Saaga

I leave tomorrow evening for a conference in Lyon. It will be the first time I am away from my daughter and she is not even two weeks old. When I get back I will have missed 18% of her life.

Our daughter seems to be settling in after a particularly rough first night at home. She seems to be moving from being nocturnal to a more normal pattern that will be less likely to continue doing sanity damage to her parents.

On Sunday morning M took me out for a walk and showed me somewhere nearby to get coffee. To make up for how crap the coffee was, she took me to the park to look at the ducks.

Yesterday we went out for the first time in the sling. I’m not sure that I like it that much as it’s pretty hot and sweaty, but M didn’t seem to mind, in fact she slept for a while after that in the same position that she had scrunched into while snuggled against my chest. I thought I changed her shape irrevocably.

My mum’s powers of holding back the rain have left her and the sky has begun its normal routine again. But the week that mum kept the rain away was fantastic. The temperature is dropping, the wind is picking up and the leaves are changing, which leads me to believe that winter is on its way…crap.

It’s official, Emilia joined the family on the 13th of September at 20 past 5 in the morning. She weighed 3070 grams and was 51 cm long.

She didn’t have the squishy thing going on. I think that is because the birth was relatively quick.

Alex is very tired after the pain and pressing that went on. We all know how efficient and well organised she is, so it will come as no surprise that she decided that we would have the baby on the 13th, so that is what happened. The 13th is the most efficient date because we are both born on the 13th as well. Alex in May and me in March.

I love her.

My first complaint about Paypal is that I had to cancel my Australian account, because the people that run it don’t allow bank accounts outside of Australia to be linked to it.
My second complaint about Paypal is that because I registered as living in Germany, the whole interface is now German and there is stuff missing. One of the things that I believe is missing is an English* button. It defies logic that I can’t choose my language on a program that is written in at least 12 languages that I could count. But it shouldn’t surprise me. Far too many companies follow this model.
It seems to me that although Paypal is a global business, it is not internationally minded.

In other news, this blog’s spam filter caught 161 entries that were obviously generated by robots and sent our way in a scattergun effect. The messages included something from every part of the unwanted spectrum; all the way from Anal virgins to Voyeuristic midgets.

In other other news, my mum is visiting. She seems to be enjoying herself and is going off to Neanderthal tomorrow to visit the museum and so on. To celebrate the birth of the baby I will take her out for a dinner consisting mostly of socks…erm… I mean Pork.

*I looked it over for 20 minutes and couldn’t find a way to translate. I suppose I will have to go through all the menus with a dictionary to find it…if it exists.

Just tryin’ to put some punk back into punctured lung.

1. It is cheap.
2. The quality is low.
3. The damage it does to you is severe.

In other rants:

Has Australia gone mad? I read some of the headlines about the APEC summit and shake my head in disbelief.

The Chaser crew have been arrested and charged under the new APEC laws.

Personally I couldn’t care less about the fate of the Chaser guys. Sure they’re funny, but they were warned (according to government spokespersons) not to break any of the laws revolving around the big fence. After reading the articles about this, what really concerned me is the ‘new laws’ stuff. It seems like there are more and more new laws in Australia that are about controlling people.

I remember a few years ago when the drug dog laws came in. This affected me, not because I was a drug dealer, but because my dreadlocks made me look like a target. So whenever there were drug dogs around, I had to suffer the indignity of having the cops walk their dogs straight toward me. It seems that our rights in Australia are only there by the good grace of the government and can be pulled out from under us at any time.

Having said all that, I am a long way from home. How does it feel living there now?

We are blessed with electronics, but don’t go swimming on your own