General site news and happenings

This portion of the site is my outlet for general opinionated ranting about any and all topics that are slightly related to my life, general parenting or in fact anything I find interesting.

Poems for the children at our local school

My daughter, being the silly young thing that she is, has been making up limericks about the other children. The timing isn't quite right on these but she thinks they're funny, so enjoy!

There was a little girl called Tyneese
Who was chased by the police
She was put into jail
Without any bail
And never a chance of release

For this next one, remember that we live a long way inland:

There was a girl named Taylor
Who fell in love with a sailor
She didn't live near the sea
So it could never be
And it was all a big failure.

There was a girl called Abbey
Whose clothes were always shabby
So she turned into a cat
Well how about that
And now she is a very fine tabby.

The Telstra saga (September 23rd 2008)

Remember how I said a while ago that the broadband situation in our area is dismal? Well, the biggest hurdle was not the availablilty of broadband, but the price. With Telstra's NextG wireless the only real choice of technology with a brand new tower a few kilometers down the road, we've been watching the prices with interest.

The first time we checked they had 3G of uploads/downloads for around $180. Then it dropped to about $110. Still far too expensive, given we use considerably more than 3G and Telstra charge $150 per gig excess. Then one magic day it dropped to $129 for 10G, with a deal that gave you the first year for half price on a three year contract. Broadband for $65 a month! So we signed up. And the saga began.

Growing older

The baby is now past 6 months old and still obstinately not doing anything interesting, other than exuding cute at levels that could kill a horse, and apparently can effectively hypnotise most little old ladies and checkout chicks that she encounters.

She is, of course, mindbogglingly cute. She's pink and fat with lovely googly blue eyes, rosy cheeks and three cliched curls of hair on top of her head, right out of a 'what your baby should look like' textbook. She smiles like a mad thing when she sees us, and grumps when we leave the room.

I don't remember my oldest child being anywhere near this cute. I do remember that she was talking from a depressingly early age and we've never managed to stop the torrent of words in the seven years since, and this baby just gurbles happily and blows rasperries, with the occasional interjection of "um" or "ba".

Refinancing

Recently, we had cause to refinance the mortgage. Nothing unusual about that, people do it all the time. But we're in a location with a 'bad' postcode, and the loan amount was well under the usual minimum lending limit. So here's a bit of a breakdown on what happened with some of the mortgage brokers I rang.

Aussie Home Loans were one of the few that I contacted that actually rang back. They took a few details of what I needed over the phone, said they'd go check it out on their computer, and that was the last I ever heard from them.

Red Rock Mortgages apparently couldn't reach me on the phone and sent me an email instead. That contact ended pretty fast, they had a minimum lend criteria of $150,000.

Time marches on

The baby is now officially 3 months old. I'd like to report that she is walking, talking and doing advanced theoretical mathematics, but sadly that is not the case.

She has very inconveniently not done a single reportable thing during her 3rd month of life.

Broadband? What broadband?

A little background - we live in a rural area, outside the reach of what most people would consider to be broadband. I know this can be hard for Americans (and Australians in the city) to grasp, but the best speed we can get for under $100 a month is 128/128 ISDN. That is, until Telstra decided to remove ISDN home late in 2008.

Meanwhile, up in the policical ivory tower, our esteemed leader Kevin Rudd decided that he wants to spend $10 billion on fibre to the node. Well that's nice, but the problem with that is 98% of the population already has access to pretty damn good internet, so spending that much to upgrade 98% of the population to really damn good internet strikes me as a pointless waste of money, especially with so many carriers in the cities already having their own infrastructure, allowing some good choice and excellent prices for the end user.

Bras update

I thought I'd post on how I went finding some enormous bras. I did eventually buy two, one of which wasn't entirely right and one that is pretty good.

The gist of this is that I'm breastfeeding and have breasts that are disproportionately large for my frame - I'm an Australian size 10 or a US size 32, and need a G cup or thereabouts. Cup sizes this big are very, very hard to find in band sizes this small. Since I had trouble finding what I wanted, this page is here to help anyone else who has the same problem I do.

The Modern Baby

This baby is definitely a product of the modern age. For a start, her parents met in an online computer game back in 2004. People just didn't meet like that back in the Old Days. We used to chat on IRC at 7am each day, while I was having breakfast and he was getting ready to go to bed - and no, this wasn't an international relationship, we lived about 15 minutes drive away from each other in the same city.

The first time I went to see a doctor I got an inept one who had just moved here from Africa, and he wanted me to do a fasting blood glucose test - fasting in the morning being possibly the worst thing you can do when you're slightly pregnant. So I looked up on the Internet what tests he should actually have done (I should have been weighed and measured and given an orange book according to the SA Health website) and then went to a different doctor who actually had a clue.

Induction? No way!

Well, the baby finally got around to arriving - a week late. At my last doc appointment before Christmas, I'd made a booking to be induced on the 27th, the first working day after the Christmas public holidays. On the night of the 26th, we decided we should read all the literature they'd sent us home with, which included a long section on the cascade of interventions that can be triggered by an induction.

Not a lot you can do about being presented with a long list of possible negative outcomes when you are reading them 12 hours before you are going to be induced, you might say? (Well ok, we could have cancelled the appointment but then I could have ended up pregnant forever). But no, baby decided induction was not the way to go, and I went into labour at 3am, just in time to have her at 8:30am, completely missing my 9am booking.

Of water, and babies

Back in October we got flooded, and the insurance covered new carpet that was going to get laid tomorrow - December 20th, also my due date. Unfortunately they've just came with a fancy floor wetness measuring gizmo, and we have to wait some more before the carpet gets laid.

We've been living in a state of chaos for months now. We'd just built an extra bedroom for the baby and completely redone Aisha's room, and had only just got those finished literally the day before we got flooded and had to take everything back out of the new rooms again. Of course, only the bedrooms got wet.

This time we're just resigning ourselves to being carpetless for another month or two, and the floor feels dry enough (a few weeks ago it was wet enough to saturate anything that touched the floor) that we're just going to put the furniture back where it should be. This is going to be a novelty.

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