Jelly beans
I’m not able to eat much yet, but I AM able to eat natural confectionary jelly beans.
That is awesome.
Jane Austen, Dance TV, and the Tour de France
What do they have in common?
Jane Austen and the Tour de France have an intricate web of intrigue and etiquette that only a moron can afford to ignore.
“So You Think You Can Dance” and the Tour de France (other than rhyming) remind me how lucky I am to be a writer rather than an athlete or dancer. I may have to wait years for responses, and get my work dismissed due to a change in market – but I can still write a bestseller when I’m eighty. Dancers and athletes have extremely short, extremely painful, extremely physically risky careers.
CJ and I view sport in general with cordial contempt. We unmute news breaks on TV, but mute them again as soon as they turn to sports. The Tour de France is the one exception. CJ inherited a fascination with the Tour de France from his Dad, and I saw a few bits here and there as he watched – and then was slowly drawn in.
For me, the first point of appeal was the scenery and architecture of France. Castles, chateux and beaches always feature prominently as the Tour passes by – usually with gorgeous sweeping aerial shots from the helicopter. A large number of passers-by also spice up the viewing experience by building giant sculptures in their fields (often giant bicycles with moving human/mechanical wheels). But it was the etiquette and complexity of the Tour de France that made me an addict.
The three most important categories are:
The winner – aka the yellow jersey – which is based purely on a man’s total time over the three-week race. The race covers thousands of kilometres, but for the last five years there has been less than a minute between first and second place – so the pressure is unrelenting. Whoever has the best time-so-far wears the yellow jersey that day.
The king of the mountain – aka the polka-dotted jersey (seriously – it turns out men who wear skintight lycra professionally don’t mind this kind of thing) – is the most skilled climber, based on how well they do in just the steep parts (including the Pyrenees and the Alps) of the various race stages.
The fastest sprinter – aka the green jersey – is the one who can leave all the rest behind (on average) in designated sprinting sections of the course (there is one in the middle of almost every stage, and the first twenty riders are awarded a decreasing number of points). It’s not so much “going fast all the time” as “putting on a herculean burst of speed when everyone else is already going as fast as they can”.
Climbers and sprinters have completely different body types, and riders always have a specialty one way or another. There are about half a dozen men who are serious contenders for the overall win. Each one is supported by a team of up to nine riders – a mixture of sprinters, climbers and those who are simply consistent riders. Many of the supporting team members are champions in their own right, but they have made the choice to sacrifice their bodies for someone else.
Race etiquette is all about wind – and glory. The wind (particularly from the front) slows riders and saps their energy. In such a long race, energy is the most important currency. So riders are constantly riding behind others in order to be in their slipstream. A team’s job is the protect their leader until the last possible moment – so that he will still have the energy to grab a win. They do most of the work, and he gets the glory.
It’s far more complex than that, however. The usual shape of the race is that there will be an early “breakaway” of perhaps two or half a dozen riders (all from different teams) who will go out ahead of the main pack, and attempt to keep their lead for the whole race. They usually fail – but they will spend a hundred kilometres or more taking it in turns to lead their own small group (which is especially vulnerable to the elements), and bear the brunt of the wind.
The rest of the two hundred riders (20% of whom will not finish the race) ride in a mass called the “pelaton”, mutually protecting one another. Safety demands riding within the first twenty riders – which is of course impossible, so there is a constant gentle shifting among the tightly-packed crowd. Etiquette demands that whichever team currently holds the yellow jersey must form the arrowhead of the pelaton, bearing the wind for the other one hundred and ninety riders.
When a crash happens at the back during the beginning or middle of the race, the pelaton will slow down to let them catch up. Sometimes a single man will race ahead unchallenged – which makes no sense, until he reaches his home town and hops off his bike to kiss his wife. It is one of the many traditions of the Tour de France, and it is universally accepted.
There’s plenty more, but this entry is getting out of control, so I’ll stop here. There are race highlights each day at 7:30am and 6pm on SBS.
At the moment (I haven’t watched Stage Six yet) Thor Hushovd of Norway (team Garmin) is wearing the yellow jersey. Cadel Evans, the Australian leader of American team BMC, is coming second – lagging by one second.
A few days ago, Thor knew he was close enough to the front to keep the yellow jersey, so he sacrificed his stage win for an American team member, Tyler Farrer. Cadel Evans has also won a stage this year, as has the British sprinter Mark Cavendish (and probably others, but I forget their names). Mark Cavendish is from team HTC and is supported by two Australians, Mark Renshaw and Matt Goss.
“Soulless” by Gail Carriger: hilarious steampunk
I promised to review a book that I really liked, and this is it.
It stands alone, but is the first of many Alexia books by the delectable Gail Carriger.
This review has been moved to Comfy Chair, where I get paid for it.
The purpose of parenthood
Last Friday I began eating solid food (including an egg for protein) at lunchtimes. Last Saturday (with CJ on hand) I taught a student for an hour (at home) without incident. Last Sunday (with CJ driving) I actually left the house for non-medical reasons (oooOOOoooh). Yesterday I began reducing my ondaz zydis medication, taking one instead of two, and substituting a maxolon for the other one. It didn’t feel great, but it’s certainly surviveable.
Today marks twelve weeks. I have one week left of first trimester, and this time next week I’ll be blogging about my twelve-week ultrasound (which will likely change the official due date, based on measurements of the baby).
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CJ lives very much in the present. I. . . don’t. CJ is happier, calmer and less likely to show up on time (or at all, sometimes). I’m the one who figures out things like, “When we marry, CJ should have a study, at least in the beginning” because I can clearly see the stress that would result if he didn’t (he is messy; I am OCD-ishly tidy). When we think of parenthood, CJ sees visions of playing with children. I ask questions like, “What is parenthood FOR?”
I’ve concluded that the purpose of parenthood is to do our best to create a “good” adult. Here’s the list I’ve come up with for what that means, with my ideas of how to actually teach it.
In no particular order. . .
1. Physical health & Eating.
They need to know how to cook healthy meals and how to exercise. We teach this by modelling (particularly with exercise – which, amazingly, we both actually do – and how much junk food we eat), and by consistently cooking healthy meals (which sets a healthy standard of “normal”, as my parents did for me). Our kids will probably be hilariously uncoordinated, so we’ll need to start early (before they know they suck) at finding sports and exercise that they enjoy.
2. Finances
They need to know how to delay gratification by not buying things immediately or falling into credit card traps. They need to know how to manage household finances, and that you really do have to do your tax return.
We teach this by giving them an increasing allowance and hopefully teaching them to save up when they want a larger item than lollies. We live sensibly ourselves, and slowly involve them in observing how much we spend on groceries, petrol etc as opposed to how much we earn. When they’re earning above a certain amount but still living at home, we start charging rent (ideally we’ll have a bedsitter they can move into at a certain point, so they can learn how to live independently without it all happening at once).
3. Running a household
It’s difficult to coordinate food, bills, cleaning, washing, working, and a social life. So our kids will do plenty of chores – all chores, including the rare ones like cleaning gutters. At certain ages, the chores will be just theirs (eg shopping for their own clothes with their own money, doing their own washing). The bedsit plan comes into play again here.
4. Smart romance (and parenthood)
Mostly this will be us (and our parents) modelling how romantic partners should treat each other, and (hopefully) how parents should treat their children. Hopefully our children will realise that kindness and good conversation are the most important qualities to look for, if you want to live happily ever after. I think pets help teach some of the responsibilites (eg cleaning up after accidents, and training good behaviour with consistent discipline) that are useful in parenthood.
“It’s like having a dog that slowly learns to talk” – Dr Cox on his son, from Scrubs.
5. Human relationships
Our kids need to know how to hold a conversation, how to make friends, how to accept people who are different, when to listen to peer pressure (shower = yes; drugs = no), and how to treat people. Modelling comes into play again, but I also plan to do my best to encourage good friendships in primary school (when I still have some influence) in hopes that kids from various families will continue to teach one another when I’m just a blobby shape that makes food. Several of my friends (friends who I like and respect, and think will produce good kids) have had/will have babies soon, so I’m angling for our kids and theirs to spend plenty of time together. I also plan to have our own two kids sharing a room until they’re about ten – which builds character, but also celebrates their increasing maturity when they get their own room.
6. Self-worth
I’ll do my best, but CJ is going to be much better at teaching this than I am. I can love the kids unconditionally, though. That should help.
7. God/spiritual health
I’ll take them to church and hopefully send them to a Christian primary school, but ultimately the only thing I can teach about spirituality is honesty (and respect for others).
8. Job and/or contributing to society in a healthy way.
I talked about this last week.
9. Contentment/psychological health
Again, CJ shines here. Probably the greatest gift I can give is to teach them resilience – which I’ll teach by letting them fall over in the playground, or make that obvious (but non-fatal) mistake – possibly after warning them it’s not a great idea. Some mistakes harm us permanently, but others teach us that a scraped knee is okay. The second type of mistake is very important, and needs to be made.
10. What do you think? Have I left something out?
Tradies
You may have heard that our ceiling fell in last Thursday night. On Friday we made contact with our landlady (may heaven rain odours on her*), and she immediately made several rapid calls. By 4:30pm, the first tradie arrived: a blond and genial plumber (someone somewhere had assumed that “water damage” meant “a burst pipe”), around six feet eight inches tall. He immediately climbed up onto our roof and tramped about in his tradie boots.
It’s a tin roof. A single sparrow landing on the roof makes a noise – noises that are carefully monitored by our self-appointed cat guardians.
Ana (who despite her cuteness is a cold-blooded killer) crouched on my desk. Her pupils narrowed to terrified slits and I could see her thinking, “It’s finally happened. The Great Bird has come to wreak a horrible revenge.”
Meanwhile I lay, swathed in my ever-present doona on the couch. My Mum sat on one of our many shoved-aside couches, doing her embroidery. We couldn’t have been happier with our afternoon’s entertainment.
The giant returned and announced our roof was A-okay. This was good news, since the alternative was having him land in Mum’s lap. He stood on our oven and poked his head through the ceiling vent, shining a torch into the flat roof. “Can’t see water. Can’t see much though,” he declared.
He exited scene left, replaced instantly by a builder who asked all the same questions and declared the ceiling past redemption. Two more men in orange tramped in, and they decided to nail some battens (temporary beams) up for us. The boss left and the other two climbed all over a ladder and our windowsill with the confidence of monkeys. They found the structural supporting beams through the ceiling by swearing profusely and bashing holes in the plaster with a screwdriver. Mum and I watched in delight.
As they stabilised the ceiling, they took apart CJ and his Dad’s (rather artsy-looking) pillars, admiring the standard of the work (“Is he a chippy then?” “He done a good job”) as they went.
The “before” shot:
The “after” shot:
As you can see above, I wasted no time getting my furniture back where it belongs (all the tools were gone by Saturday morning). The insurance assessor did his clipboard thing mere moments ago, and said the ceiling tear-down and rebuild will be covered by the Body Corporate insurance. From where I’m sitting, there’s no hurry.
I was also cunning enough (with visions of a month-long stay at a parents’ house) to ask how long it would take to fix when the time came. The tradies said that if it was just the quarter that was obviously broken, it would take a day. Good to know!
*I THINK that’s a good thing. Anyone recognise the misquote?
Rescued by Firemen
You’d think that lolling about being ill at home wouldn’t lend itself to thrilling awesomeness. You’d be wrong.
The night was last night*. The time: 7:15pm. The taste: sustagen and milk for dinner (again). The flavour: vanilla.
I was watching yet another Spicks and Specks re-run when it was interrupted by a bang above me. Was it a giant bird with a serious lack of direction? Was it a poopsicle (frozen faeces dropped from a plane)? Was it superman having a REALLY bad day?
“Meh,” I thought.
And that was when I glanced back towards the TV and asked myself the question, “Didn’t the ceiling used to be parallel to the floor?”
I called out for CJ.
“What is it?” he called back.
“The roof is falling in!”
“What?!” He hurried up the stairs and assessed the damage in about 0.2 of a second. The ceiling was making that crinkling sound glass makes when it hasn’t finished breaking. There was a clear crack between the kitchen and living room areas, marking the boundary where one-quarter of our ceiling was 30cm lower than usual. “Get out,” he said.
CJ placed the larger fish tank on the floor and moved the smaller one downstairs. I forced the cats outside and then mangled my laptop trying to unplug it from the monitor too quickly as the roof fell another 10cm. We had to carry laptop and monitor downstairs still joined together. At the last moment I grabbed our camera and took these two pictures:
CJ turned off the power and we grabbed torches. Our bedroom lies directly below the collapsed section so I took our doona out and huddled up on the hallway floor, near the open front door. We called CJ’s Macgyver-like Dad and our electrician friend (who knows people). Our mirror-image neighbours also had an ominous ceiling, but not as dramatic. CJ’s Dad brought a bootload of wood to prop up the ceiling, and turned the power back on (but we left all the heaters off). CJ called the SES and they put him through to the fire brigade, who came at once with their sirens screaming.
It’s eerie to hear sirens coming and think, “Ah. That’ll be for us.”
Firemen poured forth from the giant truck in all their flourescent finery (are they ALL so broad-shouldered?) and all the menfolk talked in grave tones and prodded things in a knowledgable fashion (I’m assuming that part; I was downstairs). They concluded that the damage was caused by a pool of water sitting inside the roof, gradually weakening the ceiling until it collapsed. The damage was declared non-structural, which meant CJ and I didn’t have to immediately wander the streets begging for shelter**
On the down side, the ceiling (gyprock) may still fall down at any moment. Perhaps I should wear a helmet to breakfast.
CJ says the collapsed section is now safer than any other part of the ceiling. Here’s what he and his Dad did last night:
And how was YOUR Thursday night, my peeps?
*technically a few hours ago, since I’m writing this on Thursday night.
**also, we had three solid offers of beds from friends and relations.
Aquarium
Back in the Summertime, CJ and I visited the Wharf Restaurant and Aquarium in Merimbula. The restaurant is excellent (great food, great service, and a stunning location right on the water), and so is the aquarium.
We first visited the Wharf Restaurant and Aquarium on our honeymoon, and when we were about to pay we realised we hadn’t brought any money whatsoever. While CJ went home to fetch his wallet, the staff suggested I amuse myself by wandering around the aquarium (for free, which was very sweet of them). I fell in love with the giant cuttlefish – the same one that’s giving me the finger with its tentacle at the end of this video.
We knew then that we’d have to go back – and this year, we did.
A lot of couples have a “babymoon” when they get pregnant – one last holiday without children. It’s a good thing CJ and I had our babymoon well before we made Mini-Me. Apart from anything else, we ate a lot of seafood and drank a lot of wine.
Dreams of Mediocrity
Week 11.
Mini-Me is now larger than any of our fish, and most of the complicated bits are largely finished (eyelashes, ears, kidneys). This has indeed resulted in a marked improvement in my health. Yaaaaaaaayyy! I’m still eating almost nothing, and still moving cautiously, but I only feel properly (“imminently”, if you like) ill about 30% of the time – as opposed to 100% of every waking minute.
So I’m pretty chipper, despite not quite being able to take on students at home this week (I can sit up for half an hour most afternoons, but a full hour upright + mild brain activity is beyond me). On Sunday, I brushed my teeth for the first time in weeks. I didn’t use toothpaste and brushed section by section (“front top”, “back bottom” and so on), taking breaks in between. It took two hours altogether. On Monday it took forty minutes. Yesterday I was able to use toothpaste again for the first time.
*insert grateful ad for Extra sugarfree gum here*
I have only two weeks left of my first trimester (the 12/13 week barrier marks the time when normal folks START spreading the good news), which means I should have gained a little over a kilo – precisely the amount that I lost in weight just this week. On the up side, that means I’ve lost all the stress weight I put on as CJ and I were trying to conceive (which has its perks, but frankly I’d rather be as sick as I am than go through that don’t-know-if-we’ll-ever conceive-and-it’s-all-a-bit-weird experience ever again).
Also, I was given Mini-Me’s first mobile – which caused me to flip out both delightedly and immoderately. I particularly enjoy the disturbed expressions on the faces.
That mobile is the highlight of my week. I’ve hung it prominently in the living room, so I glance at it hundreds of times each day. My baby is on its way and all’s well with the world.
And so we move on to today’s actual topic: jobs I don’t want my future children to have.
Traditionally, parents like to be able to say, “My kid’s a doctor/lawyer/businessman/stock trader/prime minister/police officer” or similar. Who doesn’t want their kid to be fabulously important or wealthy or both?
Well – me. I think most of the rich professions come with too high a cost to the person’s home life, personal integrity, or ability to show compassion to people who need it. I’m a huge fan of a work-life balance.
And then there’s the other side of the “great” careers – writers, musicians, dancers, artists, and athletes. I definitely don’t want my kid attempting any of those. Those are the jobs with the least causal link between how much work you put in and how much pay you get out, which is really psychologically unhealthy. The entire writing community flinched when Snooki’s book was a New York Times bestseller (Snooki is a reality star who isn’t intellectually gifted enough to wear undies while doing cartwheels). My parents did a great job on encouraging my writing as a side job rather than full-time work. (The only reason I spend more time writing than doing paid work is that I developed an anxiety disorder that prevents me doing normal work.) I’ll be following their lead as I raise my own kids.
Finally, there are the caring professions – teachers, nurses, volunteers, aid workers, social workers, and counselors. I don’t want my kid doing those jobs either. They’re jobs that invade your home life and leave you poor.
So what kind of job do I want for my kids?
I want the kind that’s moderately interesting (but stays at work), that pays fairly (with regular raises in pay, good health and insurance benefits, and annual paid holidays), and that is common enough that if a bad boss comes along my kid can transfer to another section rather than enduring abuse.
In short, the public service is the best. There are literally hundreds of available jobs ranging from IT to training to legal to political work – and 99% are here in my home town. You can switch careers completely without switching departments (in fact, they’ll often pay you to go back to uni).
I certainly won’t prevent my kid from chasing whatever dream takes their fancy – but if they can follow in their father’s footsteps (CJ is a public servant and he really enjoys his workmates and job), I will be very, very pleased for them and their future family.
What is your perfect job? What is the perfect job for your children (imaginary or otherwise)?
Second-hand shops. . .
. . . are the awesomest.
All the couches CJ and I own are from op shops, including a sofa bed similar to this one:
I love this table:
And, if luck is with you (as it was with me several years ago), you can buy a wedding dress for a few hundred dollars:
When did you last visit a charity second-hand shop (to buy, not donate)? What did you buy? Did you play dress-ups while you were there?
PS Congratulations to Neil Patrick Harris on his upcoming wedding.
Sunsets
For today’s miscellaneous Monday, from author and blogger John Scalzi, a bunch of 2010 sunsets.
See the rest (including one taken in Melbourne, and one sunrise).
Felicity Banks 