Testing

I've just set it up so I can post from txt. Neat huh?

Edited to add: it would be neat if it didn't have my phone number as the Title...

A blank page in the diary of my life

In June my optometrist recommended that I referred to a neurologist because my eye tracking is slightly jerky and has been for at least a year (ataxia). He also asked questions like "Have you ever had a head injury?" - No, and "Do you have a family history of Parkinson's Disease?" - Yes.

I went to the doctor the next day and she wrote a referral letter. 5 weeks later I hadn't heard anything back from the hospital so I followed up. The doctor wrote another referral and got the practice nurse to fax it through.

On Friday I followed up again, 12 weeks after first being referred, a different practice nurse figured out that the fax was sent upside down, i.e. the hospital received a blank piece of paper. I don't know what happened to the first referral perhaps it was not the first time the nurse made this mistake.

Aaargh.

Fortunately it is not something difficult to live with and a delay in investigating the cause is unlikely to make any difference to the outcome as the scenarios I know of are:

• the ataxia will never be explained, it is just a mysterious quirk,
• when I was born I received brain damage which was so minor that it has not been picked up until now (I was a difficult forceps delivery),
• Parkinson's disease,
• Multiple Sclerosis.
  

Unfortunately I have spent 3 months with the last two scenarios lurking in the dark corners of my mind. Parkinson's scares me less than MS. I know too many women who died in their late 40s/early 50s of MS. But, la la la la la, there is no point in worrying, la la la la la, I just need to wait and see, la la la la la, I've probably always been like this, la la la la la, think happy thoughts, la la la la la.

Public service announcement

If you're in Wellington and have been meaning to go to a first aid course and not getting around to it then join me at the NZ Red Cross comprehensive first aid course on 15 and 16 October. You can book at www.redcross.org.nz or by ringing 499 5827.

Electric sheep

Last night I hosted a toy library working bee at my house. Early this morning I was part of a futuristic SWAT team with Barack Obama, Sigourney Weaver and some other tall thin famous people. In our shuttle we donned helmets and leather superhero suits as we prepared to take on someone with seriously overdue toys.

The consumption and development of brains

School holidays has overtaken my life but it is ok:
45%
Yesterday as a 4 year-old chatted to me about playing Halo 2 (which is R16) on the xbox in his bedroom I was struck by the wide variety of options we have as parents. I expect he is better prepared than H & K for surviving a zombie apocalypse.

Winter whining

Where have I been? What have I been doing? Well mostly I haven't been posting because D has commandeered my lovely little laptop and turned it into a thing that is plugged into a huge screen I can't sit far enough away from which makes a horrible high pitched whining noise. And we all had awful 'flu. And I have new lenses in my glasses and I think they are not quite right.

---

As we drove back from the library today H listed all the things she thought of in order from most to least liked:

1. Mummy [:-)]
   
2. lego
3. Pony [Kay's new toy]
   
4. star [??]
   
5. doing sudoku with Daddy
6. Big Pig
   
7. Fimble [her buddy]
   
8. pink
9. chocolate [to eat]
   
10. yellow
11. purple
12. indigo
13. orange
14. blue
15. black
16. grey
17. brown
18. clear
19. ice cream
20. bananas
21. mosquitoes
22. planes
23. sun [because it makes her too hot]

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.