General site news and happenings

Courtesy of someone (or rather, their toddler) on Facebook in dire need of a Hoot the owl colouring in picture, I decided to step in and draw one in Inkscape. And since drawing this picture, the ABC have added Hootabelle so here she is too.

Cute, aren't they?

There's a black and white PDF of Hoot and Hootabelle you can download if you too have a kiddlywink that neeeeeeds a picture of Hoot or Hootabelle too.

The next question is, do I email that in to the ABC2 Giggle Gallery and get my own little Giggle Certificate? Or, being over 30 and all, am I too old for that?

I was reading a blog over on http://www.phdinparenting.com and came across an interesting snippet on baby names in Germany:

The myth of "When naming your child, go for as original as possible"

The traditional upper class in Germany tends to give their children traditional names, while the lower classes go for original or modern names. Studies have shown that teachers are more likely to trust children with traditional names than original ones.

This holds true in many other countries too. The lower classes (in America, black and Hispanic people are far more likely to have a 'unique' name than white) are far more likely to choose original, unique and misspelt names.

In case noone has noticed, house prices in Australia in the last decade have got themselves into a major bubble. With lots of other countries like America, Iceland and the United Kingdom having already had a smaller bubble that has popped, where does this leave Australia?

Either we are different to the rest of the world and our property prices will continue to rise much faster than wages, or we're just collectively more insane than other countries and are letting our bubble get to record-breaking heights.

There's only really two ways out of a bubble. One: it pops. And a lot of people are left with negative equity, bad debts, and a feeling of having lost a lot of paper wealth. Two: prices simply stop going up, and they slowly return to normal levels by being eroded by inflation. This way stops people from thinking houses are the next big place to throw caution to the winds and indulge in some major speculation, and they return to being simply a place to live.

Something I should have done years ago - catalogued Aisha's book collection on the internet to stop people (well, one person) buying her duplicate books.

I've made an account on Librarything and just started entering a couple of her books. I got to 98 and stopped. I'm easily going to pass 200 and have to give them $25.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/AishaS

It's probably going to take the best part of the weekend to enter all of them, especially as she has so many books that are now well below her as well as the ones at her current reading level. Her books are taking over the house, slowly ... silently ... indidiously ... a creeping growth of books, mysteriously multiplying whenever I'm not looking.