Nature, red in tooth and beak

We were forced to have a barbecue at Lake Tuggeranong Town Park.  The park is green and pleasant, with a sandy lakeshore beach, skate park and playground equipment.  Trees, shelters and barbecues round out its parkly attributes.  It rained.

Then adult swans beat up juvenile swans.  Skaters came to the rescue of the young fellers and chased the adult swan away and sat quietly until the juvenile swan managed to get back to its feet.

The Honolulu zoo says that black swans are 'belligerent, ill-tempered and territorial, they will not tolerate other swans, except their mates and young.' Youtube also has a clip of a swan trying to drown a duck, which I won't link to because that doesn't seem very sporting.  I must say, I feel a little less self-conscious about my general running away policy towards black swans after reading all this internet wisdom.


Also, black swans really do have red beaks.  With a white stripe.  No teeth.

Taking advice

If I had anything nice to say I would most certainly say it.

Miss Lou Lou's Tapping Starlettes Elvis Extravaganza

When I remember what it was like to live in Melbourne I like to think of the time I went to see Miss Lou Lou's Tapping Starlettes Elvis Extravaganza.  It's not so much that there was a tap dancing Elvis extravaganza on, although I have yet to see one held in any other city of my acquaintance.  It was more that the queue to get in went right down the block and around the corner.

I don't know if things like that still happen in Melbourne.

On driving

I have been driving for more than a year, and have had two low-speed incidents, one botanic and one diplomatic. The tree looks the same and so does our foreign policy, but there's a ding on the back of that hatch that makes me embarrassed to see it so I look away.

The shaking cold-wet sweats are over, but I wish if I had to drive you would all stay at home.

A family holiday with the family

So in New South Wales they have a south coast.  It is not the south coast of the continent, you know, because that would have to be Victoria and South Australia and Western Australia.  The south coast of the country probably only includes Tasmania if you are a purist.  You can tell that I have just spent many days with Mr Precision Instrument, as the junior is becoming known.  We have had several conversations about the meaning of 'pedantic' over the past week, but I am left feeling that the meaning has yet to be communicated.

Here are towns we have seen: Merimbula, Pambula, Eden, Bega, Tathra, Tura, Nimmitabel and Bemboka.  I find the names of towns in NSW hopelessly romantic, and was beyond thrilled to lay eyes on Nimmitabel, although I can identify no reason why. I can't remember it being in a book I love, or being spoken of fondly by people I care about it or anything like that.  Having seen it, I am sure I don't know why I have ever heard of it - it's a tiny, pleasant, highway town with no cheese factory or brewery or any brand name item that might carry its name proudly.


Other towns we saw have proud histories, or histories of which the townspeople are defiantly proud.  Eden has a long history of whaling and chopping down trees, Tathra has a wharf with a substantial-looking wooden building on top of it and Merimbula has clearly been catering to frivolous beach goers for a very long time indeed.


The junior was interested only in the beach and the ice cream shops, and generated a very high level of enthusiam for ten pin bowling on our last evening in Merimbula.  I remember desperately wanting to go roller skating while my parents insisted on looking at views and going bushwalking at a similar age. Ten pin bowling was fun.


On another day, the junior developed a massive anxiety attack, with subsequent sulking and shouting, because we could not pay the park use fee at one of the national parks near Tathra because the machine was busted. He claims he wants to grow up to be an evil scientist, but heavens I never met anyone so law-abiding in all my life.  He wanted us to immediately drive out of the park so we were not taking advantage.  And then he berated us the entire time we were there, until we became that family that you are embarrassed to see at national parks, stalking along the track sniping at each other.  I wished I lived in Iceland, on my own, with no telephone and no other humans within twenty kilometres.



Luckily things improved when we got to the beach, but it's the kind of thing children hark back to when they have grown up and left home and are remembering how much they hate their families, and Christmas is rolling around.

The junior in the jargon

Every so often I have a bit of a google around, looking up the junior's various conditions singly or in various combinations. It's because some of the things are quite rare, and one of them is very newly recognised as a thing, so I kind of like to hear if anyone has some new thinking about any of it. Because of Reasons he has had tests sent to Paris, been treated in Barcelona and has doctors in Canberra and Sydney.  This tends to make it difficult to just have a yarn to the doctor any old time I have a question.


So a while ago I was doing my googling and I found an abstract from a conference in Portugal that sounded pretty darn exciting, because it sounded like someone else had exactly the same situation that junior had, and some pretty darn smart doctors were thinking about it.  And then I realised, of course, that it was my junior that they were talking about and not some other kid at all.  And that they didn't know anything much either, but wanted to tell all the other doctors all about it.



No one else would recognise him, except us and his very own doctors, but it's a very peculiar thing to have such particular and precise and accurate information rocketing around the world, and yet information that is so utterly unlike the junior's actual life.

I was very disappointed that it wasn't someone else.  I desperately wanted us to be not the only ones in this particular situation.  Which is a terrible thing to think, really, when you think about it even a tiny bit. Which I have since, but didn't so much when I first felt that thud of disappointment and oddness when I recognised the junior in the medical jargon. 

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

Well, we're back. 

I can tell you that after a short absence, and upon returning, I really like my house. Even if it is direly in need of a de-clutter.  I can also tell you that while it is a Very Fine Thing to spend Christmas with family and friends, it is an Even Finer Thing to be in a house of one's own.  However, it would be most convenient if our home were a three-hour drive or so from our loved ones in Brisbane rather than a two-hour plane ride. It confirms my idea that NSW should be dragged out to sea, leaving the ACT where it is, then Queensland and Victoria should be squoodged up together so that Canberra ends up sort of a bit squished in the middle.  That way we would be neatly positioned a less than one day drive from most of our friends-and-relations.

The Christmas highlight was getting together with friends with kids older and younger than the junior and just letting them get on with it in Queens Park in Ipswich.  Apart from minor cuts and bruises (playground related, rather than interpersonal violence related, I hasten to add), all the children seemed to have a day of old-fashioned climbing on things, getting wet and shouting.  The only downside was the oldest child, who has crossed that line into adolescence, clearly felt just as uncomfortable with the children as she felt with the grown-ups and did not really have much of a good time at all.


The thing I really miss about Brisbane is that feeling of being totally at ease with people, because you've known them such a long time that you've forgotten what they've forgiven you for.  With new people, you never know what you might do wrong to them, because it hasn't happened yet.

Toys

Dear computer game people

I would like a new computer game.  If you make me a computer game that is the sort of computer game I like, I will pay you real cash money. 

I don't like shooting people very much and I don't like strategy war games.  I like strategy and puzzle games that are not boring and patronising.  I don't care if the pictures are amazing particularly.  I like to build cities and organise stuff.  I like trading and developing skills.  I don't get to enjoy sound tracks much because someone else is always trying to do homework or go to sleep or write their PhD or is playing a noisier game, so don't go to too much trouble there.

Please make me an interesting, complicated game that goes on for a while. 

Failing to think things through

So which person with a creative writng degree thought it would be a good idea to deliver a presentation on human rights treaties to a room full of international lawyers?

I mean, really.

Human rights - a quite serious post with no flippancy for a change

Some of you might be interested to hear that the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Bill 2010 passed Parliament today. It was introduced into the House of Representatives in September 2010.


If you read Hansard, you will see that the Opposition tried to move amendments so that 'human rights' was defined as rights in the Constitution and common law rights.  I would interpret this myself as trying to make sure that certain sorts of humans could protect their property rights, rather than an interest in human rights as universal and indivisible and as found in international human rights covenants that Australia has signed up to, but that is my personal view only and one not shared by, say, George Brandis.


If you read Hansard you will also find some fairly vitriolic personal attacks, but I guess that's to be expected.


Anyway, the new legislation (once it receives Royal Assent) means that any new bills or legislative instruments introduced into Parliament must be accompanied by a statement of compatibility, which tells Parliament (and the world at large because they will be publicly available documents) if a bill is consistent with the human rights obligations under 7 key human rights treaties. Or not. The Bill also establishes a new parliamentary committee to look at bills and the statements and to have a good think about it all.


I understand that the Opposition also tried to make an amendment to remove the requirement for statements of compatibility, but perhaps I am wrong about that. 


I am looking forward to seeing what the statements are like, and what the new committee says about them.

Reading

I realise that I have nothing to blog about because stuff is just happening without much need of comment or analysis from me.  Knockonwoodetc.

I read my way through the Booker shortlist for the first time. Back in the day when I was a bookseller (and when the husband who was a bookseller but is no longer a bookseller was still a bookseller), I just used to read a lot of new releases and generally I would have read most of the shortlisted books that looked vaguely interesting to me anyway.  And in recent years I have not paid much attention because I am always tired because I am a Career Lady now. So this year I read them all and I liked them all pretty much and I reckon the winner was probably the best book to win the prize and all, but I really enjoyed Jamrach's Menagerie and The Sisters Brothers most of all. Which may tell us one or two things, which includes that I have form for liking stories with 'menagerie' in the title, and also I seem to like chatty first-person books set in the 19th century with quite a lot of violence, provided it's violence that is excused one way or another by the narrator. Because I really adjectivally much like A True History of the Kelly Gang as well.

No doubt it exposes a terrible character flaw.  I never think of myself as a person who enjoys violence in any form, but there it is, there it is.

The Junior has been re-reading Garth Nix books and the Ranger's Apprentice series.  He doesn't seem to feel the need for any new books by authors he hasn't read before at the moment.  I am not quite sure what to think about this. On the one hand I think it's pretty bad to exclusively comfort read, but on the other hand I think he's already read more books than some people read in their entire lifetimes, so perhaps he deserves time to digest it all a bit.

The husband is doing marking, which is a completely different kind of reading and may result in violence, but less in a textual way and more in a storming about exasperatedly kind of way.

In worse news, when I was reading some words at work I read a word I wish I'd never read which was 'reablement'.  I thought they meant rehabilitation, but when you google it, it turns out to be a real word, or at least a frequently used one.  I guess I need to reable my brain to think a bit more flexibly or some such, but I found it very ugly indeed, although representing a most desirable principle, of course. It's no worse than rehabilitation really I suppose, but it's not what I'm used to, you see.

Evidence of the Presidents

I will continue to believe in the existence of the President of the USA, because even though I have not seen him, I believe I have seen evidence. Today, driving between Garran and Civic we saw lots of police people standing along the road, and a police car parked in the middle of the road. Many other cars were waiting with the engines turned off, but no one was tooting or making rude gestures.  Surely this is evidence of the President's existence. No one else could cause delays without causing ill feeling as well. Surely.

Also, there were many noisy planes flying above the Parliamentary Regions. And they did claim that it was to prevent air strikes.



No public servants were allowed into Parliament House today.  I didn't see that with my own eyes, though, so I'm not sure if I can use it as evidence for my belief.  I was advised by email. I didn't mind, I had no ill feeling.  Like most other days of my life I didn't have any need to go to Parliament House.

Ah well.

Orange

The experiment with the bronzer left us with a son and a bathroom basin the colour of a slightly overcooked fashion designer.

Should or could or must

Things that must be done today
Food and grocery shopping
Washing of clothes and dishes
Water the herbs and the lemon tree
Put out the rubbish

Things that should be done today
Baking of chocolate biscuits to say thank you to all the coworkers for sponsoring Junior in the walkathon
Cleaning

Things that could be done today
Trimming the rosemary, the mysterious hedgey plant and the other mysterious creepy plant
Napping
Thinking about Diana Wynne Jones
Moving the old desk out of the study

Things that have been done today
Shopping at Fyshwick markets and the supermarket
Clothes and dishes cleaned
Plants both watered and trimmed (hands with pleasantly resiny feeling after snipping off lots of rosemary)
Rubbish is out
Had a nice nap

Must be time to read and/or eat.

Aesthetics

I wish I was young and in black and white like Bob Dylan in 1963.

New Zealand

So, it turns out to be quite hard to write about New Zealand, because it is pretty much exactly as nice and interesting as people are always telling you it is going to be. We only went to the South Island for Reasons, so apologies to not looking up people who I would like to look up who all live in the North Island. You know who you are. Anyways, the family is determined to return to New Zealand shortly (given the niceness and all, it would be foolish not to), so we can see all the bits that are not between Christchurch and Invercargill.

Expected things about New Zealand

• It is indeed very green, especially to a jaded Australian eye from old wide brown land, etc.
• There are indeed a lot of sheep (in fact, so many that this nearly makes it into the list of unexpected things about New Zealand, because there are really lots and lots, although Roger at the Bed and Breakfast in Oamaru tells me that there are a lot less sheep than there used to be).
• You can eat a lot of delicious stuff including ice cream, lamb, venison, squid, salmon and oysters.

Unexpected things about New Zealand

• There's not a lot of traffic south of Dunedin.
• Regional towns act like small cities instead of horrifying outposts of boredom and Mad-Max-ish driving.
• If you drive for a couple of hours the geography looks really, really different to the place you left (alluvial plains, snow capped mountains, rolling green hills, rugged coast, valleys).
• Nearly everywhere looks very tidy (even the sheep are clean). I realise this may be only to the uneducated, Australian eye. Although I did see a hedge made of gum trees. I don't think it has ever occurred to an Australian that you can tidy up gum trees.

Highlights of our New Zealand experience

• The $1.50 ice creams at the Rob Roy Dairy in Dunedin. This may explains why many University of Otago students looked both happy and perhaps slightly chubbier than some other university students I have known. Or it might have been their puffy jackets -hard to tell. Anyway, for $1.50 you get a gigantic scoop of delicious creamy goodness, and when you are amazed at how cheap it is, the person serving behind the counter will laugh at you. May have a big queue.
• Botanic gardens and parks. We closely inspected the ones in Christchurch, Invercargill and Queenstown, but I must say that there are many more that deserve a visit. We got there just in time to really enjoy the daffodils. And I may also add that bulbs and annuals and flowering bushes really make sense in New Zealand gardens - they don't have that look of grimly holding their leaves to their stems until the rains come that many non-native plants (and really a lot of natives too) have here. Poor old drought-ridden Australia. It makes me sad how we misuse you so.
• Bookshops, art galleries and museums. It seemed like every town we stayed in had all three, or more than one of each. My favourite was the public art gallery in Dunedin, which arranges the work in its permanent collection by a method other than sequentially, which led to some interesting conversations. Also, top merch.
  
• Lake Wakatipu at Queenstown. It's huge and blue and so clear that when you go to the top of the Skyline thingy on the hill behind Queenstown, you can still see through the water. Also, you can catch the TSS Earnslaw across the lake, and be amused by a man about some sheep. The husband (who enjoys a good holiday) and I had some discussion about whether or not enjoying this made us Old Codgers, but we decided that we would have probably enjoyed it any time and at any age. I think we were pretending to be in a turn-of-the-century novel. Well, I know I was, I shouldn't speak for others.
  
• Pretty much everything else.
  

Responsiblity and being self-deprecating and being kind of over it.

The thing is, when I decided I could actually become a public servant I decided that I would shed all of that Gen X Douglas Coupland* knee-jerk irony stuff and become born-again sincere. And you know, it's kind of been good. It's been good actually trying hard at stuff instead of trying to look like you're not trying hard at stuff. It's been good paying people sincere compliments and and trying to take Jane Bennet approach to life instead of the Mr Bennet approach to life. But eventually I've even started to annoy myself, and I'm a bit tired of wearing that costume.

It might be the whole asylum seeker thing. What's the point of doing your best for people who clearly don't want your best?**I mean, really?

And then I was thinking about all the people I'm responsible to and for, and that maybe having a decent work-life balance is all about actually thinking about that for a change, instead of letting other people push a person into certain positions, and that Jane Bennet did end up ripped off by Lydia all the time and I bet even she eventually found herself feeling a tiny bit irritated.

So I think my responsibilities are first of all to the junior, because he had no choice in the matter of whether he got to be here or not, and I did, and I chose to be responsible for him.

Next is probably to myself, but I'm very bad at this, so I tend to avoid the question by reading genre fiction and wishing I was better at craft and eating chocolate.

I think the husband should come next, because he is the only person on the planet I've stood up and made promises to about how we will treat each other for the rest of our lives. I am unsure if it would make a difference if those promises were private or unspoken, which probably could do with a bit more scrutiny.

Next is probably BDE, or work generally, because if I don'd do a good job of that, the food and place to live and buying books at Canty's part of my life will become much more difficult and I like very much that they are not difficult at the moment. Perhaps that is after all only part of my responsibility to myself.

But I did also make promises to the BDE about things I would and would not do. I try very hard to keep those promises but that whole 'speaking to people respectfully' thing can be difficult on days of stress and fury. I try not to have too many days when every sentence is silently apended with, 'you idiot', inside my mind, but by golly it can be tough.

So my thinking on responsibility has only got that far, and after that comes 'everyone and everything else', which is a pretty broad category including the dolphins, that lizard that lives in Majura where the kangaroos graze, bus drivers who look grumpy, the person running late for the bus, local business owners, booksellers and publishers and people who don't know where to put apostrophes. And obviously friends-and-relations, but their lives are their business (much like the husband and the junior) so I don't really intend to tell you a lot about that here.

So, I wonder, who and what are you responsible for? And are the servants taking advantage terribly of your good nature?



*I had to go and look on the shelf to see of it was spelled Coupland or Copeland, but then I realised I could google it. You know, our built-in bookshelves are right next to my little computer table. I can see you David Mitchell, I can see you Kerry Greenwood, I can see you Evelyn Waugh, I can see you Peter Temple. I won't admit to seeing quite a lot of you, just like Ms Roxane never, ever saw anyone called my name in the magic mirror. I hate you Romper Room.

**I hasten to add that my work has utterly nothing whatsoever to do with asylum seeker policy, and I can say, consistently with the BDE's social networking policy, that my views on the asylum seeker debate are most emphatically, sincerely and heartily not the views of the Government, but only my own, personal views as a person. Personally.

Cleanliness is next to expensiveness, disclosure is not next to closure

I have very clean teeth.

I forgot to take photos at the ball, so you will all just have to believe that I looked as beautiful as Grace Kelly, except maybe a bit more beautiful.

My endorse of the day is that Gandel Hall at the National Gallery of Australia is a damn fine spot to hold a ball in, if you are in the mood. But, as Mrs Jennings might say, the dance floor was a sad crush.

Oh, and I have to tell you (since you all know that I am a public servant) that all of the opinions in this blog are only my own, poor personal opinions, and not the opinions of the Best Department Evah or the Government-at-large. Apparently blogging does not entitle me to represent myself as representing everyone else in the country. Who knew?

Reading this policy today about the use of social media by those-who-have-sold-their-souls-to-the-government-for-filthy-lucre made me think that it might actually only be the Second-or-Third-Best-Department-Actually. There it is. I guess the honeymoon is over. Although, reflecting on my diet over the past three years, I think I have sold my soul for filthy sucre, not filthy lucre, and maybe dropping the honey will have health benefits anyway.

I feel fairly confident the government more generally does not have a policy position on my teeth, and if they did I feel confident that dental care would be covered under Medicare.

Anyway, no cavities, which is more than I deserve.

In which more week happens

Kid got sick and then got better again. Husband still sick. Hot water service broke (but nice man from Rheem came and fixed it all up very quickly indeed and for a lot less than a new hot water serivce, plus free advice on energy saving options).

Co-worker turns out to have a broken hand, due to the accursed netball end-of-the-finger injury. She might miss the ball (exclamation marks unto infinity), not the netball, the dancing one. She has been out of work all week, and had to have her job interview for her very own job with a broken hand. I feel like we should be given some kind of degree of difficulty points.

The doctor has given me powerful steroids for my horrible allergies. Apparently they may cause mood changes, lack of appetite and inappropriate euphoria. No evidence yet, unless laughing more than ususal at Bargain Hunt counts as inappropriate euphoria. The kid says that I am not acting any stranger than usual, and I certainly ate plenty of splodge for dinner.

In my defence, Bargain Hunt was pretty funny tonight, and the guy was not even wearing his pink trousers.

The week ahead

Involves a head cold, a job interview (pretty much for mine own job which I do love), a haircut, a ball, a dentist appointment, a learning journey in which we observe that the junior has learned to do things such as paint and write, several bus trips, a few car trips, some dry cleaning and maybe a bit of hemming.

I would prefer that the head cold and the job interview were at different ends of the week, alas.

My mum is today having an openly sustainable house, to show off the aquaponics and the vegies. My brother is doubtless feeling pleased at the puissance of the Blues. My son is watching the telly and my husband is reading Judge Dredd.

I'm about to go and nap again, and examine the probability of ingesting more cold and flu tablets.