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December 28 - Well, not too long after discovering that there's more than one Wrappy Margaret discovered there are two Ruff-Ruffs. Today she kept announcing "Two Ruff-Ruffs!" over and over and pointing from one to the other. At least there was no stress involved with the discovery.

Both the laptop and the desktop PCs have gotten a terrible flu this Christmas. The laptop has all sorts of errors when I shut down, clearly there is some spyware/virus on it but when I scan it comes up clean. The desktop PC has managed to lose all of the desktop icons, even the trashcan, and when you click "Start" it takes a few seconds to open the menu. I'm planning on backing up the data and rebuilding both computers so I got a firewall and a new hard drive. I just need a new controller card for the hard drive and then I'll be hard at work making it all better. I also got a new firewall since I think the lack of the old one contributed to the problem. It's Christmas here!

December 19 - I changed Margaret's sheets last night just before bed time. I let her play with the dirty Wrappy (her special blanket) until bathtime and then I had her leave Wrappy in her bedroom on the floor. When we got out of the bath I scooped up the dirty Wrappy and tossed it into our room like I do with all of Margaret's laundry. Margaret started to freak. So I went to the crib and handed her the new clean one and she took it but was doubtful about it. When she has Wrappy she sticks a bit in her mouth and sucks on it making am "Mmmmm mmmmm" noise. Fortunately I quickly heard the good noise and she curled up on her elbows and knees to cuddle the new Wrappy.

I think we have about six Wrappys of different colors, so it's not like it's a secret that there's more than one but there she was, in a tight, happy ball, damp from the bath and not a stitch on her! It took some talking to get her "down from the ledge" but I was able to reassure her that we were about to send her to bed without Wrappy any time soon.

I'm sure some day we will need to wean her from Wrappy but right now Wrappy is limited to the crib so I think I can stand to let her have it for a long time to come. I mean, it won't be until she has sleepovers that other kids might find out about it, so we have a lot of time.

This Little Piggy Went to Market - Last night I thought about how lectures in Podiatry school must be longer than lectures in other medical branches. It just takes longer to say "the piggy who went to market" than "the femur" for example. And I can see that if they did a seminar on "this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home" all of the medical students would get tired of getting tickled by their neighbors. It must be hard to become a podiatrist.

The Mickey Saga - Mickey has had a difficult time the last few months. It started when I found a small lump in his skin. I thought it felt like either a tick or a small skin cancer. I took him to the vet who biopsied it along with a few other similar lumps she found. The cells were possibly pre-cancerous and so we decided the best thing was to remove them. So he had the surgery and was "Frankencat" for Halloween. The vet sent the excised skin to a lab for analysis and they said the edges were clear of cancer cells, and in fact, I'm not certain they found any cancerous cells in the samples at all.

At any rate our options going forward, after having dropped a significant amount of money on two surgeries plus follow up care, were to do chemo, steroids, or nothing. If more lumps appear then we can do surgery, chemo or nothing. I said no surgery or chemo. We're talking about a 13 year old cat, not a two year old one, and chemo will probably make him miserable. Surgery certainly made him miserable.

Right now he is lump-free and drug free. If we find more lumps I'm not certain what we will do. The day of his major surgery Margaret was very sad to have her buddy gone all day, so I don't know how she'd handle it if her were gone. She was also distressed when I told her that Mickey wasn't feeling well and when he came home he wasn't getting food. This is standard after your pet gets surgery so I didn't think; I should have told her he already ate. Children can make dealing with an illness in your pet much more complicated.

These days we've decided not to let Mickey sleep in our room. It means we no longer have a 15-lb. weight on the bed. In fact, his favorite spot in the bed is to lie right between us, preferably with his tail in someone's face. We usually manage to keep him at the foot of the bed but you end up feeling like your feet have been in a sandwich press all night long.

Week ending December 18 - I am like your ordinary bear and don't usually open my spam but this one got my attention. Can't recall why. The text has been scrubbed and so there are no links in it anymore:

"- We propose, for your near relations high-quality watches made with exquisite care.
- magnificent, design and graceful appearance will not let you, to be pococurante.
- We also suggest you Brand-name pencil-boxes. Beautiful Handbags, Wallets and Accessories in Winter Colors."

For some reason I felt the need to put quotation marks around all of that so you wouldn't think it was my breathless prose.

I've been trying to parse this. Sure, they're selling me cheap Chinese knockoffs that have fallen off a truck somewhere and don't really exist but we want your credit card details and we also need your SSN, mother's maiden name, PIN, DOB and home address, I'm certain.

I had to look up pococurante. It means cheap, as in "buy our watch and you won't look cheap."

But why don't some of the spammers just break the rule that all spam must be in barely legible english? I mean, why bother with words at all, in fact? I'd like to see spam that is just random characters.

I know that not being able to read the email is no obstacle to spammers or I wouldn't get spam in Russian and Japanese.

Excuses, excuses - Okay, I could go on about how I've not added to my blog and how I have a valid excuse (insert sob story here), or how I don't have a good excuse. But I think this time I won't even mention it. So there.

Margaret has a book that shows animals and their young, so it shows cat/kitten and dog/puppy and also cow/calf. When we read cow/calf she pointed to her lower leg, to the calf. Now she calls that part of her leg "cow".

Xmas - We've been en-Christmasing the house. I must admit, the whole project has been spearheaded by John. I think if it were up to me I wouldn't have done anything. We've now got candles in the four front windows, a tree with lights *and* ornaments. When we put up the tree Margaret managed to break one of our really nice ornaments before we had a single one on the tree so I declared "no ornaments, lights only!" John talked me down from my high horse and convinced me to look for unbreakable ones and we'll save the nice stuff for when she's older.

John put a wreath over the garage and a bow on the front door. The first time Margaret saw the wreath she said, "ooooh!" I'll post photos of the decorations.

The stuff I'm really into right now is all of the little home improvements projects around the house. We got an armoire for the bedroom courtesy of my parents, and the money I got from selling some of our books. It took several days to assemble since I did it mostly when Margaret was napping. I still can't figure out how to assemble some of the drawers and it just annoys me to have this incomplete hanging around.

A project I completed was to put slippery feet on the feet of the kitchen chairs. Some friends of ours in Sydney, Andrew and Jane, had put felt pads on their chairs and said it was a great improvement, but the ones I got here kept smearing glue on the floor. And that's just about as bad as scratching the wood. I replaced the felt pads with the slippery plastic ones and the chairs now slide across the floor with a bit more alacrity than we'd like but the floor is safe. I particularly like that these pads attach with a screw and the screw is set into the base, so you'd have to lose a significant amount of plastic before the head of the screw touches the floor.

I've been doing some DIY electrical work. I fixed a three-way light in the hallway. A three-way light is one where you have one fixture but two switches. Before the repairs you could find yourself unable to turn a light on or off from one end. Most annoying. I also replaced some damaged dimmers and the like.

I confess I was totally stumped about fixing the lights in the living room. We have wall sconces and three out of four were busted. My brother-in-law Richard figured *that* out. It's so sad, the problem with two of them was they bulbs were blown. I would have figured it out but John and I had each changed the bulb in one light and *both* replacements were bad. I think it was from a package of bulbs that were left here. Maybe they were left because they were bad. The fourth fixture probably never worked for the prior owners since Richard had to bend a little bi of metal to make contact with the bulb.

For me, after the excitement of electrical repairs, Christmas lights just don't do much for me!

September 18 - We're in the last days leading to the house closing. We can't wait to get into a place with more space, to be reunited with our stuff, and to be more settled in general.

In the meantime I have managed to hurt my knee. This is the same knee I hurt in my taxi accident in 1991. Back then I was crossing a street and met with a taxi at fairly low speed for a taxi but it was enough to do some damage. It was about a year later that I was able to train and feel completely normal again, all this without surgery.

This time it's been a slow degeneration and every time I train it gets a bit worse. Last week I took my "arse-kicking class" (as Martyn called it) on Thursday and Friday and woke on Saturday with a completely stiff and swollen knee. I've been training on the knee because after three years of being out of the country I'm determined to keep training until the dang thing falls off. I started to consult with friends who have had knee injuries and I thought about it and this doesn't really make sense. I've been here before, I know what I need to do and there really are no shortcuts. Knees and backs are just poorly designed (so much for the "argument from design" says the former philosophy major) and they just take time to get back to normal. Urgh.

So if you call and I don't answer I hope I am doing curls and extensions to strengthen the leg. Because no matter how much I'd like a shortcut there is no solution to doing the physio.
September 13 - As some of you know, Margaret has food sensitivities and allergies. Things seem to be getting better, and she seems less sensitive to foods than she was even six months ago. It's funny though, sometimes someone will suggest that I give her organic foods, that she probably won't react to the food if it is organic. But if you are allergic to a food you will react to it whether it is organic or not. And in fact, if you can eat the organic version of the food you aren't allergic to the food itself, you are allergic to an additive that is in that food.

I'm afraid that organic foods are starting to be perceived as a panacea.

But just because something is organic doesn't mean it is healthy. I've seen organic corn syrup, which is an oxymoron to my mind. Would people still be confident if they saw organic MSG as an ingredient? Or maybe people don't realize that a product can be mostly organic and still be called "organic". I wonder how many people read the ingredients list when they shop organic? Or do they understand that "natural" is not "organic" and "natural" is not a regulated term.

So what is "organic" according to the USDA? http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop/Consumers/brochure.html
September 12 - In America even the sugar and butter are different. This morning I noticed again that American sugar is a finer grain, a smaller crystal, than Australian sugar. American butter has a lower fat content, 80% instead of the Australian 82%.

Australian coffee is different too. You don't get drip coffee, it's all made with an espresso machine, like in Italy. In America they have found that they can sell you a cup of coffee that is half air. They call it capuccino. If they put as much foam on a beer as they do on a cup of coffee people would be up in arms.

And even if you ask for no foam they just can't resist putting masses of foam on top. Just once I'd like to look in the cup and show it to the barrista and ask, "what kind of 'no foam' is this?"
September 11 - The five-year anniversary of the World Trade attacks. When we left for Australia I couldn't understand why I couldn't seem to be able to shake this heavy feeling about September 11th. Then I found I got over it once we were in Sydney. Now we're back and I know why it was like it was. You can't go anywhere without seeing some tribute to the fallen heroes. There is no high profile event without some politician giving a speech that mentions those no longer with us.

Now I know that this is not going to be a popular position to take but it makes me think of a family where the father has died but the family hasn't moved on. It's as though New York City is still setting a place at the dinner table for all of the people who died on that date. There's just too much schmaltz around it.

John says it's just the politicians keeping this on the front pages; but it's not the politicians are not the ones wearing the memorial t-shirts, or with the decals on their cars, and they certainly didn't make Gristedes Supermarkets print shopping bags with a picture of the New York skyline (with the twin towers, of course) and a slogan ("we will never forget" I think). Well, it's making sure we don't forget.

I guess my main issue is twofold. One is that most deaths are tragic. On September 11, 2001 there were other deaths: people who were killed in car crashes, people who succumbed to terrible diseases, or people who died of injuries sustained somewhere other than at the World trade Center. And these people were sons and daughters, they were parents and grandparents, they also had friends and colleagues.

The other is that this feels like an unnatural mourning. It's being dragged out in the public eye in a way that just can't happen normally. It makes me feel sorry for the families and the friends since it looks to me like what should be their mourning is now public fodder. I think it will end up making the mourning take longer than it would otherwise.
September 9 - I read the ingredients on a bottle of Snapple Lemonade and it's sweetened with corn syrup. Man, they've gone a long way downhill since I first had a Snapple. Once upon a time they made Sodas with nothing artifical (of course artificial is in the eye of the beholder). The sodas were all clear because there was no coloring in them. So the orange soda was clear, the root beer was clear, the cola was clear. I think that in this case "once upon a time" was about 20 years ago. Yeah, when I was young and things were uphill in the snow both directions.
September 7 - We are told as parents that it's best to use the "proper" names for genitalia: penis and vagina rather than doodle and wee-wee. So how come we aren't told to say "feces" and "urine" instead of poo and wee?

Speaking of which ... adults get irritated because kids go through a long period of time with a peepee caca sense of humor. "Shampoo" takes on a new meaning for them, Betty Boop's "poo-poo-pee-doo" ditto. And yet we spend a lot of their early years asking "did you do a poo?" and "do you need to pee?" and "have you gone to the toilet?" And we are still annoyed that they spend so much energy giggling over poop jokes.
September 5 - Margaret and I are having waffles for breakfast. I'm sitting at the computer feeding her forkfuls as she runs by playing with the toy lawnmower Amelia and Duncan have given on a long-term loan. I think she has about four forkfuls in there because of the see-food in there when she comes for more.

Dad and Janet are coming in the end of October. This should be fun. We were talking about going to the American Museum of Natural History, to give it it's proper name, which Margaret and I recently visited, and perhaps also going apple picking. I'm hoping to go apple picking this weekend too. It will be nice to show them the new house as well, plus I've already threatened to put them to work!
September 3 - We bought a washer and dryer today. Since our laundry will go in the basement I just went for plain-serviceable white goods. They tried to sell me on new colors (cute but another $300-400 since it's on a higher-end model), or the extended warrantee. Feh. I got my front-loader which is the main thing and no thank you to dry cleaning options and stuff like that.
September 2 - I notice that there has been some tut-tutting by news stations over the Mexican election and how they don't have a definitive result yet. Yeah, it's a good thing we've never had problems like that in America.
September 1 - Before people had store-bought clothes with tags in them how did people know front from back in their clothing? Or was it like shoes--which originally could be worn on either foot?

We got our new camera. The specs: a tad larger than the old Optio, so fitting it in your jeans pocket is not so easy. But we're only talking a few milimeters. The camera is a Panasonic Lumix: 7.2 megapixel, 2.5 cm viewing screen, image stabilizer, and 3x optical zoom (because who cares about digital zoom, that's just cropping the picture which I'd rather do myself).

It seemed to me that there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of difference between the super teenie cameras so I decided to go with one that took the same memory card we already had, plus was rated as having less shutterlag (the delay between when you push the button and when the picture is actually snapped), and has an image stabilizer. This is the camera on the Panasonic website.

Another plus to getting a new camera is you get new software to go with it. For this camera I can simply use the built-in drivers, which is great. This means I can travel and archive pictures to CD or USB drive without needing the software and without installing stuff on someone else's computer. I've never had a problem but I'd hate to mess up someone else's computer because I loaded my photos to CD. Or god forbid, the go to connect their camera and find it doesn't work properly. Yeah, it might be a quick fix but it's at least annoying, and if the person is not very technical, it can be quite stressful. What a thank you gift.

I'm also interested in trying the new image editing software. For the last three years I've been using an antiquated photo editor for the website and it didn't have a batch processor. That means every image you see has been edited down. I have as a personal policy that I take all my photos at the highest resolution so I'd edit down once for the photo pages and once again for the thumbnails.

Some of you might be shocked at how much stuff I do by hand. I even have an HTML editor, that I like, where I am actually putting in a lot of the HTML tags myself. Yes, in this blog I add those lines between entries all by myself! I'm still looking for an editor I like: one that let's me spend most of my time in the raw mode, so it's not "what you see is what you get". I hate the way some editors sneak in all sorts of code you don't need (read: MS Word, that I used out of laziness for 2003).

Of course it would be nice to have a spell checker in my editor. And some rduimentary HTML checker so I don't have to open in a browser to see that I forgot to put an end tag somewhere. And an automatic word wrap would be a benefit. But I'm not complaining. Just dreaming. Oh, and a better search-and-replace would be cool. My current software has a search-and-replace for all open documents which is great for making changes to many pages at once, but when you are done you need to confirm that yes, you do want to save the changes for each and every document. There is no "yes to all" button.

Things the software does well: the search-and-replace for multiple documents works very well. I like that I can paste large pieces of text that are formatted into multiple lines into a search--you can't do that in MS Word! The main thing that I love about my HTML editor, tho, is unlimited undo. So from when you open the editor every change can be un-done. This is huge if you have done a massive search and replace (and saved) or if you deleted several lines using the delete key.

Some day I'll get around to looking at other editors, or even the new version of this one. But I think the decent ones are not free. Makes sense.
August 31 - Last week we went to New Jersey to play with Sam and Emma. While the four of us were in the car we were stopped at a railroad crossing to let a freight train pass. Emma said, "Look Margaret, that's a train. Choo! Choo!" and Margaret said, "Choo! Choo!"

A few days later Margaret and I were walking on Eighth Avenue and she was over a subway grating when a train went by. She heard the train, and felt the rumble of it passing underneath. She pointed into the grating and looked at me. I said, "that's a train going by." She looked at me disbelievingly, and replied, "Choo?" I said yes. So she spent a few minutes staring into the subway grating and trying to see the train. Every now and then she would look at me and say "Choo?"

Now we can't pass a grating of any type without Margaret asserting "Choo!"
August 31 (part ii) - I used to worry because Margaret wouldn't sit still for reading aloud. I would try to read to her and she would grab at the book, and turn pages, and just make it impossible to read aloud to her. Well, she would let me read one book about Appletree Farm but everything else became a turf war.

In the last few weeks that has changed and she insists on being read aloud to--a case of beware of what you wish for (or maybe "beware of that for which you wish"). She asks to be read aloud to by saying "again" or "again again again again."

The other day when I refused to read more stories she picked up I Love You, Stinky Face and tried to read it to herself. This book consists of a boy asking questions of his Mamma so there are pictures of a Mamma on every other page. As Margaret read aloud to herself in gibberish I could hear the occasional word "Mamma" and "banana". It's like listening to a foreign language where you only know a few words of the conversation.
August 31 (part iii): Oh so much to say in this entry. Margaret helps me to empty the dish washer and when she takes out the knives she says "sharp!" but please, give me a little credit, the knives are dull table knives.
August 30, morning - We went to the Museum of Natural History today. We spent our time in the rooms with the dioramas, which is the part that I remember the most. My dad used to spend time in the same museum and in the same rooms when he was a kid. I was pleased to see that they have restored the dioramas. I saw them a few years ago and they were really aged: the fur on the taxiderm'ed animals was patchy in places and the scenery was falling apart. They have been restored and, most importantly, not improved. What a relief and how refreshing that they didn't go in and change them drastically.

If someone told me they were restoring them I'd be afraid they'd be "modernized". Like they'd find a way to stick computers in there and the backgrounds would be photographs instead of the hand painted scenery. I'm also glad that they didn't feel that stuffed animals are politically incorrect or something.

So, Bravo and Kudos to The American Museum of Natural History!
August 30, afternoon - Although we took the train uptown, we walked home from the museum. Well, properly I walked downtown and Margaret rode in the stroller. On our way to the museum I ended up taking a few trains in trying to find stations with elevators so because I had taken our bigger stroller, the Valco. For those who don't know, I'm not overly fond of the Valco. It's got some good points to it but some bad points that are significant and we got a new major negative about the pram on our way to the museum. When we got to 81st Street there was no elevator so I had to bump the pram up the stairs. I got up the first five or six steps when the front wheel just fell off. It went "klunk" and fell onto the ground at the foot of the stairs. I said, "crap," out loud and carefully went back down the stairs to get it.

Margaret was still in the stroller!

So this stroller has a five-point restraint, it's got an auxiliary strap to prevent it from getting away from you, and yet the front freaking wheel just klonked to the floor like that.
August 28 - Five days in a row of rain. What do you do with a toddler when the weather is bad so many days in a row? Thursday I can't recall. Friday we took the subway up to 72nd Street and Margaret walked from about 70th Street to 53rd Street; she was very tired at naptime that day. Saturday we had a play date with Sam Nathanson and went to a park in New Jersey. Sunday we wandered all over the northern part of Greenwich Village/southern part of Chelsea. Monday I gave up and we went to the park and Margaret got thoroughly wet.

We went downtown and found a park where the neighborhood has put several kids toys, trucks, scooters, and the Cozy Coupe! Margaret loves the Cozy Coupe, see the slideshow of Margaret with Hamish and Oliver. She was very distressed when other kids came to the park and started to play with the different toys but it was impossible for her to keep all of the toys, even if I'd let her. They must have had about fifteen toys!

While we were there a playground inspector came by. I stopped her and asked about her job. She said that over the course of time they check every playground in New York City. I could see her checking things like that the tree branches were solid, as well as the obvious stuff like checking the swings and play equipment.

Meeting the playground inspector makes me think of some of the more interesting jobs I've held. I've worked at The New York Public Library, yes the one with the lions in front. I worked in Citicorp Center, the building with the sloped roof that is so distinctive on the New York skyline. I worked in Rockefeller Center for eight years.
August 27 - Margaret gave me a first foof today. Foof, also known as a zerbert, is when someone places their mouth on you and blows, making a farting sound.
For prior blog entries written in Australia, look here.