Sitrep: ave 2k8
Jan. 6th, 2008 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsidheWhen I said at 00:00 1-1-2008, as I do at that time every year, "May this year be better than last", for the first time in a very long time I had the faintest whiff of hope that it might be.
This will, of course, probably turn out to have been fatigue warping my brain again. But the feeling was nice while it lasted.
New Year's Eve was eventful for the girls. Susi moved up from the cot to a Big Girl's Bed (identical to Abbi's). There is still a big soft blanket underneath in case she rolls around a bit too much, but she hasn't needed it. Yet.
And when Abbi woke that morning she roused us with a stirring "I have a loose tooth!". This tooth was, indeed, wobbly. She demonstrated by wobbling it. We told her not to worry at it, as it would fall out in its own time. This was proven that same day at lunch when she stopped complaining about how she couldn't eat because her tooth hurt when she bit, and told us that her tooth had just fallen out, which it had. The next morning, along with a shiny new year, Abbi found a shiny new dollar under her pillow.
The new tooth is already visible, coming up behind.
Weather-wise, it has been hot. Really hot. Take-me-to-the-Sun's-surface-so-I-can-cool-down hot. This has meant that activities during my leave have been either i) not really possible, because you fried as soon as you walked out the door, or ii) not really possible because everyone else was going to Chadstone too, and for the same reason. So the girls, and I, and consequently Mim, have all been getting cabin fever. I have managed to finish the translation of the section of Beowulf which I promised lo, these 2 and a third years ago. So long? Really? Oy. And I still haven't finished, because after I had finished, I compared with an actual translation, and the differences were sufficiently strong that I'm not showing anyone until I can justify every word I write when I, as seems certain, I have to do most of it again to get it right.
Who Do You Think You Are has gotten me re-enthused in genealogy. Had a chat with Nanna and Poppa at Christmas, with some interesting stories and details. Probably I've been told some of them before, but that was before I actually cared. More fool me. We'll be going to Beechworth for a couple of days, and I hope to find i) relevent gravesites (I've found, and lost, the one in Beechworth Cemetery, so hopefully I can get a photo of it this time, and no-one has been able to find the one at Yackandandah. I don't think I'll get time to do both.), ii) check the local bookshops, especially for local histories (local histories which don't actually center around the Kelly boys a bonus), and iii) Nanna has given me the details as to how to find the house her grandfather lived in... if it's still there. The shop he worked in was an art gallery last she had seen, so I'll check that out as well. And tmorrow I'll head down the local library, where they apparantly have copies of various censuses on CD... in the Reference section only. I'll see what it takes to get some info out of them, in combination with the details I've already got, mostly thanks to Mum. (Thanks, Mum!) Dad said that he would pump his mother for info while he is up there, and that his brother had done some digging, in situ in England parish registers, even. I must see what he's found.
Today the girls played with the little girl who lives upstairs for the first time. Her parents are engineers from Iran, working out here and doing quite well. They are lovely people, I must say. Well travelled, cosmopolitan. Little asides about recycled water in London, or how Dubai is a lovely place, but they didn't like it enough to live there long. The father mentioned, in talk about cars and mileage, about how his Peugot in Tehran got 8 l/100km in the carpark they call traffic in town, and between cities got down to 6 l/100km. Peugots and city traffic are not the sort of things you normally associate with talk about Tehran. Maybe, just maybe, neither Ahmadinedjad nor the Ayatollahs are entirely representative of Iranians? Whatever, Abbi and Susi played with little Avva quietly and happily for hours. No screaming, no fights, just Abbi and Avva sharing dolls and Susi wandering around with this automatic toy saxophone which played a tune when you fiddle with the buttons, having a wonderful time, and occasionally sneaking out to steal another dried apricot from the coffee table.
In other news, SophiePanopolous Mirabella displayed a stunning example of projection, accusing Malcome Fraser of frothing irrelevancy and Stalinist evil-blind succor, in a frothing semiarticulate spray, displaying all the evils she was attempting to fulminate against: lying by omission (how many dictators had Johnny said good things about in his time, eh?), Misrepresenting the truth (So when the definition of "not torture" includes things like being made to feel like you're drowning, and physical and mental stress up to but not quite including severe injury and death (but equivalent pain is Just Fine), exactly how meaningful is a declaration that "A statement obtained by the use of torture shall not be admissible in a military commission"? What's left? The rack? Branding?), oh and we can't the intellectual sloppiness of deliberately and explicitely comparing Taxi Drivers from Khabul with Streicher (And what do I see here but that the Americans and British wanted to collectively punish Germany with national enforced hard labor and the systematic reduction of Germany to the stone age... and it was the Russians who scuppered that plan of vengeance (which might have been satisfying, but was a repeat of precisely the sort of thing which had led to the rise of Hitler in the first place, and would not have resulted in the rise of the new peaceful and happy Germany we've come to love, but all that's going off on a long tangent, except to point out that the US's plans are not always divinely inspired Good Ideas, as Mrs Mirabella and others seem to think).
I haven't had such an outright funny read since the last John Roskam column. I think that the Liberal Right and the IPA (in so far as they are distinguishable) should be given more space in the Age, so that they may continue to dig their holes. I wouldn't recommend that the Herald Sun or the Australian give them more room, though. I suspect that to give them much more room than they get already, they would have to drop some advertising.
This will, of course, probably turn out to have been fatigue warping my brain again. But the feeling was nice while it lasted.
New Year's Eve was eventful for the girls. Susi moved up from the cot to a Big Girl's Bed (identical to Abbi's). There is still a big soft blanket underneath in case she rolls around a bit too much, but she hasn't needed it. Yet.
And when Abbi woke that morning she roused us with a stirring "I have a loose tooth!". This tooth was, indeed, wobbly. She demonstrated by wobbling it. We told her not to worry at it, as it would fall out in its own time. This was proven that same day at lunch when she stopped complaining about how she couldn't eat because her tooth hurt when she bit, and told us that her tooth had just fallen out, which it had. The next morning, along with a shiny new year, Abbi found a shiny new dollar under her pillow.
The new tooth is already visible, coming up behind.
Weather-wise, it has been hot. Really hot. Take-me-to-the-Sun's-surface-so-I-can-cool-down hot. This has meant that activities during my leave have been either i) not really possible, because you fried as soon as you walked out the door, or ii) not really possible because everyone else was going to Chadstone too, and for the same reason. So the girls, and I, and consequently Mim, have all been getting cabin fever. I have managed to finish the translation of the section of Beowulf which I promised lo, these 2 and a third years ago. So long? Really? Oy. And I still haven't finished, because after I had finished, I compared with an actual translation, and the differences were sufficiently strong that I'm not showing anyone until I can justify every word I write when I, as seems certain, I have to do most of it again to get it right.
Who Do You Think You Are has gotten me re-enthused in genealogy. Had a chat with Nanna and Poppa at Christmas, with some interesting stories and details. Probably I've been told some of them before, but that was before I actually cared. More fool me. We'll be going to Beechworth for a couple of days, and I hope to find i) relevent gravesites (I've found, and lost, the one in Beechworth Cemetery, so hopefully I can get a photo of it this time, and no-one has been able to find the one at Yackandandah. I don't think I'll get time to do both.), ii) check the local bookshops, especially for local histories (local histories which don't actually center around the Kelly boys a bonus), and iii) Nanna has given me the details as to how to find the house her grandfather lived in... if it's still there. The shop he worked in was an art gallery last she had seen, so I'll check that out as well. And tmorrow I'll head down the local library, where they apparantly have copies of various censuses on CD... in the Reference section only. I'll see what it takes to get some info out of them, in combination with the details I've already got, mostly thanks to Mum. (Thanks, Mum!) Dad said that he would pump his mother for info while he is up there, and that his brother had done some digging, in situ in England parish registers, even. I must see what he's found.
Today the girls played with the little girl who lives upstairs for the first time. Her parents are engineers from Iran, working out here and doing quite well. They are lovely people, I must say. Well travelled, cosmopolitan. Little asides about recycled water in London, or how Dubai is a lovely place, but they didn't like it enough to live there long. The father mentioned, in talk about cars and mileage, about how his Peugot in Tehran got 8 l/100km in the carpark they call traffic in town, and between cities got down to 6 l/100km. Peugots and city traffic are not the sort of things you normally associate with talk about Tehran. Maybe, just maybe, neither Ahmadinedjad nor the Ayatollahs are entirely representative of Iranians? Whatever, Abbi and Susi played with little Avva quietly and happily for hours. No screaming, no fights, just Abbi and Avva sharing dolls and Susi wandering around with this automatic toy saxophone which played a tune when you fiddle with the buttons, having a wonderful time, and occasionally sneaking out to steal another dried apricot from the coffee table.
In other news, Sophie
I haven't had such an outright funny read since the last John Roskam column. I think that the Liberal Right and the IPA (in so far as they are distinguishable) should be given more space in the Age, so that they may continue to dig their holes. I wouldn't recommend that the Herald Sun or the Australian give them more room, though. I suspect that to give them much more room than they get already, they would have to drop some advertising.
