Maturity Is For Weenies
As seen on a street in a small town near Cambridge:
I’d love to, but I don’t think I have the stamina!
Keeping Abreast of the Charity Shops
Back in the US I shop at Goodwill a lot, especially for kids’ clothes. They grow through them so fast and boutique prices are insane, but you can get the high-quality boutique stuff for dirt cheap at Goodwill. In addition to saving money, there’s a huge environmental boon to reusing clothes instead of always buying new. Plus if you have a hard-to-fit kid like I do with Peo, having lots of brands in one place makes it more likely that something will fit. And that variety often lends itself to really great finds of rare, weird clothing and other good stuff.
Protip: if you can find inexpensive used plates at Goodwill – especially holiday-themed ones – you can use those to give out holiday cookies to teachers, colleagues, friends, etc. They’re sturdier so you won’t risk collapses as can happen with cheap, disposable trays, they look nicer, and the recipient can either reuse the plate, give it back to you if they wish (make it clear to them that they don’t have to), or regift it forward. Major environmental win, nicer presentation, everyone’s happy.
Peo and I went on a quest to get some used dishes at the charity shops here in Cambridge in November so we could use them for cookies we were going to sell for a Christmas charity bake sale. There isn’t one big umbrella organization like Goodwill running the shops; instead, you have to go to a bunch of different itty-bitty shops for different charities like the Heart Foundation, Oxfam, Cancer Charities, RSPCA, and others.
Each of these shops has its own style in terms of what they carry, and the prices can vary significantly. But what they do have in common is the rare, weird stuff, and some of them have it more than others.
We didn’t find individual dishes as readily as we’re used to with Goodwill – the shops here tend instead to sell complete sets and we didn’t need that many – so we failed on that account. But boy howdy did we find some weird stuff!
We also had one great find: a giant tub of about 100 solid wooden blocks for Robin for Christmas for only £3.50 which now double as burglar-deterrent-caltrops all over the living room floor.
And in that same store was this gem:
It barfs sauce at you. I almost bought it just to put pea soup in it and call it a Python-Exorcist crossover. Nobody expects the Spanish Expectoration. Nobody.
You have to understand, this scene in The Meaning of Life horrifies my husband to the point of him not wanting to watch the film, despite liking the rest of the film. So I took this photo mostly so I could show it to him when we got home and say, “Do you see how much I love you because I totally didn’t buy this to vomit sauce at you?”
He was duly appreciative.
Anyway, you’d think that’d be the strangest thing we saw on our charity shop journey, but you’d be wrong. See, that’s just a bit of slightly disgusting Python silliness, which is pretty much what they’re known for and thus, by extension, what England is known for. That’s right, Brits…all Americans think you’re a nation lethal to parrots and that it’s easy to catch a train from Bolton to Notlob. Totes truth. Yes.
This is also why Peo and I almost lose it every time Robin’s music teacher here brings out the coconut shells to simulate a horse.*
But moving on to the Oxfam shop, Peo and I entered a world of weirdness that even our Python-filled brains were not ready to grasp.
First we found this, and would have bought it except that Robin would have eaten the pieces on account of her having no respect for invading aliens whatsoever.
I am horribly disappointed that they didn’t rename this version OPERATE!
But that’s not really so odd. I don’t think there’s a store in this country that doesn’t have at least some kind of Doctor Who paraphernalia in it. It’s pretty much a mandatory national industry at this point.
Where it got weird was with the naked bodies.
Yes, I said naked bodies.
Because if you’re going to have a mannequin in your home, why wouldn’t you decoupage it with comics and then ensure it had hooks for hands, navel, and nipples?
So. This is a Thing.
And if you’re going to have that Thing, I guess it should have these things. For…hats? Small paintings? Teacups? Probably teacups. This is probably how you’re supposed to hang your teacups in the UK, all dainty-like.
O.o
And if I said, “Hey, look over there, I see a Barbie mirror!” you’d assume I meant something like this:
And not this:
The zip ties on some of the legs really sell the horror, don’t you think?
Suddenly the Daleks’ strategy seems a lot less terrifying. They just want to exterminate you, not affix your still-smiling naked corpse to a vanity device.
o.O
* Waiting for the sharkreados on this one.
Trash Talking
Recently when I took the girls to a museum downtown, we passed a man in a trashcan playing music.
His sign says, “If you feel inclined to take a pic, please be kind and leave a tip.” Then there’s something in another language followed by 50p.
As we were going by, a lady dropped a coin on his blanket and then took a photo of him. He stuck his head out the other side to yell at her for having not given him money. She pointed to the coin and he kept scolding her anyway, saying nobody was allowed to take photos without paying first.
As she insisted that she had paid, someone else took his photo and he started yelling at them.
So while I had no interest in taking a photo of him until that point, I then did take his photo and am now sharing it here publicly without having paid him because frankly if your business is to engage with the public, you ought to learn how to do that without being a complete asshole. I’ve happily supported many indie musicians for years – even having done volunteer PR stuff for more than one – and will continue to do so, but none of them ever needed to go looking in the trash for their talent or for their customer service attitudes.
Fuck you, trash dude! We are too allowed to take free photos, and the way you yell at your actual paying audience is even more rubbish than your music.
#ohSNAP
PS If you want some awesome indie music from wonderful people, I strongly recommend The Biscuit Brothers, The Roving Gamblers, and Monty Harper. Those are all folks that treat customers well, produce great stuff, and do tons for their community, all without yelling at anybody.
The Dreams of a Little Girl
The rain made the windows of the bus foggy today. As the bus went downtown I said to Peo, “We’re passing the Klingon School of Danger right now.”
Peo said, “But with the fogged windows, I can’t read the sign!”
So I replied, “That’s okay, because it just means the sign says whatever you want it to say.”
She thought about that for a moment and then asked, “Can it say, ‘EVIL SHARKNADO LAB’?”
I said, “Yes. Yes it can.”
This made her very, very happy.
At dinner when we recounted this to Corran and he wanted there to be a “Good Sharknado Lab” to offset the evil, I pointed out that there could simply be a string of ever more evil labs.
Then Peo asked, “Do you have to put a goatee on the bottom of the building so you can tell which one is the real evil one?”
Nerd parenting. We haz that.
My Middle Name is “Qob”
Do you ever see a sign or other text in passing very quickly and then your brain tries to fill in what it thought it read, only to realize a moment later that there’s no way in hell that sign/text said that?
This happens to me all the time. I asked my G+ friends what this phenomenon is called and nobody knew, so we made up our own terms. We’re the Internet. We totally get to do that.
The consensus was that the formal or clinical term should be “misparsing”, since “malapropism”, “Mondegreen”, and “paronym” are all more about speaking or hearing versus visual input gone awry.
Further, it was pointed out that if mistyping is colloquially known as a “typo” then misreading should be a “reado”, which I wanted to misread as “sharkreado” in keeping with the overall and inexplicable sharknado theme to this blog (which really ought to be a monkeynado theme but that brings up visions of the monkeyloo having a tornado in it which I’m fairly certain would use up our entire security deposit on the rental house so let’s never speak of monkeynadoes again). Therefore the consensus was that “sharkreado” ought to be the colloquial version of “misparsing”.
And further still – because if it’s possible to push things too far, this blog remains blissfully unaware of such limitations – I realized that part of my particular problem with misparsing is that my brain fills in the nerdiest possible interpretation regardless of what actual nerdery exists in the original sign/text. Therefore the syndrome that causes misparsings/sharkreadoes is FNAAH, which stands for Fucking Nerdy As All Hell.
All of this comes together thusly…if you happened to be on a bus going quickly down the street and out of the corner of your eye you saw this sign on a building:
And if you happened to have a critical case of ongoing FNAAH, you would misparse or sharkreado that sign as:
Which the Bing Klingon Translator (OMG an actual use for Bing!) assures me should be written as “tlhIngan DuSaQ Qob” or:
And then thereafter whenever you were on a bus passing that building (which would be pretty often if you take busses into the central bus terminal of Cambridge), you would picture a bunch of fully-armoured Klingons in there learning how to pirouette with bat’leths, which would be not only fucking nerdy as all hell but also fucking awesome as all everything.
Christmas in Cambridge
Way behind on posts here but Google gave me some fun autoawesomes for Christmas:
One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other
The Tesco robot never watched Sesame Street.
The more you think about this, the more your brain will hurt.
The UK Actually Puts ‘Care’ in Healthcare
Shortly after we arrived in the UK and got set up with a doctor’s office, the doctor told me I probably qualified for free medicine because I’m diabetic and have thyroid disease. She had me fill in a form similar to this:
And then she stamped it and I mailed it in. A week or so later I got a card that means all of my prescriptions paid for by NHS. ALL OF THEM. Not just the two I actually take for diabetes and thyroid, but all of them.
Because the UK’s medical philosophy is based on prevention, and part of prevention is making sure people get their proper medicine up front before lack of it makes conditions worse.
Contrasted to this, before the Affordable Care Act in the US a significant number of my friends were experiencing declining health because they had no insurance and couldn’t afford basic medication. Since the Affordable Care Act, more of them have at least some coverage, but it’s still far from perfect. And even the good-quality, employer-based coverage we’ve had from various providers in the US over the years never paid for medications outright. In fact, most had high copays, deductibles, and excluded piles of medications. As in, we paid for insurance that then inserted itself between me and my doctor to say, “Nah, we won’t cover that particular medicine because we have a backroom deal with a competitor.”
Colour me impressed that the NHS takes much better care of its patients!
Then today when I was in the clinic for a routine blood pressure test, they were giving out something from Cambridgeshire County Council marked “Winter Health Packs”.
This is what was inside:
A lengthy booklet with health tips that includes a thermometer to make sure your rooms are warm enough, a pamphlet on where to go/call for various problems, a comment card/survey, a tip sheet on how to avoid falls in the winter, a card about eating healthy that includes a vegetable soup recipe, and a tea bag that says KEEP CALM AND HAVE A CUPPA.
It’s pretty much all about how to stay warm, safe, happy, well-fed, and healthy through the winter. And it has tea. Cheeky tea designed purely to make you happy.
Now that is health CARE, both from the national system and the local shire.
NHS has its problems like any system, but let me assure every Brit reading this that you have it really, really good. As a Canadian I know what it’s like to complain about your national health care but I promise you this is leaps and bounds better than the US system.
And now for something completely different: more beautiful photos from my walk home from the clinic. Because Cambridge rocks.
(Click to enlarge.)
Is it any wonder that my blood pressure is better than it’s been in a decade? It’s almost low!
More Reasons To Love Cambridge
This was what I saw on my walk from our house to downtown on October 30:
Click for the full size image. Then sigh with delight and possibly seethe with jealousy if you don’t live somewhere with this sort of natural spectacle on the edge of downtown.
Click to enlarge.
This is the view from my doctor’s lobby:
These buildings predate pretty much all of modern medicine.
Of course if you look down, it appears they have a pigeon horror feature:
Nets and spikes. Methinks this is not a good spot for Audubon Society meetings.
But I am not a pigeon, so I like the place.
I Have Excuses
I have been remiss in updating because Halloween and the Birmingham cake show were kicking my ass. But those are over with now, so I hope to soon post lots of stuff that’s been piling up. I also need to post my cake show results over at Eat the Evidence.
But generally speaking, I get a lot less done than I intend each day because I am homeschooling Peo and Robin likes to climb up beside me whenever I’m on the computer and grin into my peripheral vision until I acknowledge how cute she is.
Robin uses her CUTE GRIN. It is SUPER EFFECTIVE.
Or if that doesn’t get her enough attention, she just sticks her finger in my ear.
She’s shoving her baby wisdom directly into my brain. Lucky me. Because nothing helps me write my next romance novel like a Wet Willie.
So…yeah. Be patient. More monkeyloo goodness coming soon.
And someone pass the cotton swabs, please.