Dewey. Decimal. Chickens.

636.5. Seems clear enough to me. Jugglinggoth on AO3. She/her pronouns. I was born in 1983, I'm gay, and I swear a lot, and I don't think any of those things put me on a par with porn blogs so just... use your common sense, yeah? 

[deweydecimalchickens]

Asked my GP (on someone else's behalf because I have research spoons and they don't) if they had anyone specialising in menopause and/or hormones.

Got back a response saying "we have lady drs"

Not even fucking remotely what I asked. I asked about their clinical specialism/research interest, not gender identity

In my experience, at least 50% of female health professionals are firmly in the "I didn't have it too bad so anyone who says she does is lying/needs to suck it up" camp and you're generally better off taking your chances with a man who at least knows what he doesn't know and is appropriately scared of it

[deweydecimalchickens]

A lot of the talk about trans people is about cisgender women feeling scared or uncomfortable. This really bothers me to say as a feminist, but there is a long history of (mostly white, mostly straight, always cisgender) women's supposed fragility being weaponised against minorities, and a long history of moral panics. Just because a woman feels uncomfortable or scared, or a man says she does, doesn't always mean she's right, or that anyone else has a responsibility to fix that.

When Carolyn Bryant got Emmett Till lynched, maybe she felt genuinely uncomfortable or scared.

When Michelle Smith kick-started the entire Satanic Panic, maybe she genuinely felt uncomfortable or scared.

When Amy Cooper called the police on a black birdwatcher, maybe she genuinely felt uncomfortable or scared.

When Phoebe Copas shot a taxi driver in the head because she saw a road sign to Juarez and thought she was being kidnapped, maybe she genuinely felt uncomfortable or scared.

And when Riley Gaines chose to focus on Lia Thomas tying for fifth place, rather than the cisgender male head coach who systematically abused her team (Lars Jorgensen), maybe she felt genuinely uncomfortable or scared.

Sometimes the answer is "put your big girl pants on instead of lashing out at innocent people". Do not do anything you can't take back because you're panicking. When I realised my life was being ruled and ruined by irrational terror I started taking buspirone; YMMV. But being scared is not an excuse to do absolutely anything no matter whose life it wrecks. And women cannot participate fully in public life if we have to be protected from fear and discomfort at all costs. We can do better than this.

The top 3 threats to a woman's safety remain:

Her male partner

Her male ex-partner

The male person who wants to be her partner

But compulsory heterosexuality is absolutely fine with that and we are shit at risk-assessment. We are taught "look over there, that stranger is black/trans!" instead.

[deweydecimalchickens]

I keep getting videos on Facebook of women doing a clean & jerk or snatch on weights I can't even deadlift and not to be extremely lesbian but uhhhh.

Why are her feet leaving the ground

How is she jumping with weights I can't even roll up my shins

When will she throw me over her shoulder like a cavewoman

All these questions and more.

[deweydecimalchickens]

Pinky has spent the whole weekend in the vet hospital after Wife found her lying on the floor hyperventilating early Saturday morning. Tentative diagnosis is congestive heart failure but we won't know the cause or prognosis until she sees the cardiologist tomorrow.

But I got a call today saying she was out of the oxygen box and breathing normally, but not eating. Did I want to come and visit her? YES YES I DO THANK YOU.

I got to spend the best part of an hour on the floor with her in a spare consulting room, fussing her and brushing her and feeding her her favourite food. She was anxious about all the strange noises but very happy to see me.

[deweydecimalchickens]

We get to bring her home and discuss long-term management.

She has mitral dysplasia, which is a deformed heart valve she's apparently been coping with since she was a foetus. She'll need medication for the rest of her life. They couldn't give a prognosis for this particular condition, but average survival for cats with heart failure is a year. The vet said she responded quicker to a lower medication dose than most, and that might be cause for optimism. She's at least 13, so if we're lucky she could have a pretty normal lifespan.

[r2x2]

The Amnesty International report that JK Rowling is trying to censor through legal threats.

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

[cbarc]

Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.

[deweydecimalchickens]

Pinky has spent the whole weekend in the vet hospital after Wife found her lying on the floor hyperventilating early Saturday morning. Tentative diagnosis is congestive heart failure but we won't know the cause or prognosis until she sees the cardiologist tomorrow.

But I got a call today saying she was out of the oxygen box and breathing normally, but not eating. Did I want to come and visit her? YES YES I DO THANK YOU.

I got to spend the best part of an hour on the floor with her in a spare consulting room, fussing her and brushing her and feeding her her favourite food. She was anxious about all the strange noises but very happy to see me.

[deweydecimalchickens]

Kids on the train:

"It was this weird game from the 1900s!"

"It was Lemmings or something"

And I took that personally.

[deweydecimalchickens]

I am delighted by the old-timey adjectives on specialist cat food.

Your cat is so fussy they will only eat pan-seared thigh of lost European royalty? You want "exigent".

Your cat projectile-vomits everything? You want "sensible".

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[deweydecimalchickens]

The aquarium in Whitby does this! They are tiny with little waving arms! I don't know why they live on discs. The lady who looked after them was very hardcore about the evils of overfishing.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[amazoogle]

the enemy drank water today. did you?

[ewoly5]

i drank water three days ago. im several steps ahead of the enemy. this is what it takes to win

[deweydecimalchickens]

I drank coffee.

[deweydecimalchickens]

First time I got a cat bite requiring prophylactic antibiotics: GP tried to send me to A&E (English ER) during the pandemic. I argued them down to a walk-in treatment centre.

Second time I got a cat bite requiring prophylactic antibiotics: I got an appointment with my GP. They cancelled it and tried to send me to A&E. Walk-in centres were no longer walk-in but 'urgent treatment centres' and I managed to get a referral.

Third time I got a cat bite requiring prophylactic antibiotics: no urgent treatment centre will take me. I have to go to A&E.

For fuck's sake. I am fully aware of the overcrowding in A&E and their preference that we take minor shit literally anywhere else. Our healthcare system absolutely cannot handle "I'm a first aider, the wound itself is fine, but it's also the kind of thing that always gets infected so can I have antibiotics before it starts oozing green please?"

I don't even want antibiotics. I wanted a beer tonight and they make my throat feel hairy and taking them around food correctly is a giant pain in the ass. I'm trying to be sensible here.

On the plus side my mother is finally willing to give the cats gabapentin next time.

[deweydecimalchickens]

One of the urgent care centres called me back and said they could do antibiotics!

I was spared the absolute mortification of turning up in A&E and telling the exhausted overworked people trying to save lives that I got a booboo.

Miracle of miracles,my GP has even agreed to give me a tetanus booster tomorrow.

[deweydecimalchickens]

First time I got a cat bite requiring prophylactic antibiotics: GP tried to send me to A&E (English ER) during the pandemic. I argued them down to a walk-in treatment centre.

Second time I got a cat bite requiring prophylactic antibiotics: I got an appointment with my GP. They cancelled it and tried to send me to A&E. Walk-in centres were no longer walk-in but 'urgent treatment centres' and I managed to get a referral.

Third time I got a cat bite requiring prophylactic antibiotics: no urgent treatment centre will take me. I have to go to A&E.

For fuck's sake. I am fully aware of the overcrowding in A&E and their preference that we take minor shit literally anywhere else. Our healthcare system absolutely cannot handle "I'm a first aider, the wound itself is fine, but it's also the kind of thing that always gets infected so can I have antibiotics before it starts oozing green please?"

I don't even want antibiotics. I wanted a beer tonight and they make my throat feel hairy and taking them around food correctly is a giant pain in the ass. I'm trying to be sensible here.

On the plus side my mother is finally willing to give the cats gabapentin next time.

[deweydecimalchickens]

Original plan for today: go for a nice swim at a local quarry where the water is beautifully clear and they have lifeguards and a snack bar.

This plan did not survive contact with my mum's ex-feral cat. Thanks Panther. You do actually need preventative healthcare. And now so do I.

New plan: try and get antibiotics without my idiot GP referring me to sit in Accident & Emergency for 8 hours.

Cat bites are like zombie bites for the whole "yep, that's fucked, there go my plans" factor.

[deweydecimalchickens]

A tale in three infuriating bloody stupid parts:

Teenager dies at Dovestone reservoir

Police say the man was found 'unresponsive' in the water on Friday evening.

Reports of fireworks before Dove Stone Reservoir fire, police say

A fire above Dove Stone Reservoir sent large plumes of smoke above Greater Manchester.

Firefighters could be 'days' at Dove Stone reservoir fire

The large fire engulfed land near Dove Stone Reservoir on Saturday and has been burning ever since.

There is already an extensive list of ways to keep open-water swimming merely Medium Stupid:

Be sober

Don't jump straight in

Don't jump in headfirst

Wear appropriate amounts of neoprene/yulex for the temperature (this will also help with buoyancy)

Take a tow float

Wear bright colours

Recce the body of water first for unexpected currents, debris, foliage, pollution, cyanobacteria, etc

Don't even think about it until you can do the following in a lifeguarded pool: swim several hundred metres without difficulty, put your face underwater while breathing out, tread water, float on your back, and recover from getting water in your eyes/up your nose

Go in a group, all of whom are following the above rules

To this we can apparently add:

Before you die like an idiot, tell your friends you don't want to be remembered by them SETTING FIRE TO THE ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRYSIDE

[deweydecimalchickens]

Actual song lyrics I heard playing in the bouldering gym today:

"I'm taking it slow, feeling my way" - that's the plan anyway

"I didn't look where I was going, and I fell" - um, no, thank you

"Shake it off, shake it off" TAYLOR I AM CLINGING UPSIDE-DOWN TO AN OVERHANG ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME

[deweydecimalchickens]

*Slaps roof of Waves & Wild Heyday Dungarees pattern*

This bad boy can fit so many pockets in it.

Making my second pair, actually more nervous this time as I'm using fabric I bought on purpose and didn't have lying around. Actually prepared for how much of sewing is cutting, folding, pinning and pressing, and how little is actual sewing, though.

[deweydecimalchickens]

Five hours of sewing later, these are my Grateful Dead dungarees.