GreyShuck @ GreyShuck @feddit.uk

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163

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219

Joined

2 yr. ago

It's my birthday - same date as a close friend too. We are having a relaxed tea and cakes on the lawn thing with other friends if the weather is up to it. Tea and cakes inside if not. I'll probably get out for a hike somewhere on the other day too.

The following weekend I am having an 'official birthday' and my SO has arranged a mystery outing to somewhere that she tells me isn't often open - hence the delay. I'm guessing some kind of specialist museum-y thing but I have no idea what exactly. Looking forward to it anyway.

A) - it wasn't private - it was a nature reserve and I was the warden and B) - I kinda intended this in an "...and I EVEN lived on an island..." way.

I do and have for most of my life. I lived on an island where my SO and I were the only permanent residents for 8 years.

I have lived in the suburbs of a couple of large towns/small cities for some years too - and in the centre of an all-but-city and although there is some convenience in those, I'd choose rural any day. The peace, proximity to nature and the ease of getting out for enjoyable walks beats convenience every time for me.

I have a couple of 0.5L food grade stainless ones that I have used pretty much daily for what must be close to 20 years now. It may even be a little over 20.

They are a little dented here and there, but absolutely fine still.

I have slept on one for around a year in the past. It was relatively cheap, but with a frame.

It was generally fine. A lot firmer that the mattresses that I have slept on most of the time otherwise, and I think that I do prefer a softer option overall, but it was still perfectly comfortable. I did find that I needed to remake/rearrange the bedding much more often than on a bed: fitted sheets didn't work with the futon, which was the main cause.

I would sleep on one again for a limited period without issue, but wouldn't be happy if I had to have one permanently from now on - or, at least, I would want to put in a good deal of research on the range of types available.

Right now? I'd hardly notice. I get paid tomorrow. This time tomorrow would be a bit better. Even better if it was this time tomorrow and the joint account too, that would be a lot better.

None of it would actually be life changing though. It would just make up for our recent house move and all the associated stuff really.

It will be passed to the wildlife trust so that they know what species they have on the site. This will allow them to manage the habitat in the most appropriate ways to benefit the bats - and other species that are present. It will also feed through to county and national records to monitor population trends and also potentially feed into any neighbouring planning applications - since bats are protected species in the UK.

What kind of explanation are you looking for?

As well as the required technology, it was political will during the cold war that drove the manned landing back then. That political will hasn't been there since: no-one is really interested in being second on the moon just for the sake of it.

And technological advances have, if anything, made manned missions less necessary if we want to investigate particular subjects: robots and remote scanning can do far more these days without the need for boots on the ground.

Most of my volunteering has been I wildlife conservation, but it has also included direct action with Greenpeace, FOE and others, running Stop The War stalls, organising coaches for protests in London, helping our at day care centres for the elderly, giving illustrated talks, undertaking bat surveys ( I have literally just finished one tonight) and dormouse monitoring, reenactment and storytelling for a local museum, car parking and running tea stalls at festivals, was a local secretary for a social organisation for about a decade and probably various other things that I can't recall just now. And i have been on a variety of committees for various organisations over the years of course.

A few of the experiences have been tedious, a few have been outright depressing due to the negativity and simple apathy of the public, but the overwhelming majority have extremely rewarding and positive experiences. I have been to some amazing places that I had no idea existed before, I have met plenty of knowledgeable, enthusiastic and caring people - some of whom became long-term friends - and I changed career and ended up working in conservation, leading volunteer teams for several years, as a result of my own volunteering.

Overall, i have found it to be beneficial physically, mentally and socially, with basically nothing negative to say about it other than the need to set limits and know when to disengage. It can take over entirely otherwise.

The Third Man (1949) if I had to pick just one. It is cinematic poetry from start to end.

Without more context (how well does your GF know the friend? How well do you know the friend? How long have you been living together? Have either of you lived with anyone else in the past? What else was said immediately after this exchange? What else has you GF said to you about living together? Whose idea was living together in the first place? Did one of you live in that home alone beforehand? What is your GF's sense of humour like otherwise? etc etc) it is going to be impossible to be sure about this, but living together is always going to involve compromises of some kind, so if this is relatively new for her, it is very likely that there is a grain of truth if she sounded like she has some reservations.

One thing that is definitely not going to help, though, whether it was a joke or not, is you getting all defensive about it.

She has told you it was a joke. I'd suggest telling her that even as a joke it has left you feeling hurt, and then ask her if there genuinely is anything that she sees as a problem and what she would like from you in order to make it better - and then commit to make those changes where that is realistic. And take the opportunity to so the same the other way around: what changes you would like from her - so that you are both communicating openly, and trying to grow and make the relationship better.

With this one, we will be assigned a position somewhere likely to be attractive to bats on the site (I think that there will be 14 of us tonight, so 14 points) and then sit there with a bat detector for 90mins or so from around sunset.

You can simply position detectors and recorders alone, without people, but they are expensive and it is best to have someone with them - you also get to see the bats as they pass and can do some of the ID there and then.

These days we record the output from the detector for later analysis of the ultrasound and a lot of that can be done automatically, using AI, but humans still need to confirm the exact species. Once you have your ear in, though, you can recognise a lot of the calls (stepped down to the range that humans can hear) 'live' as you hear them, but a lot of the myotis family of bats are very similar and need further ID, through sonograms and actual visual ID, to be certain.

Day off today and soon heading out to a contemporary art exhibition in a nearby town with my SO - and to take a look around the town too, since we haven't been there for ages.

Then I'm out again this evening for a bat survey at a new nature reserve, recently acquired by the local Wildlife Trust.

• Finnegans Wake - my 'big read' which I am doing over the year along with a group over on reddit: one of the only things that still has me dipping into reddit now. Fascinatingly incomprehensible.
• Tchaikovsky's Children of Time - some good thoughtful worldbuilding and a solid story.
• Robert Brightwell's Flashman's Waterloo - one of his series of Flashman prequels featuring the uncle of George MacDonald Fraser's protagonist. Very well researched and entertaining
• A collection of Neil Munro's Para Handy tales - gentle humour and a glimpse of a very different world - albeit rather stereotypical and patronising in some ways.

I'm interacting with it far more and in far more varied contexts than I had been on reddit for several years. Overall, there isn't as much useful or entertaining activity in total of course, but the signal to noise ratio is soooooo much higher.

Y2K.

Ep 1 & 2 were disappointingly mediocre, IMHO. Ep3 was significantly better and Ep4 was as well, so I hope that this indicates that everyone is back in the saddle now and the trend will continue.

I have experienced the blank looks and total misunderstanding since primary school and have developed a range of measures for dealing with it.

• There are a good many thoughts that I simply do not express in the first place, so have a reputation for being quiet.
• I automatically - these days - judge the level and style of communication to use when I do. Clearly everyone does this, but I have been noted as doing so more than most, which does lead to some issues around authenticity from time to time.
• I am a great believer in the 'tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, then tell 'em twice, then tell 'em what you told 'em' approach.
• I do not engage in unnecessary chit-chat with most people, and do not expect to form close connections with the great majority of people either.

Of course, I take great pleasure in meeting people with whom all those are unnecessary. It was a revelation when I joined Mensa and found whole rooms full of them.

'Frontpage' is your subscribed feed in Connect. That's what it is for me, anyway.