Good morning, Grumplestiltskin! And other conversations with our toddler...

Grumpy 2 y.o. was whining when we got him up from his cot this morning...

Daddy: do you want a nappy change?
G2yo: NO! No nappy change!!
Daddy: do you want a hug?
G2yo: NO! NO HUG!
Daddy: do you want to be grumpy then?
G2yo: NO! No be grumpy!! (said most grumpily)
we're around the corner trying not to laugh out loud.

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We're making dinner last night, and having cheese on crackers to stave off the hunger until the soup is ready. We offer E-chan cheddar on a cracker, but he sees us having camembert...

E-chan: more, more cheese?!
Mummy: oh, you want posh cheese do you?
E-chan: posh cheese! posh cheese!!

(by the way, he can also say "parmesan cheese")

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The vocab is increasing at an explosive rate now! It's amazing. Almost everything we say gets parroted, as if he's just testing the words out, trying them on for size, finding out how they sound coming from his own lips. Sometimes we are bowled over, sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes, we realise we need to be careful what we say... (e.g. shouldn't say "big stinky poo", "oh crap", or "bugger")

themes...

Isolation... Of not having a working phone or internet for a while (not just us it seems…) and not being able to talk to our dearest and not-so-nearest. Of being too busy doing stuff for our new house and missing some regular activities. Of not knowing if it will be affordable to visit my sibling in Japan in coming years due to rising airfares. Of not knowing who we can ask for help at very short notice when our child is sick, without interrupting people at work, or infecting other kids. Of getting used a new neighbourhood and not knowing where is the closest place to buy milk, when there used to be a shop downstairs from your old place. Of not having the equivalent of the friendly lady from the Lebanese takeaway shop – who is now a 20 minute walk away, during which your felafel would get cold on the way home. Of noticing the neighbours from over the hallway came out to chat to the removal guys the day we moved, but haven’t come over to introduce themselves to us even though we moved in over 3 weeks ago. Of wondering why people seem to fear the simple politeness of introducing themselves to their neighbours, as if it will lead to countless requests to borrow some sugar (as if that would be so terrible).

Worry... that civilisation is downhill from here, that we seem to be grasping for an idea of how life is headed. That parts of our society that have been commonplace for 50 years may be on their way out, and wishing I’d talked to my grandparents more about how life was during the depression, so that I might be better prepared. Worrying that I might not have enough practical skills, that I’m not resourceful enough. Worrying that certain parts of our current life would be irrelevant in a society less affluent than today's. Worrying that my last apostrophe is in the wrong place. Worrying that I don't make enough effort to buy second-hand furniture. Wondering how we can change our stupid halogen downlights in our new place into something more energy efficient. Because we all keep getting sick, and that I am using up all my sick leave too quickly. That I need a holiday but don't know when I can do it.

Hope... because we are showing signs of adapting to our new surroundings, and our son is adapting too, despite having been moved from the only home he’s known. That the (slightly older) kids in our neighbourhood play cricket in the closed off bit of laneway near our house while one of the mums looks on. That friends and family make contact – eventually! That other owner-occupiers in our unit complex do strike up conversations, even tell you their first names and where they live, and are as concerned about the management of the place as you are. Of babies just born and babies just about to be...

economic cycles

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2008/2296549.htm

I caught the end of this interview on Radio National - recommended listening. No transcript as yet, but you can listen to the recording at the above link.

my frankly vulgar green pullover (part 10?)

Things are getting a bit dire in the wardrobe stakes if the best you can muster to wear to work on a COLD COLD day is too-long denim jeans that you haven’t managed to take up yet, brown, ankle-high boots, and a green roll-neck jumper. A jumper that you later realise has a small hole in the back and that’s right – I’d forgotten - a bit of wool has caught and won’t go back in place from when you borrowed your brothers jacket and it had inward facing rough Velcro on it, silly. Oh and a shapeless dark grey coat to wear outside.

I sometimes like to think that it is good not to be obsessed with appearance. My scale of things I make time for during leisure time:

High – seeing friends and talking to family, eating nice food (including shopping for it), thinking and talking about stimulating and important issues (!)
Medium – watching a few certain television programs (even if recorded and watched later), exercise, reading, listening to music, bitching and moaning
Low – waxing, haircutting, applying makeup, shopping for clothes*, styling hair
Virtually never – colour hair, paint nails, drawing#*, painting* and sewing*

* I have to say I enjoy doing, but OPPORTUNITIES ARE RARE WHEN YOU HAVE A TODDLER WITH YOU MUCH OF THE TIME!!
# excluding texta scribbles in scrapbooks, which I’m doing lots of at present

So you see, even exercise ranks higher than grooming. But all this is hardly virtuous if you start each day struggling to put together a look you are happy with from your wardrobe, want to get rid of half of it but then you’d only have half a wardrobe, or be wearing the same thing over and over… hardly proves you are not preoccupied with appearance, does it?

So Monday, I planned to spend a clothing voucher, but ran out of time. The other week, I got a wax for the first time in god knows how long (I was getting horrified glances at my middle regions from young girls in the showers at the swimming pool! I could almost see them alarmed at the thought that they might end up like this at the onset of puberty!!) Now I just need to take care of my legs; but then, it’s winter, right? Tomorrow night, I’m having my first hair cut in over 6 months (things got a bit awkward with my regular hairdresser once they messed up an appointment and I couldn’t reschedule due to flying out interstate the next day, so I’m trying a new one…)

I noticed a groovy little 2nd hand clothes store not 5 minutes from my new home. Maybe that will help? And Angel finally gave me a solution to my longstanding problem in finding knee high boots that fit my what apparently are MASSIVE calves (if average boots are anything to go by) – a friend of hers just gave up looking and had some tailor made!! What an idea! Get a brown and black pair done at the same time!! Worth it, I think because I’ve shopped around for a pair every year for the past 5 years or so, and they keep coming back in fashion.

To do list:
- Out with the daggy, saggy, one size too big (I’ve lost weight in the past year or so, it seems) dull coloured clothes!
- Make an effort to get those suit pants taken in so they aren’t constantly being hoiked up!
- get some boots made that FIT MY CALVES

Who wants to make a clothes shopping date? I need both work and casual clothes…

Gruesome title for my adoptive state

For years, other South Australians and I have had to put up with South Australia being labelled as the state where weird serial murders happen. Kids going missing from the beach on sunny days, never to be seen again… bodies in barrels (not in Adelaide, I’d like to point out, but an hour north in a small country town)... the guy who took an axe to his ex-girlfriends’ new boyfriend, which rocked my working community – I actually knew the killer’s father. I’m sure there are more gruesome murders attributed to SA, but I just haven’t elected to retain this information in my brain over more important matters I need to remember.

But anyway, ever protective towards the place where I grew up, a while back I was trying to come up with a ready-made and witty comeback to throw at any New South Welshman who threw an insult at my home state by labelling it as the Serial Killer State. This used to happen quite a lot, as there is a particular breed of New South Welsh-people who think that Sydney is the only city in Australia, and everything else is too boring to mention or should be made fun of. They usually haven’t lived anywhere but Sydney, or can’t work out how to occupy themselves outside a dense urban environment. At that particular time, Sydney seemed to be having a drive-by-killing every other week. “Here’s my chance”, I thought! But Sydney just doesn’t cut it in the drive-by-killing stakes, when you compare it to LA, or perhaps less stable countries in the world.

But finally, NSW has done it. I think NSW can be safely labelled as the “Family Murder-Suicide State”. Every week at the moment there is a case of someone either killing their entire family, or killing most of their family followed by themselves.

But that's not very funny, is it?

Movin' keep on movin'

Well we are now safely ensconced in our new “big tall house” as my son calls it, probably because there are stairs in it. E-chan has been OK with it so far – involving him in the move and the clean up of the old place seems to have helped him to understand what is happening. The removalists (apparently that isn’t a word but I keep using it anyway) came 2 hours late on Tuesday (over a week ago now), and they didn’t finish up until 7pm. They weren’t bad, and they talked almost their own language – referring to “peaks” and “rises” when describing to each other where a certain piece of furniture would fit in the truck. I bet their 3D puzzle-solving skills are superior.

As if moving isn’t enough – E-chan went and caught a timely cough and runny nose. Now we could really do with a few beers and a good night sleep, and some time to just wander around our new neck of the woods and lie down and rest in our new house. Oh, and for our new couches to arrive.

Highlights:
- more space!
- Winter sun through the bedroom windows (our old place had NO direct winter sun and full summer evening sun)
- Finding those miscellaneous things that go missing (including things last seen in E-chan’s chubby little hands), under and behind things.
- Getting rid of stuff you don’t need/wear
- E-chan handling the stairs like a champ, and even though we haven’t installed the safety gate yet, he waits for me to accompany him up or down when I ask him to
- A friendlier block of apartments and Units, with more owner occupiers who care about stuff that goes on/doesn’t work, and say “hello”

I’d cry, but I just don’t have the time:
- Leaving our home of 5 ½ years – oh the memories! From our DINKy days to pregnancy, having a newborn and now toddler.
- Having our poor sick child stumble about our old digs as we frantically tried to clean up on Wednesday (why oh why didn’t we get a cleaner in?? I think we just ran out of time to arrange one…)
- Being vomited on for the second time in as many weeks (luckily the carpet cleaner guy was due an hour later)
- Sitting in fold up chairs in lieu of lounges in the living room (all this and Dr Who is back on telly again)
- Not being able to remember which thing went into which box
- Unexpected things that don’t work or need fixing
- And now it is OUR RESPONSIBILITY to get it fixed (actually – move that comment to the Highlights section… no more relying on real estate agents to get maintenance done!)
- 5 day delay on phone connection and still waiting on internet. Felt really cut off!

Much of the stuff we use daily is unpacked, and now we are down to the stuff we don’t use as often, that you have to think harder when deciding where to give it a home. I suspect that some stuff is never going to make it out of boxes. I mean really - why do I keep this sample moisturiser or hand cream even though I know it doesn’t suit my skin? Am I EVER going to wear that slightly discoloured shirt again? Some stuff I probably should have put in the Vinnies bin, but just ran out of time to try them on and I packed it anyway. (And who says Vinnies wants it anyway?!)

And now we have to use our own 3D puzzle solving skills to do the last bit of furniture configuration in the lounge room and in the bedrooms. And buy a step ladder so we can put some things away high up in the “big tall” cupboards in our bedrooms…

Secret boy's club!

E-chan is supposed to be going to sleep around now. However, C-chan is still in his bedroom with him, and I can hear lots of giggling!

I wonder what's going on in there....

Got a bit of a shock yesterday. I saw one of E-chan’s little friends and his Mum and big brother – they live on the same street and go to same Child care centre. C-chan and I noticed we hadn’t seen their father around for a while, and thought he might have gone away for work or maybe they’d separated. Anyway, thought I should mention it just so I didn’t seem to be an uncaring neighbour and to see if they needed a hand. No one wants to be a busybody, but I also don’t want to be one of those people who notice something is wrong but pretend everything is normal.

Anyway, the mother said her husband had passed away a few months ago. This was not the answer I was expecting. She was OK with me asking and would rather it be out in the open. She said they are all right, which I assume means they are dealing with the grief, doing OK financially and have enough support around them. It was a real jolt to imagine what it would be like to be a single mother of 2 with the youngest less than 2 years old. But then, single parents have raised children on their own before, and it will happen again in the future. All through the conversation, 20-month-old was beaming at me and E-chan most charmingly, oblivious to the conversation that we adults were having. The father had been a pretty cool, friendly fellow, with no obvious signs of illness when I saw him last, which couldn't have been long before his death.

I gave C-chan a big hug when he got home last night.

Oil, energy decline - all that sort of stuff

Further to Seagreen’s interesting post on Monday 16 June 2008 and link to permaculture dude’s energy descent/climate change scenarios….

Does anyone else get the feeling the general view on oil availability is shifting? Many have been saying that we will run out of oil, but the message has been dismissed as alarmist, quashed, or ignored. Suddenly the past 6 months, all of the issues some of us have been concerned about for years (suburbs with no adequate public transport, building houses on prime market garden land on the fringes of the city, reliance on the motor car, lack of rail infrastructure, etc etc) are gradually becoming regularly discussed in mainstream media and by politicians, without counterpoints from the oil industry saying "we have plenty of oil there is nothing to worry about".

Last night there was an interesting interview on the 7:30 Report (ABC) with Richard Heinberg.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s2280200.htm (hopefully transcript is posted, but you might have to just click on the podcast on the RHS of the screen and watch it). Basically, he says get used to petrol costing what it does now, a lot of restructuring of industry, and expenditure on non-car/truck transport infrastructure.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/business/items/200806/s2280264.htm Also on Lateline Business last night, Virgin Blue chief discussing the implications for the airline industry.

Definitely time to invest in a bike.

Whirlwind of a month!

Things have progressed with the home purchase - there has been lots to do of course, including making sure all the finances were ready to go for 3.30pm TODAY when we settle (eeek! had a few hiccups, but we got there in the end), and making sure the utilities and moving logistics are all in place. It's funny - an acquaintance said "don't you feel more grown up now you're buying a home?". My answer would have to be a firm "no, not really". Finances are only one part of life, of course - a tool. Owning a house gives you some sort of stability in where you will live if that's important to you, so long as you aren't over-stretched on your mortgage (which we aren't). Wanting to stay in the same area has only become important to us in the past year or so, but we have also rented in the same area in a few different places since 2000. It's only now that the rents are going crazy that we decided to think about buying seriously.


E-chan is sensing something is up, of course. We've told him we are moving, and he's seen the new place a few times plus photos, and the boxes with stuff in them are gradually accumulating in the house. But I'm not sure how much of the concept of moving house he understands. And to add to this, we decided recently on an impromptu and short trip to Canberra to see Turner-to-Monet, catch up with friends, and pick up my folks who visited there on the way up to see us. First night in our lovely friend's house, E-chan wakes up at 11:00, cries loudly, and when I picked him up to hug and pat his back, he vomited all over me, himself, and the carpet! The Horreur! Shower, full outfit change, buckets of soapy water, screaming and washing machines running in the middle of the cold Canberra night! E-chan was Mr Popular in the morning. Luckily, our hosts (said they) didn't hear the screaming marathon as we were up the other end of the house. The rest of the trip was fine - lovely company, sunny days (with chilly nights), interesting art exhibition (but strangely cluttered - they could have put in half the number of paintings). The picture is of E-chan running around the reconciliation walk.


E-chan was spoilt for attention when we got back to Sydney. Along with Grandma and Grandad, his Uncle and Nanna came over for his 2nd birthday celebrations (this was the family party - we'll have a party in our new place in a month or so). He got some really cool presents, including a play tea set and some bits for his train set. I think family withdrawal symptoms set in the day after everyone left, and we had a repeat middle of night screaming session the following night.


On top of all this, I've had two days off with with gastro - I usually kick these things within 24 hours, but this went for 4 days. They were days when I am usually at work, so at least E-chan could go to day-care. I was absolutely exhausted, and my feet ached!

But ech! We're there now! I'm excited about moving this weekend! We haven't moved house in 5 1/2 years, which is amazing! Am so looking forward to having more space....

OMG!!!

You'll never guess who I just saw on Playschool!!

Alex Papps!

Henderson Kids bad boy spunk, now co-hosting Playschool! (I might add that Justine Clark is now also a regular on Playschool, has her own album and DVD which most kiddies love, and is also touring with gigs at the Enmore!! The songs are durn catchy, I must say...)

What is the world coming to?

"Thankyou for your pleasant time and manner"

... is how a real estate agent we've been dealing with lately has started off each of her emails. I giggled every time and was tempted to write back "You mean 'Thank you for your time and pleasant manner'?" or "what do you mean by writing 'thankyou for your pleasant time...' to MY husband?!'". I shouldn't make fun as she was actually quite nice, with no other signs of mental incapacity. But then, I'm sure real estate agents are much nicer to you when you're thinking of buying a place rather than the standard scum treatment you get when renting.

Anyway, the big news is that we've bought a home. Our very first. Well, about half of it. Apart from the occasional open inspection over the past few years plus many internet searches, this was the first place we looked at. Rationale for buying was that we want to move to a larger place some time in the next 3 months, but rents in our area are skyrocketing. We expected to have to move out a few suburbs, but we will be roughly in the same neighbourhood - yay! We didn't expect it to happen so soon, nor have our offer accepted, so the past week and a half has been busy with engaging solicitors, getting approval for finance, and fretting about whether or not our offers were realistic, too low, or too high.

In the end, we managed to settle a day before it was due to auction, at a price that is affordable for us. We are close to a couple of parks, and within 10-15 mins walk from 3 cafe strip/shopping areas and a major arterial road with lots of buses. We'll have quite a lot more space, including a spare bedroom for folks from interstate or overseas :) and a store room and good built-ins, and maybe room for the piano at Mum and Dad's house, which they don't play and want to send over! Room to store bicycles also! Hooray! Drawbacks are the legacy of a purple "feature wall" left by the current owners, a wierd ad-hoc bath, hard-to-keep-warm open plan living area, and view of some golden arches from one of our windows.

But anyway, how exciting! Looking forward to having more space - a room to get away by myself, keep the sewing machine out for a few days at a time, potter about the kitchen without waking the whole house up, and store away the clutter.

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Yummy steamed date pudding

3/4 cup chopped dates

1/2 cup sugar

4 Oz marg/butter

1 tspn cinnamon

1 cup milk/water (1/2 and 1/2 or all milk)

1 cup plain flour

1 tspn bicarb soda

Mix all dry ingredients and fruit together, then gradually add milk/water, melted marg and soda. Makes a fairly moist dough.

Pour into a greased 1L capacity pudding basin, cover with baking paper loosened with a pleat and cover with calico tied around the rim. Place into a saucepan of boiling water so that water comes 3/4 of the way up the basin. Close lid, and weigh it down with an up-side-down bowl. Steam for around 2 hours. Serve with custard or icecream.

Serves 8

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This is an oldy but goody from the Woman's Weekly cookbook via my Auntie. It was so moist that we ate it plain (ie no custard etc). We had a double helping first time!

I'm beginning to think old fashioned english food might suit my constitution best. Just about every node of my family tree searched back several centuries (by my Dad) is Anglo Saxon, besides one Tasmanian aboriginal ancestor. Plain old English food is what I'm adapted for, and what I don't seem to have any bad reactions against*. Food like this pudding makes me not mind so much!

* but sadly this won't stop me eating thai, chinese, turkish, italian, japanese, vietnamese, indian from time to time...

Eco patent commons

Thought I'd share this site with you - the Eco Patent Commons was set up on January 2008, and is hosted on the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) website.

Interesting idea - the rationale is to create a way for companies (or IP owners) to share patents for usage to enable energy efficient and environmentally sustainable processes to be adopted widely and quickly. Also, companies in similar industries can share and improve on each other's processes.

Why not publish the invention and make it public domain and free for all? I suppose this is a way of allowing the company to still exploit their monopoly on the IP for other uses or if it starts to have large commercial potential in the future, yet still get the environmentally friendly applications out there and used quickly.

The legal side of this is a bit difficult to understand in parts - especially the idea of when the non assert clause can be revoked should a company sue you for something else unrelated to the usage of the eco-patent. I would have thought an easier way of doing this would be to give a royalty free license to other companies to use the patent for the stated purpose only, but there may be legal implications to this I just don't understand. I assume this also is based on the Creative Commons, which I know even less about - maybe the Eco Patent Commons is based on some tried and tested legal systems used there.

Anyway, have a surf around the site to see examples of which patents have been pledged to the commons so far (31, mostly from IBM) - the Q&A section is quite good at clarifying some bits.