The Bluestocking Arms Women's Pub, where women make friends with Beetles, Androids, Cakes, Dragons, Hedgehogs and other women, where wit and wisdom flourish

[inkymoose]

Here at the Bluestocking there's a place for all women. A break from Reality, and many laughs and stories to share. Have your fill of Tunnocks bars and tea cakes, sing feminist anthems, drink as much beer or gin or hot chocolate as you desire. It won't make you fatter or drunken but oh, it's fun. Sit in the garden with our Lion resident or the Quokkas and Capybara. Express your opinions loudly in Pedantry Corner. Ask for whatever you fancy to be served by our obliging Gerbil staff. Come in, all women, welcome!

Sorry forgot to say welcome to BabyOrca.

a bit freaked by the speed at which we’ve acquired gerbil-orca hybrids.

Nah, that's just an ordinary ugly microwave with a bunch of flowers!

I also have a smaller built in oven that does microwaving, but I have not used it for that.

Mind you, the larger built in oven has never been used at all since it was installed 2 years ago.

Cooking? Pah!!

Just don't let them discover the Temple of the Tooth in Sri Lanka and its various celebrations.

The Kandy Esala Perahera, during which a facsimile of the Buddha's tooth is paraded around the town, involves acrobatic dancing, music, flaming torches and dozens of elephants, some bedecked in fairy lights.

10/10, five stars. Would recommend.

Our microwave is decorated with egg boxes and a can of WD40 that DH left there. And also a very cuboid little cardboard box in which was delivered the new mobile watchman for our oil tank.

Sadly a mobile watchman isn't nearly as exciting as it sounds. It's a ice-hockey-puck type of thing which will (if you coax it and tune it and climb up and down a ladder propped against your oil tank about 1000x with a dipstick and a camera) tell your mobile phone how much oil you have left. I didn't enjoy the ladder very much: do I want to be ditched into brambles, nettles and old bricks? I do not.

Mine informed me, as if I didn't know from all the peering into the bloody tank, that we are drastically short of oil for the short bursts of heating that keep the draughty spaces of Stourton Court moderately habitable on chilly April evenings. So I phoned around for a quote for kero, and placed an order. I await the tanker.

And wistfully imagine what a mobile watchman could look like, if he wasn't a hockey puck. Something like Aragorn in LOTR, maybe.

Blimey, first day back at work after the Easter holidays and I've missed all sorts! Welcome @BabyOrca, I look forward to confusing AI with two black and white animals in the same image!

In deference to the delicate sensibilities of the assembled throng, I will not traumatise you with details of the student I was dealing with today. Let's jus't mut'ter green'grocer's apo'strophe and s'ay no more.

Has anyone got photos of the tooth dance to share? Please?

My microwave has the required airspace on all sides and nothing stored on top of it.

<preens>

😮
<faints>
It must be unique.

I'm not sure when in the performance this was as they are missing the teeth

Those gerbil skirts look much too tight. No wonder they have such pained expressions.

@MyrtleLion
What a marvellous portrait of me, thank you!

I originally generated this self-portrait, but I thought it maybe looked a little...mermaidy if you catch my drift

I think it was to help them fully express the pain and anguish at losing their teeth!

Thanks Boily! Maybe they'd just put the teeth on the floor for a moment, to symbolise, er, something or other.

But that is pretty much exactly what the gerbils did, except with Colin instead of elephants. I hope they don't get done for (1)plagiatism. I wondered where they got the idea for the torches. Naughty little cultural appropriators.

(1) Someone I once knew of got into trouble when his MA thesis was found to contain non-original material, and his friends realised when he complained to them that he had never heard of plagiarism and didn't understand why it was an issue anyway.

Dentistry.

Gosh, @BabyOrca, how did you manage to wrap yourself around the bar stool like that?

I thought the teeth had been carefully placed to make a ceremonial arch for us to glide through on the way back to The Bluestocking. The inspiration may have come from something like this.

As long as none of the gerbils can read this I probably ought to confess that I wasn’t sure if the Chief Gerbil Architect was present to supervise, so I left by a devious route, avoiding the arch.

My poor microwave lives in the utility room, and has a laundry basket holding all the dog food and dog treats on it. Occasionally I tidy out the basket and clean the top of the microwave, but not often. I’m probably going to be raided by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Microwaves.

I am feeling a tiny bit of achievement. Over the weekend, while my friend was staying, I was waking up, and actually getting up at an almost reasonable time. Since the long covid, I’ve been exhausted, and have found myself sleeping until nearly midday, if I didn’t have an alarm set, and something I needed to get up for - but this weekend I’ve been doing better. I think it was because I didn’t want to sloth in bed while we had a guest - so I thought this morning might be a return to normal service, but I woke up and was out of bed by 10.30. Not early by any standards, but a small improvement.

I wish it to be known that I was not consulted about the costumes. My tutus are comfortable when worn correctly.

(Unintelligible muttering about cast who do their own thing when a perfectly competent wardrobe mistress has spent a long time crafting appropriate, flattering, costumes.)

The sacred status of teeth is best understood by a reading of Francis Young's masterly study of 'Godlings', shadowy supernatural beings, such as the tooth fairy, who should be appeased with respect and seasonal offerings.

The tooth dance, which the Bluestocking gerbils were privileged to perform this year, is a small but vital element in the ritual year.

assets.cambridge.org/97810093/30367/frontmatter/9781009330367_frontmatter.pdf

I wonder if this is a uniquely gerbillian interpretation of the fashion for schoolgirls to hoik their skirts shorter? But in this case the gerbils have gone for tighter.

@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius do you take Vitamin B for your fatigue? The ordinary supermarket multi-Bs, but taken last thing at night (leave them beside the bed), preferably with full fat milk but definitely not with tea, coffee, or alcohol. Thiamine is the important one, but you need to take them all together in order to process them properly.

Thanks for all the microwave dressing inspiration 😊

@MyrtleLion I can distance it from the wall, and not cover up vents. But do you know if there is a weight limit for what can be put on top of it once those things have been taken into account?

@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius is your laundry basket of dog food very heavy, would you say?

I longed to have a tutu, when I was a child. I wanted ballet lessons, but never got them - I got singing lessons instead - which is probably just as well as I have no grace or poise, and was a chubby child, but had a good voice.

If I got a tutu, I’d look like Mavis the fat fairy from Willow The Wisp. 😂😂😂🩰🩰🩰

I hated ballet as a child.
Much preferred horses and dogs.
And chickens.
And cats.
And... you get the picture.