The Bluestocking: All You Need to Know About Risk Assessments, Jazz Hands, Battenberg and Sourdough (But Were Afraid to Ask) - and gerbils. Lots and lots of gerbils.

[MyrtleLion]

Welcome to The Bluestocking, the perfectly overblown, gloriously chaotic all-women’s pub where you can have a bit of a lie down if you need it.

Expect serious debates on musicals, cake and knitting, and whimsical musings on women’s rights and why the world’s on fire (again), all under the calm supervision of our support staff: gerbils, capybaras, and the occasional quokka on secondment.

The alcohol won’t get you drunk, the pastries won’t make you fat, but the conversation will digress, and that’s the point.

Remember to namechange before posting if you’re sometimes someone else.

1977 was a strange time. We thought Smokey and the Bandit was a documentary.

Ooh!

I still have two booknooks to finish.

Sadly I have to keep my feet down to do them and this isn't good for me at the moment.

I has a interview with a recruiter on Tuesday afternoon via Teams.

That is all.

It was a strange time. I was a first year undergraduate. Cork used to employ/exploit postgrads to tutor groups of us and mark essays, and one of mine (who afaik never did anything in medieval history ever again) was a young woman, quite pleasant, but besotted with her boyfriend/husband to the extent that outside the tutorial room she was never seen physically separated from him. Hand in hand, hand in back pocket of jeans (the scandal!), pausing to snuggle.

I'm not actually sure whether they were married - it was a fairly high stakes commitment then, no divorce possible.

Time moved on and a decade or so later a friend I was then working with in Dublin, who had been a contemporary of tutor, on seeing her name in connection with some feminist issue of the mid 80s, remarked on how acrimonious her breakup with the bloke had been, and how hardline and unbudging a feminist she had become.

We both wondered whether the suggestion her first name gave of a very very pious family background might have had some influence. Who names their baby after a child famous for forgiving the man who tried to rape her but fatally injured her instead?

Anyhow, forgot all about her, and then suddenly a couple of days back you mentioned her, suggesting that maybe you sometimes find her irksome, and looking on the interwebs I find she's as far from Cork as she can be while in Ireland and in a city.

Two degrees of separation!

and you would not believe the number of associated memories that lot triggered.

Good luck!
Did you want the cheerleading gerbils?

Or will they be too much of a distraction?

I think a lot comes down to where you know people from, and what your personal experience of them is.

Strange but true, in all the time I was connected to activist circles, I almost never got in trouble for my heretical thoughts. When I got in trouble, it was for failing to suck up to the right people, or failing to throw friends under the bus.

Eventually you get too old for all this Mean Girls crap, and you shake the dust from your feet.

Actual photo.

I want one of those new-fangled transparent screens! 😍

oh yes. The 'fuck this' moment. For me it was connected to workplace bullying rather than political purity, but walking away from deeply manipulative individuals is so liberating.

Where have you put the camera?????

Wishing you the best of good fortune in your job search, Myrtle. We're going through the stress of it for the second time this year, this time with our middle grandson (23). The first time was when our eldest grandson (then 25) was given a week's notice early in the New Year after only 8 months in his then job. He had more than two months of constant job applications before being fortunate enough to land a better job with a big and reputable firm.

His younger brother is having a harder time of it as his specialist software engineering field has been shedding, rather than creating jobs. Six months after being escorted from his firm's premises with 30 minutes notice the Friday before the Spring Bank Holiday 😡he's still searching. He had a final interview last week, but still hasn't heard anything, and has another next week.🙏It's so dispiriting for him. 😟

You'll never know.

That's awful. I hope things improve for him. Redundancy is a huge shock to the system - DH went through it just the once in his career & it was horrible for a few months until he got a new job. Uncertainty is so unsettling, & one phone call can chage everything. I still remember where we were when the job offer came through on his mobile: fingers crossed your GS gets such a call soon.

Thanks, Android. I do feel for him, especially after a recruiter told him he was really sorry but the job market was much worse than it had been just a few months earlier when GS1 lost his job. As for the youngsters who graduated this summer, heaven knows when many of them will find work in their subject area.

Best of luck Myrtle, I can't imagine any employer not wanting a smartly dressed lionness with x-ray vision and her own travelling cheerleader group.
Every office needs one

And I feel for Not's grandson - career plans that seemed to be AOK a few years ago are now not secure at all. I'm glad DGS1 is settled now, and I hope DGS2 gets good news soon.

I've had four redundancies in my career and it doesn't get easier.

I'm sure it doesn't. The shock and the dent to self-confidence can't be anything but hard to cope with.

Morning all.

A friend gave me a tip the other day that those gel filled 'hot water bottles' that you warm in the microwave are useful for furry friends in this weather (I have minimal heating at night), so my pals are still happily curled up asleep over one that I tucked under a fleece on one side of my bed rather that pestering me for breakfast.

Girlcat just sneaks under my duvet and uses me as a source of heating.

Your cats are so lucky, Deano and Fuzzy - unlike this one😁

Poor little love should be let in at once, and then let out the door that leads to warmth, and sunshine, and playful squeaky edible snacks.

Waddya mean, same weather outside EVERY door? Just why?

This is DH's main function from November to March.

I've had cats who think if it's raining at the front door, it won't be raining at the back door.

Actually, especially since it's you, Dean, there's an old sci fi story about (IIRC) a bloke who's being told he's insane when he insists his whole life is some kind of alien experiment. Then you see two aliens discussing him & how they made his environment so convincing they'd even put things like the Pyramids & the Taj Mahal in it - but then gave the game away because one day when it was raining on one side of his house, it wasn't raining on the other side.

It's decades since I read it. It might be by Robert Heinlein. Whoever it was, I bet he had a cat.

There is a Heinlein book, The Door Into Summer, where the cat shares the delusion common to many cats that people are just holding out on them wrt the weather thing. I remember enjoying it with reservations - there's a treacherous wife and/or business partner, funny business with time travel, and a Sweepstake ticket, and eventual marriage to the adult narrator's 12-year-old love interest. He does manage to hold out until she's 21, but there's often that ick factor with Heinlein.

Oh, and when he gets together with the love interest he has brought the cat along too. Must re-read if I can find it, it's probably on a shelf somewhere.