14 the second

Today is Sam’s 14^th Birthday. I really needed another one of those annual reminders for me to freak out about just where all the time went. As I left for work this morning Sam came and gave me a hug as I wished him Happy Birthday. The fact that he was looking eye to eye served notice as well. Not long now until he’ll be taller than me.

So, what to say about Sam at 14. Something that he can look back on and be proud of or something for him to look back at and blush? The reality is that the latter would probably be hard to come up with because he’s such a good kid.

Sam marches to the beat of his own drum, taking on what he wants to and pursuing it with diligence and skill. He took up volleyball last year, something none of the others have shown and interest in. He also started playing tennis, but in his own Sammy way, only played non-competitively. I was encouraged to hear him say this year that he was going to play competitively. Saturday just gone was his first ever competitive match and he walked away victor in both his singles and doubles. Yes, I am very proud.

Through the winter Sam played soccer and did well but also took on something else of a non-traditional sport for the Temby tribe – table tennis. Not only did he give it a go, but held down the A4 position and was part of a team that went through their entire season undefeated, an epic achievement.

Outside of his sport he has continued to work hard at the scholastic side of life with rewards to match the effort. He has a nice group of friends and is the person most likely to be asked for when the phone rings on a weekend. Or you could find him setting up a server for minecraft or occasionally doing his own thing in the yard.

I set the kids a challenge earlier this year to see how much they could improve their soccer juggling skills. For each 10 juggles they achieved they’d get a mars bar (only the first time they got a number mind you). Sam was the one that took it most to heart. I don’t know if it was representative of his love of chocolate or just the challenge. I like to think it was the latter. Within a month he’d managed to beat my record and worked up to something in the order of 80 juggles. It was great to see him disappear out in the yard and just go for it over and again.

He still hasn’t come to terms with the fact that wearing long pants isn’t going to see the end of the world hastened and would be happiest if the entire world only wore shorts, but we’re getting through that and he’ll at least wear them when informed there really is no other option.

It should be noted that Sam is still the child ‘most likely to react to his sister’ but I think deep down he really does love her. After all, he makes her lunch (and that of his brothers) every day!

As noted before, I am very proud of Super Sam and particularly enjoy the fact that even at 14 he’s not adverse to giving the old man a hug.

Happy Birthday Sam.

12 the third

Thomas is 12; the last of the boys in his last year before becoming a teenager. There is only one more year until we have three of them in the house. In four more years we’ll have to survive a year of four teenagers. Heaven forbid.

Thomas continues to be very much Thomas. I know that sounds kind of lame, but like all kids, he really does have his own personality and it means something to me. Thomas is the child in the family I would deem most likely to be the class clown.

Thomas decided this year that he’d like to play club soccer and so we took him out to Plympton Bulldogs where he played in their under 12 team. It has been great for him. He’s come a long way in terms of his confidence on the field and played some really good games of football, even if it was something of a task to make sure that he got to training and games each week!

Thomas still retains his capacity for deep thought, surprising me every now and then with a question about the more serious side of life. He’s a thinker, even if most of the thought is consumed in coming up with ways in which to be funny.

Thomas’ speech has come a long way from the early days of his development and its rare now that I feel the need to stop and get him to repeat what he’s said. I am so proud of how hard he’s worked through his whole life to date to get to where he is with it that I just can’t put it into words any better than that.

Thomas is also perhaps the child most likely to compromise, sometimes caught between being in the younger pairing with Emily or wanting to be one of the boys. He generally retains his sense of humour though occasionally, just every now and then decides he’s had enough and that someone else should have a turn at taking one for the team!

I dearly enjoy the time that I get to spend with Thomas and am as proud of him as I am of all the kids.

Happy Birthday Thomas.

The Great Uncertain

Things are getting interesting around work at the moment. We’ve started to talk to people about their futures. The joy of construction work is that when the project is done, the big question on everyone’s lips is, “What’s next.”

We’re in an odd position in that the company moved away from construction some time back but are now making more of a concerted effort to get back into it. One of the things that we lack from that initial move away from the business is the people that are used to moving from project to project on a regular basis. So we have a team of people that are in some cases, going through the process for the first time. If there was another big project looming on the horizon it would be a lot easier, but the big challenge at the moment is that there isn’t such a beast in the offing.

It means that when you sit down to have a conversation with people about where they want to go and what they want to do, the part where we tell them what we have to offer them is sadly lacking. It’s funny how vague promises and commitments don’t seem to fill people with lots of warm and fuzzy feelings. Suddenly morale around the office plummets as people are forced to start thinking about their futures (not that they weren’t already doing so).

On top of all this, as I try to maintain some level of positive morale and keep the productivity up, I of course am going through exactly the same thing. It can be hard to tell people to hang in there, that they will be looked after, that something will come up when at the same time you’re wondering how true that might be.

I’ve been with the company nearly 12 years now. Is it time for a change? What direction do I take? Will I even have a choice in the matter?

It’s the big uncertain.

Exactly where you stand

One of those fun things about your children growing up is that they start to communicate with you. Apparently it doesn't last, but well at least there's a phase where they do. Having said that though, it's a two edged sword.

Sometimes it's a good thing ...

And then at other times you think maybe it was better when they couldn't ...

Which ever way you look at it, at least you know exactly where you stand!

A girl named Floor ...

A Girl Named Floor …

The other week whilst in Brisbane catching up with Nick, Ramona and the boys we were also lucky enough to see Fons and Yoris again.

Now for those not in the know, Fons (not to be mistaken for the Fonz  is one of Caroline’s innumerable many relations … a cousin’s son or some such which probably has a more precise genealogical term for those that way inclined. Fons and Yoris stayed with us for a couple of weeks in Adelaide as part of their adventures travelling around the world and we had a great time. It was a happy coincidence that they would be in Brisbane at the same time that we were scheduled to be there.

We managed to hook up with them on a drizzly day (because that’s mainly what Brisvegas dished up in the week that we were there) and decided that we’d take the Brisbane ferry for a ride up and down the river, stopping at the Gallery of Modern Art for a bit of culture.

We caught up with them at the Ferry terminal and they introduced us to Flora, a Dutch girl that they’d met whilst volunteering in Indonesia or some such that had caught up with them in Australia.

It was all good, but at some time during the day Fons happened to mention to me that Flora was just the name that she happened to introduce herself as to English speakers. It turns out that her real name is Floor.

Yes, that’s right, like the thing that you walk on. Now how the hell was I supposed to meet a girl named Floor and then just say nothing? Just let it go, forget it ever happened? Not likely, but by God I bit my tongue for a long time. I walked past the sign that said “caution, wet floor” and I didn’t say a word.

Quietly I catalogued the things I could have said, not trusting myself. It was like a valve holding back the pressure. Something was going to give.

Then we lost her. She wandered into a different gallery and we were thinking about leaving and so started looking.

I said to Caroline … what do we do, go to reception and tell them we lost Floor? I could just imagine the questions coming back … “you lost the floor?”

“No not the floor, Floor. A girl … named floor … she’s not a walkover you know …”

I mean once you start dropping “the” into the name, the number of one liners increases exponentially. I just don’t think that I can write them all down here.

Just think along the lines of please don’t wipe your feet on the floor … a floor so clean you could eat off it …

And perhaps I should just leave it at that … I’m sure you can come up with plenty on your own.

Clearly someone’s parents weren’t thinking about English translations all those years ago J

The Olympic Medal Count

I’m sure that I’ve probably made some comment on this about four years ago, but I can’t be bothered going back to check out whether I did or not. So here it is. The Australian media were basically a bunch of bastards until we started to win a couple more than that first relay gold medal.

There was a lot made about the fact that as a nation we’d had high expectations that weren’t being lived up to. In reality we only had that expectation because some athletes and certainly the media beat it all up ahead of the games. So we didn’t win all the gold medals that we expected. Personally I think even fourth or fifth in the world is a remarkable achievement. So I’d like to say well done to all our athletes that even made it as far as London.

Then there’s the medal count. I happen to check a number of media sources at different times and not all of them are based here in Oz. So I find it really interesting to see that different countries establish a nation’s rankings in different manners.

Here in Australia, it was all based on how many gold medals were won, with the silver and bronze used to split it when countries were tied. I find that an astonishing way for a small nation like us to put the tally together. Based on that, we were tenth.

In the US (who won both the most medals and the most gold, they put it together based on total medals won. That put Australia in 7th. Now if I was in the Aussie media, I’d be looking to spin our performance so that it looked as good as it possibly could.

Of course there’s a couple of other ways of putting the tables together as well. There’s medals per head of population, which usually puts Australia in a better spot than we see in other counts (though places like Jamaica smash us because of their sprinters. Then there’s medals per GDP which is another interesting measure. 

I’d be curious to see medals per dollar spent on training, but I sure don’t have the time, inclination or information sources to do that.

What I did do though was put together my own count based on a gold medal being worth 3 points, silver 2 and bronze 1. It says that a medal is important, but it still provides reward for placing better. In that way, Australia also placed 7th.

The other comments I’ll offer on the London event, which I thought went very well are:

1. That I would have to call this round of the olympics the year of the slow-mo montage. I got sick to death of artistic compilations of athletes I’d never heard of (non Aussies in particular) dragging out time and time again while somewhere, somewhere else in the big old thing they call the games, there was probably live sport happening that we could have been watching. I’d estimate that the amount of live sport versus bullshit was probably edging close to 50/50. 
2. That I was ecstatic when channel 9 had the coverage ahead of channel 7, because that meant that I wasn’t going to have to listen to Bruce McAvaney, who drives me nuts. I didn’t factor in how much it would shit me to have Mark Nicholls, a pom, presenting Australian performances. The emotion he brought was simply fake. It was bad enough when he popped up for the Ashes, but this was a step too far.
3. That I should have invested in Foxtel for the event to see events I wanted to see when I wanted to see them instead of being hustled away from a hockey game in which Australia were actually playing to sit through 20 mins of pre-race bullshit for the marathon.

I might have to remind myself of that four years from now in Rio. Or hope that the ABC get’s the rights.

Real or Fake?

Get your minds out of the gutter, it’s got nothing to do with boobs.

The other night I went to say goodnight to Emily and Thomas who had been shipped off on a mission to the land of nod. First I went to Emily’s room to find her curled on her side. It was the perfect angelic picture of a sleeping cherub. 

The thing is, I know Emily so I quietly crossed the room and gave her a kiss, telling her that I loved her. Then I quietly said to her, “Now stop faking and go to sleep properly.” This brought an immediate smile as her eyes popped open, knowing that she’d been busted. I gave her a stern talking to and moved on. 

I entered Thomas’ room wondering what I’d find. Talk about contrast. There he was, flat on his back, one arm thrown above his head, mouth wide open, blissfully sleeping away. There was simply no question as to whether he was faking it or not.

There’s possibly a lesson there for the youngsters that want to pretend to be asleep, but hey, I probably shouldn’t spell it out any more than that, should I?

The Right to Bear Arms

I, like many other people read with horror the news of the massacre in the theatre in Colorado. I don’t think there’s anything I can say that probably hasn’t already been said and I can’t begin to imagine just how bad it must be for those that were involved or even remotely close to the incident.

However, having said that there was something that I read a couple of days later that truly blew my mind.

Following the shooting, applications for guns went up by 41% in Colorado (including applications to be able to carry a concealed weapon).

I can only surmise that this is a fundamental and significant difference between the psyche of Australia and the US.

After the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania there was almost universal agreement throughout the nation for better gun control and tighter gun laws. Sure there was protest within the gun community and objection to it, but all in all, the cry was there and the government acted upon it.

Yes in the US, even after such a significant and tragic incident, we have not a cry for greater control or to get guns off the street, but a deference to that much loved (?) line of the constitution about the right to bear arms.

I am astounded that the reaction to the event is to carry a gun. Would it truly have been better if more people in that theatre had been carrying concealed weapons? Would they have fired back at the intruder? Would they have been good enough to stop him before he inflicted tragedy? Would they perhaps have created even greater mayhem and potentially injury or death with the cross-fire they would potentially create.

It reminds me of a story told to me by a South African friend who said that he knew it was time to try and get out when he was almost accepting of the fact that there had been a shoot out in their street/compound. He joked that he thought that most of the firing had possibly been the two groups of security guards at each end who had probably ended up shooting at each other as the would-be burglars ran off somewhere else. That’s not an environment in which I’d like to live.

People say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but I still maintain that if there isn’t a gun about, or if it’s locked away, you take away that capacity to grab it in the heat of the moment and potentially change someone’s life forever.

I’m not so naïve as to believe that tighter gun laws will completely remove them from the streets, there will always be someone willing to go outside the law in an order to get ahead, but surely if the number of guns available even legally is reduced then the opportunity for those outside the law reduces as well. We’ve come to far from a world without guns but if every one of them was destroyed, no one could be shot.

I just don’t know that I’d feel safer in a cinema in Colorado today than I would have before the shooting.

The Claw

One of the attractions of coming up to Queensland to visit Nick, Ramona and the boys was of course the theme parks on the Gold Coast. After much research by Caroline it was decided that Dreamworld would be the park of choice and with the weather not particularly conducive to much else we’ve spent a significant amount of time over the past week.

One of the good things about the park this time around is that all the kids are now tall enough to go on any ride that they choose. Of course, being tall enough to ride the Tower of Terror and the like doesn’t of course mean that the little pink thing will be enamored of the idea which means that there’s still an element of family splitting involved to try and keep everyone happy. Michael doesn’t really want to be caught dead on the Madagascar ride and Emily sure as hell wasn’t going near some of the scarier rides.

Back in 2007 we went to Disneyland and one of the rides that I had been really looking forward to was Space Mountain. It’s a roller coaster in the dark and Emily was just tall enough to go on and so we dragged her on. I spent that entire ride with Emily screaming and crying in my ear as I tried to reassure her that she was going to be ok and that the world wasn’t ending. I didn’t get a chance to experience that ride properly until 3 years later at Disney World. What it did do however was to put a significant dent in Emily’s willingness to go on anything that she thought might be scary.

So fast forward back to the present day and during our first visit to Dreamworld for the trip, we come up to the ride known as the claw. Emily agreed to go on the ride with Michael, Sam, Thomas and I, but as we drew nearer and nearer to the front of the line, Emily’s willingness was evaporating fast. Being the good father that I am, I talked her into going anyway.

Lets just say that that didn’t pan out particularly well and I was immediately reminded of the Space Mountain experience, thinking that we’d never get her on anything else for the rest of the trip. It was certainly the case for the rest of day 1.

The next day was a juggling act but on our third day, somewhere and somehow, Caroling convinced Emily that the Buzzsaw wasn’t such a bad ride despite it rising some 43m in the air, suspending you upside down and going backwards (which Emily had declared the worst part of any ride). I had seen the past coming back to haunt the future.

I was to be surprised. Emily didn’t pull out at the last moment and didn’t refuse to never go on another ride ever again. In fact a day later, she also decided to go on the Tower of Terror II despite the previous declaration that she wouldn’t ever do it because she hated going backwards and was scared of heights. She even decided that it was the best ride ever and insisted on doing it again immediately after getting off!

Seems that we might just have another little thrill seeker on our hands.

Camping with the Griswalds Tembys

We recently had a lovely time camping in the flinders rangers with the Rowlands and the Haines. All seemed to be going somewhat loosely according to plan. After failing on the ‘pack Saturday night after our sport’ plan, we managed to get everything loaded and stored on Sunday morning and were off before lunch. The drive went well and we arrived at Rawnsley Park Station in time to set up for dinner.

One of the issues that we had was that in planning to sell the caravan, we’d started to strip things out which meant that the stuff that we normally just assumed was already packed had to be considered, found and stored in the van again. Apparently at the end of our last camping trip I failed to pack the tap connection for the hose. We had one part, but not all the parts … so no running water.

It was getting rather cold with night time temperatures expecting to hit -2C though we weren’t overly concerned as we had the heater in the caravan (though Michael, Sam and Thomas were all outside in tents/annexes and the like and were going to have to deal with sleeping bags, blanket and good old body warmth.

All was good until about midnight when the heating seemed to cut out in the caravan. That meant that someone had to get out of bed and face the cold to work out what was going on. There was only ever going to be one person doing that. Caroline noticed (from bed) that the microwave was off and that led me to believe that we’d likely tripped the circuit breaker (especially given the fact that we’d had the a/c and a fan heater running at the same time. I went out side, checked the box that we were plugged into … no good. I explored the van, pulling fuses, all good. I pulled cords and reinserted them changed points at the box … still nothing).

Finally, lost for any other potential cause, I pulled the connection between the cord and the van. I’m not quite sure what made me do it, but I gave it a sniff. Something smelt burnt. Clearly not a good sign and given it was now about 1am and bloody cold, I simply dropped the cord in the dirt and went back to bed thinking about how this was suddenly starting to look like it was going to be one of those trips.

We decided that in the morning we’d drive the 30kms or so back to Hawker, the nearest town to pick up a new cord and a connection for the tap. We drove all over town (took about 5 mins) and found the one store that was likely to have what we needed. Despite having a reasonable amount of camping equipment, they didn’t have the electrical part that we needed for me to fix the cord. We tried the garage down the road that had an auto electrician on hand but they didn’t have it either.

In a fit of desperation, we walked across to the service station and huzzah! Where I least expected it they had a nice new caravan extension cord of the right amps. We were saved. So we trekked back, set everything up and didn’t face any further dramas with our set up! Griswalds evaded

The rest of the trip was great fun. We climbed Rawnsley’s Bluff (even with Thomas sick as a dog) and drove up to Blinman and back through Parachilna and Brachina gorges. A great trip indeed that left us with a desire to go back and further explore the Flinders when we next manage to find the opportunity.