Space Prince

(And of course the generation who raised us loves to act fake shocked like “my grandkids don’t know how to boil water” like yeah, Janice, that’s because you took your kids out to eat 6 nights a week and baked Stouffers lasagna one night)

And now we are broke. And can’t afford to pay $60 to have every pair of pants we own hemmed (shoutout to shorties!). We are making yogurt because we can’t afford to pay $2.50 for one yogurt.

I’ve learned to knit to make myself wool hats and scarves. I’ve learned to sew so I can make items that would otherwise cost me 4x the cost to make it. I’ve learned to make yogurt because I would prefer to spend $2 for a gallon of milk and get 24 yogurts out of it rather than just one.

I’ve planted fruit trees in my yard so I can reduce the carbon footprint of the fruit I eat, and because produce is expensive.

I raise egg-laying chickens so I don’t contribute to factory farming.

My husband hunts deer so that we can eat lean, virtually fat free meat, and also not contribute to factory farming. The deer live happy lives and are not allowed to suffer. (Hey PS also, hunting up here plays an important role in ecology, as otherwise the deer population would explode, and deer would starve in the winter. Thanks for coming to my TEDta…)

Recognising silent acute pain in animals - assorted species grimace scales:

Development of the Horse Grimace Scale (HGS) as a Pain Assessment Tool in Horses Undergoing Routine Castration 

The composition and initial evaluation of a grimace scale in ferrets after surgical implantation of a telemetry probe 

The Assessment of Facial Expressions in Piglets Undergoing Tail Docking and Castration: Toward the Development of the Piglet Grimace Scale 

The Sheep Grimace Scale as an indicator of post-operative distress and pain in laboratory sheep and the  Coding and quantification of a facial expression for pain in lambs 

Mouse -  How to be a pain management advocate for exotic and zoo animals (full text available - includes additional species)

The Rat Grimace Scale: A partially automated method for quantifying pain in the laboratory rat via facial expressions 

Evaluation of EMLA Cream for Preventing Pain during Tattooing of Rabbits: Changes in Physiological, Behavioural and Facial Expression Responses 

Pain evaluation in dairy cattle 

Pain is subtle - we cannot depend on vocalisations or extreme abnormal behaviour to determine if an animal is on pain - animals can cover up pain while going about their daily life. Grimace scales have been found to be reliable indicators of pain (full text available)

Unfortunately, I could not find a clear visual grimace scale for dogs, cats or birds :(  

Which is a shame, because perhaps I could have recognised my own dog’s discomfort for the acute pain it was sooner:

(left: dog in pain. See eyes, tension, cheeks, whiskers, ears compared to the multiple species grimace charts above. right: tired but not in pain dog)

Perhaps my new books that arrived today might have some on dogs at least. There’s this visual blog post of a stressed dog at the vet - stress in the absence of a trigger looks very much like pain.

Here is a small comparative cats, with the link going into more detail. Not a scale but better than nothing:

[Image Description: Tag reading “donatello/michelangelo”]

So you know what, fuckheads!? If I want to maintain the one tiny scrap of innocence I have left, I will. The official policy of AO3TagoftheDay is now that turtles, teenage, mutant, ninja, or otherwise, do not fuck. It never happens. They don’t fuck. They don’t fuck each other. They don’t fuck humans. They don’t fuck in real life and they don’t fuck in fiction. This tag is about two gay Renaissance painters holding each other close and kissing chastely under the Sistine chapel ceiling.

and on our first night at the hotel, all the boys wanted to play (whether they were nerds or jocks or whatever, everyone just wanted to play the wii lmao) and i was the only girl who was enthusiastic and willing and they patronizingly allowed me to play cause they figured i’d be an easy loser and they made fun of me for picking peach (because the typical femme lesbian i am, of course i main as peach) 

and the rules were that you had to pass the controller to someone else if you lost and the only person who was allowed to keep playing was whoever was in 1st in the last round 

ok.