The Bluestocking Women’s Pub: Where Clever Women Sit and Think, While Gerbils Run the Bar.

[MyrtleLion]

Come in. Yes, you’re in the right place. No, you don’t need to explain yourself.

Coats will be drycleaned before you depart. Bags won't be stolen because Gubbins will play her triangle. And you really don't want to hear it.

The gerbils run the bar.
They are small, brisk, and unionised.
One is polishing a glass with unnecessary seriousness.
Another is keeping the tab and will remember what you ordered last time.
There is a triangle involved. No one knows why. It keeps Gubbins happy.

Sit. Think. Drink. Join in.

The gerbils have it from here.

Previous thread...
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5481554-the-bluestocking-womens-pub-definitely-full-of-ludicrous-halfwits-who-refuse-to-get-a-grip-with-unionised-gerbils

I hope Swash & @SionnachRuadh see this one:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1615813599450613

Ah you've all gone to bed and here I am floating like a midnight ghost above the Bluey watching the gerbils tucked up in their little beds (except Glenda and I really shouldn't comment on what she's doing).

Saturday night is movie night and chocolate night in our house, so we've been watching an unusually quiet and reflective (not sure if that's the right word) movie on Netflix called Train Dreams, which has remarkably little to do with actual trains. It was very gentle though and we both enjoyed it a lot - at least, DH stayed awake all through it, even though he's been out shovelling snow today as we had about five inches of the white stuff last night - more due on Monday and possibly Wednesday.

A friend of mine is currently on vacation in Madrid, where she went to get out of the Maine winter for a month. However, they have been surrounded by flooded regions and all their bookings in Andalusia have been cancelled, so in Madrid they've stayed apart from a few days in Toledo. I can think of worse places to be stranded. They wanted to come home this weekend but because of the snow their flight has now been rescheduled to next Thursday. Luckily they can stay in their hotel. She tells me they can't claim for the cancelled bookings on their travel insurance because flooding is an 'act of God', which seems mad to me. Isn't that precisely what insurance is for?

I'm still up. Have taken half a Diazepam and heading to bed now.

I was delayed by 24 hrs flying back from Belgrade last summer and Saga insurance sent me an electronic lounge pass and gave me £70 compensation, which was at least a help.

Lufthansa got me a room for the night. I was supposed to get a meal at the hotel but 'the restaurant's closed'...

I had to fork out £150 all over again for my transfer from Glasgow to Fife. (I could have tried to get a couple of buses home, but would have had to wait several hours, given my flight time, and didn't want to struggle with my case myself.). The lounge pass was a big help and the £70 at least offset part of the cost.

EU regs are supposed to mean that the airline has to supply you with meals and a room - even when it's caused by bad weather, I believe - but you don't get any other compensation from the airline if the delay has been caused by weather.

I think that the EU regs apply for any flight starting from or landing in the EU.

Ah. Also has to be an EU or UK company.

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/travel/flight-delay-compensation/

Oh, fabulous!
I'll have two of those - but not until lunchtime!

When I was at university in Hull, I used to go to a nightclub called Spiders that served Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters.

Also Willy Worms that had a liquorice worm in the glass.

Do the gerbils also know the recipe for Jeeves’s famous hangover cure?

WAW, I hope you got some sleep in the end. I slept like a log, apart from briefly rousing at 5.15, for almost 8 hours.

I still feel knackered. I think it's a case of the Februarys. The constant gloom is just accentuating the impact of the short days - 7 inches of rain in 6 weeks here, a third of our annual total.

Gerbils, I wish to console myself with the hot chocolate bowser. Followed, after a healthsome hike up Peak Woo, by a roast lunch, with a glass of dry sherry beforehand. And please don't skimp on the Yorkshires. Oh, it's roast pork today, is it? Well, it's perfectly possible to have Yorkshires with roast pork. You can manage that? That's very kind, thank you.

I love the Bluey. I walk through the door, and bang goes Lent.
And yet, in the real world, I'm still not drinking booze OR hot chocolate.

This is so cute that the 'A' key and the 'W' key on my laptop are in danger of being worn out as the only possible response is AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
I'm guessing that Teddy knitted the lovely huggy blanket she wrapped Little Foxy in, and her own jumper.

Swash, your Bear is still in our thoughts 💙

As I said, I used to put it down to laziness. She liked to draw pictures but she would only draw things that she could see and she would have a meltdown if you asked her to draw from her imagination. Even things like "Can you draw a picture of a cat?" You would have to tell her what colour the cat was; if it was standing or sitting; if it was licking its paw etc. Her Art teacher at high school spotted it straight away.

I had a lovely surprise yesterday - 'surprise' because I ordered it from the publisher on 23rd Oct, it was somewhere between the USA and Ireland since then.

Britinme's book of poetry arrived! And it's great.
Receiving a book of poems by somebody you know is a bit of a hostage to fortune - supposing they are not very good and you have to say things like
'I loved them! your use of imagery like whiskers on kittens and raindrops on roses was really - errrr- fresh and powerful...'😬

No such problem with Britinme's book! The poems are wonderful, all the ones I've read so far but are beautiful, and so varied - life love injustice childhood Yorkshire nature aging identity beauty exile...
Even architecture, you'll be glad to hear JanesLittleGirl! [St Mary's Cathedral, 'this house of the mother of God' starts with the architecture but moves beyond it]

It was a long wait for it to get across the Atlantic, but worth the wait.
Congrats Britinme

Fox "help, help, there was a funny looking man in a weird dressing gown with a big stick"
Teddy "come on little guy, let's go home. I've got soup"
Fox "ok"

😄
And all I thought was 'AAAWWWWWW did that lovely teddy knit that cosy little huggy blanky herself, aaaaawwwww'..

We've got quite a spectrum here at the Bluey, haven't we?😂

I've just discovered a page called 'ADHD Memes' on FB.

Once again I'm thinking, 'What, you mean not everyone thinks like this? Not everyone is fussy about which knife/fork/spoon they use*? Not everyone sits down just for a few minutes and is still there after their tea has gone cold?

My just for a few minutes expanded to reading a month's worth of memes. I don't have all of the traits, but it would appear that I have rather a lot. I've trained myself hard most of the way out of some of them, but they still come back and bite me on the bum.

*I'll use whatever is available, but I have my favourites which I will dig out from the depths of the drawer.

Edited for the inevitable typo.

I'm with you there @EdithStourton

It's interesting to know not everyone is like that, isn't it?

It's astounding, @ChristmasStars

It also explains why, at school, I struggled to remember atlas/ PE kit/ apron depending on the day of the week, why, at uni, my friend always had a spare pen and I didn't and why, even now, with a much thumbed diary I still sometimes get a phone call of the 'Where the hell are you?' variety.

I have a reputation for being usually very organised, but this is only because of said well-thumbed diary, and years and years of training myself not to be a complete dipshit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHDinos/
For @EdithStourton and @ChristmasStars.
We may not see either of you for a while now 😂.

I just saw I got a post removed on Thursday - I really hope I didn’t upset someone here? I can’t remember what it was I said.

Looking back, there are a few deletions from Thursday. I suspect they all pertained to the other thread.
Whether they were spotted by MNHQ or reported by lurkers is another question.

I’d strongly expect it to be lurkers. It’ll be the Misogynist Monitors dropping in. Should we alert the Security Gerbils or is that the capybaras’ job?

When Kitty is Prime Minister, nobody will be allowed to delete posts by Bluestockingers.

I do the interrupting thing. I try so hard not to and keep apologising for it. I fake eye contact when I remember.

I was diagnosed with OCD in my 30s. A cousin's son was diagnosed with Asperger's and ADHD and that then made so much sense of our family...

As I progressed in my school career, I met more and more pupils with ASD and I'd find myself recognising my teenage self in them. For whatever reason, the bairns with ASD seemed to get on okay with me.

Mind you, there was that time that the parents asked staff not to encourage their son's interest in Doctor Who...Last I heard, said laddie was doing a degree in Astronomy at Edinburgh Uni.

Then there was the time I bumped into another former pupil at ComicCon in Kirkcaldy...He's now in his 30s. We're FB friends now and I get pics of him in his Doctor Who cosplay.

Particularly now that I'm retired, I have to write all appointments etc down in a wee diary...Problem is that I keep misplacing it.

I was okay at keeping on top of things for other people - at work, for my parents, my husband - but don't seem so good at doing it for myself. Even now I can't decide whether I'm shamming or not, but reading about it all has helped me make sense of myself.

A couple of years ago, I was at the osteopath's and had gone off at a tangent about something. She: "I hope you don't mind my asking, but are you by any chance on the spectrum and do you have ADHD?"

Turns out that both her children have diagnoses. Then, with a grin: "Do you like science fiction?"

Right. I'll stop blethering now.

Ah. That makes sense. I haven't checked whether I've had deletions. I should check my 'fun' email account to see whether I've had any warning messages from HQ.

I don't see any, but I can't cope with my Outlook account: I seem to get thooooosands of notifications for social media stuff - which is why I don't use my main account for that.

@EdithStourton I love the Bluey. I walk through the door, and bang goes Lent.
And yet, in the real world, I'm still not drinking booze OR hot chocolate.

Avoid them if you like but don't forget, Edith, that Sundays don't count for Lenten abstinence anywhere. Except where it does, where people don't like Arithmetic

You can only get 40 days for Lent if you count 6 days in a week. I've never written it out before, or seen it, but it seems to make sense.

Apologies, MN removes my tidy formatting .

Ash Wednesday 18 February
Day(7) Day (6)
18 February 1 1
25 February 8 7
4 March 15 13
11 March 22 19
18 March 29 25
25 March 36 31
1 April 44 36
Holy Saturday April 4th 48 40
Easter Sunday- 5 April

Using the calendar on my iPhone/ipad has been a game changer for me, notifications come up on my watch. I can also see DHs now but he’s not figured out how to accept my invitation for him to see mine yet so we’re not quite fully synced yet.

Gradually catching up with the thread. And I think it sweet that you were talking about funerals on the day I found out my friend died. As a Muslim, the women were segregated in the "Ladies' Hall" at her funeral and not allowed at the graveside. It was Ramadan so there was no food afterwards either. Another funeral happened at the same time because the prayers are for a speedy deliverance to heaven and not necessarily specific to any one person. They did have tributes but only from men.

A bizarre experience for me as I then just drove home.

Do you mean deletions from the Bluey thread??? I don't recall ever seeing that happen.
I'm carefully avoiding the thread that '1pw of the brass neck' has apparently taken over now.😒