The Adventures of Pooh

I am in bed with my computer, taking it easy after a nasty tummy bug, not yet 100% but improving.

H is wanly watching a DVD clutching a container. She threw up last night, I'm not sure if it was the start of the tummy bug or just too much mucous from her cold but she is very pale.

D is looking after our nieces, H' & I, at their house. H' is not at school because she is convalescing after her own tummy bug.

S, H' & I's mum, is at school doing my parent helper duty.

Parenting is all about logistics.

Expecting someone taller

H & K don't like to compete with each other. They like to be first equal. If we offer a reward they like to receive it simultaneously even if one of them earned it first. This is particularly true of K who likes everything to be fair so long as she's first. I think that I needed a caesarian because K was so upset that H was being born first, if they could have come out simultaneously, or K first, they both would have been fine.

We don't have a height chart, marks on a doorway or whatever. Largely this is because I was too caught up in the present for the first year or more to look to the future and partly it is because having not started one it never seemed like the right time to start. Now I realise that for our family, for H & K, it is the right thing to do. Currently, despite information to the contrary K believes she is taller than H and H believes that she is the same height as K and everyone is happy. Who needs objectivity?

Wrongo, zombie lips!

For a few years I have been telling people that it is now legal to park on the wrong side of the road here (facing in the opposite direction to the flow of traffic). I thought I'd read something about a law change to this effect in the paper. I was wrong, it is still illegal and you can be ticketed for it.

Now I know that one of my failings as a human being is an overdeveloped attachment to being right, so I hereby give you, my gentle reader, a chance to tell me what I've got wrong and I'll 'fess up or at least try very hard to understand your point of view and agree to differ.

P.S. Does anyone know where the quote "Wrongo, zombie lips!" is from? Trusty Google is letting me down.

If you don't eat your meat

We've decided to eat vegetarian at least one day a week. I was inspired by a snippet in New Scientist which said:

How to eat green

If you are serious about reducing your carbon footprint, going vegetarian for one day a week will make a big difference, says Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who has audited the greenhouse gas emissions of our meals. "The differences between eating habits are very, very striking," he says.

Writing this I've done some more research. There is an article on New Scientist Environment which references Environmental Science and Technology (DOI: 10.1021/es702969f). The research is American and the detail would be slightly different here because we don't keep our cows in barns and transport grain to them but that doesn't stop them farting a staggering amount of methane.

If that is all too sane for you try this leaflet which was delivered to our "No Junk Mail" snail-mailbox just the other day. My favourite part is the second question on the second page:

QUESTION: Yes. Thank you, Master.

I am very happy to take questions like that.