colour up-to-date. (Come to think of it, 2000 was probably the year I said "chuck it!" and stopped colouring my hair for a while).

.... I had just applied for my Washington State professional licensure, in keeping with NAFTA's enactment that one should be licenced on both sides of the border.

Gosh, where did the ten years go?

Looking forward to the next ten, come what may,

--elane

Thank you, all of you who entered the “So You Think You Know Rosie” quiz. Not very many of you, but then I sense that fewer and fewer people are reading/writing to Livejournal - they’ve all gone off to the succinctness and sensory overkill of Facebook and Twitter, which is a pity.

But, I’m sure that you are eager to hear the answers, so ( here we go! )

There - wasn’t that fun!

I've got a possible pitch for a features article on Third Culture Kids in London and the rest of the UK, and I'd really love to talk to people about the TCK mindset, either people who are Third Culture Kids themselves or who are partnered to one.

The article would be for the trends section of a national paper, and I'd really like to get it right - the idea would be to make the TCK experience sound as exciting and interesting as possible, whilst not hiding the problems that I know many TCKs face.

If you'd like to be involved - or if you know anyone who would - please let me know in comments or in a PM!

L.xx