Christmas pause 2025

 The pause comes earlier to this blog as we prepare for Christmas with quite a bit to do when it comes to visits, shopping and dealing with a few medical issues with dad.

Wishing all a Very Happy Christmas  and all the best for 2026.

 

The nom time of the year

Yes it's getting to that time of the year and guess what? In all this grump messed up craziness I got one!

With the help of the Teddy Bears, I can count down the days toward Christmas while noming on small squares of milk chocolate.

Don't ask what other folks may make of it but if I feel the need to have an Advent Calendar then I do and other peoples opinions don't come into it.

In other news, our community Christmas Tree is up, decorated, fully illuminated and carol singing whereas the Council tree is much smaller but has four penguins by it.

I don't know what penguins have to do with Christmas but still.. 

1,300th post

Do you know something? This happens to be1300th post here at The Dorm which is quite a milestone (not a Millstone) in its history.

 Indeed it almost never really got started between pressures from my career and having an early version of a blogging tool that was used for more mainstream "big" posts  and if you really want to know the truth, actually I'd of much sooner just had this one cos it's everything about me.

When I say everything, I mean starting with having this very much childlike (but not childish) little girl side that has never gone away , enjoying the simpler things of life like dolls, teddies, engaging in children's games and interests.

It's taken me to different places, meeting some remarkable people who share the same side mixed in with their more groan up side all trying to balance both sides of themselves and sometimes with having partners too.

It's also the only blog that deals with an important side of my life quite openly, that I am transgendered and how that taps into issues from my own childhood, having an inner girl child and has lead to me presenting as that female both at home and increasingly in the presence of others, something that has helped me an awful lot.

Our community, the alg community, has supported in its own way, me in all of this.
In this blog I do talk from time to time about things such as music, books and anime which have been great interests of mine for a while but in a different way, more from how they tie into my past and the child within me which sometimes by accident has occurred elsewhere as ultimately I can only be me wherever I may post.

To mark the occasion of this 1,300th post we've taken a break as I was editing iD tags for some music files that were messed up before loading in the micro sd card. We all know that stuff often needs sorting.

The countdown before CatMas continues next week.

School girl tech

Every modern young lady I ever met had some interest in music  whither or not it was just about the look and fashion of the artists, just singing the songs and usually some way of playing our favourite music.

Obviously with changing times, what it is we have changes as some products come to the end of their lives and others replace them and so while I was infatuated at one time with reels of tape, also I was an early adopter of the Japanese craze of the MiniDisc although that technology has come to something of a dead end with the discontinuing of recorders.

I have had personal digital audio players using either downloaded albums or home made copies, not least the Sandisk Clip Zip and a few Fiio models that offered better ergonomics and better sound but the current drive towards everything being Andriod based with swiping action is difficult for some of us with limited dexterity.

But I did need the ability to have bigger capacity cards and be free from the 5,800 song limit for indexing of older players.

Enter the Fiio X5 Mark II.

It's a digital audio player for sure but it is designed from the ground up to sound really good starting with using the same chip to convert the zeroes and ones of digital to analogue sound  as a £400 separate cd player and a very high quality headphone stage that cures at the outset the problem of not enough of and the failure to reproduce fully, the sound even from iTunes or better quality Mp3 albums.

Then there is the fact it also plays not only regular 16 bit lossless (Flac) downloads and home copied files equalling the full quality of a cd, it plays 24 bit better than cd ones too (192/24 being its limit) and it sounds on headphones better than many separates.

Critically it takes two cards that can be indexed together so two 128 gb cards can be indexed which helps with lossless files as to get the better sound they give, they do use more space per individual track.

In the UK you can by cd and better than cd  quality downloads from Presto who do Classical music and 7Digital as well as the French Qobuz company for much else like rock and pop.

Generally I tend to compile cards by genre finding it easier to find the recordings I want that way helping with swapping out - I keep mine in a single plastic pouch per card with the title on a sticky label inside a wallet folder.

The kicker though is it for once has a proper line level output just like a cd player rather than relying on a crummy headphone stage with its built in restrictions, so armed with lossless files it sounds equal to or actually better than a dedicated cd player.

It also has a coaxial digital output so you could use it as a sd card transport to a dedicated hifi digital to analogue convertor too.

Throw in the ability to play from a charger while charging and you too can be listening in really high quality to all those files while being portable enough to carry around with you.

This will work as much as the M21 is the better bet with 24 bit classical downloads for it's massive 2tb capacity.

Looking beyond the nine to three forty-five

The other blog (and it's template) tended to look things from a female explorative and school girlish angle while here tended to centred very around school girl or wanna be school girl life and looks but as time goes on, topics well covered or changes creep in what we post does alter.

It's fair to say what we were posting from around 2014 through 2018 isn't because of changes in circumstances and as ever you've always had to be aware of Bloggers restrictions (and revisions of). 

 

Beyond of that school girl look - some have rooms full of full uniforms - the teen fashion concious girl with skater skirts and big bold strips has always been a favourite of mine.

While with my condition fussy fastenings are something I would need help with and heels being a no go with being very unstable on my feet I do love a more girlie satin dress look with frills and pretty bows as whenever I have managed it it just felt "right".

I'd love to be in that picture. 

Weeks happenings

Well it has been a rough old week with the grump getting super stroppy arguing black really is white, telling you things weren't there when it was they'd put them away in a confused state and refusing to recognize that having having checked with them making plain just what was for them alone, they allege you didn't get what they wanted.

Thankfully we've calmed down somewhat over the last couple of days so at least we were able to watch the Remembrance Sunday parade without any atmospheres.

Somehow yesterday moving from where I was sleeping to getting up I got cramp in my left legfrom just below the knee to a little above the ankle with severe muscle pains so I wasn't able to move at all for several minutes and spent the rest of the day hobbling about with my walking stick going room to room.

It'll most likely subside over time given some rest but carrying things with one hand taken up with your walking stick takes some getting used to.

Thoughts about lessons

 

Well we're still playing catch up here with being away but that was different this time as school was shut so no lessons in ancient measurements that I never use or worse still trying to calculate capacity, area and co to formulas I do understand but involving a whole batch of converting one unit within the same system to another.

When you have well documented difficulties with number work from birth it's expecting a lot for me to do that that especially as generally speaking the Metric system is all tens hundred and thousands and so on and noticably easier for me to use.

I suspect some people never really got over the changes and those in industries that hadn't seen much investment in new equipment tended to stick with old ways as even in the late 1980's City and Guilds were still doing vocational exams in Imperial even though as school leavers we were metricated. 

I much prefer English Literature and the Humanities to be honest especially when they can be combined with Field Trips which okay we have stuff to take in and worksheets you take around and complete it just seems more "real" to me.