The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Pfusand:

Quarter-inch and smaller rings - look for jewelry findings.

White blouses - Well, okay, but I look ghastly in white.

Invisible? There was a one-year period when I was *always* the last one served in a restaurant group.

In box and department stores... well, no more than most, but I put it down to being quiet and patient, not to being a guurl.

*Sigh* They're expecting cackling, aren't they?

I'm in a dungeon -- sorry, a Fantasy Role-Playing Game (FRPG) -- and we all read and enjoy Girl Genius.

Currently, our adventures put us on contemporary Earth, so when we need something, we look for it on the web. Even though there isn't a real Bugtussle, Iowa, we know where it should be, where the nearest real town is, and where the other Bugtussles are. We know how much our personal jet, a 1-11 [should have] cost, and we even know its interior layout.

We think it's hysterical.

Xopher,

'Seamstress' is a weird case. I bet it came about because someone thought 'seamster' (feminized version of *'seamer') didn't sound feminine enough, so they added the '-ess' suffix. That way you know it's a female woman GIRL seamer, you see.

I read -- and you may take this with a grain of salt -- that women were forced out of the, uh, garment-making trade when it became lucrative, so the word "seamster" disappeared. Later, when women were again allowed to make clothes for sale, they used the imported (French) "ess" ending.

My favorite is "backster" or "baxter" as the feminine of "baker."

Ah, I see a reference to Leslie, of Sainted memory.

I too believe that "civil union" is a second-best title. I would suggest that the general term should be "marriage," and that religious marriages get a modifier tag, like "religio-marriage" soon abbreviated to "relig-marriage" and then to "lig-marriage" or "ig-marriage."

...and San Francisco did a few years before that, which prompted the Governator to utter dire warnings against a Gay Apocalypse.

Wish me luck in the coming apocalypse! I live in Massachusetts and work in Boston, and my closest co-worker (and ordained minister) goes home to her wife every night. I should be very close to ground zero.

...

Nothing yet...

My wife points out that weight is probably not the right trigger for babies, but rather, the 5 point harness buckle. If there were a proximity detector on the keys that connected to a sensor for if the car seat was buckled, that would probably do it.

I too thought of this. Now, I know nothing about child seats, but I'm assuming that there is one buckle for the seat itself, and another for the child. (1) Have a pleasant chime sound every ... five (?) seconds if the child's buckle is latched and the engine is not on. (It would be a great feasture if it only sounded after the engine was turned off.) (2) Do not permit the doors to be locked from the outside if the child's buckle is latched. (Or some other nag-y alternative.)

P.S. Yes, of course I've forgotten very important things!

Knew a kid who limped? Or wore braces? Hmpph. She was in a wheelchair, with braces on her short, shriveled legs that had long, surgical scars down their fronts.

Sent away for the summer? Oh yeah. I was in the cycling unit at Camp Hoffman during a bad outbreak. We get up, wash our faces and hands in the cold pump water, go to breakfast, wash our faces and hands in the c.p.w., go out cycling on the roads, eat by the side of the road, cycle some more, return in late afternoon, wash o.f.&h. in the c.p.w., go to supper, wash o.f.&h. in the c.p.w., chat, go to bed. We did not tour places with people, not even the cow barns at U.R.I. (a staple activity). We got ice cream once: We stopped across the street. One counselor went across, wrote down the menu, and came back. We placed our orders, the counselors went over again, got the cones, and brought them back. Not a very engaging experience.

I got the entire series of five Salk injections and three Sabine sugar cubes.

Here's the follow-on:

Huffington Post story.

I was a junior in high school when JFK was shot. I believed it was Oswald acting alone from the beginning, and what I learned in college (1965 - 1969) did nothing to change my opinion.

I majored in Criminalistics* in the School of Criminal Justice, so a lot of our instructors were former police officers. One of them told us that Oswald had been given a standard paraffin test, which confirmed that he had fired a gun recently. Then, someone fished the wax cast out of the trash (Note: The chain of evidence has been broken (to say the least) at this point.) He examined it for the pattern of residue, using a technique that was not yet confirmed, and determined that the pattern indicated that Oswald had fired a rifle.

Now, I've never seen a hint of that act from that day to this. (In fact, I don't even recall a comment to the effect that Oswald had been tested for GSR at all, but it would have been as standard as fingerprinting him, and no one mentions that either.) Nor have I seen any mention of a test for determining residue pattern.

Make of it what you will

* The actual title was "Police Science." But if you put that on a form, it gets abbreviated to "Pol. Sci." which must be "Political Science" and we have a numeric code for that.

Many years ago, I was thinking about the fact that no one -- no real person -- was 100% bad, and I was outside on a sunny day, so I composed the aphorism:

"Only a shadow never sees the sun."

Combining the quotation: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.†with the knowledge that she 'saved' $9,000 to $14,000 per year for her small (under 10,000 pop.) town per year by charging rape victims for their evidence kits, we get:

One of the 'values' in her town, when she was mayor, was nine to fourteen admitted rapes per year!

I'm between things at the moment...

But I'm sitting here at work, wearing a skirt I made, and hairsticks with matching earrings that I made, so I don't feel too out of it.

I'm bracing myself for my Christmass cookie project (assorted cookies in packs of six for about twenty-five sets of people), and it's just occured to me that a nice anniversary present would be some unfinished bookcases that we can sand and stain and sand and poly and sand and poly again.

There is one difference, as Rep. Barney Frank explained. "Now you have to buy a wedding present for that nice lesbian couple next door."

Oh, you QA guys are making my mouth water. I've been out of the software field for several years now. (I took the work I could get: tutoring, mostly math and stats.) My husband thinks that I could get back in as a tester, but who would hire a cough, mumble year old woman as a novice QA person?

Well, I haven't seen the recommended Doctor Who's yet, but I like Stargate SG-1: Unending (the last episode) and Stargate Atlantis: Sunday, which was... unexpected.

They can be runners-up to the Doctor.

Vian @21 wrote "I note with interest that Hillary loses a decade on that age, presumably due to being female - I mean, she's in her *60s* -"

It's more extreme than that -- Hillary is 60 and Hillary is six months younger than Mitt.

Hmmpph. My cousin met her Kenyan husband... in Kenya! It wasn't that easy, though. First, she had to join a U.N. mission, then she had to befriend a Kenyan woman on that mission, then that woman had to take her home, where she could meet and fall in love with her new friend's younger brother.

They did the agricultural college thing after they were married.

Nit Alert: Rhode Island, while small, is populous, so it has two representatives and thus four electors. It is states like X. Dakota that have a single representative.

Julie at 100 wrote, "I did find a nicely compact way to store our manga, in the form of smallish cardboard bins with the right dimensions to hold ~15 volumes of the same series and run the entire depth of their bookcase; the bricklike formation also allows the bins to be stacked on top of each other."

Oooh, I need! Where did you find them?

Here's something I did once -- well, it took several weeks. I put a small box (shoebox or similar) in each room in my [old] house, and I dropped bits of cruft into the nearest box as I noticed it (pens, buttons, keys, badge clips, whatever). After a few months, I gathered all these boxes together, emptied them onto the rug, and sorted them into piles. (Yes, I am of the pile-making persuasion.)

I was amzed to discover that some of my piles were big enough to count as a collection; e.g., I had enough electrical bits (3-prong/2-prong converters, electrical tape, wire,etc.) that I went out and bought a[n electric blue] toolbox to put it all in, and added in other, vaguely electrical things from The Boxes in the Closet.

I tested every key on every lock, put the good ones on a key ring (found among the cruft), and recycled the rest.

And so forth. Maybe this will work for you. (At least you may find, as I did, that I don't need to buy any more combs.)

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