The GirlAlive Blog

New Hamsters! And other stuff.

Last month, my husband and I decided that A) we’re not going back to the US this year and B) therefore we can get some new hamsters.

We decided to get some Russian dwarf hamsters, since that’s one of the types we haven’t had before. But we decided this a couple weeks before Christmas, and we were planning to spend Christmas in Wigan with husband’s family. So we didn’t want to get hamsters and then leave them in our house with hamster-sitters right away.

We went to Wigan and it was really nice. We both got titled estates in the highlands for Christmas, and I got some books and fluffy blankets and stuff. I got to spend time with my nieces and nephew. One of the days we were there we went out to the market and it was nice and I had a lovely time until I started having agoraphobic panic attacks in the grocery store from the crowds.

The other thing that happened at some time when we were out is that my hypermobility started acting up and my pelvis got all dislocated. I was in quite a bit of pain for about a week.

We got home and my pelvis was feeling better and we planned to go out on the 3rd of January to get hamsters. Then there was another hurricane-level wind storm on that day so we waited until Saturday.

The store was crowded and we had to stand around for a long time in the shop waiting for someone who could box up the 2 hamsters that they had and sign all the requisite forms. We ended up with two male Russian dwarf hamsters. We named them Leonard and Sheldon.

Leonard is brown and very curious. If we pick up their little hiding house, he is likely to climb out and straight up your arm. And then poop on your shoulder.

Sheldon is silvery-gray and very shy. He hasn’t been aggressive at all, but he is shy and more likely to hide in a pile of bedding.

I hope to post pictures of them soon, if not here then definitely on my Tumblr.

The night after we went out to get the hamsters, my pelvis fell apart again. I didn’t sleep the whole night because of the pain. So the hypermobility/Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is apparently becoming less of an occasional inconvenience and more of a full-blown disability.

So, to sum up: new hamsters, painful disability.

About My Book

Okay, so I’ve referenced the book that I’m working on a few times here now, and now that I have nearly 20,000 words on the page I’m willing to go public with what I’m writing about.

Actually, I’m working on 3 different books, but the one I’m furthest along on, and the one I’m enjoying the most is a book written for Americans to explain the things they will find in Great Britain that will annoy, confuse or surprise them. I’m covering basic things like words that are different (like pavement instead of sidewalk), to how the government is structured, to which celebrities the British talk about that the Americans have never heard of. I’m trying to make most of it funny and light, a bit like my British Food web site.

I’m also planning to intersperse my text with famous quotes about Britain, and maybe some original illustrations. I don’t have a publisher. If there are any interested, let me know. If need be, I will self-publish. (The actual publication could still be a few years off, realistically.)

Also, I don’t have a title. If you come up with a title for me and I use it, I’ll make sure you get a free copy and a mention in the “thank you” section. If you can think of anything about the British that annoyed, surprised, delighted, or confused you, feel free to post it in the comments, or hit me up on Twitter or Tumblr. I’ve already done about 160 topics, but there’s always a chance I’ve missed something.

So that’s what I’ve been working on that has kept me from posting here and on my book review tumblr as much as I should. With the help of a netbook I can use while I’m still in bed, and my patron saint of writing, Neil Gaiman, I’m actually properly determined to finish this book and see it in print.

Who will pick up the slack when the church fails?

I was raised a Republican and a Christian, as are many Americans. When I would ask questions like, “Why don’t the Republicans support social services for the poor, when Jesus spent so much time helping the poor?” I was given answers that, at the time, made sense to me. I was told that Republicans did not want the government serving the poor because that was the church’s job. You get a better society when people have to give to charity voluntarily to help others rather than just taxing them.

In theory, this sounds great. But let me tell you a story. In 2001 I lost my job. I was living alone in Seattle and my closest family was 1600 miles away. After I had been unemployed for about 6 months, I was diagnosed with a huge ovarian tumor which may or may not be malignant – they couldn’t tell until they took it out. I was scheduled for surgery in the first week of August.

A few weeks before my surgery I got a letter from my health insurance company saying that I owed them about $600 in back payments on my COBRA coverage and if I didn’t pay it immediately, my insurance would end July 31. So if I didn’t find $600 ASAP I would have a choice between cancelling the surgery or ending up in about $35,000 of medical debt.

I mentioned this financial problem at my usual Thursday night Bible study. They prayed for me and, unbeknownst to me, one of the leaders of the group went to the pastor and told him about my need, which he then referred to his “benevolence committee.”

The next Sunday I was pulled aside after the service and brought into a dark back room with 3 members of this committee. (Keep in mind that I didn’t ask for their help – someone else had asked on my behalf.) They interrogated me for about half an hour. They demanded to know how many jobs I had applied for and where, and if I was applying for low-level jobs and if I was registered with any temp agencies, and how many and which ones. I was in tears by the time they were done making me feel like a failure as a human being. I lived all alone 1600 miles from everyone who cared about me. OF COURSE I WAS LOOKING FOR A JOB. I HAD NO ONE.

At the end of the meeting they reluctantly agreed to pay my COBRA bill (and absolutely not a cent more) if I brought the bill to the church office and they would write a check directly to the insurance company.

This kind of cold and stingy treatment would be understandable if I was a stranger wandering in off the street asking for help. I had attended this church for three years. I had been on mission trips with them. I was a member of a small group. Even when I was earning near minimum wage and barely getting by, I still tithed 10%. And this is how they treated me, when I hadn’t even asked them for money. Someone else did.

This is how churches treat their members: like con artists who are trying to rip them off. Imagine if you are poor and hungry and not a member of a church. Who will help you then? If churches won’t even help the people that they supposedly trust, why would they ever help the poor that they don’t know?

I believe that this is what has happened to churches because they associate themselves with the Republican party. They have allowed the money-worshipping capitalist doctrine of their chosen political party to infect the church, completely ignoring the actions and teachings of Christ. They have been told over and over that people are poor because they are not working hard enough or not trying hard enough. That’s how they treat people. If they really lived by the Bible, they would know that people are often poor by no fault of their own, because we live in a broken and fallen world.

As I’ve grown older and had some time away from the US to really examine what both sides are saying, I cannot support the Republican party. (I’m not really a Democrat either – I think both parties are beyond corrupt.) They have adopted Christian rhetoric only when it suits them, and they have attached themselves to anti-abortion causes only to lure believers into a party that, at its core, represents greed and violence. The Bible says that you cannot serve both God and money. More and more I believe that you really cannot serve both God and pure capitalism.

So I guess this is me, formally renouncing the Republican party.

I’ll throw a few links here at the bottom. Most of them will be from my Tumblr.

Financial Sector Profits Roar Back
A History of Bank Mergers in America
Abortion Tactics and Conflicted Moral Ambivalence
Everything summed up in three graphs
Corporate Tax Dodgers

I think I just caught tuberculosis on the bus.

Okay, so it has always been my understanding that when you get on a crowded bus and you have to sit on an aisle seat next to a stranger, the polite thing to do is to move to a free seat when the bus empties a bit. The guy next to me on the bus today apparently did not get that memo.

He got on early in my ride (I think near the center of Edinburgh). The bus was empty to the point where I could see empty seats in front of me by the time we got to Cameron Toll. And still the guy sat there next to me. Coughing and hacking like he might have tuberculosis. Coughing into his hand, and then resting it on the back of the seat in front of him. By Straiton, my back was starting to seize up from being stuck in the same position for, by then, about an hour. I was actually tempted to turn to the guy and tell him that there are plenty of free seats for him to spread his diseases to. But I’m way too introverted to do that. Instead, I’ll just whine on the internet about how rude and disgusting he was. He didn’t get off until a few stops before me. I dread to think what kind of foul diseases he has generously shared with me.

And yes, I washed my hands a lot when I got home. A lot.

“You look like you could be from Proctor”

In 2000 I went to Russia on a missionary trip with my church at the time, City Calvary Chapel (from Seattle). I was sick through most of the trip because of undiagnosed chronic stomach problems. Because of that, I was left in Moscow for several days while the rest of my group went on to Ryazan.

A few days later I joined the group in Ryazan and a man walked up to me and said, “You look like you could be from Proctor.” That man was Loren Harrison. He was from Duluth and had been told that a girl from Proctor (a suburb of Duluth) was part of our group from Seattle. He was kind and generous and in every way an example of a great Christian man. I found out that he went to the same church in Duluth as my parents, but didn’t really know them (it was a large church).

When I went back to Duluth for Christmas later that year I was able to introduce my parents to Loren, and also meet Loren’s wife and kids. My parents became fast friends with Loren and his family. In the intervening years, he has done missionary work all over Africa.

Loren suffered from a ruptured brain aneurysm earlier this week. He was airlifted to a hospital with skilled neurosurgeons in Minneapolis, but in spite of their best efforts, he never regained consciousness and passed away yesterday. He was 50 years old.

Loren loved helping people and did missionary work all over the world. He never saw an “us” and “them”, but understood that there are only different faces of “us”. Please pray for his family and friends as we are all struggling with losing someone so suddenly and so young. The world is a worse place with Loren no longer in it.

Plans and the absence thereof.

I haven’t been posting here. That is pretty obvious. I’ve been spending a lot of time reblogging stuff on Tumblr and sending out half-assed tweets, but I’ve mostly been laying low.

There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, I just don’t feel very witty or entertaining lately. I feel like anything I write here is going to be a disappointment after spending so long not writing here. And then it compounds the longer I fail to write.

I’m going to be flat-out honest about another reason I’m not posting here. Back in 2008 I left my job with the NHS under not very good circumstances. I had said some things about my job here that offended people. I also said things here that were in no way related to my job — in some cases written as much as 4 or 5 years before I even worked for the NHS — that was used against me in a complaint from my (now former) co-workers. So I am understandably wary about being honest on the internet. But enough time has passed now that I can be honest and mention that when I left that job, the boss basically threatened me and said that if I ever wrote anything negative about anyone working at the NHS again, she’d make sure I never got hired by anyone ever again.

So what has happened here lately? I got hired by a non-profit organization back in January, for a 6 month contract working in clinical trials. I worked those 6 months, and now I’m unemployed again, though I am working a few days this week at my old office as a consultant, to help them with a bit of a backlog.

During my time working there, we lost two of our guinea pigs. Elvis died from unknown causes. He lost weight and then eventually died. After he died, Fudge was distraught. He stopped eating and wasted away, dying about a month after Elvis. Apparently, Fudge didn’t know that it was time to eat if Elvis wasn’t there squeaking about it.

We are down to two pets. Spike is getting old. He’s nearly 6 years old, which is pretty ancient for a guinea pig. He never squeaks at dinner time. He hardly squeaks at all, so it’s been very quiet here. He’s developed an impacted anal gland, so husband has the unenviable job of cleaning out a smelly guinea pig ass every so often.

We still have our hamster Luna. She’s a terrible hamster. She bites and tries to escape and seems to be furious most of the time. I’ve never seen so much hate packed into such a tiny fluffy package. We can’t take her out and play with her because she has a taste for flesh. She doesn’t just bite because she is trying to figure out what your finger is. She bites because she knows it is your finger, and she hates you. We can’t even put her in a rolly ball thing because she can escape from them. Before we had Luna, I didn’t know that hamsters could hiss and growl.

At the moment, I’ve been working on writing more. Not here, obviously. But I’ve been working on a few fiction and non-fiction books that I’d like to write. So I’ve been writing about 1000 words a day, you just don’t get to read it. So far, we’ve been okay financially because I knew my last job was temporary, so I saved up a lot.

The plan is to move to the US sometime next year. Here’s the problem: I’m used to having a lot of paid vacation time, and basically unlimited sick leave, and free healthcare and a pretty good retirement plan. I’ve gotten spoiled living in Europe. I’ve gotten used to being treated like a human being, which is not really encouraged by American corporations. So I’ve looked around at jobs in America that have benefits comparable to those in Europe. So far the only job I’ve found is in Congress. So I might have to run for office when I go back to the US, because politicians are the only people in America who get the same benefits as average people in Europe.