Roads to Safe Places

I wrote this for Crocky years ago, while she was on her Highland trip with her Chapel Choir. It is a silly little thing, now, and, like so many fics of that time, an AU, but I love it, nonetheless. There are, sadly, a lot of minor mistakes in it, I hope you don't mind too much.

Title: Stalking Severus Snape - A story in 25 receipts and shopping lists.
Pairings: Minerva/Severus.
Author's Note: I would like to apologise for any errors concerning Morrison's products or their prices if they are being portrayed inaccurately by this. I found it very hard to find accurate prices for the items I needed for the late nineties, or even which products they offered back then.
Summary: The items in this file were all retrieved while supervising the convicted and evicted Death Eater and Half-Blood Severus Snape, who was sentenced to the destruction of his wand and exile from the Wizarding community. He is being covertly supervised until his next hearing to ensure he is no longer a threat. See excerpts below.


( File no. 346a - Excerpts. )
 

Day 01 → Your favourite song
Day 02 → Your favourite movie

Again, I don't really have a favourite movie. The movie I have watched most often is the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, so it's probably that one by majority view.



Day 03 → Your favourite television program
Day 04 → Your favourite book
Day 05 → Your favourite quote
Day 06 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 07 → A photo that makes you happy
Day 08 → A photo that makes you angry/sad
Day 09 → A photo you took
Day 10 → A photo of you taken over ten years ago
Day 11 → A photo of you taken recently
Day 12 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 13 → A fictional book
Day 14 → A non-fictional book
Day 15 → A fanfic
Day 16 → A song that makes you cry (or nearly)
Day 17 → An art piece (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.)
Day 18 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 19 → A talent of yours
Day 20 → A hobbie of yours
Day 21 → A recipe
Day 22 → A website
Day 23 → A YouTube video
Day 24 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 25 → Your day, in great detail
Day 26 → Your week, in great detail
Day 27 → This month, in great detail
Day 28 → This year, in great detail
Day 29 → Hopes, dreams and plans for the next 365 days
Day 30 → Whatever tickles your fancy

Well, to be honest, people in Switzerland, they're not that much different from Germans in Cologne, really, a couple of years back with their nno-mosque signs. Central Europeans are apparently never happy when a non-Christian religion wants to add buildings to their houses of worship that are a threat to the easily scared, seeing as they are perceived as obvious symbols of financial and political power. They're a sign that in reality, non-Christians over here are not how people here like their people from a non-Christian background to be - quiet, shy, downtrodden, in their place, grateful, tolerated.

I seem to remember that in Germany back in the day commenting on articles, saying that even if they were fine with minarets in general, they did not want them to be higher than the spires of Christian churches - which, considering that the buildings of banks and several chimneys are considerably higher than church spires and remain scorn free, says a lot about the priorities of our good Christians over here.

Still, the posters back then strike me as... well, a little more tasteful than the ones used in Switzerland:



Really tasteful colour combination there and style there, guys, but still better than the others, really driving home their association of the shape of the minarets with those of rockets in these atrocities.

When I read today that these people, the people with the above posters, the people who made obvious the association between houses of worship and terrorism, that these people won, against all predictions and common sense with a surprisingly high amount of votes, I was absolutely floored. The initiative was launched by nationalists, people I thought were about on one level with nationalists over here, a small group of politicians that is worrying and too powerful for my taste, but still a minority which does not have too much political influence, thankfully, not really. These people made Switzerland add a charming sentence to their constitution which simply reads, "It's forbidden to build minarets".

What the FUCK, Switzerland?

I'm with the people who made these:



"The sky above Switzerland is big enough. "

Too bad the minds in Switzerland are not.

In the documentary "Guys and Dolls", this one guy shares (at about 4:50, I think) that:

So Channel four did a documentary on transsexual children as a part of their Bodyshock series. I have some qualms with that documentary on the "extremes of the human body", because seems to border on being a freakshow rather than a respectful depiction of "extreme" bodies too often for my taste. But so far, so good, congrats on your "extreme" status, maybe it's educational and respectful in spite of that.

A few minutes in, it turns out that it's not - for some reason completely beside me, they decided to use incorrect pronouns because they thought it would make the documentary "more accessible" to the clueless cispopulace.

Yeah, it's so OBVIOUS that it'd be so much LESS confusing to have the Voice Of Authority, the narrator of the documentary, use the wrong pronouns and leaving the doting, supportive parents use the correct ones. Unsurprisingly, people (examples here and here) are quick to point out what is wrong with that and write to Channel four, to which they get the same standard response.

And the response is really lovely. They apologise if "some" people were upset by the use of "biologically accurate" pronouns, but that they felt they were trying to do the right thing, and "almost all" the reviews were "favourable" and everybody loves their documentary a bunch and they were doing the right thing.

I don't know, but I'd imagine that if you're going out and making a documentary about a particular group of people, and the group of people are pissed off about the results, you ought to listen to them?
And maybe, if you talk about how people "will have to get used to using female pronouns" for a person, you ought to take a fucking hint?

I love teaching, and tutoring. I had forgotten how much fun it can be, and I really missed it.

Seems like I'll be coaching and correcting a person's self-study efforts rather than forcing weak, unmotivated students to repeat stuff ad nauseam at the behest of their parents for a change.

For reasons only known to himself, my father once obtained an electric piano from a customer a couple of years ago. I think he said at the time that niaseath might get some use out of it because he can play the guitar and is, after all, The Musical One in the family. Since my brother can't play the piano and the thing has been sitting in Hesse up until last week, that plan was never put into action. Since my father's reorganising his flat he's asked me if we need it and I gladly accepted, and now we have an electric piano!



Crocky can't really use it to practice earnestly because she needs a grand piano for that, but it's good to prepare lessons and play around and for me, because I'm getting lessons, too. I started at the beginning of the week and just now spent a couple of hours with this beginner's version of Scarborough Fair and I Saw Three Ships. It's fun, but my progress on is very slow, as expected. It's a lot more fun to be a complete noob on the piano, though, seeing as the results are never quite as jarring to my ears as the strangled-cat sounds that I'm so good at producing on the trumpet.

So far, I'm not really giving up on the trumpet, but playing the piano is much more fun, so I'm rather pessimistic about the time I'll spend with the instrument in the future, what with the piano looking so inviting and the option to put in earphones and practicing around the clock and everything, which is a definite downside of the trumpet - which I can only practice very quietly and for a very limited amount of time in the afternoons. I wish I could be more optimistic about the likelihood of me losing interest in either or both of the instruments after a while - I'm just not that interested in music, and even though Crocky's enthusiasm is highly infective, I am not sure that I won't be spending my time with other things in future. It's very nice to dabble, though.

The only downside to the piano is that it did not like being left in a car over night and is now its speakers make rather alarming crackling noises occasionally. We had hoped that it'd get better after a while if the piano didn't react well to the moistness in the car and had to dry,  but we're worried. If this keeps persisting we'll have to have someone check it out.

How is everyone?

I finally have a label for myself, thanks to mqnsk, who came up with this label for the likes of us:

Femmebutch Knights of Misanthropy

I want that on a T-shirt, and a shirt that says "Dumm oder was?" for discussions with my sometimes not so smart fellow-Germans. I've seen an icon with that line, and I think I'd love it for teaching.

What I've been doing?

Job-hunting, studying, tidying up our flat, making chainmail, teaching and taking names. I'll post pictures of trips niaseath and I made to abandoned buildings in Hannover in the next couple of days.

A couple of weeks ago I went on an excursion with a group of hunters from Hamburg to see the wild ponies in Dülmen. We had a really good time, and I was told maybe a hundred times that I, indeed, look like my mother, who organised the tour together with another hunter and had invited me to come along. ♥

The pictures can be found if you click on these links.

Day 1: Merfelder Bruch


Day 2: Environmental centre and carp ponds


Day 3: Dülmen

On the second day we listened to a talk at the local environmental centre and took a tour of a nature reserve by horse-drawn wagon. A woman that looked and talked like a Biology teacher told us about herbal remedies, dyes, poisons and folklore, in the afternoon, in the nature reserve, a conservationist from a local organisation talked us through local birds living at the Herzog's carp ponds.



( Environmental centre and carp ponds (15) )

I've not really been into baking, but a friend's birthday changed that. I baked some autumn-themed spice and chocolate cookies which were very tasty. I can only hope that they arrived in good shape (that is, in one piece, and not as hard as rocks).

The fresh ginger roots in the supermarket had been on my mind for some time, and they're the reason why I choose spicey cookies. The results were astonishingly gingerbread-like. I am usually not even the biggest fan of gingerbread, but the fresh taste of the ginger changed that.

Ginger-chocolate chip cookies
Absolutely delicious. The recipe can be found here (it's vegan).


Ginger cookies
Recipe can be found here (and seeing as how the egg is completely optional, really, it might as well be vegan). As soon as I can track down affordable crystallized ginger somewhere, I'll definitely try triple ginger cookies, too.


Lentil "falafel", yoghurt sauce, and salad

Yummy. Yes, the sauce is not on there.

( Sauce )

( 'Falafel' )

This is a backdated entry. I meant to post it at the time, but never got round to.

Yesterday, Crocky and I went to SeaWorld, and it's a beautiful place. The lighting is amazing, the tanks seem, by an large, to be of a fairly reasonable size, the fish were all bred in captivity and there is a member of staff in each room who explains interesting things about the fish and makes sure that no one stresses the fishes with flashlights or hitting the glass.





( Caution, picture heavy (33) )

Ich sollte es eigentlich ja besser wissen, aber ich habe diesen Artikel gelesen:

Gleichgeschlechtliche Partnerschaften - Kinder brauchen keine Hetero-Eltern

Und dann hab ich noch einen Fehler gemacht - ich habe die Kommentare auch gelesen. Hier mal eine Auswahl, es ist zum Schreien:

"Ja, es muss ein tolles Gefühl sein wenn man in der Klasse oder auf dem Pausenplatz mitteilen darf das man eben nicht ein Mami und Papi zu Hause hat sondern zwei Mami oder zwei Papi... Den dem Hedonismus und Egoismus moderner Erwachsener dürfen keine Grenzen mehr gesetzt werden."

"In einem Punkt verlieren einige heterosexuelle Paare doch drastisch, wenn homosexuelle Paare bei der Adoption gleich gestellt werden: und zwar jene hetersexuellen Paare, die auf natürlichem Wege keine Kinder bekommen können. Denn um die gleiche Anzahl Kinder bewerben sich dann plötzlich viel mehr Paare. Und die Wahrscheinlichkeit, den Kinderwunsch erfüllt zu bekommen, sinkt für Mann-Frau-Paare, die biologisch nicht Eltern werden können, drastisch."

"Denn eines ist mal klar, die Anzahl der Kinder die freiwillig zur Adoption frei gegeben werden, ist verschwindend gering und die klassische Familie IST für Kinder der beste Ort um auf zu wachsen und nichts anderes."

"Nur, weil so manche bunte Erscheinungen des menschlichen Lebens immer hoffähiger werden und sich auch ein entsprechendes Lobbywesen dazu gesellt, ist hier noch längst nicht alles im Sinne der Natur."

"Ich hätte auch erwartet, dass Homo-Kinder öfter homo werden."

"Homosexualität ist natürlich- aber ob es natürlich ist, Kinder durch homosexuelle Paare großzuziehen? Homos haben gegenüber Heteros in der Gesellschaft keine Nachteile. Sie können es offen ausleben ebenso wie Heteros."

Was soll einem dazu noch einfallen...?

So, ich gehe mal wieder an die Arbeit hier.

I sorted through links I had saved on del.icio.us a while ago, rediscovered Wordle, a device that turns the most common words in a text into pretty word clouds, and decided to feed it shady online versions of popular Fantasy books.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

So, who is this book about?

( More worldes )

I've been searching for fresh peppermint plants for ages, but even though they always have rosemary and sage in stock our shops never offered any. One of the things I missed most when coming back to Germany from Glasgow was the lack of peppermint plants, or even peppermint extract. Maybe I just go to the wrong shops, but I've been searching and not finding anything for months. I was very exited when I finally spotted two scrawny plants in the herb section of our local supermarket, and they've now got a new home on our living room window sill and have been growing happily so far.

( Peppermint lime sorbet recipe and nectarine sorbet recipe. )

The lime sorbet was unexpectedly good for the cold I had last week, and tea with fresh peppermint is also a real treat.

... with some borders, for a change. Our kitchen is an example of why no one ought to shop hungry at the moment.

Not that I mind. Nom.



( Read more... )

I found this article today and it looks interesting. I 'm storing it on here because the uni PCs won't let me get onto my e-mail provider's web page for some odd reason.

Abstract: 
Friends are of crucial importance to lesbians’ lives, their significance heightened due to lack of acceptance from blood family, work colleagues and society. Despite a proliferation of literature on lesbians’ love relationships, lesbians’ friendships remain understudied. In the light of theorising about widespread shifts in intimacy patterns in modern industrial societies, this thesis examines the role of friendship for contemporary lesbians. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, using lesbian feminist, feminist psychological and mainstream sociological theories to interpret lesbians’ negotiations of their friendships and preoccupations with their own continually developing sense of self.

The study finds that firstly, the most significant issue in negotiating friendships is deciding on a lesbian identity despite socialisation to ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. Friends are expected to be accepting and supportive or they are lost. Discrimination, the fact that the lover is the ‘best friend’, struggles with difference in lesbian communities, time constraints and a more general shift to individualism mean that community and family contacts are replaced by small, supportive and affirming friendship networks. These meet needs and within them lesbians negotiate a sense of self, but for the most part with no template of political consciousness. Secondly, while friendships are important, they are also difficult. The fluidity of the friendship relationship, blurred boundaries between friends and lovers, and women’s moral ‘imperative to care’ all provide barriers to communication. Thirdly, while lesbians value ‘the relational self’, a confident sense of self is challenged when close-connected relationships sit at odds both with mainstream, heterocentric culture, and with traditional models of psychology which promote independence and separateness.

Lesbians who are confident communicators, who have access to alternative feminist discourses which value relatedness, and who, together with their friends, are open to change, are able to negotiate satisfactory friendships and relationships. The study demonstrates lesbians’ complex subjectivities as changing selves are negotiated through friendships, love relationships and communities, particularly through experiences of loss.

So tell me internets, why is the desire to be called by your name a radical feminist issue? I am thinking about changing my name, and I never realised that there was still such a heated debate about this.[Poll #1413059][Poll #1413059]

I tried to find articles on the matter, and pretty much all sources I've found and read after a lazy Google search make it a front-line issue of modern-day extremist feminism to be attached to your own family name. This should probably teach me to be more careful about my sources, but the degree of conviction that women should change their names confounded me.

The articles I found stress that while most women don't even think about it, there are "some" for whom it is a "struggle" and that "more and more women" are keeping their name (and that's still only 10% in the US, apparently, not sure here about the numbers in the EU and Germany). On the whole, it seems to be an option that only the self-and/or career obsessed consider, or those who want to Make A Point. The writers (fair enough, we're talking writers on US "women's sites" dealing with marriage here, what did I expect?) make excuses and long explanations for those women with the quirky desire to hold on to their name ("They are very invested in their career", "they are uncertain about the wedding", "their husband's name doesn't go with their first name").

They also paint those husbands who change or even hyphenate their names and their fates in a very negative light ("that would be as oppressive to him as it would be to you to change your name! Would you want that?" - "He would be ridiculed by his peers!" - "His family line might be lost!" - "People would get confused!" - "It would mean that he's a feminist-brainwashed weakling!" - "It would be difficult for him to introduce you!" - "Think of the children!" - "He would think you are more attached to your father than to your husband!").

The consensus is that keeping your maiden name is bad, selfish and confusing, changing your name is the desirable default because of family lines and social acceptance. The rationalising strategies these people use to explain why 90% of women change their names are stellar, too. It's all their own, free choice, they don't mind their new identity, names don't matter, anyway, they want to belong to their husband's family, they want to fit in, it's more convenient for the insurance company/strangers/the family/children/the dog, they want to give up their ugly maiden name. Since everybody is equal now, there is no point in not making the convenient, traditionally and socially accepted choice. You have the freedom to choose between a right and a wrong option, apparently, and it's interesting that 90% of couples make the same free choice.

Some of the articles I found: 
Maiden Names ( have an excerpt - caution, rage warning )
Married or Maiden Name - Behind the Last Name Change
Should I keep my maiden name?
The Pros and Cons of Keeping Your Maiden Name
The Reasons Why Women Keep Their Maiden Name

THE COMPARISON.

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still,
As that which from chafed musk cat's pores doth trill,
As the almighty balm of th' early east,
Such are the sweat drops of my mistress' breast ;
And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seem no sweat drops, but pearl carcanets.
Rank sweaty froth thy mistress' brow defiles,
Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils,
Or like the scum, which, by need's lawless law
Enforced, Sanserra's starvèd men did draw
From parboil'd shoes and boots, and all the rest
Which were with any sovereign fatness blest ;
( Read more... )

Via sf_drama . That community is full of win sometimes.

The eight "equally important" parts of  how thinness and happiness can be achieved:

1. Honesty
2. Physical appearance
3. Exercise
4. Mindset
5. Sex
6. Food
7. Men
8. Faith

Having had lots of fun with the Zeit.de version of it, I'm currently playing around with the "EU Profiler". It's a questionnaire on your position on 30 key issues for the this week's election which compares your answers to your country's parties' position on said issues, or to those of other European parties.

While my results and my ideal match are not terribly surprising, I liked being able to look at such a concise summary of why I'm going to vote the way I'm going to vote. I missed the comparison with party stances on individual positions which the Zeit version had, but the international comparison option is awesome and surprising in many cases.

I fell in love with these cookies which I found on this blog here. They're not fat free as I couldn't get hold of prune puree, and I used (again) only half the sugar advised in the recipe. I don't know what it is with recipes, in particular vegan recipes, why they go overboard with the use of sweeteners. The same is true for the use of dairy and fat in non-vegan recipes, and I usually cross-reference recipes to find the lowest common denominator.



I'm baking these for the sewing marathon next Tuesday. One brave girl from Crocky's theatre troupe has agreed to hem the costumes in the institute's student café that day, and she asked for company. I was going to go for muffins, but it's easier to prepare enough of these and they're tasty. I'll try to get them more chewy until then, though.

When Crocky and I went shopping on Tuesday we cracked an egg and decided to make banana pancakes with cinnamon, cocoa and sugar. I am curious whether there's a vegan alternative to the eggs in pancakes. I suspect it's probably baking powder, but I can't imagine the consistency'd stay the same. Huh. 



Banana pancakes consist of your basic pancake mixture of choice (in our case a small egg, 100mg flour, 100ml milk) and a puréd banana. No sugar, as the banana is sweet enough, although we did sprinkle some sugar on top in the end.

As linked by bronnyelsp before, there is an awesome documentary on eight people who believe that they are "English through and through". They agree to have their DNA checked, find that a percentage of their DNA hails from somewhere else, hilarity ensues.

( Playlist embedded here )

I'd love to take that test and learn about my genetic history. I suspect that it's mostly Eastern European.

It is so ridiculous that these island dwellers are all so convinced that they are "100% English", and I love how their test subjects all deal with the information that they are not, in fact, "100% English", whatever that means, by trying to explain some part of their identity by their genetic make-up ("Oh, far Eastern, so that's why I like spring rolls!").

I wonder whether that has any long-term effects, if they start feeling a little less hostile towards the particular ethnic group they are descended from. Makes me wish that test was both easily available, 1000% confidential, and required - that should have a positive outcome for some people with skeevy race issues.

Truth, justice, freedom, reasonably priced love, a hard-boiled egg, and Alzheimer's research, thanks to auronsgirl.

I like her lilacs, although the large one is sadly not very practical for attaching it to a bag as I had intended, I should have gone with the smaller one. Next year, definitely.


( (c) ~Yoodi)