The weird and wonderful world of corporate finance (by alaric)

Ok, so, let me start with this: I'm an engineer. I'm not an accountant or an economist or a hedge fund manager or anything.

However, I have studied those worlds from time to time for various reasons, and I've always kind of enjoyed it because it's a complex world of systems, and there's a lot of engineering behind it. But it's all explained in weird jargon and kind of inaccessible to engineers.

So, this blog post is my attempt to document the aspects of corporate finance I understand, but explained in a way that makes more sense to me, and hopefully to other engineers, or people who think they aren't engineers but are really.

If that sounds interesting to you, buckle up and let's get started!

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Tyroids and Singing (by sarah)

Back when covid hit I lost my voice - it was a whisper for about 18 months and the sore throat was horrendous. Of course we knew why this was as I was hospitalised with chest pains a few months after appearing to recover - my thyroid was inflamed, I did in fact have Grave's Disease or hyperthyroidism - it was over active and it had gone there from being slightly under active and the damage thyroids do isn't so much how high or low they are but the rapidity of that change - my eyes ached all the time but I was on medication relatively quickly and there was a lot of other stuff with mum etc going on. There wasn't really time to process it all.

Things improved and my voice came back and it wasn't quiet right, I always feel I have a lump in my throat and I find doing some of the sounds I used to hard... mainly I get coughing fits, and often I have a mild sore throat. Like my soft weirdly wide nails with ridges on them - they are kind of normal shape again - kind of but the ridgedness and softness remain - this is all just part of the corse with Grave's disease but the sore throat wasn't too bad and my voice was basically back so I started singing again - first at the monthly Folk Music Jam sessions, just whispers with the general melee, then I joined a Folk Choir that is lets you sing the part you want rather than being split into sopranos, altos etc... and then I joined a group called The Cryptid's and even wrote songs to make the general public sing!

I've got two project exploring voice coming up and I also got to be the Fairy Cryer and do announcements in my loud announcing voice including support from the actual Town Cryer - I even have my own bell for the role. And then a few weeks ago it happened...

The sensation of being strangled, the weird loud swallowing noise, wheezing and whistling when breathing which both kids hate and if I touch my neck I have like a flesh collar under the skin. The cough is worse, the sore throat worse - ear ache and my levels of tinnitus have shot up... and my voice is wavering, changing pitch and cracking randomly. And I have been blaming everything rather than facing the fact it's the thyroid again. I had been back under the GP's care for endocrine issues and I don't really want to trek back to the hospital but it is what it is. I have been mainly avoiding the Gloucester hospital since mum died and have been doing relatively well with that - I don't want to go to the hospital.

Its weird though because my main thing is that I really want to sing and that is the thing I have latched onto - if I have to have the thyroid removed what happens to my voice?

The Tangled Tale of My Career (by alaric)

I've been feeling a bunch of despair, boredom and ennui about my career lately; so I've decided to attack it in the way I know best - by writing about it.

When I was little, I wanted to be a scientist. Of course, that wasn't what I actually wanted - but popular media had created this vision of a mad scientist labouring in a lab making weird and wonderful things. I later learnt that what I wanted to be was called an "Inventor", which is a kind of engineer; the application of science to make things - the goal of building a fantastic machine is to get that fantastic machine, not to test some hypothesis. So it's definitely not science.

This was fed, in part, by the reading material I had around the house. My maternal grandparents had been an electrical engineer and a science teacher, respectively, so I had a mixture of O-level science textbooks and old cloth-bound tomes about electrical power distribution networks. Plus, my mother was a science fiction and fantasy fan, so I had stories like E. E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman books (epic space battles, written by an engineer so tending to linger on the technical details) inspiring me. I saw technology as a way of solving real problems, and I found learning about it fascinating, and the challenges were engaging - and what's even better, I found I had a knack for solving them. The future looked exciting!

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Eve and May (by sarah)

It is May, the beginning of May, the beginning of Summer - for some the new year begins now, what ever it is a time of new beginnings... except it is also when Mum was dying, it was an end, a birth to the after life maybe... a something and definitely a transition.

Tomorrow it will have been two yrs, we are only just sorting out her room... only just removing the broken stair lift (it couldn't be fixed metal had sheared off of it), only just paying off some of the stuff that needed paying off. We have only managed any of this with help - we found the roof had been leaking and teenagers swarmed the house and like a little chain of ants took ruined carpet and matrices to a small skip we had out the front. We made them sushi and they stayed to play video games and craft things afterwards - I cried because the teddy bear calendar had been moved - it was still in the configuration my dad had set it too. It had to be moved.

The house moves forward, into a new era, it is once more a big house - Jean has wondered off to University... there are no small children... it is strangly empty and yet not as we have a house full of stray animals... but it is different. Mary likes being able to use the computer more - the entertainment centre is back in the living room and we watch films and play games.

My health has not recovered from miscarriage, covid or looking after mum... but it has gotten better just not as much as I would have liked. And if I was angry about womb stuff before hand I am livid now... we had to go private to get teenage periods that were heavy enough to cause passing out looked at treated in any sort of reasonable time frame... and mum... mum who made sure I knew about periods before I had them because she hadn't and had thought she was dying when her's started... was still too embrassed to tell me she was having some problems in her 70's because everything about wombs and sex and often boobs... problems conceiving, loosing pregnancies, still births, abortion, periods, STDs, AIDS, problems both physical and mental after having a baby and even not wanting babies or sex... all of it is taboo still - all of it is not talked about.

And well I confronted her about blood... she had stage 4 womb cancer... with everything else that was happening it was a drop in the ocean of medical chaos at the time but involved us having to make "interesting" medical decisions, she had already had two different types of breast cancer (no really) which she had beat with operations, radiotherapy and the lighter end of chemo. They told us that it would only be pallative for the cancer but that it was initially advancing quiet slow - the treatments for it in the state she was in would likely have killed her but she was still scheduled to go on the lighter side of chemo etc... as she fought off infections it became aggressive and very quickly spreading. It still wasn't what killed her.

There was genetic testing and a want to stop this kind of thing happening in future - for womb and reproductive system health to stop being shunted to the side. I am sharing all of this with my mum's permission including that though she would never sign a Do Not Resuscitate or ask for no treatment whilst there was hope... she did decided to only take palliative care and go for quality of life over more invasive cancer treatments. I know some people felt this was me allowing mum to kill herself but it really wasn't and all the decisions where talked over endlessly with her and medical professionals. It was also not her only active cancer - she had a slow growing tumour on the adrenal gland.

But all that aside the womb cancer could have been found sooner... and this is the case for many and we don't talk about it... lives are lost needlessly because we won't talk. Before covid I had a set of workshops I had created specifically to try and break these barriers down - the conversations can save lives. Even nurses attending the workshops told me they had suffered and talked about stuff with colleagues or gone to the drs. Stephen Kings mother died because this very thing and that is before we even look at how birth control has been used untested and has its origins in eugenics, or how pain is dismissed as hysteria or aesthetics denied because you managed a vaginal birth so you'll be fine with pain...

This was why I started The Glass Pelvis, and the more I looked the worse it got.

All of this and more is bumbling around my brain - and it is two yrs since mum died, five since dad died and mum basically gave up on life, six since I the miscarriages.

I am a mess, I am still on a crutch... but it is much better than it was... I like to earn medals - you know those race at your own pace type thingies and after mum died I did a Golden Heart challenge with Medal Mad inscribed for her. Then last yr I did the Fogetmeknot medal to remember dad - he always thought he'd be forgotten... ironically or the universe joking with me... I forgot to get the inscription done - Alaric says we can take it and have his name added to it at a shop in Gloucester. I also dragged the family into memorial walks for diabetes, cancer and dementia charities.

This year I have chose Get Lippy 60k in May from the Eve Appeal which is a charity that deals with gynea cancers of which there are five main ones. Womb cancer is of course one of them.

Walking is hard for me and oftentimes painful but there will be dedicated walks for this with live streaming from the me only ones and I am resurrecting my walking group but under the new name Wandering Stars who I plan to walk with on Friday's. I am happy to go visiting country parks and things with people too or do the odd evening if peeps want to join me.

You can of course sponsor me and help raise money for the charity - here is my just giving page:

https://www.justgiving.com/page/sarah-snell-pym-get-lippy--eve-appeal?utm_medium=fundraising&utm_content=page%2Fsarah-snell-pym-get-lippy--eve-appeal&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=pfp-share

Gloucester Story Telling Cafe – Stories and Songs For May (by sarah)

After last months amazing first birthday bash The Gloucester Story Telling Cafe is hitting it's second yr running with the fabulous Cath Little as guest storyteller and Jessica Law as guest musician. It is very exciting to be able to bring such fantastic artists to Gloucester and to hear everyone sharing!

I can not express the joy it has given me, Jane and Deborah to watch the cafe grow and bloom in this way.

It is the fist Thursday of every month at The Folk of Gloucester a fabulous timber framed building that looks like it is from a fantasy story itself!

Doors open at 7 pm for a 7:30 pm start.

99-103 Westgate Street - just down from the Cathedral and it used to be the Folk Museum and then The Life Museum.

It is pay what you want and as well as our monthly guests we have an open mic - 10 mins max and welcome all forms of story telling within in that so bring you personal anecdotes. flash fiction, traditional tale, shaggy dog story, musical ballard and share!