» Essential Items

salt
Small packets of salt. Useful for causing severe pain with open wounds, making magickal circles or general magick cleansing, throwing over your shoulder for luck, making water dense enough to float in, making water habitable to marine fish, melting ice and as an effective facial scrub.

But I don't like chips!
(Wed 2nd Nov 2005, 13:00, More)

» Terrible Parenting

Not even comparable with some of the other stuff on here
My Mom is an absolute legend. She has issues, leading to some odd parenting decisions, but on the whole I had a fantastic childhood.

She was the oldest of 9 in rural Ireland, born in the 40s. She was immediately sent to be brought up by her grandparents, and never saw the rest of her family. Excepting her Mom, who would ride the few miles on her bike every Boxing Day to visit her. My Mom never really minded, as she had a happy childhood with her grandparents, aunts and uncles. Then, when she was 15, her Dad turned up at the house and told her that he'd found her a job in England. So off she went, and that was where things went wrong. She got pregnant at 19 by an absolute beast and had 6 children in 10 years, before doing a midnight bunk with the lot of them, against the popular opinion of the day that she should put up with the beatings that would put her in hospital.

Fast forward another 10 years and she's with a lovely man and had me :) I was able to enjoy a normal childhood, but it did leave her a little controlling, possessive and with a spine of steel.

My mother's highlights?

Giving my sister a black eye for saying she was a bad mother.

Screaming at me, demanding an explanation as to why I came back with wet socks but dry trainers. I had no explanation that she would have been able to understand - It'd been snowing and those with a rudimentary grasp of capillary action should be able to see why.

Made me beg for her love on my 13th birthday because she found out that my sister, who I hadn't seen for 3 years, had visited me at school and I hadn't told her. My mom and sister don't speak and I was banned from seeing her, so I was scared to tell my Mom that she had been there and I hadn't told her to go away.

Was insanely jealous of any relationship I had with another girl/woman - friends, sister-in-law, etc. She would demand to know why I could talk to them and not to her. I only have one female friend now, the rest are all male.

Told me at around 13 to have sons and not daughters as "they love you more", leaving me with a vague sense that I was doing something wrong to her.

Made me go on holiday every year at the time I had exam results due, no celebrating with friends for me!

Banning me from telling anyone in the family that I had moved out at the age of 20 in my last year of uni, due to the shame of it. You didn't leave Mom's house before the age of 30 unless you were thrown out.

Banned me from having a deaf boyfriend at 16, in case we got married and had deaf kids - he didn't have the hereditary kind.

Refused to let me go on the pill as a teenager to help with my crippling period pains - apparently it made "bad blood" go back into your system.

There's more craziness, but frankly it was a good childhood and there's nothing I can't get over as an adult. I still respect her more that anyone else, particularly for the manner in which she made good her escape from her violent husband and how she kept it together after that.
(Sun 19th Aug 2007, 19:22, More)

» Misunderstood

The tricky jargon filled world of public service
It's a whole different world and a different language when you work for the public. I hadn't long been at a *huge* local authority, just working as a temp, when I received a call for someone in my office from a... water sports officer? I nervously called out to my colleague if she wanted to speak to this odd person, to be greeted by peals of laughter.

Apparently, the title I was after was "Ward Support Officer"
(Mon 10th Oct 2005, 17:13, More)

» Weddings

My upcoming Nuptials ...
... are now frightening the shit out of me after reading this board. I get married in six weeks.

No family punch ups expected, even though my lot out-number his two to one.

But I'll have the warm fuzzy sensation of having known the chief bridemaid, best man, and one of witnesses biblically, when making my vows to my husband.

EDIT: not literally, whilst making my vows. Just cos it's not a church do doesn't mean those sorts of shennanigans are acceptable.
(Wed 20th Jul 2005, 12:43, More)

» The Dirty Secrets of Your Trade

Milk is practically alive...
Like Olembe, I worked for a large dairy. I wasn't a big fan of milk to begin with, I feel my stomach is telling me something ain't quite right when I drink it. I worked in the lab testing samples of every batch of cartons, bottles and polybottles that came off the line.

You'd do a rake of chemical tests on the ones about to be sent out. Any problems would be shown up by it having the wrong freeze point, fat content, etc. The offending batch could be removed.

But the biological tests? You'd stick a sample in a petri dish with some agar, and leave it in the fridge for three days. By now the milk had already gone out to supermarkets. After three days, a dodgy batch would have colonies of bacteria easily visible - no microscope. So those batches get recalled, having already been on sale. I saw this happen many times.

Particular lines were a problem, usually a glass bottle one. Apparently corner joints of pipes delivering the milk to the receptical get pretty mucky. Since we provided to most of the major supermarkets, I could identify which milk came from which line in the shop and avoid accordingly.

BTW - milk is cleaned by having a hydrogren-peroxide solution passed through it. It's called Oxonia and it's deadly stuff. Part of the chemical tests on the outgoing milk involved detecting it, and I only did so once. You get to shout "Oxonia on the line!" and all hell breaks loose until it's fixed. I makes me smile when I see adverts for this "twice-filtered milk", probably had it satured in deadly chemicals twice
(Sat 29th Sep 2007, 11:27, More)