Cheap Therapy

• Many things have happened, given my last published update was September 14th
• Went to something to do with the iPhone that I can’t talk about.  And yet I can talk about programming the iPhone. Stupid NDA. Met some interesting people and talked shop.
• Wandered aimlessly around Sydney. Well, there was the Lindt café, beer, much walking (and thus blisters), cheap cherries (AU$7-8/kg), Qantas Club, art and nice Unagi-don. Oh, and Nicole and Hugh opening their film. Catching up with friends was good too, although would have liked to catch up with more of them!
• Less than a week away and already Bilby and Cygnet have changed noticeably.
• My father made 3 score and 10. Hopefully now the world is a different place to what it was then.
• Shopping with the whole family
• Deb’s fabulous Disco 40th
• Camera (box) shopping
• J’s first Birthday party
• Dreams of people falling. People falling in reality
• SF@The pub

It seems I haven’t posted a redux-ion in some time. Since last:

• Went postal (voting, that is).
• Greeted the new arrival
• Fathers’ Day
• Discovered a rust spot under the weather seal on the door of the new car. Missed by the RAC. Not mentioned by the dealer (if they noticed it). Bugger.
• Visited a few car shops to get anti-rust stuff.
• Therapeutic shopping at NetPlus (need more storage), OfficeWorks (noticed they now have magnetic print-yourself car signage) and Zytech.
• Want one of the new iPod Touches with a speaker!
• Was not destroyed by Large Hadron Collider. Nor was world. At least not that I could tell.
• Made a lot of some assortment of toast, boiled eggs, baked beans and Weet-Bix every morning.
• Many stories were read.
• Drove the battlewagon some more.
• Attended surprise birthday for MikeyOb.
• Showed Puggle how to solder. Badly. But at least good enough to fix the cordless phones. Discovered you can answer the landline while the voip line is still ringing. Then pick up the voip line and get a dialtone even though the landline is in use
• …darling, names, names names…
• Walked to the shops with the kids. Had coffee. Waitron brought water with plastic cups for the kids unbidden, and my cappuccino plus two ‘cups of froth’ for the kids totalled $3.65 (cheaper than I pay for just a coffee many places). Hats off to Bada Bing.
• Discovered the evil credit card company (ANZ) will ring you to tell you you’re overlimit, but not before they’ve charged you $35 for the privilege. It also seems easier to cancel and apply for a new card than to get a limit increase (even if it’s to a lower limit than you were on before!). Getting a decrease is much easier. They did at least have a callback number when I didn’t believe they were the bank and resisted my social engineering attempt when I hadn’t identified myself.
• Helped the kids make vege kebabs with pesto. Yummy!
• Took the opportunity to indulge in pate, soft, hard and (soon) blue cheeses.
• Roasted a chook.

It’d been suggested that a good fathers’ day present would be not helping with Cygnet’s birth. Which as it turned out was not what I wound up doing on Fathers’ day. Instead, I found myself in the kitchen, babe in arms, with Bilby and Puggle pleading for breakfast. All very domestic.

Both sets of grandparents paid a visit, (reminder, clean the lens before the baby’s born!), as did the midwife. Then Bilby and Puggle were whisked away to play with their cousins for a few peaceful hours.

I did manage to score some homemade Rocky Road, a copy of Stardust, and of course Cygnet and spend the majority of the day in my pyjamas.

• Dinner with the folks. They get to see the battlewagon. Puggle is very keen on it, and Bilby didn’t like going for a drive in the old car
• Pretty much proof the car dealer put a car they were too lazy to let us drive ‘on offer’ (it’s no longer on offer since our sale was finalised, but it’s still there unsold).
• Trying to sell the old car. Vacuuming and detailing. The harder I vacuum the more sand is revealed. When did we stuff it full of Christmas trees?
• Farewell morning tea, luncheon, and post-work drinks for the old boss. Last time he was farewelling me
• Pizza dinner with Redbraids and MikeyOb, which was very pleasant, and reminded us of our laxness in inviting people over for dinner for adult conversation…
• The annual paying of the big bills, and doing of the tax. Followed by the watching of the bank balance. Then the bill for the stamp duty on the car arrives
• My GP retired. Then started running for the Labor party!
• Puggle is obsessed with take-away chicken from Chooks after we bought some the other night. Tonight he offered that he and Bilby would order that, and we could eat the regular dinner. He asked for the phone number so he could ring up and order some. He even suggested that he and Bilby might eat some regular dinner as well as Chooks. I suspect we may not go there in a while until the obsession has died down!
• Edging closer to the arrival of Cygnet. I should really start looking at names.

Today I took a day of selfish annual leave to do handover swimming lessons with Puggle and Bilby. The day unfolds thus…

 
Bilby (as usual) wakes me up because she would like her Weet-Bix (the 5-grain ones are pretty good, although given how infrequently I eat commercial breakfast cereal I can still taste the sugar). Amazingly she then goes back to bed, leaving me to try to catch up on shuteye on the couch so as not to disturb anyone.
Finally others surface and it’s time for breakfast proper, with the usual battle with Puggle to convince him to get himself dressed.

Mum comes over to mind Bilby, then it’s into bathers and we’re off to swimming.

Puggle’s class is just us, the instructor and one other parent and child, which is good from my perspective. He’s working hard on his windmill arms. We have some olympic swimming footage to show him as inspiration
The pool is nice and warm, but it’s cold outside and the day is getting cooler.
Lunch for Bilby (Puggle is still watching the concrete pour at the end of the street). Then it’s time to swim again. Bilby’s class is empty, except for us.
She swims to the point of exhaustion, I think she spends more time with her head under water than above it. She’s more comfortable with the lesson than I am.
After that it’s off to pick up the new car, Dad kindly gives me a lift. Cheque handed over, keys picked up, it’s time to pilot the battle wagon back home. You’d think if you wanted to make your customers happy you’d bother to sell them a car that doesn’t have the ‘empty’ petrol warning light on.
I forget that the new fangled ABS and EBFD don’t stop me spinning the wheels at the lights. Not used to having a V6 It happily cruises down the freeway.
Home and lunch. Then off to cash in receipts at Medicare, health insurer, then Medicare again (this time with a massive queue). A brief trip to Dymocks to pick up a new street map to go with the car.Then it’s home and with the car seats fitted it’s time to fill up and go for a drive.

$95 worth of petrol later…!

I get to check out the cruise control (sadly it doesn’t do the steering). Annoyingly I set it at the legal speed limit and it stays there, which means the car is going slower than most of the other traffic. Having the car attempt to get back to speed is amusing though, although it tends to floor it, not sure if it could spin its own wheels…

A stereo that works and plays CD’s (not that we’ve tested that yet)! Lots of bits that open and close… Two trip odometers. Sadly the manual is not yet with us, so some of the buttons just require guessing. But boy is it huge! I’m sure the back end is out there somewhere… Needless to say we’re trying to only park anywhere that requires going forwards at the moment.

Then after the drive it’s home and time to prep dinner, put the kids to bed and watch some Middleman.

May even get the tax return done tonight…

… Massachusetts was renamed to Aquinnah in 1998, no doubt due to people repeatedly getting arrested when asking for directions.
On an almost totally unrelated note, Aquinnah is the name Michael J. Fox gave to his daughter.

Can you guess it’s baby name season again?

• Home Based Learning Network trade fair. I won the first door prize
• Touring the frozen eastern states. Qantas cancels two of my flights due to maintenance issues, and books me on the earlier flight. Fortunately I am able to make it to the airport on time in both cases, although one of them involves eating my dinner in the car… One flight is on a plane flown up from Melbourne to replace the original aircraft. The new plane has a loose interior panel next to my seat, which the hostie kicks into place And the reading lights don’t work. Hopefully nothing else is wrong with it!
• I’m going to try a cut for those who like such things. Apologies if this doesn’t work on the syndicated feed.

(more…)

• Using Google Sketchup to model some housing development and investigate overshadowing. Pretty awesome once you get the hang of it. Write submission
• Probably no WWDC this year
• A birthday dinner for Becc with fine food and company
• A week without students. Meaning lots of things getting done while they’re not around
• Get to see Cygnet for the first time
• A long weekend. ANZAC day. Bless ‘em.
• A picnic in a smaller park than anticipated. But my first time walking both Puggle and Bilby there. Reminder, Bilby is heavy enough I need the stroller
• AppleScripty pythony Dilberty goodness
• Car test driving. Kia Grand Carnival and Toyota Tarago (Last week the Volkswagen Passat Wagon, Subaru Liberty and the Tarago). See a separate post somewhat later
• Games at Kylie’s. Happy Birthday! This time I prove I can lose at Super Scrabble as well as Scrabble

For those who don’t read boingboing.net, a blogger’s article on raising Free Range Kids (letting her 9 year old navigate their way home on the subway themselves), now has spawned a Free Range Kids blog.

I was thinking today that if there was one thing that I’d like my kids (and really, pretty much everyone) to be able to do it would be to be able to wonder at the beauty in and of things. Pretty much anything really. Trees, rocks, whatever. Illuminated by light from a nearby star(!) (itself powered by nuclear fusion) that makes its way out from the core of the sun, streams through space, the atmosphere, hits the object and is reflected into the (improbably evolved) eye where it’s interpreted by an equally fantastic thing called a brain that exists, and is here and able to wonder about everything. And that’s ignoring the subatomic level, time, and lots of other cool stuff. Pretty much the more you know the more levels you can appreciate things on, and whatever way you cut it, existence is cool.