Welcome to my first real blog :3 I'm (evidently) new to this whole Talking About Yourself And Your Life on the internet thing, so forgive any skittishness i may have.
But as my page suggests this is indeed a space dedicated to whatever is currently going on with me, if anyone should care to read it. I initially made this blog to talk about my top surgery journey, and now, i vague post about work and upload silly animal videos.
Stick around if you'd like and see what turn my life will take next ( ´∀`)
This being an index post though, i will update below as time goes on with handy little links so The People may be able to better read my ramblings.
Toodle-oo for now!
Top surgery blog:
Top Surgery Overview
Chapter 1. - Psychiatric Review
Chapter 2. - Finding a private surgeon
Chapter 3. - 2nd Psychiatric Review
Chapter 4. - Thoughts and Feelings (Interlude)
Chapter 5. - 1st Consultation
Chapter 6. - Pre op Assessment
Chapter 7. - 2nd Consultation
Chapter 8. - The 2nd Interlude
Chapter 9. - Judgement Day
Chapter 9.5. - Continuation
Chapter 10. - After Surgery
Chapter 11. - The morning after and Discharge
Chapter 12. - Coming home w/ Thoughts and Feelings
Chapter 13. - Check ups and Happy Endings
Bonus - Ramblings about obvious and mundane things post op
Ecological Consultancy:
That's right, i somehow landed my dream job with no experience. everything i've written post my surgery blog is neatly filed away under the tag #A's bemusings
Otherwise the only long story to date is the Kent Affair which i'll list below:
what an interesting side of tumblr i've just been staring at. i couldn't help myself, i had to take a peak at the caged foot slave tag (you will notice that discussion in the tags of my Study of Footprints part 2, if you feel you're missing vital context here)
The tag is actually not much at all about foot fetish content, for all those who are curious. and its strangely more about forced feminisation, sissification and cross dressing, as a byproduct of being in the same sort of wheel house via the submission route. i see how caging leads to forced feminisation but everyones ignoring the feet part of that tag, in the tag, and i think thats very funny.
Some of those posts, man, they were actually iconic bangers but i can't bring myself to reblog fetish content, no matter how funny.
I'm talking stick image of man and woman loo sign with a key round the womans neck and a cage around the man's crotch, deep fried, saying REBLOG IF YOU'RE CAGED RN
absolute gold.
or better yet, pictures of pretty women with captions like "reblog if you'd let me feminise you to look like me" or "reblog if you love cross dressing".
I do actually like cross dressing. i have my limits but i love womens clothing, i was so fucking close to reblogging that one but i thought better not to jumpscare my poor reader(s)
oh this is truly heart breaking stuff, in the time it took me to write out my part 2, my original study of footprints got flagged as containing mature content ( ｡ﾟДﾟ｡)
I have no idea how they assess these things but i have to assume they got some robot to scan through it and it saw i was talking about feet, and footprints, and there were pictures of (animals) feet. (´TωT`) i've asked for a 2nd review with an explenation but i assure you i'm just excited about identifying animal footprints and gaits
On the left there is the mini beasts'* fore foot, while on the right we have its right hind foot
*excuse the incorrect useage of the term its just a fun one that i never get to use
Notice how all the pads are little triangles :3c they remind me of a cartoony slice of lemon. but anyway, like mice they have 4 toes on their fore feet, and 5 on their hind. also like mice that thumb like toe on their hind foot will be on the inside, and their outside toe will splay out a little from the rest. i left a little bit of my thumb in the 2nd picture for scale, they usually come to 0.75-1cm in length ( T∀T) so small!
Both prints are actually from the same paper again, so lets see if we can piece this one together again too. this one's not such a clear example like the mouse. looking just to the right and below the fore print i showed above looks like another fore print which should not be there were one dormouse walking normally. no doubt it was investigating, and i know for a fact that earwigs infest those tunnels. i would have a non standard, if not, hesitant walking pattern showing signs that perhaps i took a step or 2 back if i were in a tunnel with 20 ear wigs too, but maybe thats just me..
I think, the 2nd print right next to the one i showed aside, this guy is doing the same as the mouse from before; a standard rodenty trot, with this print being the left fore leg meeting at a similar latitude to the right hind leg. the horizontal distance between the 2 is a good indicator of its relative body size, which in scientific terms is: stupidly cute and teensy weensy.
I follow the surrey dormouse group on instagram (shout out to the s.d.g. on i.g.) and they pretty much only post pictures of the fat, lazy, bastards themselves just curled up alseep in someones hand, or wide eyed looking like some kind of bug, or alien, caught in a plastic bag. i've grown inordinately fond of them lately. i know surviving in such a harsh and changing world is a full time job, and harder than anything i could imagine, but hazel dormice seem to me like the most unemployed of all animals.
Actually, while i'm on the topic, i finally saw the non native edible dormice the other day when my car broke down in Tring (just about the only place where they exist in the uk). they're much larger than our native hazel variety, and grey. i will say, and maybe this is because i've never seen h.d. in action, but the edible kind certainly are spry.
They're also very fat and round and fluffy, in fact thats why they were eaten because they're fatter and rounder than most dormice species, but they were scrambling and bounding through those branches like greyhounds flying over terf. they were so youthful and full of energy; i feel like you'd just never get a show like that from our h.d., no, this bunch are professional stuntmen.
Bonus set:
Soooo the other day i was on a riperian mammal survey and we found signs of otters!!
My collegue who was in the water with me, J., he took pretty much all the pictures, so i don't have them to show (´TωT`) except for the biggest and best one!! which i took because i had wandered off downstream and found them.
Here are the beauties
What you're looking at is 2 very distinct hind leg prints. like the rodents from before, otters also have that fore and hind feet distinction where the fore feet will be a lot more round and the hind a lot more elongated. but the cool part is, since its that perfectly thick wet mud, the claws and webbed feet have shown up!! you can see a clear gradient in the depth of the footprint between the toes, those will be caused by the webbing.
I also completely missed it while i was there but i fancy i can see a fore foot print just to the left of the pair. cartoonishly round and perfect, to my knowledge otters fore feet are a bit silly with its pad proportions like that.
I didn't get a picture of it but we also found a lot of mink prints, which look quite like a cartoon paw print as well only they're tiny, maybe just a bit bigger than my thumb. in each print their claws were visible too.
That's quite important for our client to know about, mink presence that is, so i can only hope my collegue will include that in the report. thats the trouble with being basically an intern, i'm always chomping at the big for the coach to sub me in. i'm thorough and i'm bloody passionate, which is more than i can say for pretty much all of my collegues. i'm sure the critically endangered european mink and the very invasive american mink are indistiguishable by print, and i think it really would be essential to do more surveys so the client knows whether they need to put anti mink measures in place, or alter their planned method of works to prevent impacting the mink if its our endangered native one. but thats not my call to make, its not my job. *sigh* alas. hopefully when my contract's ending they promote me and keep me on; then i can really start sinking my teeth into the work.
Well anyway, thank you very much for taking the time to read, to presumably the few, if any, of you that made it this far.
I didn't forget you know, tell me you didn't think i would forget. I never go break a promise if its in my power to keep. and i shan't leave my dear reader(s) high and dry, just chomping at the bit for more of whatever i have to say.
Just what with all the nonsense that's happened this last week i've genuinely not had the time to go through all the papers, but now it's done, which means i get to talk about it.
Now i love footrpint work, can't get enough of the stuff. and what detective doesn't? i love figuring out who's been here and what they were doing. in fact, i found some truly interesting ones the other day, but i think i'll leave that as a bonus at the end.
Most mammals, in my experienced and professional opinion, are ridiculously easy to tell apart by prints, but when it comes to rodents its a different story. They all have roughly the same foot shape, paw pad placement, foot:body ratio, and same ecological niche and habits. some of the only distinctions between them are the shape of their paw pads, and the size of their prints (or the size of their stride length, indicating the size of the beast). I could tell a mouse from a rat from a squirrel but i could not tell our mice species apart (except for harvest mouse because they're so teeny weeny and would never be found in a tree so its pretty clear cut)
Because this is a blog for everyone of all levels of knowledge i'll first go through that very unique, but universal rodent foot shape:
In my experience, the layman does not know much about footprints. They expect a mammal print to be a cartoony black shape with a distinct, large, central pad and 4 massive toe pads, and for carnivores they would be right. (image below from google, claiming to be mouse prints)
But for rodents it's a whole other world. for starters, most rodents are plantigrade animals, meaning they walk on the flat, or the whole of the foot, like we do, so in a print their heels will also show up, and there should be equal distribution of the toe pads and the palm pads (unless they're doing something other than walking, like standing on their hind legs up for example, then you'd see more weight on their toes).
Most rodents, also, will have a rounded, more standard "animal" looking forefoot with 4 toes, while their hind feet will be elongated, and more human esc in shape, with 5 toes. often as well, with a distinct thumb looking toe seperate from the rest. sometimes this toe is on the inside of the paw, sometimes on the outside; it's species dependant. rodents also always have small claws but these will almost never show up in ink tunnel traps, the kind i'm analysing now; instead though claws (in all animals) will be highly visible in soft ground conditions like thick, gloopy, mud, and snow.
The most pronounced thing, however, about a rodent's foot is the pads themselves. unlike the large carnivorous foorprints that most people are familiar with, with the large, curved central pad and the 4 oval toe pads (shown above); rodent paw pads are usually always circular, and they don't have one central pad on the palm. instead the palm will be a cluster of, seemingly random, circular pads, around 4-6 (again, species dependent). Below are actual rodent prints, with mice on the left and rats on the right, though you will, of course, never get prints as clear as this in the field; and shape and size will differ by species.
Luckily for me, and all other ecologists and enthusiasts, dormice are ridiculously easy to tell apart from all the rest because they have silly triangle shaped pads; all of them, toes, palm, and heel. when you make up a dormouse tunnel, ink it, and look at the fools who tottered across your piece of paper, you'll be greated by lines of circles or lines of triangles; it's just that easy. Here's what i mean (left forefoot, right hind)
But, if you couldn't tell by now, i'm not in it for the easy ride i'm in it for the love of the game. and i found some very lovely examples today of mouse and dormouse fore and hind footprints today, which i'll finally now get into.
Set 1:
There's a bit of my thumb there for scale. But here we have some gorgeous mouse prints! very well defined, on all the papers this was by far the clearest, and darkest. i imagine this guy either walked across right at the start while the ink was very thick and fresh, or maybe they're just fat and they put more pressure down when they walk. who can say but lets soak this one in for a bit.
On the left here we have a forefoot while on the right we have a hind. In most of the samples this week the prints were identical to these, where the fore feet seemingly has one round central pad and 2 heel pads, which is strange because mice fore feet should have 3 round pads clustered to make the palm. Though, this hind foot printed very well, as we're able to see all 5 toes and most of the palm pads. its hard to tell without seeing them together for the front feet but that hind foot is the right one.
Luckily for us though, they came as a lovely little set! i think the fore foot must be the left one because the mousy- ratty rodents walk in what the nibs call a trot. this is where one side (lets say left) will be spread out in a stride while the other (right) will be close to the centre. when thats mapped out in prints it will place alternating feet (fore left with hind right, and fore right with hind left) close together. it's tricky stuff but fun to spot once you get it.
Set 2:
I suspect this is a different species of mouse
This one is much fainter than the last, but it was one of the few of this type i could actually see. most were the exact same size and shape as set 1, for fore feet that is, while this print was at least a good 0.5cm larger and the central pads are different. i'm honestly not sure what to conclude, and what to tell you, my dear reader(s), so i'll just lay it all out and you can decide for yourself.
It seems to me like the central pads here are a lot more spread out, and also with the size difference it would help to make those pads more distinct. i can't find anything on the differences between wood mice and yellow necked mice prints, because who on earth aside from me cares, but i have to imagine that both have a cluster of 3 central pads, with 2 heel pads below. everyone says they're almost impossible to distinguish, or at least it's not possible to reliably distinguish them.
I think i have to conclude, that all the common prints displayed, those shown in set 1, all have "1 central pad" because the 3 pads are so small and so close they merge in the ink. and its not just about whether the ink is fresh and gloopy either because even the faintest prints caused by nearly dried out ink still show one central pad.
When it comes to mice in the UK, wood mice and yellow necked mice at least, they can just about be distinguished without checking their neck by their size, with y.n.m. being the largest mouse in the uk and, in my opinion, having a different looking face to wood mice. i really think, therefore, that this print is a yellow necked mouse because its significantly bigger. but then thats where the main problem lies.
On site, i've seen so many y.n.m. its just crawling with them, but i've not seen a single wood mouse. i can't believe that wood mice infest these tunnels primarily and y.n.m. rarely pass by. so i don't know what to think. looking just at the prints it feels so clear cut, but with what i've actually seen on site it seems unlikely that theres only one y.n.m. print, because i haven't seen any other prints like this one. maybe they really are indistinguishable and this is just the print of a goliath, who am i to say.
Sorry to be such a yapper, and a tease, but only 10 pictures are allowed per post so i'll drop the link to part 2 here where i actually talk about hazel dormice
"I like yaoi because it's free of heterosexual dating mechanics" ppl when the larger more masculine boy takes care of and protects the smaller feminine one.
Liking old books is so embarrassing, like: “this is my blorbo :3 he- he’s from an 1800’s mystery series :) my favorite ship you ask? I- I ship this silly Victorian detective with his best friend :D
I hope my friends know i love them. all of them. even the ones i don't really speak to, nor speak about.
I hope all my friends know that i listen to their music when i drive. all of them. every song i've heard in their car and remembered; every song hummed, and especially, every song that's confessed to be one of their favourites. i hope they know i listen to their very souls on the way to and from work, and often the tracks of their hearts play on loop in my head while i'm working too.
I hope all my friends know that i think about them. all of them. and i hope they know that i'd be nothing without them.
I flatter myself by thinking i'm articulate, but i've never been able to say i love you. not to someone's face at least, and not in such plainly put words.
I hope all the ways i actually say it count for something. that all my gestures, my gifts, my compliments, my acts of service, that they all count for something.
I hope my friends know i love them. and i hope they feel loved.
Well anyway, time to nerd out about something else now.
I feel like for a (largely) ecology centered blog i don't show even a fraction of what i say i'm looking at. It's entirely because i'm such a forgetful pilled Never Take Pictures - cel, but i don't want my dear reader(s) to feel like they're being deprived.
I went to great lengths today to get some photos. Here are the only 2 S. worms i found :3c
Ok so I say "great lengths" taking pictures of these guys was easy. When the weather conditions aren't quite right like today's the few stragglers you will find will be very dosile and drowsy. I had to acost that very pale 2nd one so I could figure out if it was a girl or just young.
Unlike last time it didn't shit on me but it did pee on me instead, which, to my complete surprise, had a smell that was reminiscent of a penguin's enclosure at a zoo. There was an odd stale fishiness about it, for something that presumably only eats bugs.
AND!! AND!! GET A LOAD OF THIS!!
So what you're now looking at, probably with confusion, is, yes, mud, and cow hoof prints. BUT (i'm going somewhere with this) BUT!! This is very exciting >:3
The area itself is that dreaded field from The Kent Affair, that astute readers may recall, where all those blasted bulls are kept. well a small rivery, streamy, thing tries its best to run through that field but in large parts it becomes a much less glamorous bog, which then gets all churned and mulched by those beastly bovines - displayed above.
AND - these muddy scrapes are the perfect environment for amphibians!! more specifically for frogs and toads, or as we call them in the industry, Anurans. iirc its the very rare and endangered natterjack toad that is especially fond of these shallow marshy waters. in fact, i'm almost certain that a large part of the reason these toads are so endangered is because we just don't have the roaming hoofed beasts anymore that keep churning up the good stuff for them.
I haven't seen any in this field, and they're nocturnal i think, so i won't, and lord only knows if they're in the south of kent anyway. but it's exciting that these environments do exist! or it excites me at least.
And i wasn't just talking out of my hat, those marshy parts are teaming with frogs. i keep seeing them all the damn time and i tried so hard today to get a picture for my adoring fan(s) but i didn't see any :(
But i did put my foot (and leg) right in it. i didn't slip, mind you, so don't go thinking i'm clumsy. there was a patch that was waaaay deeper than i thought.
Some where in Kent, (in England, of course), there's a hill called Holmes Hill, and on that hill is a cottage, called Watson's Cottage. I know this because I happened to drive that way coming home, as there was severe queues on the M25 for this time of day.
It gives me (frankly an absurd) amount of joy, and peace, knowing that no matter what, these two will somehow always be together. It almost makes one believe in something grand, and Romantic, and silly, like soulmates.
Rare photos from trans history: Olympic runner and Zdeněk Koubek styles Cinda Glenn’s hair, 1936. Koubek was one of the first trans men to gain international fame after he transitioned in 1935.
ID: A photo of a newspaper snippet. A headline says “Here’s How I Used to Do It!” This is followed by a photo of a Zdeněk Koubek and Cinda Glenn. Both are smiling broadly as Cinda leans her head back to let Zdeněk style her hair. The photo is captioned: “An expert at women’s coiffures although not a hairdresser, Zdenek Koubek proves himself as he combs the locks of Cinda Glenn, New York night club beauty. Koubek knows all about coiffures from experience, since they were of concern to him when he was the foremost girl athlete of Czechoslovakia, prior to a sex-change.”
Cool, so you want natural fiber costumes with no/nuanced corset slander, people wearing colors, historical hairstyles, people wearing hats or headcoverings and long sleeves outside during the day, no potatoes or pumpkins in pre-columbian Europe, actors with textured skin and wrinkles, minimal makeup, consulting HEMA groups and weapons scholars for all the weapons and fight scenes, a good soundtrack that includes traditional instruments?
Oh, you mean you want 100% white people. Even in crowd scenes in port cities. There's a different word for that.
