Another Weekend Shattered...

Natalie's away -- incipient Igoritis of the spine and all -- in Hobart, doing Big Medicine Stuff. Fair enough, too. Like any group of professionals, doctors need to keep their knowledge current, and make sure their skills stay up to date. I just hate it when the Big Medicine Stuff weekends happen at difficult times, such as right now.

Actually, Natalie's back is improving, which is fortunate. I remembered that I'd bought a TENS unit a few years back to take care of a muscle strain that wasn't resolving itself properly. (Okay -- it was a groin muscle, and the goddam strain lasted six goddam months.) Zapping an electric current through your skin may sound a dubious sort of measure, and it's true that nobody seems entirely comfortable with the science behind it as yet, but it works. That muscle strain of mine went away in under two weeks of TENS treatment, and I've had no further problems there.

The application of the TENS unit to Natalie's back has coincided with a sharp uptick in the rate of improvement. It was getting better before, but very very slowly. Once we got the electricity into it, the improvements happened almost hourly. She's well enough now to successfully drive her bucket-seat, low-slung Honda to Hobart and still function at the other end. Compared with a couple days ago, that's positively miraculous.

Unfortunately, this is also the weekend of the big Harley-Davidson owners' rally here in Tas. That's not so bad in itself, although it gets a bit tiresome listening to all those thumping great hogs charging around the hills. But along with the Harley mob came Roz and Steve and their youngster, whom we shall call "K". K and Elder Son were great friends when Roz and Steve lived down here in Taz, so there was much excitement over the prospect of a reunion.

Aha. But with the HOG rally came a stonking great concert for the Harley crowd, culminating in a late night performance by St Jimmy Barnes of the Concrete Tonsils. And thus came the dreaded suggestion of 'The Sleepover'.

...like I could say "no."

So the kids and I tidied the house yesterday, and that went well. Very well. I was impressed by the boys efforts, so I promised 'em we'd find something nifty when we went shopping. Then we went to the car -- and the rear tyre was flat.

Well, fuck.

I've never changed a tyre on the Terrakhan before. Just finding the tools was a job and a half. Locating the barely-adequate jack and tyre iron didn't take long, but finding the special rod to slide into the body of the car to unwind the device that lowers the spare tyre which hangs under the back of the car body took the owner's manual and about forty minutes of car-emptying, swearing, searching, seat-folding and carpet-lifting.

Okay. Tools assembled. Spare tyre duly extracted. Time to jack up the... oh shit.

Ever tried to jack a high-wheel-base vehicle using a compact hydraulic jack with no more than 15cm (six inches) of travel? Seriously: fifteen centimetres of lift, no more. Bloody lucky the tyre died on the concrete pad in the garage. If it had been roadside, I'd have been totally fucked. As it is, I grabbed a wooden chock and then spent fifteen minutes poking around under the car, finding the one and only point on the frame that would actually allow the tyre to clear the ground using no more than fifteen cm of lift...

Of course, once all that was done it was gravy, sure. But by that time, there was no more wiggle room for shopping. Roz arrived with young K, and it was Game On.

We let the kids wear themselves out for a while, then loaded everybody in the now-repaired Terrakhan, went down to Scottsdale and bought some essentials -- pizza makings, a big watermelon, some telescoping aluminium walking sticks for the boys (that was their choice. They wanted the damned things. They were cheap, so what do I care? Weird kids.) and some gin, some curacao and some ice.

Roz stuck around for a cool drink -- just long enough for Feral Rob to show up. Feral Rob is the father of Elder Son's best friend, who we shall call "J", and sure enough, J was in the car too. Happily, there was also a six-pack of Stella Artois. Feral Rob is a man of great and civilised spirit.

K, J, Elder Son, Younger Son and the Mau-Mau tore around outside in the afternoon sun while Rob and I put a dent in the Stella. Finally, the Feral clan had to go, though, so it was back to just me, and a pack of kids.

I put Plan P into action: first, lots of home-made pizza. Second: baths for all kids, and pyjamas. Third: reinstall the big screen and the digital projector in the loft over the garage, and make a fuckload of popcorn.

The kids ate pizza, bathed, pyjamaed, and then rocked out to "The Tale of Despereaux" on the old mattresses in the loft. It wasn't a bad gig, and I was enjoying it too -- at least, right up until Younger Son decided that his tummy hurt.

Younger Son's digestion has been a bit dodgy of late, and this time was a bit worse than usual. I had just time to grab a large, mostly-empty popcorn bowl and shove it under his face before he got started. Now, the Younger Son is a stocky, surprisingly muscular little gobshite, and unlike most kids of six-going-on-seven, he has serious goddam abdominal muscles. Every gym trainer, every doctor who's ever examined him, practically everyone who's ever lifted him up -- everyone notices. It's odd.

And when he's puking, it's unfortunate -- because all that abdominal muscle just tightens up into one huge spasm. He gets range, and power, and by god he gets vocal volume. Sounds like he's trying to gargle a chainsaw. Despereaux definitely came off second best, even in full digital surround-sound.

Yech.

Happily, it was a one-chuck event. Once he'd divested himself of watermelon, ginger beer, home-made pizza and popcorn, Younger Son was quite happy to brush his teeth and get on with the film.

I took the Mau-Mau down to her bed when the film ended, but as it was a treat for the boys, I let them choose another film. They went with "The Revenge Of The Pink Panther" (the real one, with Peter Sellers) and I left them to it. After all, I could easily hear them from my bedroom, and I didn't want the Mau-Mau to be alone in the house, even when she was sleeping.

The original plan was for the boys to camp out in the loft, on the mattresses with the sleeping bags and all -- but they chickened out, so when Clouseau had finally thwarted poor old Dreyfus once again, they trooped down and set up in the boys room.

Of course, being as how it's summertime down here, there was no goddam hope of a lie-in, no matter how late they were awake. 0630: the sun's well up, and the thump-thump-thump of clumsy sub-teen feet is all over the house... sigh.

Gonna be a long, hot day today. I've already loaded 'em up on pancakes and watermelon. They've played the Wii on the big screen for a couple hours, but it's too hot up there now, so they're left to their own devices. I can't let that go on too long, though... so I'm cutting this short.

Natalie gets back maybe 1930 tonight. Roz and Steve will -- theoretically -- come to collect their spawn sometime before that. So... I've got maybe eight hours to go.

Wish me luck.

This Is Really Stretching Coincidence

So there's a theory out there which says basically that the Large Hadron Collider is causing ripples through time to prevent the discovery of the Higgs Boson - that the future is sabotaging the present to prevent the real-world-physics equivalent of a divide-by-zero error. Seriously: there are people who think this is truly, actually, mathematically the case, viz:

"In a bizarre sci-fi theory, Danish physicist DrHolger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Japan claim the LHC startup has been delayed due to nature trying to prevent it from finding the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle".

They say their maths proves that nature will "ripple backward through time" to stop the LHC before it can create the God particle, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather"

There's another reference to this idea here, from the usually sane New Scientist magazine. It's not the first time that science has suggested that quantum effects can move backwards as well as forwards in time. In fact, I believe it's an accepted part of certain quantum models. But nobody's really put forward any real-world cases for it actually doing anything... until now.

That Large Hadron Collider thing, on the border of France and Switzerland - the one everybody was worried might create a mini black hole last year before some kind of helium coolant leak shut the fucker down for nearly a year, that one? Well, they got it up and running again. And they're getting set to go, baby go. Except that all of a sudden, there's been another technical glitch, and they've had to bring it back down for a while.

And what was the glitch this time?

Well, apparently a bird dropped a large chunk of baguette onto some of the exposed workings of the machinery on the surface. Really. Here's another reference: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_incident/

I don't know about you, but that whole time-ripples-hiding-the-Higgs-Boson thing is starting to look like maybe we should give it some more serious consideration.

The Reviewer's Burden...

I read a Dan Brown Novel.

I wish I hadn't.

Go and read the review, and bask in your good fortune at not having to read the book yourself.

Well. That Sucked.

I think I passed the grading, though I haven't formally been told yet. I can't say it went well. The uniform jacket I wear is a heavy, triple-ply judo-weight cotton with mid-length sleeves. Up until the day of the grading, daily temperatures had maxed to about 22C, with low humidity. On the day of the grading, it hit something like 28C with thunderstorms drifting around the place.

That's not good. But lets add this: the training hall is an old thing. It has no air-con. And it's in one of the slightly dodgier suburbs, so the windows are all grilled. And none of them -- not goddam one -- can be opened. Not an option.

So, obviously, I was a little sweaty. Yep.

But at the same time, I was still tailing off from the gastro of Wednesday night and Thursday. I thought I was pretty much okay, but apparently the sudden shift to heat, humidity and exertion thought otherwise. I made it through the waza -- the technical routines -- more or less all right, but running through the pattern of kamae, or stances, I got the unmistakeable signal from my belly that lunch was about to come back.

Somehow I kept things together, stumbled through the last couple of stances, bowed out, and beelined for the toilets whereupon yes: my nice, light, healthy lunch did indeed make a reappearance.

I felt a little better after that. Things might have gone okay, but the bossman from Adelaide decided that we junior sword-slingers weren't cutting properly, and he gave us all a nice, heavy stick and put us through an intensive exercise: kiri-oroshi cut (that's the big one, where the sword starts hanging down behind your head and arcs up and over, splitting your opponent to the belly-button), then pivot 180 degrees and kiri-oroshi again. And repeat. At high speed.

I'm not sure how long we did that. Long enough that my shoulders are still stiff today. But I do know I had to stop a little early and zip off for another appointment with Doctor Chunder.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Natalie's back issues went from bad to worse, apparently. I'd moved a mattress downstairs for her before I left, and she spent most of the day lying in the middle of the floor, watching Flight of the Conchords with the kids.

In the midst of all this, the Mau-Mau began to run a solid fever. Probably just a reaction to her 4-yr-old immunisations which she got on Friday -- but bad enough to lay her down and out. And of course, Natalie wasn't really in the best position to play nursemaid.

Not pretty. So: Sunday morning, I got up, orchestrated a Big House Cleanup, and then made some decisions.

It was still hot and sticky, and I wasn't feeling a whole lot better. The Mau-Mau wasn't looking too hot either, and Natalie was still doing her impression of a woman in the advanced stages of zombification. I really wanted to take some action, get some kind of heat/cold treatment going to try to help Natalie, but on a Sunday in Scottsdale, you can't just trot out and pick up the appropriate bits and pieces. So I zipped into Launceston, did the grocery shopping, put in an appearance with the sword folk long enough to deliver an apology for not being able to make the day, and headed home again.

Which is a pisser, because I've missed the formal cutting -- they brought over the proper straw mats which have been used in tameshigiri (test cutting, where you try your technique to see if you can actually cut through something that supplies roughly humanigrade blade resistance) for the last few centuries. I really wanted to get involved there, but the thought of Natalie on the floor on her mattress and the Mau-Mau shivering away with her fever was a bit too much.

Thus, when I returned home, I got to be nursemaid for the day. Lots of heat packs. Plenty of fluids for the Mau-Mau.

Oh well. Today the Mau-Mau is better. Natalie is still stiff and slow and sore, and says she has much the same pain - but in twenty years of martial arts, I've become quite good at watching people move. She's a good deal more free in her actions today: up and about for longer, taking less time to recover. This isn't going to resolve quickly, no. We'll probably be doing the heat-pack regime for a week or two at least. But I think she'll be able to function again, albeit painfully, in a day or so.

One small blessing: it's a public holiday today. I'd planned to fire up the lawnmower and the whipper-snipper, but it's been wet this morning. Looks like I get a break. I'll have to go up into the shed and put up insulation instead...

Aaargh!

Oh, fantastic.

So Natalie's minor back troubles have flared to full-on pinched/swollen disc issues. She's pretty much horizontal, and that's that. Apparently they took one look at her yesterday at work, and sent her to the physio.

That really ices the cake on this weekend.

I can't duck out of the grading. Already did half of it, and it's an expensive sort of thing to quit on. Plus I don't want to have to go through all this goddam preparation again. And of course, the bossman of the style is coming out from Adelaide for this. So I go.

And I can't duck out on Dion's going-away. That happens only the once, and it'll be a long time between drinks afterwards.

So we've organised aides and babysitters and emergency inlookers. Natalie and the kids should be okay for the day. Tomorrow? Well, the second half the sword seminar would be really really nice to attend, but I'm damned if I'm leaving Natalie flat on her back with three kids again. Either she's significantly better tomorrow, or I miss that second half.

Naturally, since I have to wear a heavy jacket today, the weather's closing in. Huge humidity, possible thunderstorms later. Sweaty, sweaty, sweaty stuff. And by now, my wrists, shoulders and forearms are starting to feel the effects of a week of reasonably intensive practice on the grading techniques.

On top of that, my water supply has a goddam platypus in it.

I like platypussies. I admit it. They're really cool. I love how completely wrong they are: aquatic, duck-billed, egg-laying mammals with a poisonous spur on the hind leg in the males. And on the mainland, they're increasingly rare. But they're not particularly rare down here. Most decent-sized waterholes (and there are a lot) have a platypus or two. Most stretches of river have one or two.

We've got two ponds on the property. The big one, about 25 m across, has a spring under it somewhere -- but it doesn't flow fast enough in the hot season to keep the water flowing. Just fast enough to keep it turbid. That pond is our swimming pool in the still, humid, hot days of summer, and last year I spotted a platypus in it a couple times: nice.

The other pond is only about 4m across, and it's sheltered by a screen of brush and trees. The water in it is clearer than finest crystal, and the little spring that fills it never stops flowing. I keep a careful eye on that little pond, monitoring the various forms of life in it, because that's our water supply. I pump water from there to a holding tank on the hill above the house, where it gravity-feeds to the sinks, showers, toilets, etc.

Also nice. Except that yesterday afternoon, there was a goddam platypus swimming happily about on the surface of the water-supply pond.

Is platypus pee bad for you?

Flat Out

Uhhh... where was I?

Monday was sword training. I did the written part of the grading. The practical part comes Saturday. I've been practicing whenever I get the chance -- but since practice for this grading involves waving around about a metre of extremely sharp steel, I have to be pretty much kid-free. That's difficult. I tend to practice at night.

Tuesday: Elder Son was home. Some math was done, and some socio-cultural/historical stuff. And a Get Well card for his friend who fell out of a tree. But Tuesday night I zipped into Launceston (again) and watched movies with the Cool Shiters. Saw a very odd Jackie Chan flick, in which Jackie played it straight. The film is called "The Shinjuku Incident", and it's banned in China, apparently. It's an earnest film, and Jackie does okay in his role - but I didn't find a whole lot to be excited by. It's the story of an illegal Chinese migrant to Japan, who falls in with the Chinese illegals there and gradually gets sucked into organized crime, then duly chewed up and spat out. No surprises. Many others have made this film before, and lacking anything really new to bring to it, the only reason to see it is for the novelty of Jackie Chan in a non-martial, non-entertaining role.

Wednesday: there's a gastro doing the rounds down here. Apparently it's quite nasty. It's knocked quite a few people down, and a while back there was an entire ward of the LGH locked into isolation for it. So, Tuesday night Younger Son got carried into the house after falling ill at his first visit to Cubs. And Natalie's been a bit off her feed, yep. (Oh. I see I didn't mention Cubs. Yeah. First time and all. I had to drive out into the boonies north of Scottsdale to find the hall... and of course, Natalie told me 1530 hours but the boys weren't actually due there until 1630. Useful. But they enjoyed it. At least, they enjoyed it until Younger Son came over all chunderrific.) So -- Wednesday, I made it all the way through the afternoon of Spanish with the lads, but an ill-chosen afternoon snack (I had some chips with the boys. They were fine chips. My stomach wasn't fine. That is all.) I had to call off the evening martial arts class. Nobody likes to see vomit all over the mat, no.

Thursday: uhhhh... yep. More efforts at sword training, and an attempt to get into the domestic stuff. Natalie's done something horrible to her back. She's walking around the place like a cripple, and even rolling over in bed is a production. So there's about twice as much crap to do around the place as usual, but I've got half the time I'm supposed to. And of course, there was the primary school intro ju-jitsu class to occupy the afternoon. I can only be thankful for Kindly Neighbour Lady A, who looked after the Mau-Mau while I was teaching kids the joy of nerve point techniques -- and who remembered to bring along to the school some important paperwork I'd forgotten when she came down with the Mau-Mau to collect her own offspring.

And today?

Today after I dropped the boys off and did the general shopping, I grabbed Neighbour Lady A's little daughter Microblonde, who is the Mau-Mau's Very Best Friend In All The World. And so my morning consisted of two four-year-old girls tearing the place up, down and sideways. No sword training yet. But hopefully, Natalie will take the Mau-Mau with the boys to orchestra... although I suspect I may have to take over that task, because the whole spine thing was looking worse than ever this morning.

I'm taking ten minutes out to put all this down. And to say that the rhododendrons were actually camellias after all. Now I've got to get back to it.

Sword grading tomorrow. Going-away party for Dion after that. Sword seminar on Sunday. And spring has turned my property into an overgrown mass...

A Floral Tour of Chez Flinthart

This was a bastard of a post to manage. My surly satellite connection dropped out twice, and I could only load two images at a time or the whole system overloaded and fucked up on me.

Okay: first, to everybody in Briz I didn't manage to contact over the weekend -- all I had was a flying visit. I tried to call a friend about lunch in town, but in the end, even that didn't happen. I had time to do wedding-related stuff, and bugger-all else.

The time is definitely coming when I have to bring the family north for a proper meet-and-greet Briz holiday, I think.

Second: I took a slow walk around the property this morning, by way of resting a bit. And I carried the camera. I don't plant much by way of showy flowers, except for bulbs -- Natalie liked daffodils and jonquils and irises and tulips. Much of what flowers here is edible. And yet the place is still alive...

Bay laurel. Yes, the kind you cook with. The tree is about 8m high. The flowers look like shit, but they smell great and the bees love 'em.

Fuschia

Apricot

Snowdrops

Raspberry

Blackberry

Strawberry

Blood plum

A daffodil

Bugger. I've doubled up. This was meant to be the Snow Pear. They look similar.

I have no idea. I think it's a weed.

Lavender

Lilacs

Russian comfrey, I think

Nasturtium

Wee little daisies

Purple magnolias

White magnolia

Dunno this one. A native of some sort, and a real bee magnet.

Irises

JOnquils. You can't tell, but they're smaller than the daffy earlier.

Waratah

Rhododendron

Oh! There's my snow pear

Dandelion

Dandelion with afro

Blueberries

Quince, I think

Cherries

Apples.