You thought it was a hippo

Last night my daughter came running up to me in the garden, urging me to come with her. (If she sees anything scary now, she fetches me and I have to come and look.)

"See that, Mommy - that brown thing, with eyes", she says, pointing to a small (~10cm high) clump of mud and leaves in the flowerbed. There was a bit of white gunk on it that could conceivably have been mistaken for eyes. I explained that it was a heap of leaves out of the pool pump, and kicked it apart a bit so she could see what it was.

"You thought it was a hippo!" she exclaimed.*



*She's improving with the first / second person pronoun mix-up, but it's not quite perfect yet.

Buttons!

My daughter has developed a major phobia about buttons. You know, those things that pretty much all mens' shirts have, and most of my smart, for-work clothes. Well, she started off last Tuesday having a complete hysterical fit whenever she saw a button, and refusing to be in the same room as her Daddy until he changed into a T-shirt, and she has gradually been improving all week. On Wednesday, when I fetched my car after a service, my Mom had to take Zeb out into the car park - because she refused to stop screaming when she noticed that one of the guys at the service reception desk was wearing a button-up shirt.

This follows hard on the heels of the massive ant phobia (about 2 weeks ago) and, before that, the snake phobia (causing her to be unable to enter the children's diningroom at the hotel, or even walk past the door - because there was a small picture of a cartoon snake on an ABC poster). This seems to be the pattern at the moment..
1) Develop huge, world ending / hysteria inducing phobia.
2) Gradually work through phobia, until it settles, in 1 to 2 weeks.
3) Develop new huge, apocolyptic, hysteria-inducing phobia.

I'm now running out of reasonably smart clothes to wear that have no buttons. This morning, my daughter suggested I should wear my (buttonless) dressing gown all day. Hmmmmm...

Two, going on fourteen

The other day my daughter dashed outside early in the morning, while I wittered on in the background about it being really cold and her needing to put on her slippers. But she completely ignored me and carried on walking carefully around the pool bricks (it's netted). So I walked out a bit further (it was cold), and said "Did you hear what I said? What did I say?" *
Little Zeb, without looking up, then says loudly "Zeb's not caring!" and keeps on walking.

I, of course, initiated immediate disciplinary action, without trying to decipher whether she didn't care about the cold, or whether she didn't care what I had said, but would do what she liked anyway! I figured, either way, forcible removal from desirable outdoors and insertion into slippers was justified.

I'm torn between pride at her obviously correct understanding and good contextual use of the concept of not caring about something, and utter disbelief and incredulous shock that the thing she doesn't care about is my opinion.




*Shudder - I really did say that.

Birdsong

It's a bird of paradise.
It's not a dove.
It's not a peacock.
It has a fancy tail -
It's definitely a bird of paradise.


- Made up by my 2-year old, bird-mad daughter today. I can't remember the
tune, but there was one. She made that up,too.

Don't hand me!

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a restaurant with my daughter sitting on my lap. She accidently pushed her elbow into me, and I said, as one would "Don't elbow me!", at which point she fell over, convulsed with laughter.

I said "what? what?" - wondering if it was some strange sort of fit - and she gasped through her chuckles "Elbow me! elbow me!" and collapsed again. So I said "What's so funny about your elbow?", and then, just in case we've never introduced her elbow to her, clarified this with "It's that pointy bit in the middle of your arm - why is it funny?".

Little Zeb then calmed down enough to sit up, waved her arm about madly, backhanded me in the face, shrieked "Don't hand me!" and collapsed in convulsive laughter again.

It's illuminating to me how much of our language use really is quite wierd. I guess the use of a body part to describe an action is a bit odd - but as an adult I'm used to it. I remember as a kid sometimes just repeating the same word over and over and over until it lost all meaning - then being really stumped in conversation for days afterwards.

As you wish

I have just reread The Princess Bride. It just gets better and better each time. I'm reading a lot at the moment as I have a UNISA assignment due and my wabbing structured procrastination is taking a bit of a hit.

Anyway, today I found, in a marvelous example of universal synchronicity, one of my favourite web comics doing this.

Made me feel all warm and fuzzy :). Hooray!

Bookses!

We (at work) got notification today that the book that our paper will be in will be out soon.

It's one of those catchy, easy to remember titles...

The Geospatial Web: How Geo-Browsers, Social Software and the Web 2,0 are Shaping the Network Society

The book has an accompanying home page here . My contribution is the paper / chapter titled "Fire alerts for the Geospatial Web".

Structured Procrastination in action

So this weekend I .... hemmed the curtains. At some point I'll blog the list of things I have for my structured procrastination experiment. It was a scary list. (Yes, wedding samplers appear on it).

.. no really, I'm not procrastinating

but just check out this post on structured procrastination - it made me laugh a lot, and really, it's ultimately going to improve my work productivity, so could reasonably be classified as work. Really.

Telecommuting Tip and news comment

I don't know how many of you have seen the ridiculous furore caused by FNB dropping their proposed anti-crime ad campaign. Of course government delegations should have pressured them into dropping it. I mean, God Forbid anyone should venture to suggest that there is anything even vaguely not brilliant in our country that the government could possibly be doing anything about and isn't! Anyway, the text of the proposed ad is available on Real South Africa , and seems to me to be pretty innocuous. It doesn't in any way lay blame for our current high levels of very violent, scary crime at the government's door, but simply requests that our president take into account the concerns of many South Africans, and actively, publicly and vocally prioritise crime-fighting in this country. I think I might fill in the letter and send it off anyway.

One letter I have sent to government recently, is one to Trevor Manuel. I think the tips for trevor email address is a really good idea. (Hell, even if he never reads 90% of what gets sent, at least you feel you've had a say). Well, my tip is to try to economically advantage companies that prioritise telecommuting for their staff at least one day a week. I figure we have some major problems with road congestion and greenhouse gas emission, and simply improving our transport infrastructure ain't going to cut it. I think it will take years and years to convince car-driving South Africans that to take public transport is a safe, reliable alternative to driving their own cars (certainly I'm not going near the Gautrain until it's been running for a least a decade - with a brilliant safety record...) and I'm not sure that the planet really can handle everyone willy-nilly driving for that long.

Flicking sore

I broke my toe this morning while carrying the potty to the bathroom. It hurt quite a lot.

I have spent quite a lot of the day trying to convince my daughter that I said "flick".

Link link linkety link link

As Marginalia said, this is important.

Then, courtesy of Confluence , a fiendish word puzzle, Funny Farm . BTW, if anyone can get the unobvious three letter word linking to "chicken" (you'll know what I mean when you get there), please tell me - it's driving me nuts.

..and a Happy New Year

to all those recovering from Christmas and floating around until New Year. My Christmas was wonderful - my daughter had an absolute ball, and every now and again looks around the wrapping-strewn lounge (I'm not really an efficient tidyer), and says hopefully "I don't know where all those presents have gone!". She had so many presents that we were still opening them yesterday - so she can be forgiven for thinking that some may still be lurking.

The Giant Duck went down a treat and is now regularly snuggled. It is bigger than she is by quite a margin, and probably will be for a couple of year.

I miss Cape Town dreadfully - I miss the Great Boxing Day Braai, and I desparately want to be able to just hang out with friends. We don't know anyone up here with kids anywhere near Zeb's age, and pretty much have only hung out with family since we got here. Hopefully, now that we own a house and know that we are fairly settled in the area, we can start finding social things to do around here. Also, we might meet families next year when Zeb goes to nursery school. (In 11 days - 11 DAYS - my baby starts school in 11 Days - I don't think I'm ready. )

I got the 2-disc version of Pirates of the Carribean, Dead Man's Chest for christmas, and I must admit to some disappointment. Aside from being unmistakeable as an "inbetween" film (like the Two Towers was), I wasn't as taken with Jack Sparrow's character - I didn't get the feeling that he was as redeemable as he was in the first one, he was much more selfish and far less swashbuckling. I don't know... it just didn't grab me as much, which was sad. Maybe version 3 will be better again.

Yesterday I decided to switch on my laptop from work to finish updating the system - I had fetched all the sources and simply (ha-ha) had to emerge world to compile them all. Somehow, I have lost my windows manager completely. I could get to a terminal login, but no startx. Anyway, merrily I continued my emerge quest, and subsequently could not boot at all. So it looks like I have, yet again, screwed my gentoo disto horribly - and will once again have to face the disaproval of my boss, who will once again tell me how wonderful Ubuntu is and how I now have to switch - because he has absolutely no understanding of how long it actually takes me to set up everything I want to on a pc, and how long it takes to install everything. I reckon, if it takes me a week to sort out my gentoo, but then it works, then I have everything set up as I want it, but if I "just install Ubuntu" - then I have to first back up gigabytes of data, try to somehow store / export all my settings on all the apps I use (probably a day's work in and of itself) and then try to reproduce said settings in a new distribution that I don't know from a bar of soap. I'm a bit bummed by the whole thing.

Anyway, I think I will abandon the bastard for the rest of the year, and see if anyone is around to help me when I go back to work next week. I'll take a few good books in with me in case no-one's around. Now I need to try and get some sleep. A has put up new curtains in our bedroom that actually reach all the way to the bottom of the window, so sunrise might not wake me up tomorrow :).

Weathergoth

Extemporanea had a weatherpixie on her site - and I thought it was so cool that I grabbed myself one - proudly now displayed top right.

ow, ow, ow.

It should be ho! ho! ho! - but I am sitting at my desk with a monstrous headache, unable to take anything more exciting than panado. My total abject failure to wean my daughter has some downsides - like the fact that the sight of two panados is enough to just about make me weep with relief. So I've started a really really long uninteractive process on my pc, and now don't need to concentrate on anything for a couple of hours.

Last night I was thinking about movie love / sex scenes, and how, after contortions I could probably never force my fairly unsupple body into, gorgeous women rise and waft gracefully across a room to gaze out of windows, artfully silhouetted in angsty monochrome, or langorously dress themselves again in their drop-dead gorgeous movie-scene clothes. Anyway, I was thinking about this because I have dodgy hips - if I sit still for too long or stay in a wierd position for any length of time my hips "go out" - as in, seize up horribly and painfully, forcing me to emulate a cross between the hunchback of notre dame and Forest Gump (pre the Run Forest! Run! scene). The upshot being that if I was ever in a sumptuous movie sex scene, I would, post-action, have to lurch horribly across the floor - grunting ouch! ouch! ouch! - in an attempt to unlock my dodgy hips, while my hapless companion, whoever he / she happened to be, either ran screaming for the door in horror, or collapsed in helpless cruel laughter - destroying any hope of afterglow, save that related to the twinkling lights caused by me cracking my head on a doorpost in mid-lurch.

I thought all this, you understand, apropos of nothing at all.

Moved

We are all moved out of our old house, and gradually settling into our new house. My daughter has been quite unsettled - understandably, as we have just upped and shifted her away from the only home she probably consciously remembers. I have got the water switched on, but Eskom can't find the property on their computer system. Also, two of our electricity meters have identical serial numbers - deeply dodgy.

I think it's completely unfair that I am at work in the week leading up to Christmas. I have a kid. I reckon primary care givers should have compulsory leave during school holidays. I shouldn't be sneaking in blog time at the office! I should be taking Zeb to see "Faver Kismas" at the increasingly bun-fight emulating shopping centers. I should be making decorations with her and decorating the cake - and swimming, and playing, and running naked through the sprinklers.

It's just not Christmas if the Mommy is at work. It's just wrong. It would have been wrong when I was little, and it feels wrong now. I don't think I'm cut out for this working-away-from-home stuff.

I think I may try to get work as a nursery school teacher. No real extra-murals to deal with, and school holidays off. Plus - the added bonus that one gets to work with kids, who, in general, don't irritate me, as opposed to office colleagues, who, in general, do!

Another cool link

DM of the Rings made me laugh a lot - despite all my stress re: moving, and seeing a therapist today who basically told me that feeling depressed and anxious is all my own fault. Ptoooie. Ah well, maybe she'll have some good suggestions despite her obvious lack of understanding of clinical brain disorders.

Anyway, looking at her pricing structure convinced me that psychologising is a viable living, R450 a session. And she's a "life coach" too.... <insert wretching noises here> - only, on her form, she lists "Life couching" at R500 a session. Not entirely sure that's legal, here.

It's a small world

We are in the throes of packing, due to move house tomorrow. Yesterday, I took my daughter and mom to see the new house. Zeb has been quite interested in the moving process for a while, and was very keen to see the place.

So we ring the doorbell, and the current owner, Mrs S, opens the door. I say "Mrs S" - she says "You!!". Turns out we went to school together. Since I haven't lived in this city for at least 10 years, I have pretty much avoided meeting school mates, so it always comes as a surprise when I do.

All in all, a good visit. Zeb discovered that her new room is painted purple, and is perfectly reconciled to sleeping in the "Barney room" in the new house.

iBleugh

So, I use iBurst. I've mentioned this politely. They still have not managed to solve their open relay problem, or even give me feedback on how its going. Tonight I'm emailing their customer support manager this:
------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mr Hall,

I have repeatedly reported this particular issue to your iburst technical help desk - with no luck. It seems they either don't understand the problem, are completely incapable of fixing the problem, or simply don't care.

Many of my friends use Livejournal (www.livejournal.com), a blogging site. Much of my personal online activity revolves around reading and commenting on these blogs. Unfortunately, Livejournal does not allow me to comment, when I am connecting via iBurst. This is NOT a setting on my pc. I am NOT running any kind of mailserver. I can post comments quite happily from the same unit through my work link, just not through iBurst.

I have reported this error at least three times, most recently around November the 14th. A customer service consultant did phone me after that, to tell me that they were working on the problem, and then.....nothing.

The problem is still occuring - it seems at least one of your relays is an open relay, so anyone accessing the internet via that relay is banned from commenting in an attempt to reduce spam. This has to be affecting more people than just me.

This is the error message I get while trying to upload comments to the livejournal site:

One or more errors occurred processing your request. Please go back, correct the necessary information, and submit your data again.

* Your IP address (196.2.124.251) is detected as an open proxy (a common source of spam) so comment access is denied. If you do not believe you're accessing the net through an open proxy, please contact your ISP or this site's tech support to help resolve the problem.

This ip address resolves as:
Server: ns-cache-01.jhb.wbs.co.za
Address: 196.30.31.193

Name: wbs-196-2-124-251.wbs.co.za
Address: 196.2.124.251

Definately your problem.

Sincerely,

String theory

This (xkcd) brought tears to my eyes. Literally. It's an absolute gem of a webcomic find.