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!

I had about half a dozen ballet lessons as a child, but was clearly not a natural so i went horse riding instead. Much better!

Also, Woley, Willo the Wisp was my favourite character.

We had to do ballet at school; it was compulsory.

I was far from graceful.
At that age I was into climbing trees, building dens and running fast.

I wasn’t keen.

Long story shorter: when my kitchen was refitted most of my cooking was done by microwave so I went for two combination ovens, so for example I could microwave crispy baked potatoes and steam vegetables at the same time. They didn’t have turntables, but separate salespeople on different days assured me this wouldn’t matter, the machines bounced the microwaves all round.

Total lies. I now have two expensive machines which microwave food very unevenly, even when stop and rotate it every 30 seconds, and - because they are integrated - are difficult as well as expensive to replace.

Your posts are making me think fondly of the days when I had a freestanding combi Panasonic.

Compulsory ballet was surely dreamt up by an evil sadist, Swashy!

I spent an awful lot of time doing country dancing at school. Like you, I was/am not graceful, but I can just about manage country dancing without standing on everyone else's toes.

@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius , snap! I’m sorry to read of your post Covid fatigue. It’s been two years for me. Life-changing, and not in a good way.

I was in bed before midnight last night and was woken by the alarm I’d set for 10:30am. I try to rearrange all appointments which start before midday.

Perhaps I ought to try Vitamins B, too.

I read somewhere that when many long Covid sufferers had blood tests soon after their infection they were shown to have low levels of ferritin. That’s true for me. What I don’t know is if their ferritin levels were low before they were infected.

My microwave has an aeroplane on it. A model one, that is.
You could have a small galleon, Swash, or maybe a brigantine. Or better still a barque so you could make excruciating puns about barques and bites...😏

Hello BabyOrca you are very welcome!

That picture of you and Magpie - I haven't seen so many black and white outfits since I left convent school😄

From several pages ago: Woley, I'm a salad person too so you can talk to me about salads to your heart's content! Even on the coldest day of the year, I have to have one, usually for lunch.

I've always loved raw veg, when I was little I used to follow my mother around the kitchen when she was cooking the dinner, pestering her for a raw carrot or even the stalk out of the middle of a cabbage leaf, anything raw and crunchy.

It seems weird to me that some children having to be coaxed to eat vegetables. Cooked vegetables were also so much more fun to play with than cooked meat - you can't make a complex canal network to carry melted butter or gravy through meat like you can through mashed vegetables

@Magpiecomplex: 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.

Not only tighter, but also worn much lower. I think they are proud of their rounded tums, which must be a good thing.

Those arches remind me of Andy Goldsworthy when he was just learning maybe or Test for Echoes.

An Orca-maid makes much more sense than a fish human hybrid. Both mammals and the tail flaps correctly.

I haven't always had a clear on all sides nothing on top microwave. I used to stick a baking cooling rack on the top (to aid air flow) and then stored stuff on top of the cooling rack.

Or you could buy a microwave shelf that sits over your microwave

Sooo...

My mother, rightly it turns out, realised I had the attention span of a gerbil, two left feet, totally tone deaf and with a complete inability to sit still or follow instructions so she wouldn't let me go to lots of things. Therefore:

No ballet
No Sunday school
No singing lessons
No musical instruments
No Brownies
And definitely no ice skating (as she knew I'd no doubt chop mine or someone else's fingers off!)

Actually no extracurricular anything!

As 4 year old me once refused to pretend to be a tree swishing in the breeze during some sadistic school PE lesson that involved listening along to something on the radio she made the right choice I think.

Although me and my sister used to go off into town (4 and 9) on Saturday mornings to the cinema for the children's cinema.

Arghhhh.
I should have been safely retired by now, but no - I’ve got to do various online mandatory trainings.
Fair Work Environment|Discrimination …
first few sections all good, but then one in which the scenario is about how to apologise if you get something wrong. And the scenario they’re using is …pronouns. Two colleagues coming out of a meeting, ‘can you believe she did it again, how hard is it to say ‘they’?’ And then ‘she’ approaches them about to do some sort of apology…

It requires you to check the ‘right’ checkboxes - if you don’t it does some scolding revision and throws you back to try again . Even the ‘wrong’ ones are couched in terms of it being a ‘mistake’, so I tried the ones which were least inaccurate. I seem to be on my last chance - no idea what it does if I don’t comply.
It’s not the scenario itself which I’m upset about (I’m a practiced pronoun avoider thanks to MN, and I’d probably try to use ‘preferred pronouns’ as a courtesy) - it’s the coercion being imposed by the training which is the problem. I think it is itself discriminatory and noninclusive.

my management are all in the US, they have different trainings.

I’ve exited it for now while I mull over what to do. I’m thinking maybe contact one of the US managers to voice concerns about the uk training without going into specifics and suggest that it needs revision to ensure it is non discriminatory.

I was briefly sent to ballet - I'm happy to share my experiences of it with anyone researching the contested concept of 'gender dysphoria', cos I know I had serious attacks of it every time I had to do ...that sort of thing😬
My parents must have taken pity on me because it didn't last long enough to do permanent psychological damage... I think😦

The 'tree swishing in the breeze' thing sounds dreadfully familiar, Boily - I'm having flashbacks!!

I loved country dancing.
What we lacked in skill we made up for in enthusiasm.

@Magpiecomplex

“Compulsory ballet was surely dreamt up by an evil sadist, Swashy”

Yes. Nuns.

Ooh, was it “Music and Movement”?

We had to do that in the hall.
It was very silly.

I do think the main thing putting my mum off sending me to ballet was there was going to be absolutely no way she'd get me in the outfit. I would have a screaming fit just being put in tights and those checked skirts that came with an attached vest. And pink was a totally no go colour for me!

She's also have had to drag me off the train yard or off a tree to go be girly and she was all for an easy life!

It will have been something like that. I used to dread it.

That sounds very tricky, Errol. Possibly some reference to UK law, WORIADS, all of that - no doubt you have thought of all this.

I was on a course at work a while ago and the trainer referred to 'a pregnant person' in mid-waffle. As I was considering how best to tackle this, another employee (ex-forces, arsey as) asked an entirely reasonable question which allowed her to say, 'So if a pregnant WOMAN should...'

She was kick-arse, honestly. She had zero patience with molly-coddling over-indulged nine-year-olds, and managed to get the head to let her do a whole wall display on 'trying again' and 'resolving issues yourself' and 'not giving up'. 'If you don't try again, you'll never know if you could have succeeded with just one more go!'

Country Dancing was preferable, yes, as it suited those of us more prone to galloping.

I went to a girls’ school so we had to be divided up into those willing to take the male parts and those not. There was a core group of us who preferred the male parts, so it always worked out fine.

Being forced to do country dancing in the hall in vest and knickers with the boys in vest and pants.

Aged 9! It was awful.

• *I could buy a galleon for the microwave @MarieDeGournay but there’s still the question of its weight.

Thanks Boiley. I don’t think the shelves would fit with my kitchen’s sense of its zeitgeist, but they are a decent and practical idea. Space and vents all catered for.

You could always cover one in barnacles

Oh, barnacles is a good shout Boiley!

Hmmm…Not quite what I’d envisaged but it’s a start.