The D stands for Disappointment
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jenaciousd.bsky.social
The D stands for Disappointment
@jenaciousd.bsky.social
430 followers 680 following 1.2K posts
Midlife crisis, hyperfixations, cats, watercolours. Chronic fatigue and depression / anxiety. I need a nice cup of tea and a hug. PhD student in microfluidics with the OU.
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jenaciousd.bsky.social
(sincere moment) If there’s anything I can take off your plate and get done for you, lmk. I mean it.

(back to regular awfulposting) Have some silly shit to take your mind off things
January 16, 2026 at 11:21 AM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
No new pictures where are you mentally
Photo of a green parakeet. It’s wearing a green wig. With a blunt fringe and plaits that come out of the sides and curl back round. The bird looks rather pleased with itself and also as if it is planning trouble. The text reads Me: why am I so broke? Amazon: your parrot’s wig has been delivered Screw cap of a tweet by @alicegoldfuss (who I do not know). It reads: when I say “I need a vacation” I mean I want to be placed in a terrarium and have someone else be responsible for keeping me alive It’s dated 2022, either 9 January or 1 September. Who knows. A screencap from Our Flag Means Death. Ed (Taika Waititi) is skidding forward on one knee across sand, and is labelled “all my problems”. Behind him, a British naval officer has been sent flying, is currently airborne and upside down, and is labelled “me”. This is why I need to be stored in a terrarium for a couple of weeks while All My Shit is sorted out by someone else.
January 13, 2026 at 5:14 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
My local one, when I was growing up
A photo of the street sign for “Carters Lane, known as Wibbly Wobbly lane”. It’s just outside Hitchin, and is the location of Wobbly Bottom Farm (which makes amazing goats’ cheese).
January 8, 2026 at 1:42 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
I put the purple blanket down to keep cat hair off the sofa, so obviously Ripley sleeps underneath it.
A small fluffy black cat is nesting under a purple blanket on a purple sofa. She was not amused when I pulled back the blanket to take this photo. A fluffy black cat and a pointy ginger one are asleep under a pale grey blanket. They are facing each other and only their heads (and a bit of one black arm) are showing.
January 8, 2026 at 1:30 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Not a pig in a hat, but an unprompted #Franimals offering. Seasonal, innit.
A Robinturong. It has a binturong’s head, hind legs, and tail, and a European robin’s body and wings. I’m sure it still smells of popcorn, but robins are fighty little sods and I wouldn’t want to get close enough to check.
January 3, 2026 at 9:45 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Sketch of a pig. It is wearing a bowler hat. It’s also wearing the rest of Liza Minnelli’s best-known outfit from Cabaret.
January 3, 2026 at 9:19 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
No cheating. Reskeet with the most recent picture of your pet.

This is the most recent of each.
Elsa, a 15 year old Siamese x ginger tom, 1 kidney, the brain cells of every other ginger cat on the planet. She’s asleep on her side between my legs and the arm of a purple sofa, looking very round. Her feets are tucked into her tummy fur, and her ears are enormous. Ripley, a 13 year old ball of black fluff, is yawning while side-lit by an electric heater. Her top canines and incisors are visible, and one of her lower canines is, sort of, if you look closely. No teeth behind her canines are showing because she doesn’t have any. What sort of ridiculous animal absorbs the roots of its own teeth? Anyway, she’s very pretty and very dim, and has become top cat in the house just by doing what she wants and never realising that she’s usually the reason she sometimes gets walloped. Bruce Banner, a formerly (still mostly) feral enormous black cat of unknown age and background. He’s sitting half next to me on the sofa, and half on one of my legs. From this angle you can see how wide his head is but not how abysmally scruffy he is - he only washes his face, paws, and bum, and won’t let me help.
January 3, 2026 at 8:47 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
…
My 2026 word is, apparently, “sloppy”.
January 1, 2026 at 6:41 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
The best thing about taming a wild animal* is that he’s seen horrors far beyond those of fireworks and so is supremely unbothered, and that’s taught the girls that they don’t need to be scared either.

*Bruce Banner, who was technically feral (not stray) but might as well have been wild.
Elsa, a ginger tabby Siamese cross, is fast asleep on a purple sofa next to my leg. She goes beautifully round when relaxed. She dozed like this all through the new year fireworks.
January 1, 2026 at 12:51 AM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
I’m either a bird, or a painter of birds.
The front cover of “Painting Birds - Expressive Watercolour Techniques” by Sarah Stokes. The cover art is a pair of psittacines (possibly parakeets?) on a branch. They are seen from behind, and are snuggled up together. One has its head rotated and buried in it shoulder feathers. They are both red-yellow on their bodies, shading into dark blue-green tails. The painting is tight and representational (lifelike and detailed) around their heads, and gradually becomes more loose and expressive (less detail, more impressions and spatters) towards the edges.
December 30, 2025 at 2:17 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
This stuff is dangerous. It’s like Bailey’s, but spiced rum instead of whiskey.

Also it’s called BUMBU.
A bottle of BUMBU CREAM. The bottle is opaque white, with a gold coloured X on the front. Apparently it’s a cream-based drink with rum and spices, and is a product of Panama.
December 30, 2025 at 12:27 AM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Not quite accurate, since number theory was my least favourite bit of my entire BSc -MSc journey, but maths is maths.
The front cover of the “Think Of A Number” book, which was a tie-in to the TV series. Among the things on the cover are Johnny Ball (wearing a crown and clutching a whole lot of Stuff), a large calculator, a plant, La Gioconda, and the constituent parts of the human body (8 pints of “blood”, a sack of coal, etc).
December 27, 2025 at 4:34 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
It’s the sea! On Christmas morning!
Southwold beach, ~9.15am Christmas Day. The sun is low and a strong wind from the left (north) has made really cool shadows on drifts of sand behind pebbles. Southwold Beach. The wind is blowing the seafoam up onto the sand. The tide is coming in faster than I realised, which is why I now have slightly damp boots. Sizewell B nuclear power plant, as seen from Southwold Beach. I fully trust the science behind nuclear power. I trust physicists. I do not trust politicians and I do not trust the effects of capitalism on health and safety measures. Very windy indeed. I (a middle aged white woman in a pale blue cable knit jumper, leather jacket, and glasses (which have slid down my nose)) am being blown about in the sea wind. My hair is going everywhere.
December 25, 2025 at 10:03 AM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Tbf I lost the morning to Bruce Banner, who’s discovering laps. It’s taken him since 2019 to be brave enough to lie half on me, so I wasn’t about to disturb him.
December 23, 2025 at 6:20 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Definitely my Badminton Gallery!
Rory Kinnear as Chauncey Badminton, painted in the style of the Obama HOPE poster. Instead of that, it reads EMPIRE. Three Badminton Moon. Rory Kinnear x 3, in grey scale, with wolf like necks, and a full moon. Warhol’s Badminton. 4 repeated “prints” (painted individually) of Rory Kinnear as Nigel Badminton. The deep shadows are black, his hair yellow, and the colours of each are red, green, orange, and blue.
December 23, 2025 at 5:00 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Oh no.
I am sitting with my legs folded on a purple sofa. I’m wearing a green top and jeans that are black under the cat hair. One of the major donors of the cat hair (Ripley) has nested in my legs and is showing no signs of moving. She is a tiny cat in a huge fur coat, which is mostly black with gingery highlights and grey tufts. She appears very stern; she’s probably just waiting for a thought to pass by.
December 23, 2025 at 4:02 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Make This A Thing.
Me. In my kitchen. Wearing a Winter Soldier Christmas jumper (shades of blue with a grey star on the chest and one grey arm with a red star on the shoulder). I am a middle aged white woman with dark brown hair back in a loose ponytail, and rectangular glasses. I’m wearing black skinny jeans and socks (you can only see one) that are white with black squiggles. I have one hand on my knee and the other (the metal arm one) on my hip. My foot is up on the kitchen counter. I am 160cm tall; the counter is slightly higher than crotch height. This explains my expression.
December 17, 2025 at 1:14 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
#ArtAdventCalendar Did another Google-version-of-Zoom thing last night.
#watercolour #BirdArt #GenAICanGetInTheBin
A watercolour and pen painting of a puffin (head and shoulders). The puffin is wearing a red and white striped bobble hat and has 5 green & blue stripy fish in its beak. One of the fish has a gift tag that reads “Merry Fishmas”. The painting is very splashy and loose, with the outlines more of a suggestion than a boundary between colours. There are bluish splodges in the background, with runs and bleeds between the colours. Over it all are some spatters of white and dark blue. All in all, I really like how this turned out because I’m usually a lot more controlled and careful with paint. If I do it again, I’ll mix the dark feather colour to be more grey - it was an hour and a half class and I didn’t have time to adjust it.
December 12, 2025 at 7:20 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Today’s #ArtAdventCalendar. I did an online “Paint a pigeon” class via Eventbrite.
Watercolour painting with ink pen and a touch of white gouache. It’s a very splattery, scribbly, pigeon facing left but with its head turned right. It has a big green splodge in its throat, pink on its tummy, and bits of blue on and under its wing. There’s a big streak of pink outside the lines, a patch of blue, and lots of splashes of pink from whacking my brush with a finger. The class was 90 minutes. It felt rushed but was a whole lot of fun.
December 4, 2025 at 11:18 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
#ArtAdventCalendar No, there was never any chance I’d remember every day.
2 pencil sketches from the medieval fair at Stow cum Quy on 30 August. On the left, a bearded man in a doublet, holding a longbow. On the right, a leather boot with the top folded over, laced up the side (in a holding it together way, not as a means of getting them on or off). They are very quick & scribbly. The proportions are reasonable, but you could never pick the man out of a line up unless he was with 5 short skinny women. Still, the exercise was quick sketches from life and I’m happy with the results.
December 3, 2025 at 11:50 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
#ArtAdventCalendar

bsky.app/profile/jayi...
Watercolour and gel pen painting of a mug and teapot. The mug is short and wide, lime green with an orange ring round the top edge, white inside, and has STAY WEIRD written on it in white. The teapot is also wide and squat, small, and tiger print: the top is gingery orange and it fades into cream at the bottom. I called this “My teapot’s too small” because that is the smallest mug I have, and the teapot only holds enough to fill it once, kinda.
December 1, 2025 at 7:37 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
I have So Much funeral admin (and housework) to do and yet have only managed 30 minutes of art today.

This was not that 30 minutes. This is that 30 minutes and 2 previous hours, across chunks of time of various lengths.
Photo of an in-progress study of a (British) goldfinch’s head, in pastel pencil on Pastelmat. The head and shoulder feathers are getting there (the black bits need a lot of work, and Bruce Banner trod on the white). The beak was today’s 30 minutes and is about 95% done (and hence looks almost but not quite ok). Its eye is still an empty void, showing the bare card (colour “sanguine”). The background is smudgy greens, with more smudging to come once I’ve made all the mistakes round the edges. You can still see the texture of the sanding in places; I like this sometimes, but not in this piece. It’s 8cm square and the edges are taped off with masking tape covered in bumble bees.
November 29, 2025 at 5:38 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Litlington could be a good nickname. The other two… not so much.
Screenshot of a mapp showing Shingay cum Wendy, Abington Pigotts, and Litlington. All fine baby names / nicknames.
November 26, 2025 at 5:06 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
I am going to adopt this tradition with our heirloom powdered eggs.
A gold-painted tin of powdered eggs, provided by the US “For European Recovery”. Gran originally got them; Mum inherited them; then Sister did. They’ve never been opened.
November 26, 2025 at 12:22 PM
jenaciousd.bsky.social
Some of my favourites:
Screenshot of a map app (a mapp?) showing Great Bradley and Little Bradley (Suffolk). Screenshot of a mapp showing Nasty (Herts) Screenshot of a mapp showing the lake called Hen Poo (Scottish Borders). Screenshot of a mapp showing Six Mile Bottom (Cambs). Dick White Referrals is a veterinary specialist but too well-named to crop out.
November 26, 2025 at 12:10 PM