Caprica’s Neighborhood

Yep, this morning was my last chance training session. Because tomorrow is the day I go shopping for a pair of swimmers.

See, I've been trialling this new way of living where I take one day at a time. Just live that day. Don't worry about the future and forget about the past. The one flaw with this plan is that one day you happen to glance at your calender and realise you'll be leaving for Thailand in three weeks and don't have a thing organised.

So I'm off to the big(ish) smoke tomorrow on the dreaded swimming costume search. I will have an egg on toast and a glass of juice before I go so I feel fortified and strong. You don't want to risk any mid afternoon blood sugar level drops because that could lead to depression and feelings of self loathing.

One thing you must remember when trying on swimmers is that there will be none of those awful change room down lights that show up every dimple of cellulite, on the beach. Another thing to remember is that 99% of people are perfectly average just like you. So unless there happens to be some sort of super model convention happening where we are I should be fine. And if there is...... well best not to even contemplate that.

But I am shopping for swimmers at a great time. I've just lost 7 kilos so I'm feeling pretty damn fine and this morning I managed to fit into a pair of size 10 Cue pants which didn't hurt the self confidence either. Plus it means I have something to wear to my nephews wedding next weekend.

But the main thing going in my favour are the people I'm travelling with. There will be my daughter Kimba and her friend Nat, both 21, almost 6 feet tall and gorgeous, and there will be Lizzie, 17, beautiful, all dark and mysterious. So no ones even going to be looking at me.

Of course Jem will be there as well. She's 5 years younger than me at 40. She's at that difficult age where you still feel like you have to show you've still got it. Whereas once you hit (almost) 46, you're not as hard on yourself. I mean there comes a time where you just have to say, this is it. This is me. I eat healthily, (well, except for the wine, but its not going anywhere) and I exercise like a demon, and this is as good as it's going to get. And its not that bad.

However, having said all that, I still find shopping for swimmers to be the most horrendous job out there. Hopefully it all goes to plan.

~

I love tourists ... really I do because they help my local economy but.. 

-  please stand to the right on the metro (train) escalators so that we locals, with things to do, can walk past on the left.  There is even a sign asking you.

-  and when you get to the top, or bottom, of the escalator please do not just stop there while you figure out where to go next.  There are 50 people about to trip up behind you.

-  Oh - and if a machine has a diagram of how a ticket should be inserted they really want you to insert your ticket that way!  

I think someone needs a drink ....... 

***

I wish all Americans a Happy & Safe Thanksgiving - even the tourists! 

"Dear Congressman: We're melting. Love, the Glaciers." - Al Gore

Okay, I just had to speak up on this mind-numbingly ignorant rumor about Hadley CRU. Background: Fox News is claiming that an email from a university shows once and for all that Global Warming Theory is a scam. Apparently, the University of East Anglia's computer was hacked and the following phrase (ooh, 3 words, that must disprove global warming!) was found: "Hide the decline".

Aside from the obvious question, where's the rest of the frigging sentence, there are several reasons why this proves nothing. Oh wait I stand corrected, this does prove one thing: that Fox News and global warming deniers will do anything to scam the American public.

First off, scientists hide data all the time. No, not to "deceive" anyone. They hide columns or rows just as you would minimize a window if you were working with several Word documents at once. In statistics programs like JMP, it allows a scientist to see data in a less jumbled fashion.

Second, for Fox news to suggest that this proves climate change is a hoax, they would have to prove that East Anglia scientists were the ONLY people who proved global warming theory. (And we know that sentence is redundant, right)? Let's suppose the Large Hadron Collider managed to wipe that university off the map - demolish all the data. We'd still have overwhelming evidence from a Godzillion other places.

Global warming theory has been tested over and over again, by many other scientists. To date, no one has disproven or even come close to disproving human caused global warming.

Global warming is not a political party. It's simply a sub-category of pollution. If you want to understand it, read the primary literature. Don't get your scientific data from television. Please read my Global Warming facts and myths to undersand better. And here's Al Gore. Science didn't work, so he's gonna try crazy.

 

 

My kid went to his dad's this morning. Flew from Seattle to SanFran at the asscrack of dawn 6am. Since this is one of the busiest travel days of the year, we signed him up for the Unaccompanied Minor service on Virgin America. (That's an additional $160, it ain't free.)  My whole reasoning is that I wanted them to be accountable for him if anything happened on this busy travel day and when he comes back -- reroutes due to weather, bad plane, whatever. They introduced him to the airline attendant, and even made me set up a password for me, the kid, and the exhusband. And hey! He gets free movies, free tv, free food... cool, right?

THEY LOST HIM.

My ex called me after everything was over, and told me what happened. He had spent over an hour with the Virgin America people trying to find out what the hell happened to him, Aside from the fact that THEY DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE HE WAS LOST - no one knew, no one had an answer, no one even instigated any kind of search until he started yelling (and my ex can YELL) and he just happened to see my kid walk by, looking for him as well. Lots more details to the story than that, but basically you get the gist. Their general take on the incident... they can't do anything, you're just SOL if they lose your kid.

FUCKERS. VIRGIN AMERICAN CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.*

*Bad pun strenuously intended.

We're having our bi-yearly alternative Thanksgiving. It's a long drive to my sister's and the holiday food is way too heavy. I don't normally eat turkey or mashed potatoes.

My family feels obilgated to make unfamiliair recipes for my diet restrictions, when I'd rather just help out cooking. But they want to be in control, so I just doodle around in the kitchen. I also get tired of people asking why I'm not drinking.

Sometimes we spend the holiday with our friends Rosie and Mr. Spacely. Rosie is an amazing cook. We both love the same foods, so cooking with her is a delight. Eggplant, Asian-American fusion. It's really light, healthy holiday food. 

We all sit by the fireplace and discuss snowshoeing or winter hikes. They have a pileated woodpecker family that lives in their backyard, so we watch for them. It's all very casual.

This year we'll spend the day spoiling our cats. It will be the new strays' first holiday with us. Sometimes I call my Apache friend, she tells the most amazing Native American stories. Native Americans all take part in gatering the food and preparing the meal.

I think this kind of cooperation is what makes Thanksgiving more special for people like my Apache friend; everyone has a job to do, everyone works to put food on the table. It's more about survival than indulgence. So I'm glad to share the holiday with friends.

Happy Thanksgiving, Voxers! 

I've got a presentation to do on the 30th for work. It's talking about the kind of work my little department does and how it could help another department in my firm.

And I am cacking myself.

I was watching a film at the cinema a couple of nights ago and in between concentrating on the film, I noticed that I was feeling v. nervy and getting palpitations and traced it back to the fact that this frigging presentation is really freaking me out. I even started thinking about calling in sick on Monday and landing someone else in it at the last minute to cover my presentation.

The last time I did a presentation was 6 years ago - that's how much I hate doing them, I've managed to stick my head in the sand, avoid and totally ignore them for 6 glorious years.

But it's just my luck that the TWO other people who could've/should've been doing this presentation have BOTH got annual leave booked that day.

FFS - I've given birth to two babies, so how the hell can a 10 minute presentation be freaking me out so much?????

But it is.

So many people I know - husband included - give presentations with such ease; they don't bat an eyelid, filling their presentations with witticisms and funny stories and totally comfortable in their own skins.

And me?

My presentation is just going to give it to them straight in the hope that 10 minutes won't really feel like 10 hours and I won't somehow fuck it up.

 

Sometimes, when its late at night, and I'm lying in bed trying to sleep, I feel like walking up to Lizzie's room and saying to her

what the fuck are you actually doing?

Because it sounds to me like she's moving a large herd of cattle through a small obstacle course.

Or sometimes its like hospital noises. You know, random things crashing about, television blasting, phones ringing, laughing. At any moment I expect her to crank up the vacuum cleaner.

And I'm beginning to think she's retarded in some way. Because no matter how many times I ask her to try and be quiet after 10.30pm, she persists in being exactly the opposite.

It seems that she lives in the filth and squalor that only a teenager can live in for months, then suddenly decides she must clean her room at 11.30pm.

This also requires a loud thumping up the hallway past my bedroom to the bathroom, where she deposits an extremely large pile of dirty washing which she is always surprised to find hasn't been washed ready for her by the next morning. It also means a large pile of towels to be washed, some of which feel suspiciously like they have never been used, just left on the floor for a while.

Now here it is, 11am and she's still in bed. Meanwhile I had to be up at 5.30am to fit a 30km bike ride in before my day even began and she'll be up soon wondering why I need an afternoon nap.

I wonder if you can have morning tea naps.

I've been seeing these amusing Garmin ads on tv recently. They're wild . I like the nutcracker one. We used them in grad school but I had no idea they had such a weird sense of humor.

I had a flashback to one of our grad school forest projects. We worked in teams of four to analyze the community ecology of an Audubon Sanctuary. We only had one day of work left, but a huge snowstorm was on its way.

Two of us decided to just work a few hours to get the data we needed. We were doing some veg inventories (that's a fancy way of saying we had to identify trees, and just by their bark).

Well, the snowstorm started early. We went off trail only to find that the work took much longer than expected, and pretty soon we were in whiteout conditions. Everything looked the same. We had our compass but we were in a hurry to get back, knee deep in snow, freezing cold and not anywhere that a GPS would work. Garmin's ad reminds me of that day, except we were on foot, in the woods and losing light. Whee! 

Staring at our compasses (which were declinated all funny for various reasons), I turned to my partner and said, "why don't we just follow our footsteps back"? We found the trail quickly after that. I love low-tech solutions.

 

It's been 3 months since I started my daily photo blog and since I can barely keep up with all my different online efforts, I hardly expect you too (unless we're FB friends and I subject you to the updates on a daily basis). So I thought I'd do a wee recap and share some of my best snaps from the past 3 months. I'm actually quite proud of myself!

Thank god its only 24 degrees today. Thats 20 degrees cooler than yesterday. We've had four days over 40 (thats over 100). Tells of a hot summer coming up. Already bush fires all over the state.

And yesterday this poor old King Parrot dropped by looking for water. Its the second time I've seen him and he's about the most exotic thing I've ever seen in our backyard. Besides myself of course.

No idea what he's doing around these parts. They usually hang in rainforest type areas and that I can assure you we are not.

Wonder if he's someones pet. Hmmm.

Anyway of course yesterday was the day a leak appeared in the bird bath and there was harldy any water in it. So of course then I went in and gave Daz a serve for being a slack arse and not fixing it immediately and that now the poor bird would probably die from heat stroke and it would be all his fault.

But I've dragged an old bird bath out and filled it so hopefully he'll come back.

Hopefully Betty won't try to eat it. Because she hates magpies, (don't we all). Doves are ok. Magpies are scum.

So here are some fairly crap shots of the beautiful boy. I didn't want to get too close and scare him off. He sounded exhausted. Those little strips of bluey green down his side are almost fluoro. (fluorescent for you non australians)