Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • vis-à-vis going to America

    So on Monday night we headed down to our old stomping ground, Slough, where I had booked what turned out to be a quite stunningly strange hotel. The place looked ‘okay’ in the photos, and had okay reviews, but when we actually got there it turned out to be quite, quite odd. In what was clearly once a pair of large 1920s/30s houses, they have converted the rooms into hotel rooms. The one we got was vast and had the feeling of every expense having been spared, but wanting to look like no expense had been spared. The dado rail had been damaged and a matching but unpainted section, inserted. The wall had very faded framed prints and a giant mirror above the bed… Pelmets with thick brocade curtains hung above plastic-veneered-chipboard cabinets. The light on the table was powered by a 4 socket white extension lead sat on-top of the vast dresser. There was no link between the tiles in the bathroom and the laminate floor in the bedroom – just a gap… The bed had been screwed back together, badly, with random off-cut sections of wood, but was the same nasty plasticy veneer that if you stood well back looked a bit like lacquered wood. If you stood back and squinted you can imagine that it looks good in a photo. In person though, it’s just a bit strange. The room was absolutely vast, and we rapidly discovered that one of the light/ceiling fan combos had been involved in a self-cable-tangling incident which rendered both the light and the fan inoperable – and made half the room very dark. Aided by the fact there was only one bedside lamp. The other fan operated with roughly the smoothness of a tin of ball-bearings being gradually tilted from side-to-side.

    You might wonder why, at the tail end of September, we’d want fans. Because it was the temperature of the sun.

    And the coup de grâce was the can of Foster’s lager perched high up on a picture rail type affair. I’m not sure if it was open or closed, but it suggested a certain lack of attention to cleaning. When we mentioned it, and the faulty light, they were keen to point out how it was the largest room in the hotel. But that wasn’t really our concern…. Anyhow.

    So the visa interview was simples. There were a few questions… when were we planning to go, where were we planning to go, and when did we get married. It all went fine until the last one when an overwhelming mind-blanking level of panic hit me and it took quite a while to work out, from first principles as it were, when my beloved and I got married.

    Particularly because my the one thing my brain managed to pull from the fog of adrenaline was that it involved a 10, so I started counting backwards from now, got to 2010 and then went, no… that’s definitely not it. Then I went (in my head) “shit! bought the house in 2k6, met Kathryn in 2k7, that means we married at the end of 2k8!”…leading to something along the lines of “2008! October…2008… 25th! October! 2008!”

    Something like that.

    I think the woman looked at my panic stricken face and decided it really wasn’t worth asking anything else, and if she did I might just explode from sheer panic. Still.

    It’s a weird process, because at least for the spousal visa classification, you don’t have to queue outside, you just get queue-jumped through the masses, then you slink inside and into the pavlovian-response-training-chamber.

    You’re allocated a ticket number, then a giant display pings up numbers (along with a chime) telling you which window to go to. Which means that every time it chimes you have to look up and go ‘is-that-me’. Which at some points is fine, but at others the chimes are going off every few seconds, making you look like some kind of deranged prairie dog as you try and relax by reading, or at least, by not staring directly at the screen continuously, but then have to look up every time it pings. And, next to it is a screen which I think gives you helpful advice about how to prepare for your day, and also (I think) tells you just how awesome the US and the Embassy are, but was semi-functional on our day, with 2/3 of the instruction display screen off and the remaining 1/3 saying helpful things like:

    Prepare yo
    certain th
    in all cas

    which was at times very amusing and at times slightly unnerving. It’s a weird mix of boredom and anxiety that’s really less fun than it might be, but actually is not nearly as bad as I thought it might be. Given my health history I was expecting a tedious bunch of a billion questions, and got none.

    At any rate, everyone we dealt with was very nice. The first guy told us we wouldn’t need the Affidavit of Support from Kathryn’s mom, but the person who assessed our application said we did need it. That was fine, though, because we’d asked that it stayed in and so it was right there in the pack.

    She flicked through a few things, ticked a few boxes, then said “Congratulations” and explained that the visa and passport would be returned by their special couriers in around a week.

    So we are, in fact, moving to the US.

    British European Airways - International Services Tariff card, designed by W Yate - c1955

    We celebrated this in the traditional way, by going to an exhibition at the Science Museum about the USSR’s space program. It turned out to be an amazing exhibition, featuring some truly incredible things, including Soyuz and Vostok capsules – including the one used by Valentina Tereshkova. Looking at the mechanical complexity and the complete lack of computer technology… these things went to space. These things took people to space and back. Engineering models of Sputnik, and of the Lunokhod 1 lunar rover… It was just astonishing to see these things together and up close.

    My only disappointment was I saw a gorgeous poster from early in the program, just after the launch of Sputnik, and was really excited about getting it – because one of the ‘explainers’ there was telling me how they had lots of great swag (we’d had a long chat about the differences between the single person Vostok and the 3-person mission Vostok, and she’d explained what the writing on the side says “Man inside, please help him get out” or words to that effect, along with extraction instructions before getting into selling me stuff)… but when we got to the shop – it’s clearly related to the one they’ve designed the logo for the exhibition of-of. And all they had was the variant with the exhibition name splashed across it. Not the ‘In the name of peace’ version.

    IMG_20150929_175119

    Annnyhow. Then we thought we’d try and score tickets to Photograph 51, a play about Rosalind Franklin, on in London at the mo, with Nicole Kidman as the lead! We failed… instead we got tickets to another theatrical production and so we meandered around the environs of London killing time, before heading to see Tipping The Velvet (the musical) in the evening. The second act seemed to flow better, and the lead actor seemed to find her feet more. It just felt smoother and a bit less clunky. Anyhow, they seem to have had a lot of fun with it, and it’s totally not what I was expecting in that they play the script for comedy…

    …which isn’t how I read the book.

    It was also pretty cool seeing a play in a theatre with a very percentage of audience members being queer. No pandering to the white cis-male needs here.

    Anyhow, so that was our awesome day. We now just have to finish selling the house; our solicitors inform us that everything’s gone to the buyer’s solicitor now, so hopefully we should be in a position to exchange contracts soon. If everything works. At which point we’ll be able to book flights and shipping for our stuff.

    So, err, we’re moving.

    Yeah.

    Mmm.

    I need a word that means Scary-Cool.

  • shadesofmauve:

    It’s another beautiful day, and I’d really rather be working my yarden.

    Yesterday’s attempt at yarden work was a little overwhelming, just ‘cause I’ve let it go so long, but I realized that I can use my new border idea to sort of pace myself. Install border -> weed/deadhead/tend THAT area –> progress to next area. It cuts the giant yarden up into small satisfying pieces where I can see what I’ve accomplished.

    I really need to A) ‘do’ the chimbley first, whatever that means, and then B) borrow a chopsaw. A chopsaw is the best tool for both the studio trim and cutting the old fence boards (I used the circular saw yesterday, but chopsaw is safer and faster). Usually I’d borrow my dad’s awesome one but he’s doing a bunch of work on his own place right now and he needs it. There are three neighbors who may have saws they’re willing to lend; I just need to work it out with one of ’em.

    And I probably shouldn’t borrow anyone’s tools until I’m done with the chimbley. Non chimbley items are distractions that are far more fun than chimbleys.

    But it’s so much more fun to start new fun things than finish tedious uninteresting jobs… And following my advice you totally won’t end up 4 years down the line scrabbling to finish a billion small uninteresting jobs. No. Not at all.

  • Roses

    shadesofmauve:

    pyoorkate:

    shadesofmauve:

    Roses are weird. They’re associated with all sorts of emotional concepts and events; they’re as over bred as show-dogs; they often require a lot of work to get them looking good and they require almost no work to keep them alive. Having a really scraggly but surviving rose in your yard is dead easy. I pulled several out of the deep shade when I bought my house – they’re now in mom’s yard, where there’s a lot more sun, and doing much better.

    Getting antique roses is kind of like going back before working and show dog lines diverged; you get less ‘perfect’ flowers, but usually (not always) a lot more aroma and vigor. And occasionally a lot more size. Modern roses are not being bred for their ability to eat small houses. Old roses on the other hand…

    My mom took six cuttings from a Cecil Bruner at my aunt’s old place in Eugene, Oregon, around twenty years ago. She planted the healthiest in their yard, where it grew… and grew… and grew. It tended to attack people on the sidewalk. This bush was the size of their SUV. She took a cutting off that and put it in the front yard, where it was scraggly and slow growing for about five years, until it hit something – water or a decomposing squirrel or a bit or radioactive superrose juice out of a comic book – and exploded.

    My folks needed to move the original when they re-landscaped, so mom cut it back to four bare canes. Dad took a trailer load of rose to yard waste. They dug it up with a tractor.

    Three years later it’s as big as the SUV again, but no longer in a place where it attacks small children on the sidewalk. The smell is almost spicy, an entirely different rose smell than we’re used to, and an entirely beautiful one (I actually have a little vial of attar of rose, rose mixed with sandalwood, that is the closest I’ve smelled to a replica).

    In my own yard, I’ve only go two remaining roses. The elderly lady who owned the house decades ago LOVED them, but she planted when there was a lot more sun. Now all the trees are mature, they mostly die at my place, so the rose that smells like raspberries is now thriving at mom’s instead. The hold-out, which is growing like mad with only morning sun, climbing up through the rhododendron and trying to get into my house, is a lovely dark pinky red rose you can see all over the Pacific Northwest called Dr. Huey.

    No one ever plants Dr. Huey. They plant fancy schmancy roses that give you perfect florist worthy flowers, and when those fancy schmancy roses fail to thrive and new little happy shoots come up from the bottom, the frankenstein plant is revealed: the root stock is Dr. Huey.

    Dr. Huey will happily grow to 12 feet tall, and all the rose blogs recommend getting rid of him. He frequently loses all his leaves to black spot, but he doesn’t die. The Good Doctor perseveres. I’m pretty sure the Dr. can’t die.

    I love Dr. Huey.

    So if you look at roses, and you want something that will cut beautifully for your flower arrangements, look for new ones! If you want a plant that might eat small buildings, look for an antique. :P

    We have a couple of heritage roses here, because my mum adores heritage roses and gave us some. They are gorgeous when they’re in flower; the aroma they give is so much more rich than modern hybrids, but as with yours, one of ours is almost leaf free most of the year. It’s got terrible blackspot, but I don’t care because the smell is delicious :)

    I’m really hoping the people buying our house love the garden, because it’d be heartbreaking to hear that they’d ripped it all out and gravelled it, or some such awful fate.

    Also, because we’ve got a plant called Katherine Dykes back there, which we bought entirely because of the name, and which struggled in Slough but has flourished in Bristol :)

    OMG that plant name makes me so happy, lol! As you already know, I’m hoping Katherine Dykes flourishes in the US, too. :P

    The people who buy your house damn well better appreciate your garden. It looks AMAZING, from all the pics you’ve shared!

    It’s Embassy Day today…. So I’m really hoping that Katherine Dykes gets to the US…! Although as Kathryn put it, today we look like /wholesome/ dykes today… With button down shirts on ‘n all…

  • shadesofmauve:

    shadesofmauve:

    Oh, I DO have a picture of the chimbley! This is a few days ago. Yesterday I took off the bulk of mortar from the second ‘tier’.

    You can kinda see how irregular it is – there’s a gap between chimney and wallboard I stuffed sound insulation in and need to trim over, but there’s also a place near the ceiling where the whole thing jumps almost an inch to the left! That and the fact that I didn’t realize I should take the drip caps off means the places I have to hide with trim are really irregular, but I have a plan for that. You also can’t really see that there’s a place in there where they apparently realized too late that they hadn’t planned things right and they just mortared a red brick in there.

    The pipe with the yellow handle is the new gas line, running down into the cinderblock for the gas fireplace insert. The thing hanging off the handle is a headlight, which you should have if you own a house ‘cause they’re totally handy.

    Actually you should just have on anyway. That way you’re prepared to both see hands-free in the dark and act out any bizarre miner fantasies you may have.

    Oh, and the folded cardboard is there because Calliope loves to dig in insulation and if I don’t block it off she’ll pull all the fluff out of the hole over night.

    She’s very industrious.

    Seconded on the headlamps; they’re awesome, although I don’t know where mine have gone… and I doubt my dad’s proper miner’s lamp will hold a charge anymore, considering it’s never been charged in my lifetime….

  • etfleehome:

    Now that’s how you deal with hate

  • shadesofmauve:

    shadesofmauve:

    mercurysalt:

    bringing u premium content from the hardware store

    So there’s a section in Kingdom of Loathing with Smut Lumber Orcs and everything’s an off-color pun, and the most hilarious thing about it is that it isn’t half as smutty as walking down the aisle at an actual hardware store.

    “I’d like a two-inch black nipple, three kinds of lube, a ballcock, a brass cock, and a female-to-female butt end connector.

    Also some hand cleaner, because I’ve been playing with my caulk all day and I’m totally covered in this sticky white gunk.”

    O WAIT I TOTALLY FORGOT THE STUDFINDER

  • The Prince and the Dressmaker

    diversityinya:

    We’re very excited to share with you some sneak peek art from Jen Wang’s new graphic novel, The Prince and the Dressmaker, out with First Second Books in 2016!

    The Prince and the Dressmaker is about a young 19th Century prince named Sebastian who secretly loves to wear dresses. He hires an ambitious young seamstress named Frances to make dresses for him and as their collaboration grows, so do their feelings for one another. Sebastian and Frances must find a way to balance their inner desires with the strict expectations of the royal family – or risk exposing Sebastian’s secret to the world.

    “This book is really special to me because I basically wrote it for my teenage self, which is something I haven’t done before. I wanted a story that explored questions about gender and self-identity in a way that was also really colorful and fun and positive. The personal themes are there, but also lots of dresses and princesses. The idea was to create my ideal Disney movie, and writing this has genuinely been one of the most fun, liberating, experiences I’ve had making comics. My awkward confused fourteen year-old self would’ve really connected with this book and I hope it does the same for other young readers,” says Jen Wang.

    Jen Wang is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator living in Los Angeles. Her young adult graphic novels Koko Be Good and In Real Life (co-written by Cory Doctorow) are published by First Second Books. She recently wrote the mini-series Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake Card Wars for BOOM Comics, illustrated by Britt Wilson.  Her upcoming graphic novel The Prince and the Dressmaker will be published by First Second Books in 2016.

  • Big day approaches

    As we get closer and closer to the visa day I get more and more stressed. Like, wandering in circles trying to shake it out a bit, trying yoga, listening to relaxation stuff stressed. It’s quite weird for me, because for a long time I’d managed with my childhood GP’s fantastic advice:

    “Be less stressed”.

    Which actually worked for me. And many things I can shake off, but it turns out selling the house, moving to a new country, registering as a nurse and doing the related exams, attempting to found a business with my best beloved, and potentially starting a third renovation project… combined… that I’m not managing to just shake off. No matter how well things seem to be going.

    Of course, it all hangs on the visa interview, which approaches. I’ve got all the paperwork lined up in a bag, all ready for the interview.

    We also had someone around today to quote us for shipping. Distressingly, we’ve 55% of a twenty foot container, or 27% of a forty foot container. Which being as we’re being grumpy get off my land types, we don’t wish to share. Which seems terribly wasteful. Then you think “oh well, we’re taking the car, lets tuck that in there”… at which point you see us rapidly flinging furniture out.

    Also, apparently, you can’t (or shouldn’t) take foodstuffs or liquids of any sort in your shipping container, as that is considered an almost invariable trigger for taking your container to a warehouse and having it searched personally. Which is up to a bonus $2000 fee… So I won’t be taking the oil for the Minor, the Grease, etc, etc..

    So suddenly, we’re looking at not taking a bunch of stuff that we were going to take, but it’s looking very do-able, we’ve been offered somewhere to rent for 6 months, it’s all so far coming together; so much so that I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  • Roses

    shadesofmauve:

    Roses are weird. They’re associated with all sorts of emotional concepts and events; they’re as over bred as show-dogs; they often require a lot of work to get them looking good and they require almost no work to keep them alive. Having a really scraggly but surviving rose in your yard is dead easy. I pulled several out of the deep shade when I bought my house – they’re now in mom’s yard, where there’s a lot more sun, and doing much better.

    Getting antique roses is kind of like going back before working and show dog lines diverged; you get less ‘perfect’ flowers, but usually (not always) a lot more aroma and vigor. And occasionally a lot more size. Modern roses are not being bred for their ability to eat small houses. Old roses on the other hand…

    My mom took six cuttings from a Cecil Bruner at my aunt’s old place in Eugene, Oregon, around twenty years ago. She planted the healthiest in their yard, where it grew… and grew… and grew. It tended to attack people on the sidewalk. This bush was the size of their SUV. She took a cutting off that and put it in the front yard, where it was scraggly and slow growing for about five years, until it hit something – water or a decomposing squirrel or a bit or radioactive superrose juice out of a comic book – and exploded.

    My folks needed to move the original when they re-landscaped, so mom cut it back to four bare canes. Dad took a trailer load of rose to yard waste. They dug it up with a tractor.

    Three years later it’s as big as the SUV again, but no longer in a place where it attacks small children on the sidewalk. The smell is almost spicy, an entirely different rose smell than we’re used to, and an entirely beautiful one (I actually have a little vial of attar of rose, rose mixed with sandalwood, that is the closest I’ve smelled to a replica).

    In my own yard, I’ve only go two remaining roses. The elderly lady who owned the house decades ago LOVED them, but she planted when there was a lot more sun. Now all the trees are mature, they mostly die at my place, so the rose that smells like raspberries is now thriving at mom’s instead. The hold-out, which is growing like mad with only morning sun, climbing up through the rhododendron and trying to get into my house, is a lovely dark pinky red rose you can see all over the Pacific Northwest called Dr. Huey.

    No one ever plants Dr. Huey. They plant fancy schmancy roses that give you perfect florist worthy flowers, and when those fancy schmancy roses fail to thrive and new little happy shoots come up from the bottom, the frankenstein plant is revealed: the root stock is Dr. Huey.

    Dr. Huey will happily grow to 12 feet tall, and all the rose blogs recommend getting rid of him. He frequently loses all his leaves to black spot, but he doesn’t die. The Good Doctor perseveres. I’m pretty sure the Dr. can’t die.

    I love Dr. Huey.

    So if you look at roses, and you want something that will cut beautifully for your flower arrangements, look for new ones! If you want a plant that might eat small buildings, look for an antique. :P

    We have a couple of heritage roses here, because my mum adores heritage roses and gave us some. They are gorgeous when they’re in flower; the aroma they give is so much more rich than modern hybrids, but as with yours, one of ours is almost leaf free most of the year. It’s got terrible blackspot, but I don’t care because the smell is delicious :)

    I’m really hoping the people buying our house love the garden, because it’d be heartbreaking to hear that they’d ripped it all out and gravelled it, or some such awful fate.

    Also, because we’ve got a plant called Katherine Dykes back there, which we bought entirely because of the name, and which struggled in Slough but has flourished in Bristol :)

  • rivendellrose:

    just-shower-thoughts:

    From Saving Private Ryan, Interstellar, and now The Martian, America has spent a lot of money trying to retrieve Matt Damon.

    We really ought to put one of those toddler leashes on that guy. Save ourselves some trouble in the future.