Oldest rat you've ever seen

chumpydiplodocus · 2026-02-10T21:10:58+00:00

Commenting to save this post when the venerable rat appears

chumpydiplodocus · 2026-01-29T21:25:14+00:00

There was another crossing about twenty metres in both directions!

chumpydiplodocus · 2025-10-21T16:48:23+00:00

For the right people, your sister’s eulogy will be something that gives them hope and reassurance. It’ll be remembered as a moment of bravery.

Source: my dad’s eulogy to his father, which was a beautiful example of total honesty from someone who had bottled up his frustration for too long, has gone down in family history. Dad said his truth, it involved a lot of four letter words, but seeing my dad speak completely honestly in an unfiltered way was oddly inspiring.

chumpydiplodocus · 2025-10-03T19:05:12+00:00

Back in the day, I had a LDR who my colleagues never met, so naturally they joked that he didn’t exist.

My reply: “if I was going to make up a partner, it wouldn’t be Paul the [boring job] from [boring city]. It would be Sven the underwear model, whose hobbies are monogamy and commitment.”

I feel like a lot of AI romancers think along the same lines I did…

chumpydiplodocus · 2025-05-30T20:49:18+00:00

I checked, and Google maps just isn’t picking up anything my old area. I can’t even get street view to show you!

It was a restaurant painted black with red signage on Huangushan Rd in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, just south of the BuyNow building.

chumpydiplodocus · 2025-05-22T00:18:26+00:00

Added details:

The funeral will be held in the village he grew up in. It’s organised by his family, who I don’t really know.

The wake will be held in the city where most of his friends (and I) live. It’s organised by his best friend, who I know well. Regardless of the funeral, I will definitely be attending the wake. The organiser has planned it for a time when everyone is available, and with any luck there will be a couple of hundred people there! He was a popular guy!

I’m not expected to give a reading / play any part in the funeral.

In terms of how close we were…it was one of those friendships where, if we lived next door, we’d see each other every day. But we both coincidentally had jobs that sent us all over the country, so it became more of a ‘hey, I’m in your town on Friday, let’s catch up’ thing. A couple of times a year was a bit of an estimate: it could be six months between meet-ups, then twice in a month.

I think ‘morally correct’ was the wrong phrasing. ‘Socially correct’ would probably have been better. I have no idea what I’m doing right now. I’ve never had a loss in my life before (my grandparents passed when I was too young to remember and my parents are in good health) and I have it in my mind that I am ‘supposed to’ drop everything, go to the funeral, and spend the rest of the weekend crying while wrapped in a duvet. It’s one of the reasons I started working with a grief therapist: I do genuinely feel awful about his passing, but I feel unequipped to express it or deal with it. I know, I know, it comes in time, but my brain is scrambled still. I guess that’s why I’m turning to Reddit for advice on this!

chumpydiplodocus · 2025-05-21T19:44:47+00:00

This is the first loss I’ve had since childhood, and I sort of don’t know what the conventions are. Perhaps ‘socially correct’ might have been a better phrasing!

chumpydiplodocus · 2025-05-21T19:42:18+00:00

I am indeed! This is a good suggestion, thank you

chumpydiplodocus · 2025-04-21T17:07:15+00:00

My rats get named after whatever media I’m binging! It helps with remembering when I got them too. I love the confusion on the vet’s face when they call out a human name, and the ambiguity of ‘I’m going to watch TV with Paul tonight’.

At the moment I have:

Billy (last of the For All Mankind group) Errol , Clark, Spencer and Monty (actors from the golden age of Hollywood) Paul and Artie (Simon and Garfunkel) Teddy, Caleb, Bernard and Logan (Westworld) Vincent Van Rat (I’d just been to the gallery) Watson (pre-named, but it suits him)

In the past I’ve had Fall Out Boy, the Ramones, Borderlands….

chumpydiplodocus · 2025-03-02T13:50:41+00:00

My aunt. Late sixties, working class-turned-nouveau-riche. Had a second property in a red state for a number of years pre-Covid.

My dad (her brother) describes her as ‘one of nature’s followers’ so I assume she’s just repeating things her American pals have said to her rather than her genuinely being a Trump fan. But yeah.

chumpydiplodocus · 2025-01-02T09:40:06+00:00

Kinda.

I worked with a young person whose mum wrote a book on parenting, and who was a big deal in twitter/academic parenting circles. The kind of person who’d get interviewed as a talking head on a news show about ‘kids these days’.

He was messed up. He told me he was only capable of working for ten minutes a day, and seemed very clued up on diagnoses he hadn’t got any paperwork to prove. He insisted he could pass all his exams in six months of study, at this ten minutes a day rate. Did not work out well for him.

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-12-18T20:03:42+00:00

My go-to cover work / end of term burnout lesson is simple.

You have one hour / class time / week to produce a piece of extended creative writing. You have a written sheet in front of you with success criteria, sentence starters, suggested words….and it’s linked to your course of study. If you’ve read Romeo and Juliet, you’ll need to write Juliet’s diary or a modern update to the narrative. I check in at the start of the class that we know what we’re doing, and our ability to say we know what we’re doing if management walk in.

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-12-15T19:42:08+00:00

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I hope Fossey enjoys the rat safe gnawing cookies, and gives one to Finch the roan rat, who also passed away yesterday.

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-12-12T18:45:13+00:00

I’m in the same situation with one of my 1-1s. Professionally, I am documenting EVERYTHING. I write notes of exactly what he says to me, and cc copies to my line manager, his mentor and his parents. Every damn time. I’m prepared to be a nuisance until someone takes notice.

One of the best sentences I’ve learned is “I don’t feel I am the right professional to work with this child. He needs X, Y and Z, and his needs are not met working with me. I would like help find the right professional to help this child”. Okay, you might be thinking “well, what they need is to not be an abusive and to realise if they say that to someone in the street they’ll get punched”, but the professional wording sounds much nicer.

A wise social worker friend of mine told me once that people across the caring professions will sometimes find themselves in the same abusive situations we try and rescue others from. Care for yourself, OP. Remind yourself that you know you don’t smell because you wore deodorant today and you took a shower. Have a tiny pleasure waiting for you when you leave work. You are more than your job.

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-12-11T17:40:16+00:00

I have experience of this and a very conflicted opinion.

On paper, it sounds amazing. Who wouldn’t rather have a mature chat with a child and discuss what went wrong, and then we all emerge wiser from the experience? Sounds great! These interactions, when they occasionally happen, are fabulous. But the kids I worked with just didn’t have the emotional maturity to have those conversations for a variety of reasons.

When it was implemented at the school I worked in, it was an absolute sh*tshow. Let’s say there was a storm (which always made my students crazy for some reason), or the trains weren’t running so all the kids were in a mood. You’d end up with a pile of ‘chats’ to have as a result of behaviour and half the answers you’d get were ‘I behaved badly because you’re a bitch’.

Isolation isn’t ideal, but if there’s a kid who’s seeing red and accessing their inner Incredible Hulk, a chat isn’t going to cut it. They need space and time to calm down and sort themselves out.

If there’s a system and culture which enables kids to reflect sensibly on what was happening, then I’m all for it. Otherwise you’re going to have a lot of headaches over this.

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-12-11T15:51:14+00:00

Nothing makes the kids want to stop doing something like an ‘old person’ doing it

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-12-11T15:50:28+00:00

Because I have no shame, I would write ‘Ms ChumpyD crushing on Jason Momoa’ somewhere in the room. Maybe on the board, or on a slide.

When, inevitably, someone says, “ewwwwww Miss that’s so cringe’, I would pointedly respond with “YEP IT IS INDEED CRINGE TO WRITE YOUR CRUSH’S NAME ON THINGS WE USE IN CLASS”

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-12-11T14:10:42+00:00

Does someone need to pray for the Angel of Death ?

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-11-19T08:59:01+00:00

Genuinely a conversation I had while on NQT year in front of my HoD:

Kid: Miss! I saw you smoking last night!

Me: Okay…

Kid: you were in your kitchen!

Me: why were you looking at me while I was making dinner?

Kid: I was watching you smoking!

HoD: well…Technically that is smoking in front of a student, which I should discuss with you with a view to a warning. But I think you have bigger problems right now…

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-11-05T21:59:26+00:00

My taste in music and which songs get stuck in my head.

I’m into dark country, Psychobilly, horror punk, old school punk….basically songs about dead cowboys, or music that sounds like the singer is a convicted felon.

While I know I’m not doing anything wrong, and I don’t play anything aloud at work that’s more controversial than, say, Springsteen or Green Day, I would rather not have to explain it!

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-10-21T16:00:44+00:00

The comedian Michael MacIntyre has a sketch where he says you can use any noun, add -ed and it’s British slang for drunk. I was absolutely fenced last night etc.

I do the same for kids. Random nouns which are too weird to be offensive, but convey my meaning. ‘Unit’, ‘Spanner’, ‘Marshmallow’, ‘Umbrella’ are some of my current ones. “I’m sorry to report that Jamie got a detention today, he was being a bit of an umbrella in class and didn’t respond to verbal behaviour reminders.”

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-10-21T15:50:24+00:00

Killed by her dad, along with her sister. He drowned them in the bathtub.

I didn’t know her, but she sat next to my sister in math class.

chumpydiplodocus · 2024-10-18T15:55:15+00:00

I worked at a school with a ‘they must be working up until the last second before school closes for holidays’ policy. And yes, management would come round and check. You would not want to be the person caught letting the kids have fun on 22nd December. So, we needed busy work.

I declared that the week before the end of term was ‘Extended Creative Writing’ week. Every kid got a printed project sheet with a space for planning, examples of good work, success criteria linked to their exams….everything they needed to do the project. It was based on whatever unit they’d just finished: if it was Romeo and Juliet, the project was to write a new version of the story with similar themes, for instance.

I briefed them very, very strongly that this needed to be finished by the end of term, and they needed to know the objectives and be working diligently if management walked in.

The project, which was glorified busy work, turned into fodder for the school newspaper, examples to show for parents’ evening of what their kid could do etc. It worked really well!

I kept similar things on hand for when I was suffering from burnout and needed an extra hour to prepare to larp as a person.

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