Harry Potter, Harry Potter, Harry Potter

The Noodle is up to the Order of the Phoenix. He seems to be over the fear of Voldemort.

We have been hearing a lot about diverse Harry Potter issues. The Noodle tells me he has been doing a lot of serious thinking about it.

Dolores Umbridge is the worst teacher.

Boggart is pronounced Bogart. As in 'Neville's Bogart is Snape'.

Charms and/or Defence Against the Dark Arts is the best subject.

An online quiz that places you in Ravenclaw is disappointing.

Snape is not a sympathetic character to a seven-year-old boy.

Fred and George are the best magicians ever.

competence

So is it more damaging to your sense of competence to always be working right at the edge of your abilities with the stress and the short deadlines and the working late OR is it the always working comfortably and safely within your boundaries with not much to challenge you at all?

Sometimes writing is hard, n'that.

Am having to cudgel the brains at work to try and write something interesting.

It's a terrible about-face from writing at work usually, which is about simplifying ideas and squeezing them onto one page. Interest is rarely an aim.

On the other hand I am having lots of fun cudgeling my brains for birthday present ideas like this and this or this. Well, maybe not the last one.

Reading, reading, small amounts of thinking

So I made the husband borrow me some books on Bourdieu from his university library, because it's a bit outside the expertise of the library we have at work and I feel a bit like I should only get inter-library loans for work-related reading. So I've had speech writing and social inclusion and negotiation and dispute resolution and really I think Bourdieu would be at least as relevant as some of that, but I can't quite sell it to myself yet. Or perhaps I mean I can't quite imagine myself explaining it to my boss quite yet why I need to read more Bourdieu and how it will make me a better public servant. Which I doubt it will, actually, although I am sure it would not make me a worse one.

Anyway, one of the books I thought was kind of a survey of how people in America are using Bourdieu's ideas in their thinking but it has kind of turned out to be really a book about why Americans hate Bourdieu's ideas, and it's been interesting I suppose. I have a tendency to fall in love with the things I find intersting, and some part of my critical thinking turns itself right off.

Also I have been feeling quite sad to realise how far away from all kinds of ideas I am right now. But that's a function of my imagination, not geography.

Party planning

So the Noodle has invited a tasteful amount of children to his birthday party in three weeks. It would have been in two weeks, but his bestest friend is in Shanghai at the moment, so we had to delay.

Kids these days seem to lead a vastly more cosmopolitan life than we did. Our whole burning desire was to go to Queensland, and I never got there until I was 17 thank you very much. These days the kids are off all over the world. Argentina, China, India, anywhere you can think of really.

Sigh. I am only partly consumed with envy.

So for the birthday party we are planning some non-competitive games, because the Noodle is always irritated how some people get prizes and some people don't. He is thinking that if everyone has a goody bag at the end, no prizes are necessary. He is considering whether there should be a prize for statues, but has forbidden pass the parcel outright. I think this has more to do with the fact that he was the only kid who did not get a pass the parcel prize at the last birthday party he attended rather than any kind of ideological commitment.

There will be pizza and frog-in-the-pond. And lemonade. What else is necessary (besides valium and earplugs)?

Reading

The Noodle: The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. He says it is hard, but he keeps coming out with all kinds of concepts about time travel and photon teleportation and different dimensions, so he must be getting at least some of it.

Me: Samurai Kids 4: Monkey Fist by Sandy Fussell. The Noodle has already read it since we got it yesterday afternoon, so I stole it and read it on the bus. Which caused some consternation, because he wanted to read it again when he got home from school this afternoon. Oops

Back from the north

Which, being Brisbane, used to seem like the far south to us Queenslanders, but to us Canberrans looks and feels like a dream-world of the north with the jacarandas, the sunshine and the tiny beads of sweat on the skin. 'It's not humid at all' the Brisbane-dwellers say, in a tone of similar bewildered outrage to those comments on the ABC news site saying 'but Australia is not a racist country'.

And Brisbane is indeed quite humid and Australia, well.

The kid had a fine holiday, where no one expected anything of him at all except that he relax and have a good time and entertain himself if he got bored, which is surely the best kind of school holiday experience a person can have after all.

Life with no kid

It seems to involve movies, DVDs and junk food. About 90% of my day-to-day energy seems to be generally consumed by attempting to not be a bad role model to the junior. While he is away I have kind of, um, relaxed a bit.

Not sure if the stress involved in trying to be good is worse for the kid than the high levels of exposure to junk food and laziness would be if I gave up trying to be good.

Let's just say I may have eaten apple pie for breakfast, and I'll leave the maths up to you all.

The Noodle, on the other hand, has been quite busy up there in Queensland. Apparently.