Over and over again

Ever since my oldest child was a baby, he has suffered night terrors, usually when he is overtired. As he's grown older it has morphed into a slightly different form, he now sleep walks. To all appearances he is awake, but since I know him so well I can tell that he is actually still asleep. The key to this is that when he comes to talk to me there are a lot of "um"s and "ah"s. He is still articulate past his actual age so it's probably only me that realises what is actually going on. Tonight I wasn't 100% sure if he was awake or asleep but when he told me that he wanted something he had spoken about previously I realised the truth, because he hadn't spoken to me about that idea before. My thoughts are that this is still part of the dreaming process and since he usually doesn't remember talking to me the next day I think I'm probably right.

My youngest on the other hand actually doesn't seem to need as much consecutive sleep as other children her age so when she comes to talk to me after 9pm at night I know for a fact that she is awake and she will stay awake for hours. The other two? Once they are asleep, they are asleep. Thank goodness for "normal" children.

Argh! Uni stress

Why I even thought I'd be able to do this is beyond me at the moment. My high school English teacher is probably to blame, she always told the rest of the class that if they didn't know how to write an essay they should just look at mine because, according to her, I'm very good at blathering on about nothing while making sense at the same time. However high school was literally half my life ago and the essays were much less than 2500 words with a life to distract me and a minimum of 6 discovered references apart from the required reading though. Interestingly my ways of avoiding works are somewhat similar, my bedroom was never as tidy as when I was doing my Higher School Certificate and my house is cleaner than it has been in years. The difference of course is that I have to clean a larger area, which means more time spent avoiding work.

I can probably get it done before the due date and time of midnight Perth time tomorrow, but it won't be up to the standard I know I'm capable of. One of the many parts of my life that disappoint me is the fact that rather than work at something frustrating me I will deflect, procrastinate and excuse myself. Tonight's deflection involved watching School of Rock for the first time and my excuse is that my sons have used up all of my monthly broadband download limit watching YouTube vidoes so all my searched pages load so slowly it seems hardly worth waiting for them.

This is of course all a nonsense. The truth is that I should have started this essay earlier in the study period. There is no excuse for my procrastination and it is definitely something I need to work on if I am going to be both studying this university course and learning MYOB for a potential income stream during the next part of my life.

Back to the wet

I think the wet season may finally have started after 2 months of oppressive humidity and extreme sweatiness. But the rain falling on my roof right now has reminded me of the one thing I didn't like about last wet season - the fact that heavy rain knocks out the satellite reception for the Austar pay-tv. It's bad enough that they run ads these days, it's even worse when you are watching a movie and through no fault of your own the weather suddenly stops the movie and you miss the end of it. I still don't know what happened at the end of Girl Interrupted.

Someone told me once that in Singapore the pay-tv companies place a larger satellite dish as standard equipment to help stop the disconnections during rain storms. Why Australian companies don't do this is beyond me, except of course for the fact that it would probably cost more.

In other news, the my sons miss their sisters (who would have expected that result? Certainly not me) and I am running behind on my 2500 word essay due on Monday.

Half the children, double the fun!

Yesterday my husband ran away from home, taking two of my children with him.

Ok, not really. Despite what the newspaper reports would have you believe my husband T will actually be at sea (on his Navy boat no less!) on Christmas Day so he had to take his Christmas holidays early in order to be back at work on Dec 15. I decided to go and stay with his parents for Christmas because:

1. they don't live in Darwin which means it's definitely not going to be hot compared to here


2. they have a pool


3. it's basically free food


4. it's my father-in-law's 60th birthday 2 days before Christmas and I thought it would be a little unfair to fly down for the party and then fly back to Darwin for Christmas.

Hang on, I may have gotten that list the wrong way around...

T told his parents that he wouldn't be able to come down for Christmas due to the whole being-at-sea-for-work thing (yes, they did ask again after the newspaper reports if he was still going to be working over Christmas) so they pushed the 60th birthday party back to early December so T, their oldest child, could be there. I figure they probably want the rest of the family there as well so I decided to pull the kids out of school a week early - nothing ever happens during the last week of school anyway - and fly down on December 5th for the party on the 6th.

T then worked out that he could take holidays from Nov 24 and promptly booked a plane ticket down to his parents.

Since our older daughter is only in her first year of school and our younger daughter is only in preschool he thought it would be nice if they went with him to Qld, so yesterday I put all 3 of them on a plane headed south. That means the only two children I have at home are the boys, currently aged 9 and 8, which means......
I don't have to get dressed in the morning because they can take themselves to school!!!

Oh happy day

I have my laptop back! It only took 2 weeks. Turns out that the person I talked to on the telephone twice was either asking about a different laptop or misunderstood what the technicians were telling her. The lady who rang me today said that the reason my laptop took so long to repair was the fingerprint scanner, and it still doesn't work despite having been replaced with a new unit. You know what, it doesn't matter. Having the fingerprint thing was nice and convenient but I'd far rather just have my laptop at this point. So that's what I told her and she said I could come and pick it up.

Now I get the joy of turning it on and keeping my fingers crossed that the woman who told me they'd "swapped the drives out" wasn't right because if I've lost all my stuff I'm going to be more than a little cranky. Especially since it's Friday.

Just tell me the truth

I'm becoming convinced the computer repair shop is lying to me.

First - the background. On the 30th of October my oldest son spilt a glass of water next to my laptop, which pretty promptly stopped working. The next morning I rang HP to tell them my laptop wouldn't turn on and the tech support guy walked me through a few things to get the laptop going again. It did start up so I was all "yay!" and then I asked him if he could help with something else I'd been having trouble with, the fingerprint security thing that had stopped working a couple of weeks before. Whatever he asked me to do didn't work, and each step didn't work through several restarts of the computer until finally the computer just stopped working again. At this point he declared the job required more help then he could provide and told me it would need to go to a repairer. Since the repair shop is pretty near my house I decided to drop it off, so I have a receipt for the laptop dated 31 October at 12:04pm. I was told at this point that it would likely take a week because they were pretty backed up but they would order the parts that day so when it came up on their job list it would be pretty quick to fix.

Friday last week (so exactly one week later) at around 2pm I got a phone call from the repair shop asking me for my log-in password. The lady who rang me told me that they'd had to order a second part but they'd finished installing it so after a few tests they should be calling me back later that afternoon. Except they didn't. Yesterday (Tuesday) I was going to be in the area anyway so I popped in around 1pm to ask what the status of the job was, I was told that it was on the guy's desk and they would be probably returning it to me later in the afternoon. Except they didn't.

Today I just rang up to find out what was going on after starting to experience moderate panic about the whole looming-end-of-semester-with-all-relevant-information-saved-on-that-laptop business. Today the story is that the tech who was working on it yesterday was called away for an emergency, he wasn't there right now but one of the other techs believes that it should be ready by either this afternoon or tomorrow.

Now I don't know about anyone else, but this is starting to look a lot like I'm being fobbed off. Either they've lost it, they are incompetent, or I keep getting bumped down the priority queue. No matter what it is, I would far rather they told me the truth than keep getting my hopes up. Not to mention that this is a warranty repair and their stated service standard is 2-4 working days for warranty repairs. I almost hope HP send me out a customer satisfaction survey if I ever get the laptop back.

Bad Mother

It's the weekend again and I will now reveal my poor parenting skills. Today's lunch for the children was hotdogs. Tonight's dinner will be sausages. I do plan on making some salad to go with the sausages but I already know that at least two of them will turn the sausage into a hotdog then tell me they are too full for salad.

To top off the poor parenting today, I laid down on my bed with my 3 year old around 2pm to encourage her to go to sleep and woke up over an hour later with no 3 year old next to me. So the only person who had an afternoon nap is me, the only person over the age of 10 in the house. Luckily the only damage is the crumbs all over the dinner table and the apple core on the coffee table.

Cyclone season ahoy!

I may as well stick this here too rather than keeping it on my hard drive - I know how that turns out from my experiences over the last month! When I took the kids to school this morning and came back through the security gate the Cyclone Watch board was up for the first time this cyclone season so it's definitely time for me to start thinking about what to do.

Since this will be my first full cyclone season in Darwin I have had a bit of time to think about it. I also need to think about the fact that for most of December there will be no-one in my house since I am staying with the in-laws for about 3.5 weeks. So far, this is what I've come up with to do before I go away in early December:

1. Bring outdoor furniture inside


2. Put bikes in shed


3. Bins inside shed or filled with water


4. All windows and blinds closed


5. All external doors closed and locked


6. All internal doors closed


7. Fridge and freezer empty


8. All electrical appliances switched off and unplugged,
   including dishwasher
   excluding telephone

Now I have to remember to add to this list as more ideas occur to me.

Swimming lessons, aka the military don't love children

One of the more interesting parts of moving to Darwin was that our house is on a Defence base. There aren't too many Australian Defence bases that have housing and this is very likely to be the last time we get to live on a base, but it's a kind of cool place. The housing itself is pretty shoddy, despite our actual house having won design awards about 15 years ago, but the community on base is good and the fact that we know we will not have to worry about someone breaking into our house is great.

For the first month or so after we moved here, my oldest son's head was pretty much on a swivel looking out for people wearing camouflage, people carrying guns, APCs driving down the road - you name it, he loved it. Then it all became a bit passe as he gradually realised that he was seeing stuff like this pretty much every day. What he hasn't experienced before today was swimming lessons run by an actual Navy PTI (physical training instructor). The usual swimming teacher is on holidays this week and this guy is filling in for her. He assured me he is AustSwim qualified but it was very obvious that even though he is qualified, he's very underexperienced.

So although Olly was great and he does know his stuff, lessons for the toddlers this week was a bit hit and miss because he didn't quite know what he wanted to achieve or how to get them to listen. Lessons for the bigger boys were more constructive, although the slight case of hero-worship my boys had for him probably meant they weren't listening as well as they should either.

I'm convinced this house is cursed

So, the desktop computer went belly-up and I needed to reinstall Windows XP on it to make it work again. This of course means that all the other programs that used to be installed no longer have registry files associated with them so they all need to be reinstalled. I decided that was all too hard and it could wait a while, so I didn't bother setting up much more than FireFox on the desktop, thinking I could use my laptop which was all set up the way I liked it.

Perfect plan, right? Keep everything in the one place, don't have to worry about forgetting passwords or usernames.......Perfect plan right up until a Vista update coincides with the fingerprint security device magically disconnecting itself, requiring me to suddenly remember a password again (luckily I did, DH doesn't so he can't use the laptop anymore) and then last night the power supply in the laptop stopped working. Unlike all the other power supplies in the house that have stopped working (TV, DVR, desktop computer) there is an identifiable reason for the laptop to stop working and it is a glass of water which was "by accident!" knocked over next to the laptop - by the oldest child, who is nearly 10 years old.

So this morning was spent firstly on the phone to HP support, then trying to find their registered repairer after being given the wrong street address. This afternoon was spent on the desktop computer, reinstalling certain programs that are necessary and finding that I've completely forgotten my email password.

Luckily today is Friday which means wine o'clock comes earlier. Unluckily the kids want to go trick-or-treating so wine o'clock will have to be postponed until after we've finished that.

If anything else powered by electrickery stops working I may go completely insane. And if the laptop takes longer than a week to repair I will be furious.

Fish-killer

A few weeks back we went to a BBQ at a friend's house, where they had recently had fish that all died. Somehow I was rail-roaded into taking their fish tank and stuff home while their neighbour gave us 4 goldfish from their apparently abundant supply. It took 4 days for the first one to die, followed by the second last Friday and the third on Saturday. I don't know for sure what's killing them but it could be me. It could also be the fact that our house is just too damn hot for keeping even tropical fish alive, there is a thermometer inside the tank which sits consistently up around the top of the red zone (which I believe is the ideal temperature for this type of fish) and sometimes goes over the top, despite me trying to keep the house no warmer than around 29C. Or it could just be luck - I also can't keep plants alive. Maybe I'm lucky the kids have become somewhat self-sufficient and can feed themselves at need.

The jury is still out

Back when we first moved away from Sydney, my husband suggested I do "something" constructive with my time while we are living in Darwin for 2 years. He told me he didn't care much what I did as long as I wasn't bored and lonely while he was at sea. I kind of poked around a little and decided to enrol in some university studies externally, which is why this blog started, as a requirement of the first unit I was studying.

In order to keep both myself and my husband happy this meant that we needed another computer. We only had 3 ;) One of them is a very old laptop with about 40mb of internal memory, one of them is a fairly old desktop that won't run certain games that my husband likes to play (such as Star Wars: Empire at War), and one of them is the desktop that does play the games and was connected to the Internet. It sounds like a lot, but it's not enough - the old laptop crashed, the old desktop is used by three of the four children, and the other desktop didn't work as a time share arrangement. So we got a new laptop, one the kids aren't allowed to touch, has wireless internet (yay!) and can be used when we're travelling.

Which is a good thing, as it turns out. Two nights ago I turned the desktop computer off before I went to bed, wondering what was causing it to be so slow at opening up FireFox and if there was a virus or something I needed to scan for again. Yesterday morning I turned it on and found out what was wrong - BSOD! Apparently something went wrong with creating or saving a registry entry and now the computer needs to be fixed. Given that I am in the middle of a study period for uni that is delivered completely online and my husband is in the middle of a sea-going period that requires him to spend most of his time, funnily enough, at sea, the new laptop is a real life saver. If my desktop computer had crashed and we had no other computer capable of connecting to the internet I would have to withdraw from the uni unit which would be both a) bad for my study record and b) bad for the hip pocket as I think we've passed the census date for the study period so I wouldn't be able to withdraw without paying for the unit. It's also really lucky that part of the last unit taught me the value of Delicious so I have all my bookmarks.

So now I get to find out how good I really am at following instructions. I Googled the failure notice my BSOD gave me and found out what it is plus a way of fixing it. This fix is slightly risky in that I may lose all the data on that computer but hey, it probably needed a new install anyway. And at least I still have my laptop. The bad thing is that the current work I was doing for the study period was on the desktop which means I can't access it before it is due to be submitted on Monday, so I'm hoping to be granted the extension I requested.

And let that be a lesson to me - always keep your work on a second computer, online server or flash drive, just in case of Microsoft living up to it's reputation.

Full disclosure

In the interests of living up to the blog title, I leave you with this - my second son (known as Thud), the newly 8-year-old who was born with congenital heart defects, was recently diagnosed with scoliosis as well. Being my son he has decided that this is a much bigger thing than it actually is and that this explains why his handwriting is crap.


What is actually going on is that he really screwed up his body when he was building it in the first place. Not only did he get the Ikea instructions for his heart, he also got the Ikea instructions for his spine. His heart was missing a vital component (the tricuspid valve, causing tricuspid atresia), he got the two arteries leaving his heart the wrong way around (transposition of the great arteries), and when he was building his spine he forgot to put all of one piece in (hemivertebrae at L1 - NB despite that link my son is clearly not a bulldog). According to my research both of these problems occur at roughly the same point of foetal development, and neither of them are a) my fault or b) caused by my older son having measles at that point of my pregnancy. Sometimes, in my blue hours, I have my doubts about the second, but there's nothing I can do about it. See, mountain out of a molehill.

Also according to a few Internet friends this combination, together with his retractile testes (there is nothing that isn't on the Internet these days, I really am sorry Thud if you find this in the future!) are commonly found in people with genetic syndrome that hasn't yet been diagnosed. Great. Another thing to worry about. Although I have ruled out all the ones that include mental retardation because no-one could argue with me and his older brother the way he does if they had any kind of slow mental processes.

And the results are in...

...but I'm not supposed to say what they are unless you ask me. Go on, ask me!

What it means though is that this blog is going to m.orph into something different. I originally picked the blog name and URL for two purposes - it was meant to describe the process of learning and to describe my own slightly hystrionic self who can turn any small problem into a huge deal.

Sometime over the next month the learning process posts will be deleted (so the new crop of students can't easily access them, this is highly recommended by our tutor) and the more personal stuff will commence. There will probably be a lot of new learning stuff because I found the process of blogging much more useful than keeping my thoughts in my head, so don't say you weren't warned. That's if I don't manage to overcome my strong self-censor who deletes, re-reads, re-types and deletes again.

Oh, and at some point I need to go back and fix a minor issue that I don't like, the "Click for more" at the bottom of posts that don't need it. But that's something for another day. In other words, don't click for more no matter what it says beneath this.

And now, the end is near; And so I face the final curtain...

This has been a very enlightening study period.


I read the description in the course outline and said to my husband "This will be easy! I've done almost all of this stuff before!" The thing is, I'd never actually thought about most of it before. I clearly didn't read the word "reflective" anywhere when I was selecting what unit to study. But I've enjoyed it far more than I expected, although I have found that it is very easy - even after 18 years! - to fall straight back into old habits of trying to avoid study in favour of cleaning the house *sigh* This is something I definitely need to address before I start NET12 in the next study period. I need to factor in school holidays and illness when I write my study plan at the beginning of the period and try to not let myself get distracted or fall behind.


There have been certain pieces of information that I will definitely be looking at again, my bookmarks for this study period are pretty numberous, but I can't guarantee that I will continue blogging. I still find it easier to think thoughts inside my head rather than putting them out where other people can potentially comment on them. Despite all that having to be accountable with time stamps etc is probably a good thing for me and my fourth grade teacher always said that I needed to get the thoughts out of my head so they can be evaluated. So here they are, for better or worse.

"Regrets, I've had a few;
But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption...

...And did it my way."