#1: Shout at people to get you things. This gets old really fast. Then you get organised and have a water bottle/spew cloth/15 remotes/landline/cellphone/snacks lined up on the couch next to you ( Read more... )

The spring of 1991, I was fifteen. I was about to sit my first big exams, my peer groups were shifting, boys my age were starting to behave less like annoying younger brothers, and life was starting to get interesting. I'd spend my weekends mooching round the local bookshop, wondering whether I could get a summer job there, and flicking through ( Read more... )

I realised after writing my last post that childrearing manuals are not simply a function of today's media-led society in which women are isolated from their kin groups and turn to celebrities for advice. L M Montgomery's strangest book, Rilla of Ingleside, documents one quite well - the main character adopts a war baby at age 15 and raises him ( Read more... )

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new parent is in need of Advice, and there are no shortage of authorities willing to provide it. The hard part is looking beneath it and deciding whether or not the philosophical underpinning of the advice is something that fits your own values. There seems to be a huge quantity of crypto- ( Read more... )

Connie Willis wrote a fabulous short story comparing the eastern front in WW1 with the Swarzschild radius of black holes, the point at which light or any other information cannot escape and is sucked into the black hole. You get close enough to the eastern front and nobody hears from you again ( Read more... )

So of course, it was freezing driving rain, the poles on the bus came down and broke (fortunately just before my bus stop), and there was a fire alarm fifteen minutes after I came in ( Read more... )

So, there was quite a big earthquake last night, 7.8 on the Richter scale, but it was in such an isolated location off the South coast of Fiordland that it may have inconvenienced a few kea, but so far no reports of damage from nearby towns ( Read more... )

I'll not disturb the rest of the world with my views on whether former university tutor Clayton Weatherston is a murderer or manslaughterer for stabbing his ex-girlfriend 216 times, but this at least requires comment ( Read more... )

Our home network has grown a branch - we now have a working network cable from the switch in the computer room to the socket in the lounge, so portable internet in the warm room with cables under the floor rather than down the hallway - woohoo! I can now plug my laptop into the socket from the dinner table ( Read more... )

The last few months have been pretty busy, and I haven't done much in the update department as a result. Things have just been ticking along nicely for me, since I hurt my back at Easter and recovered from it pretty much completely by mid-May. Since then, it's mainly been sorting out The Baby Stuff ( Read more... )