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.

Breasts, and expensiveness ...

Since the baby is due pretty soon (the doctor on Tuesday actually told me to hurry up) and my bra really doesn't fit very well anymore, I thought I'd have a little look-see around the Internet at maternity bras in my size. I was horribly disappointed.

Last time I was pregnant I gained about the same amount of weight and the same number of cup sizes as this time, just I started out at over 50kg rather than under this time. The net result of all this is I've ended up being slightly bigger than last time, and even more in uncharted bra size than last time. I still have my utilitarian beige Triumph bra in a 12F, altered down so its wearable by someone who is a size 10 (which incidentally puts it at a size 10G, a size that is practically impossible to find). Unfortunately, it is slightly too small.

Earning a little extra at home

Since I've been lazing around at home pregnant the last few months, doing not much besides eat and expand (it takes work to gain 20 extra kilos, and its not all baby!), I thought I'd try out the classic "you too can earn several squillion dollars a month from home" that seems to crop up all the time on the Internet, and usually aimed at stay-at-home mums.

The bottom line of course, is you can't earn very much at all, especially if you are outside of the US. Australians are a little under-represented in the "earning money from home" stakes, but a few sites came up that are either international or specifically Australian. Most take people from the UK, New Zealand and Australia.

November 25th - Election day is over!

Well, I managed not to have an election day baby, which isn't entirely a bad thing.

We were having a talk about one of the common complaints about Kevin Rudd last night - that he has no experience running the country. Now really, how many people out there do have experience running countries in the past? Not many at all. Its not like business, where you can start by running a lemonade stand in your front yard and work your way up to being a CEO of a big multinational. Prior experience running a country is pretty hard to come by. For a start, there's a lot less countries than businesses, and its a lot harder to start your own country than your own business.

Watch the bump

Well, its November 12th. That makes me about 8 months pregnant, since I'm due on the 20th of December 2007, which also happens to be the day that the insurance claim gets completed and we get half the house re-carpeted. I'm not sure if that fact makes it more or less likely that the baby will arrive on time.

One of the most amusing things that can happen when you are waddling around a small town sporting a large bump is that people come up and discuss your bump with you. Or rather, they just discuss your bump. Sometimes its about the size, sometimes about whether I'm carrying high or low, and now its speculation on when I'm due. I've had quite the variety of comments over the last few months - here's a few:

Keeping kids healthy

Spotted this story over on AdelaideNow. What I found interesting was the mention of replacing part of the Baby Bonus and welfare payments with fish, meat, milk, spring water and fruit and vegetable vouchers.

Nice in theory, but how do you enforce it? Nobody in this house (well, except Aisha and the cat) likes fish, no matter how healthy they say it is, so I'd be very annoyed to lose money I could spend on food we'd actually eat and just get a useless voucher for frozen fish at the local butcher. Same with spring water - why waste money on a bottle of spring water when perfectly good, clean water falls from the sky and is collected in my rainwater tanks?

Just a little wet today

Our local region had just a spot of heavy rain recently; a flash flood, in fact. While our town didn't come off as badly as some others, we had a good few inches of extremely localised rain in an hour, apparently the heaviest rainfall in over 15 years.

When the rain cleared and the sun came out and we got to survey the damage, the town was missing the top layer of several streets - all washed away to pile up a few hundred metres downstream - and quite a few houses were a lot wetter than they should have been. One of them was ours. We got off quite lightly with just some damage to our northern wall, three rooms with very wet carpet and almost every spare piece of towel, sheet or blanket in the house soaked in muddy water. In true Murphy's law style, one of the sodden rooms was the baby's intended room, and we'll be lucky if it's useable before the baby arrives. Could be problematic.

A belated introduction

I suppose, now that this site has been floating around on the internet for the last several years, that I should introduce myself a little better.

I'm a bit of a hermit, and a lot of a geek. I'm in my early 30s now, with a very precocious and talkative 6 year old girl called Aisha who you will find features heavily on this website, and a very quiet and introverted partner who occasionally pops up in the webcomic, much to his disgust. Just to prove the geek point, we met in an online roleplaying game back in 2004. Please don't hold that against me!

Baby Names

There's a few simple rules that one should follow when naming a child. Nothing special, and very easy to remember. This seems to be lost on many modern parents.

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