Ten things
Mar. 13th, 2005 04:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaTen things I've done that you probably haven't:
1. Discovered an extra five siblings.
I was given up for adoption but my birth parents later got married anyway and had another five of 'em, I found when I tracked them down a couple of years ago. My adoptive parents, meanwhile, divorced and both have new partners, so between them and my adoptive sister I have a total of six parents and six siblings. I still haven't met one brother and one sister.
2. Lived with someone for eight years who is neither partner nor family.
Tom is smelly, hairy, messy, loud, sailing-obsessed, a drunkard, a right geek and owns (and listens to) more Marillion than can possibly be right. He's probably my best friend. He's also practical, intelligent, funny, completely reliable, cheerful and a really good sailor but don't tell him I said that.
3. Got eight A-levels.
It's partly because of the way they marked Double Maths round my way, and I did an extra one in Electronics at my last job because it was a sixth form college and I could. But I still had a bit to myself in the results in the local paper because I was the only person that had done six. And that's not counting the Special Paper Physics, in which I got a top Grade 1.
I've since been through three universities and still haven't got a degree. Working on that, though, engineering design turns out to be what I should have done in the first place.
4. Been asked by transvestites how I achieved such realistic fake breasts.
I've got hair halfway down my back, legs so long I can't buy trousers and tits big enough that I have to get bras from a specialist shop. Accordingly, I get mistaken for a man about once a week. That I know of, anyway, sometimes it probably doesn't come up. I'm not young enough to get called 'sonny' much any more and 'mate' can be taken as genderless. Now and then I have to flash in pub toilets to convince the offended-looking woman that yes, I do know it's the ladies, thanks; people behind counters tell me I can't use Miss Thompson's credit card or railcard and, living in a touchy-feely considerate sort of place, I get thoughtfully and considerately asked if I'm pre- or post-op. I sometimes wonder which way they think I'm transitioning. Wearing a dress is about the surest way to bring on confusion, including being groped by the aforementioned transvestite trying to work out what they were made of.
One day women will be allowed to stride and be tall and have shoulders without offending against the gender rules, and it'll make my life easier. But probably, I admit, less amusing.
5. Made a lot of my own clothes.
Including two dresses, three skirts, ten pairs of trousers, one pair of shorts, four fleeces and about ten assorted other tops. Almost all of them are wearable too, with the exception of some early experiments in each category. And one pair of trousers, black velvety moleskin low-slung drainpipes with minor flares which I made just too close fitting to be able to get into. Applications from slim-hipped long-legged people who might fit the Enchanted Trews are welcome.
6. Played bass for the Admiral.
You know the Admiral car insurance adverts on the cheapy digital channels and all over the London tube? You see that waxy-faced bloke in stockings with the pasted-on parrot? He was the singer-songwriter in my first gigging band. The songs were rather cheesy and his singing nowhere near as good as he thought and he tended to turn up to gigs in brown leather trousers like chaps but it was kind of a laugh at the time and it gave me a lot of useful experience so I shouldn't complain, of course.
7. Fallen asleep at a Slayer gig.
I wasn't terribly well that day and a bit spaced on painkillers. Everything was turned up so high that you just couldn't determine what was going on at all, and you can't blame the Brixton Academy's sometimes dodgy sound because Fear Factory were on before them and sounded great. I'd really wanted to see Slayer but they turned out to be a bunch of chubby blokes standing still and playing nothing but noise without information so I went and sat against the side wall and went to sleep.
Hmm. Running short here. There are lots to do with being poly and bi that felt like very unique circumstances at the time, but there are plenty other poly/bi people around here and anyway, resorting to sex feels like cheating. Unfair on the people involved and unfair on the verifiability front.
I also suspect I'm not the only person around here who got sent to a child psychologist for being violent. The daft thing is that I'm not, never was, but if you're a tall child and someone starts a fight with you, and you fight back, the short one will run away and scream at the teacher and you get told off for hitting people smaller than you. I was also supposed to be upset because I came from a 'broken home' but I never understood that, either. Mum and Dad were both happier, I got to have two houses and two bedrooms and two Christmas dinners and stuff. I understand how it can be a problem but in this case it wasn't.
I've done some fairly spoony scientific stuff in the course of being a lab tech for a university, from laser scattering particle size analysis to atomic force microscopy to running cell lines and building carbon filters for blood, but most of these will be scuppered by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zotz or davefish amongst others.
Most of the music and stage related ones are also going to be nulled by other music types on here, unless I get more specific than is in the spirit of the thing.
Oh! I know.
8. Canoed from Wigan to London.
To raise money for charity, while I was at sixth form college. 250 miles down the canal system, took us about two weeks, we raised several thousand pounds. We all got sunburnt, crusty and dready, had multiply blistered hands, the food was awful for most of it because we didn't get the hang of cooking for fifteen on camp-stoves til right near the end, we were running on about three hours sleep a night because we'd come in so hyper from the effort that we couldn't sleep til late but had to get up at six to be able to get the camp packed up and still get the miles in for the day, and whilst canals are great for having many pubs along them, the beer kept getting more and more expensive as we travelled south and our Northern student pockets couldn't take it. The last leg to Teddington was on the Thames itself, with huge cruisers going at 10mph instead of the sedate canal 4mph speed limit, but we were so fast by then we were in danger of overtaking. We went to the Town Hall a few weeks later to hand the money over in the form of one of those giant cheques, and one of the two Building Studies lecturers (read: retired brickies) who'd come with us showed the Mayor of Wigan a picture of the other one's arse, on show one afternoon as he was trying to change on the towpath after being pushed in. Happily the Mayor of Wigan was a retired miner and thought it was tremendously funny.
9. Doubled the weight of a Mini.
I'd bought a very cheap and knackered Laser dinghy from someone in Hastings. The mast foot had cracked in the way that they do so he'd replaced the entire assembly with a giant stainless steel plate and tube which made the boat ridiculously uncompetitive on weight terms, but I'm a bit heavy to be a competitive Laser sailor anyway. Lasers are thirteen feet long and Minis only ten feet and half an inch, but I had no other way to transport it so on the roofrack it went, tied on to various places including to the passenger door handle. Later that evening before I was due to take the boat back to Brighton (I was living in Battle, near Hastings, at the time) we decided we'd go to the pub. I wanted to stay sober as I had a rugby match the next day (brief university thing, I was far too unfit to be able to run round for 80 minutes but I'm handy in line-outs and you can wrap as many wingers round my legs as you like without disturbing my steady trundle up the pitch) so I offered to drive. Despite the Laser and its three-part mast on the roofrack, the tied-up door and the tiller, centreboard and sails on the back seat, we piled four six-foot-plus people into the car and headed to the pub. It was only when it was struggling a bit to get up Battle Hill that I stopped to think about it. A 70's Mini 1000 weighs about 600kg. At 85 kilos, at the time, I was one of the lighter people in it. I don't know how much a standard Laser weighs but that one was more because of all the repairs. We did make it there and back in one piece and without grounding on anything, though. The biggest problem was the lad in the passenger seat getting a bit queasy on the way home. He did wind down the window, but untying the rope from the door handle the next day was not nice.
10. Designed and built a robot.
For my course this year. It's quite sad but I'm going to write a website for it, given how much help I've had from other random bot-building sites about the place. It looks like a cross between a horseshoe crab and an Imperial Cruiser, being black and shiny and angular, with a pentagonal base and sloping point at the back. It has little beady IR eyes, three of them, and front contact switches that look like whiskers so it knows when there's something directly in front of it that needs pushing, and edge sensors in each corner. It can detect and chase after other bots with IR beacons (there were meant to be a whole classload of these that would fight each other but mine's the only operational one so we can lead it around with a single emitter) and push them around and off the edge of tables, without falling over itself. It whirrs and bustles about and spins on the spot in confusion when it can't see anything and is terribly cute. S'cool.
1. Discovered an extra five siblings.
I was given up for adoption but my birth parents later got married anyway and had another five of 'em, I found when I tracked them down a couple of years ago. My adoptive parents, meanwhile, divorced and both have new partners, so between them and my adoptive sister I have a total of six parents and six siblings. I still haven't met one brother and one sister.
2. Lived with someone for eight years who is neither partner nor family.
Tom is smelly, hairy, messy, loud, sailing-obsessed, a drunkard, a right geek and owns (and listens to) more Marillion than can possibly be right. He's probably my best friend. He's also practical, intelligent, funny, completely reliable, cheerful and a really good sailor but don't tell him I said that.
3. Got eight A-levels.
It's partly because of the way they marked Double Maths round my way, and I did an extra one in Electronics at my last job because it was a sixth form college and I could. But I still had a bit to myself in the results in the local paper because I was the only person that had done six. And that's not counting the Special Paper Physics, in which I got a top Grade 1.
I've since been through three universities and still haven't got a degree. Working on that, though, engineering design turns out to be what I should have done in the first place.
4. Been asked by transvestites how I achieved such realistic fake breasts.
I've got hair halfway down my back, legs so long I can't buy trousers and tits big enough that I have to get bras from a specialist shop. Accordingly, I get mistaken for a man about once a week. That I know of, anyway, sometimes it probably doesn't come up. I'm not young enough to get called 'sonny' much any more and 'mate' can be taken as genderless. Now and then I have to flash in pub toilets to convince the offended-looking woman that yes, I do know it's the ladies, thanks; people behind counters tell me I can't use Miss Thompson's credit card or railcard and, living in a touchy-feely considerate sort of place, I get thoughtfully and considerately asked if I'm pre- or post-op. I sometimes wonder which way they think I'm transitioning. Wearing a dress is about the surest way to bring on confusion, including being groped by the aforementioned transvestite trying to work out what they were made of.
One day women will be allowed to stride and be tall and have shoulders without offending against the gender rules, and it'll make my life easier. But probably, I admit, less amusing.
5. Made a lot of my own clothes.
Including two dresses, three skirts, ten pairs of trousers, one pair of shorts, four fleeces and about ten assorted other tops. Almost all of them are wearable too, with the exception of some early experiments in each category. And one pair of trousers, black velvety moleskin low-slung drainpipes with minor flares which I made just too close fitting to be able to get into. Applications from slim-hipped long-legged people who might fit the Enchanted Trews are welcome.
6. Played bass for the Admiral.
You know the Admiral car insurance adverts on the cheapy digital channels and all over the London tube? You see that waxy-faced bloke in stockings with the pasted-on parrot? He was the singer-songwriter in my first gigging band. The songs were rather cheesy and his singing nowhere near as good as he thought and he tended to turn up to gigs in brown leather trousers like chaps but it was kind of a laugh at the time and it gave me a lot of useful experience so I shouldn't complain, of course.
7. Fallen asleep at a Slayer gig.
I wasn't terribly well that day and a bit spaced on painkillers. Everything was turned up so high that you just couldn't determine what was going on at all, and you can't blame the Brixton Academy's sometimes dodgy sound because Fear Factory were on before them and sounded great. I'd really wanted to see Slayer but they turned out to be a bunch of chubby blokes standing still and playing nothing but noise without information so I went and sat against the side wall and went to sleep.
Hmm. Running short here. There are lots to do with being poly and bi that felt like very unique circumstances at the time, but there are plenty other poly/bi people around here and anyway, resorting to sex feels like cheating. Unfair on the people involved and unfair on the verifiability front.
I also suspect I'm not the only person around here who got sent to a child psychologist for being violent. The daft thing is that I'm not, never was, but if you're a tall child and someone starts a fight with you, and you fight back, the short one will run away and scream at the teacher and you get told off for hitting people smaller than you. I was also supposed to be upset because I came from a 'broken home' but I never understood that, either. Mum and Dad were both happier, I got to have two houses and two bedrooms and two Christmas dinners and stuff. I understand how it can be a problem but in this case it wasn't.
I've done some fairly spoony scientific stuff in the course of being a lab tech for a university, from laser scattering particle size analysis to atomic force microscopy to running cell lines and building carbon filters for blood, but most of these will be scuppered by
zotz or davefish amongst others.Most of the music and stage related ones are also going to be nulled by other music types on here, unless I get more specific than is in the spirit of the thing.
Oh! I know.
8. Canoed from Wigan to London.
To raise money for charity, while I was at sixth form college. 250 miles down the canal system, took us about two weeks, we raised several thousand pounds. We all got sunburnt, crusty and dready, had multiply blistered hands, the food was awful for most of it because we didn't get the hang of cooking for fifteen on camp-stoves til right near the end, we were running on about three hours sleep a night because we'd come in so hyper from the effort that we couldn't sleep til late but had to get up at six to be able to get the camp packed up and still get the miles in for the day, and whilst canals are great for having many pubs along them, the beer kept getting more and more expensive as we travelled south and our Northern student pockets couldn't take it. The last leg to Teddington was on the Thames itself, with huge cruisers going at 10mph instead of the sedate canal 4mph speed limit, but we were so fast by then we were in danger of overtaking. We went to the Town Hall a few weeks later to hand the money over in the form of one of those giant cheques, and one of the two Building Studies lecturers (read: retired brickies) who'd come with us showed the Mayor of Wigan a picture of the other one's arse, on show one afternoon as he was trying to change on the towpath after being pushed in. Happily the Mayor of Wigan was a retired miner and thought it was tremendously funny.
9. Doubled the weight of a Mini.
I'd bought a very cheap and knackered Laser dinghy from someone in Hastings. The mast foot had cracked in the way that they do so he'd replaced the entire assembly with a giant stainless steel plate and tube which made the boat ridiculously uncompetitive on weight terms, but I'm a bit heavy to be a competitive Laser sailor anyway. Lasers are thirteen feet long and Minis only ten feet and half an inch, but I had no other way to transport it so on the roofrack it went, tied on to various places including to the passenger door handle. Later that evening before I was due to take the boat back to Brighton (I was living in Battle, near Hastings, at the time) we decided we'd go to the pub. I wanted to stay sober as I had a rugby match the next day (brief university thing, I was far too unfit to be able to run round for 80 minutes but I'm handy in line-outs and you can wrap as many wingers round my legs as you like without disturbing my steady trundle up the pitch) so I offered to drive. Despite the Laser and its three-part mast on the roofrack, the tied-up door and the tiller, centreboard and sails on the back seat, we piled four six-foot-plus people into the car and headed to the pub. It was only when it was struggling a bit to get up Battle Hill that I stopped to think about it. A 70's Mini 1000 weighs about 600kg. At 85 kilos, at the time, I was one of the lighter people in it. I don't know how much a standard Laser weighs but that one was more because of all the repairs. We did make it there and back in one piece and without grounding on anything, though. The biggest problem was the lad in the passenger seat getting a bit queasy on the way home. He did wind down the window, but untying the rope from the door handle the next day was not nice.
10. Designed and built a robot.
For my course this year. It's quite sad but I'm going to write a website for it, given how much help I've had from other random bot-building sites about the place. It looks like a cross between a horseshoe crab and an Imperial Cruiser, being black and shiny and angular, with a pentagonal base and sloping point at the back. It has little beady IR eyes, three of them, and front contact switches that look like whiskers so it knows when there's something directly in front of it that needs pushing, and edge sensors in each corner. It can detect and chase after other bots with IR beacons (there were meant to be a whole classload of these that would fight each other but mine's the only operational one so we can lead it around with a single emitter) and push them around and off the edge of tables, without falling over itself. It whirrs and bustles about and spins on the spot in confusion when it can't see anything and is terribly cute. S'cool.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-14 11:38 am (UTC)Why thankyou.
Date: 2005-03-16 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-18 10:20 pm (UTC)your stories of lasers, playing rugby, clothing isues and repeatedly being told that i cant use my own credit cards ring so true