100% certain

after todays foray to the artcie depths of an unheated uni building i can report with absolute certaintythat i am not a polar bear

i am going home.

while i remember...

okay i am working like totally enthusiastically on those various tasks, and have even taken myself out to work so that i can't be distracted by play school or vacuuming, (although this may well backfire as it is bloody freezing out here and the heaters are turned of...) but i just remembered two more cute kid things: sophie told me this morning how much she had loved seeing the recent "puffet show" at child care (how cute is that! puffets!) and isaac found the instructions to one of their train tracks and proudly referred to them as the destructions. given that this is how i feel myself about any kind of instruction book i think this is yet more proof that this is a golden child.

it is hard to type with frozen figners....

three big stalking things

i always loved that line in BlackAdder where someone says "disease and famine are stalking the land like....two big stalking things...."

at the moment i have my own stalkers: two papers; three presentations; two paper reviews that all need to be done very much in the sooner rather than later zone. so i am being very up beat and positive that i will get some of this under control this weekend and still have time to being a good mother. or at least a mother unlikely to be the subject of court intervention.

and i should phone my mother too.

why?

why is it that perfectly beautiful children can on occasion be so absolutely infuriatingly brutally unrelievedly horrible? and why does it have to be tonight?

sound mind and body? yeah right

in the "what the hell was i thinking" category: sometime on the weekend, while drawing up the week's menu i decided that tuesday would be a good night for zucchini soup. so now i'm cooking it. and even as i grate 750 grams of zucchini the thought occurs: who the hell is going to eat this???

on the other hand...

the other experience i had today was the polar opposite of my encounter with Vision Man. we had isaac's 3 monthly review with his rheumatologist who is an entirely lovely, gentle, caring, kind man who always takes time to talk to isaac (invariably about trains) always answers my questions carefully and concisely, and never uses expressions like "I know this might be hard for you to understand..." or "Well i AM an expert" or "sorry what was your name again?" a medical genius and a nice guy to boot. and that is a whole lot more than can be said for some other people who are not a million miles away....

misunderstood

for the third time this year i've today had to face the same feedback, from the same people, about the same written document: a plan for a research area over the next 18 months. every single time i've met with these people they've told me that they can't see what it is that the group described in the document is actually doing. so then we given examples. and then they say: "but there's no big picture". so we talk about the big picture. and then that person says "yes but we can't see what that means". so we give an example. and then they say "but where's the vision" so we give an example. and they say "but it's not sexy" so we give a sexy example, and they say "but that's not in the document...." AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH....honestly apart from the time i was with husband number 2 i never really felt that i was bad at communicating but i am starting to think that it would be easier to communicate with lichen or poppy seeds than with these folk who are supposed to be giving me "useful feedback". next time i write something for these folk it is going to conttain lots of pictures, and very big arrows pointing to boxes with headings like "This is sexy because"... and "This is our vision" and "read on for exciting but terribly specific examples of the vision in action"....And maybe i'll do a puppet show to go with it.

times and places

some days i seem to be overwhelmed with things to write in this humble blog, and theni can go for days without a thought crossing my mind. i guess the trick is to write when one needs to get stuff writ, and then to leave it when one doesn't. i feel a big like a kid with un-done homework when i don't post anything, but then i think even if i managed to win the Nobel Prize for World Peace I'd be feeling guilty because i hadn't also managed to wash the kitchen floor, or sort out my tupperware cupboards. so guilt can take a flying leap at itself just at the moment and i'll write whnever ever i feel like it.

missing missy

the biggest drama we have had in a long while began on sunday night when soph placed her 2 year old and much much loved stuffed puppy dog missy on top of her lamp and managed to melt her eye and burn the fur off one side of her face. thank god she didn't burn the house down. i have never seen her so distraught; not just crying, sobbing and heartbroken. so needlss to say i have spent the past two days trying to find a replacement dog (no luck) but manging to find (in a florist shop in Kew of all places), the 'male' version of the same dog. this dog-same company-has a blue bow, and blue foot pads instead of missy's pink bow and pink foot pads. so that dog is hopfully in the post to us as we speak. and now i have just found a doll hospital in geelong who think they'll be able to make the alterations of pink to blue. and i have convinced soph thatmissy needs to go into hospital for a few days to get all better. so now i just have to track down some pink gingham that passes muster, deliver the dogs, and then hope that the reinvented Missy passes muster with a cannier than is helpful child...i am sure tis is making me a better person but i am not entirely sure how....