20.12.25 update - shop tat and fluff

 The trouble with these things is when I've left it a while I don't know where to start. Where I left off last time? The past week? Today? I want to include everything, but the number of things is always increasing. 

A calm moment

I'm relying on photos to remind me what's been going on, but also a lot of my updates aren't any deeper than 'hey look at this thing I found'. Still, I want to put out as much as I can. 

It's time for the Parka

 so here are a few things I've spotted while out and about. Very silly. There will be more of this so be patient. 

Dan was amused (or confused?) By this

I don't know why but that just sounds dirty

Now looking for gonk hats to put on Christmas trees 

Don't let the Bells End

Another cool thing this month is the horror advent calendar from https://orbific.com/

A little piece of dark (but festive!) Piece of microfiction every day. Some of them are funny. Some of them are a gut punch. I'll update later on with some of my favourites. 

On the theme of laughing and crying, the best thing I've read recently is probably Life Hacks for a Little Alien by Alice Franklin.

For the first few chapters of this I swung so quickly between amusement and outrage, I don't totally identify with the protagonist (I'm not diagnosed on the spectrum in any way) but i was a Weird Kid and I remember exactly how frustrating it was to be a Weird Kid who didn't understand how the world works and just wanted it to make sense and be fair (I still don't understand how the world works, who does?).

So, what else has been going on?

How your email finds me

Ferrets continue to be their hilarious little furry selves. They're actually sleeping more at the moment with the days being shorter- they're meant to be Crepyscular, meaning active at dusk and dawn. They usually manage the dawn bit, although they're used to waiting a few hours for me in the summer so they can deal with me prodding them when it's still dark in winter. But with it getting dark at 4pm, all bets are off on when in the evening they'll actually want to play. 

This is their most common state

Combination of advent calendars means I'm getting a good balance of chocolate puns and existential dread.

Precious continues to live up to her name... but with the occasional fart

This is when the fart occurred.

I will round up with some more shop tat and decorations. Then next entry I'm going up be starting with pictures taken from 14th December which tells you either how distracted I've been or how many pictures i take. 

A balanced lunch at the marina (6th December)

A Santa who is not at all terrifying 

Some Christmas art

Night view

More Precious being precious

And now I shall leave you with this. I haven't managed to get much Christmas up yet, but I made this vague attempt at a Mari Lwyd which is hopefully confusing some neighbours. 

07.12.25 - overdue update

 So I keep meaning to do another of these, but there's always so many other things to do.  Stuff to do around the house, things to sort, things to clean, things to read or listen to,  things to eat (both in the sense of reminding myself to eat and also making sure stuff gets eaten before it goes bad). 

I'm not sure if this mutated jelly sweet counts as  'gone bad', i think it was born bad

The amount of things I can do online/ on my phone, and can therefore say 'oh I'll do a blog after I've got x, y,z out of the way' are endless. I finally listened to a podcast I've been meaning to listen to since LAST YEAR. 

(https://audioboom.com/posts/8617926-episode-one-the-indelicates - very good if you want to know about The Indelicates latest album of course, but also some interesting bits about conspiracy theories, art and politics, AI, music as a commodity and the state of the world in general)

I need to chop some meat for the ferrets today, and it's easiest to do when it's been frozen and has slightly defrosted. Which means i have to get it out of the freezer and catch it at the right time for chopping. Which means at the right time for chopping, i have to be free and have energy, and the kitchen has to be clear enough for chopping (we have a tiny kitchen) and so while i could get the meat out now, I'm waiting until I've got some other stuff out of the way first, but if i leave it too late, I'll be knackered when it's ready to chop. 

This is the sort of thought process I'm dealing with here. Mentally I am keeping a lot of plates spinning and I can't tell which of them I even want to keep up. 

So, speaking of the Ferrets, sad news out of the way now: we lost Queenie. 

Queenie: 2020 - 2025

She had some dental trouble, a lot of plaque and then also a loose tooth. We had the choice of a) painkillers and wait for the tooth to drop out, b) sedation and extraction or c)full anaesthetic for extraction and get the plaque sorted at the same time. Anaesthetic is tricky for small animals (for big ones too i guess) and I didn't want her to have one lot of sedation now and then another procedure later. We took the risk and it didn't work out. She got through the procedure ok, but then her heart stopped in recovery. 

She's a big miss, the first of her 'coven' (5 sisters) to go and she was a real sweetie. She liked to be picked up and cuddled in the morning, and she liked to groom my arms (although grooming sometimes turned into gnawing). She was also a favourite with the ferret rescue community and particularly the boarder they all stay with when we go on holiday. 

So, please enjoy some of her greatest hits. She really had a fantastic stink-eye

Apart from that, the main thing going on with us is trying to juggle helping our neighbour (looking after his dog, passing messages on to his social worker, arguing about Christmas lights being a fire risk) with our own life. I don't want to go into details here (and probably shouldn't) but it's A LOT to deal with. 

So, I think that's enough of an update for now. That's the rants over. I'll try and post again soon with happy Christmas things or whatever. There's lots of tat in the shops after all.