Whole lotta not blogging going on

Not a lot going down lately, so no urge to blog. Stuff that's happened:

• A. is toilet training. Argh! the horror!
• D. performed at Town Hall in his junior choir. They were exceedingly cute.
• E. has taken to howling blue murder when she doesn't get her way. Such as when she gets put to bed. She's howling now, because her brutal and cruel parents have put her to bed.
• Empty staff positions filled. Yay! Don't have to do no personnel stuff for a while. Note to self: glue staff to chair to avoid having to re-hire.
• Taking two weeks off work for school holidays. I intend to indulge in some sitting, and maybe some hangin' around.

That's all for now. Catch you in a few weeks' time.

Learning to talk

A. is at that most entertaining time when he's starting to talk a lot, and starting to become understandable, but still at an entertainingly low level of verbal accuracy. Some recent gems:

• "Bibby Bec! Bibby Bec!" when looking for auntie Bec
• Cucumbers have been variously referred to as "Doobadabbas" and "Cubacubbas" as he gets more of the consonants in line
• There is a crane yard near our house that we occasionally drive by. It's very exciting for boys who are fans of Cranky the Crane. Thus, the cries of "Ganky Gane! Ganky Gane!" when we drove by yesterday. Poor old Ganky has been a popular toy lately with A., leading to some water damage when he was played with outside in the rain.
  
• D is becoming a fan of Guitar Hero now that he can actually play it a bit. So both boys were singing along to Cherry Pie. A.'s rendition of the lyrics "She's my cherry pie": "Cheers my beppy bye"
  

Long long weekend

Took an extra day off for the APEC long weekend. Memorable highlights:

• bought a 24" monitor that was on sale for $599. Now we've got to get the Mac Mini to go with it.
  
• D. quote (while playing with his soccer medals and awarding them to people): "Baby E. wins the Nobel Prize for Kickboxing!" (further research indicates it is a simpsons quote, but I found it hilarious when he said it anyway).
• A. being discovered riding his bike around in the rain, wearing only socks (his galoshes had fallen off). He was thoroughly soaked.
• D's writing has massively improved - he was writing a lot this weekend.
• Saw Ratatouille with the kids. Quite entertaining, and while it lacked some of the substance of previous Pixar movies, it was entertaining, and beautifully animated.
• Tomb Raider Anniversary edition gave me vertigo and sleep deprivation.
  

Off to Canberra for a conference later in the week, to be joined by J and kids at the weekend for Exciting Times In Sunny Canberra.

Random posting

So, haven't posted in a while. It's a pity to disappoint my vast readership, so here's some blather, some tiny sparks of pointless conversation to fill the yawning silent void that is the blogosphere.

Trois Freres is still awesome.

If you're 6, Ben 10 is awesome.

If you're 2, Hi 5 is awesome. Personally, I think it's a lot less interesting now that Kathleen is gone. She was a hottie. Not much point watching the show now. And I've just discovered (while extracting the above web link) that The Princess Bride is one of her favourite movies. And her husband has the same name as me. And her favourite number is 1. That's one of my favourite numbers! up there with Graham's Number and n. It's her birthday tomorrow too, and another of her favourite movies is on TV right now, so it's a good time to be Kathleen, I reckon.

If you're six months old, pretty much anything you can grab and chew on is pretty awesome.

D is going through a Favourite Music phase. On the way home this evening he controlled the iPod (with the little radio dongle to make it play through the stereo). He couldn't quite figure out the controls, but he was very excited by the power, and was trying to find his favourites (he was disappointed by the lack of Doo Wah Diddy Diddy). On a regular basis he'll come up with a new favourite band. We listen to a lot of music - at home, as well as to and from school/work in the car each day. So I'll frequently get drilled on my favourite songs (and mine vary depending on mood as well, but I can generally fall back on Golden Brown and most of Faithless' Reverence album). He'll frequently claim the Cat Empire and the White Stripes as his favourites, but today it was The Police (mainly because of Guitar Hero and Singstar). Regina Spektor gets listed frequently, as does Jackson Jackson (though I'm not sure why - he doesn't really know their songs). I've gotta say, for a six-year-old he's got pretty good taste in music :)

Governed by thugs and degenerates

From what I can gather (via listening to Hack and a bit of web searching), proposed new legislation (see also) will mean that the ACCC can sue unions and community groups for organizing boycotts of companies, if the company makes a complaint. The companies will have nothing to lose in doing this, since the ACCC foots the cost of the lawsuit. So things like boycotting oil companies that are producing shale oil, or are cruel to animals, or engage in any other unethical practice, would become illegal. So personally boycotting a company isn't illegal, just encouraging others to do so is.

Wankers.

Argh! ADSL woes!

Stupid new ADSL modem doesn't like stupid long ethernet stupid cables, so we're back to using the slow old ADSL modem (which has served us faithfully for years). The new one worked for a bit last night, and for a bit this evening when I jiggled the cable, but then it died. Probably some requires-cat5e-cable-not-dodgy-homemade-cable malarkey. Anyways, it seems to work if I have a short ethernet cable and a long phone cable, but I don't have a phone cable quite long enough to run without turning the house into some sort of Shelob's Lair of Networking, which Mrs B seems to have some weird objection to. Chicks, eh? Whatcha gonna do?

The upshot is that tomorrow is Go Visit The Nice Cable Selling People Day, and until then I'm living like some kind of Saxon serf in the dark ages with only a 1.5Mb connections to the interwebs.

Opportunities lost...

So there I was (I've long thought that's the best way to start an anecdote), in the men's bathrooms (not the best way to continue said anecdote, but bear with me here), washing my hands. An Important Academic is in there too, washing his hands (not a euphemism here - we were actually washing our hands). He points at the windows, and says something to the effect of "You know it's a dodgy neighbourhood when they've even got bars on the windows of the toilets". And I'm hit by the "there's a joke here" demon.

In this case, as you know, you generally have about 2 seconds to come up with your response. And I know it's there, and it's pretty funny. The words are all in there, tumbling across the landscape of my consciousness like great big tumbly consciousy things, toying with me, but I can't get them to perform the right acrobatic maneuvers to turn into That Joke I Know Is There. A second passes, and I say "yeah" to kind of stall for time, and That Joke is still there, not ready to come out right (it could come out, but it'd be a bit of a mess).

Then the academic starts talking about the project we're working on, and the joke hits me. Bam! And it's pretty funny for an off the cuff remark, but it's precisely one second to late. He's all like "blah", and I'm all "blah blah" and if I backtracked the conversation I'd look a bit tragic, like some guy that can't get his witty rejoinders out quickly enough, so I let it go, just a little sad that such a good joke was gone forever (unless someone else ever comments on bars on the windows of a bathroom, in which case Bam! they're gonna get a good one).

It's just one of the sad tales of my life. I'm surrounded by some very witty people (as well as some people who tell a lot of jokes), and it's rare that I come out with a good one really quickly. There was That One Joke I Made At Mardi Gras which pretty much everyone I know knows, because I've told them, just in case they weren't aware of how witty I can be. I remember one radio comic (Ross Noble) cunningly coming up with a way of repeating a joke he'd come up with at a live performance (he apologized on air to a lady from the live audience after accusing her of having sex with wizards). But this one is lost to posterity; and on reflection it wasn't that great. And most of you have probably figured out what it was by now, so I'd better not tell it here. After all, I wouldn't want anyone to take the piss.