Our cat died last night. We sat down to dinner, our three cats lounging around us as they do. Tim looked over to Joe, who was asleep. Both Tim and I have fallen into a habit over the past few months, of watching Joe. Because of his illness, he’s been having a great deal of trouble breathing. So when he falls asleep and lies there so still, Tim and I have a habit of watching him, paused, until we see him taking a breath.
Alix had made dinner last night, and we were discussing whether or not it could be classified as one of her best, when I glanced behind me to Joe. And paused. And waited. Tim said “I saw him breath a little while ago”. “Thank goodness”, says I “I’m having a heartattack here”. I glance over to Joe again. His eyes are open and I’m still not seeing his sides move.
29 Sep 2007 – 29 Nov 2009.

Well, I spent some of last Friday and Saturday wandering around the streets and knocking on doors. People looked at me warily thought the screen / security door and I said I wanted to give them an orange balloon and a letter. They looked confused, but consistently opened the screen / security door to let me give them the items.
I explained my purpose and on the whole, got agreement to give it a whirl. At two places I got “Thank goodness, I’ve been doing it for years. Now it’ll really catch on when we do it again next year”. At most places I got “What a good idea, how reasonable”. At one place I got “I don’t celebrate Halloween”, but was able to get the picture of teenage kids with eggs out of her head. At one place I got “I don’t speak English”.

And at one place I got “What exactly are you celebrating on Halloween?” With an accompanying frown and subtext of “Are you a devil worshipper?” I was able to explain I was celebrating kids seeking lollies and nothing more. Lastly, I got two “We don’t celebrate Halloween”, Devil Worshipper!, cue door closed almost in my face.

On the whole, people were pretty generous with their willingness to give it a try.

For a few years now, every Halloween my daughter has been asking if we can trick or treat. Every year, I say that it is an American holiday, that no-one here in Australia celebrates it.
This year, my daughter asked a new question - Can she have a Halloween party. I said yes. I should have seen it coming. Now she wants to go round the neighbourhood with her friends trick or treating...
Happily, etfb came to the rescue. He had an idea about notifying the neighbours beforehand, giving them balloons to put out if they want to participate. I'm buying balloons this week and walking round the neighbourhood.
I've always felt that knocking on doors when people don't want to play socailly awkward for all concerned, and the hit rate was never very high for those who do. This neatly removes the issue.

I went on a driving course today. Understeering, oversteering, emergency braking, emergency braking and avoiding obstacles (this is hard!). Skid panning.

I learnt new words like ‘drifting’ and ‘stepping out’.

Lots of fun. And I finally understand now what they are talking about on Top Gear when they do the course in the blue car.

The place offers half day skid pan course – you spend a half day under and over steering for fun. Or just hooning around. I am interested in going. If I get 5 to 7 of my friends, we can take up the entire class and all do it together.

Any interest?

Andrew Barr said yesterday that six kids from the 700 at Kingsford Smith had been involved in a bullying incident this year. That makes 0.86%. The national average is 27.7%. I think he might have been misinformed.

As you know, I've been doing stuff about bullying at both a departmental level and the school level.

The result?

The Department of Education is implementing my strategies. The will create guidance for all state government schools on current best practises based on the strategies I developed for my son’s school. They are going to undertake a survey of the current prevalence and level of concern on the topic with the kids.

The school is angry with me for bringing it to the minister's attention. They have been brought into the Department and told to make it go away. They have outlined their current strategy in the school newsletter this week, hired 3 staff specifically in the areas of counselling, youth workers etc and pulled two executive teachers offline to finish creating their policies and procedures. The school board is creating a sub-committee on the topic, which I intend to be on. They are implementing programs of self-resilience for the 'high risk' victims (of which my son is one), training the teachers on the use of 'circle time' (a teaching methodology which improves trust and change the culture of the school to a more caring one).

I am meeting with the school again in teh first week of next term (as none of the teachers they have hired are coming on board until then) to work further with the school to 'help them improve their already great skills in this area'. The principal is all about saving face.
The school is fine, nothing to see.

I don't care that the principal is pissed with me. What I care about is that my son hasn't been bullied for the last week.

I have contact details of senior people in the Department, journalists and the business card of the opposisition spokeman for education. Should things not stay on track, I have people I can talk to.

I think I am pleased with how this is going so far.

As I said in my last post, I'm putting together some thoughts on con roleplaying. But I need help.

I have a three question survey on con games I'd like roleplayers to fill in (sorry for the spam if you aren't a roleplayer)

Click Here to take survey

Also, if you are a aussie roleplayer, I would be grateful if you spread the link about a bit (put it on your blog? emailed it to friends?) - the more views I can get, the better.

Thanks flist!

I have thoughts / ramble / article on the state of roleplaying in Australia building in my head... Once it slows down enough for it to become coherent, I’ll let you know.

Twas an interesting con.

In other news, I met with the Director I spoke of today. He was impressed with the concreteness (his word. Well he said they were concrete, I adverbed it) of my ideas and wants to meet me next week so he can give me an update on what he’s doing to implement them. I have a meeting with the school on Thursday to go over them as well. Things are starting to look up.

I met a person in Turkey who said I had to be a bitch about this matter. Turns out I had to be a) a bitch and b) a free consultant on the matter. Ah well, so long as there is progress I guess.

“I’m sorry. To say I’ve failed implies I’ve stopped trying.”

I was quoted this last night. I liked and wanted to write it down.

Went on a boat trip today. It’s purpose seemed to be to sunbake and swim – which is a good idea in summer / autumn, but not on a cold spring day.

Kids want to swim though, so we are off to the most famous beach in Turkey tomorrow (mostly cause it’s a sand beach, turns out pebble beaches are both hard to walk on and impossible to build rock castles in).

We’re also off to a ghost town. The town was abandoned by the Greeks in 1922 and has been left to rot and ruin ever since (I heard a story that should anyone live there, the Greeks will invade).

Had no internet connection in the hotel we’re staying at. The hotel got a techie in and wanted to use my PC as the test for the wireless connection. The techie spoke little English, I spoke little Turkish and the hotel man spoke little Tech. But between the three of us, we got the internet connection back. Turns out using a computer displaying Turkish is sometimes easy, sometimes hard depending on how well you know any particular screen. The differences in the keyboard, both layout and extra keys are annoyingly stumbly.

I thought we had gotten bored with ancient roman ruins.  But today, my daughter found her inner photographer.  Everything was examined through the lens.  Until she found the turtle.  Then she found her inner cameraman.  Anyone for videos of a turtle eating?

Things I have stopped the car for as they were in the middle of crossing the road

 

Calf

Herd of cows

Chickens (why’d the chicken cross the road?  To avoid getting run over)

Peacock & peahen

Turtles

Crab

 

The latter two categories, I stopped so I could take photos of them. Theoretically I could have driven around.

 

I’ve seen this quote a number of times "only 7 percent of communication comes from spoken words, 38 percent is from the tone of the voice, and 55 percent comes from body language"

I admit I have only learnt a very limited amount of Turkish – about 30 words if I am generous(1). But I have found the combination of them and a lot of tone and body language has gotten me through.


1 – The words for ‘hot chocolate’, ‘orange juice’ and ‘strawberry’ have come in way more useful than you might think

Other set of Turkey pics



More pics can be seen here

I am in heaven. Or more precisely, I am in the best hotel I have ever stayed in, in Cappadocia region. The women who greated me at the door welcomed to me to 13 joined up cave houses in Ürgüp.
The best things are:
§ It’s a cave! The roof is stone, the walls are stone. Happily the floor is wood
§ It’s 13 houses joined tother, which means that there are courtyards everywhere, stairs going to random places, unexpected rooms and general ramshackleness that makes me very happy
§ They have given me unfettered access to their kitchen and laundry, which means the kids will stop complaining about the unfamiliar meals and I can stop doing laundry in the bathroom sink (Allah decreed that washing should be done in running water, which means there are no sink plugs in Turkey. Makes it very hard to do washing.)
§ Because it’s a cave, the walls are thick enough to stop my kids arguing from being heard in the next room
§ Because it’s a cave, they have wireless access points everywhere, which ironically means I have the best reception I have had to date
§ Because it’s 13 houses joined together, the place is filled with interesting furniture and bits and bobs.
§ There’s a tunnel under street connecting parts of the hotel together.

Did I mention how much fun I am having, just being in the hotel, let alone the rest of the region?

When studying Islam many years ago, I was amused to learn that in the first call to prayer of the day, the muezzin says the line “Prayer is better than sleep”. Being woken up at dawn by a louspeakered call I am less amused.

In Turkey, there is so much to see. The country is surrounded by history. I can see why the casually use ancient roman lintels to build a wall. Or make a pavement with Grecian carved marble. It has meant that I have had to pick and choose what to see and what to skip. For example, yesterday I decided to drive past:
§ Troy
§ Aristotle’s town where he lived and married
§ Homer’s home town
§ One of the seven churches named in Revelations (the one where Satan will sit)

In order to see:
§ Virgin Mary’s house (where she lived after the whole cross incident)
§ St John’s Bascilla (disciple of Jesus, where he lived and wrote a bunch of biblical letters)
§ The capital of the Roman empire in Asia (200,000 people lived there). Hadrian has a temple there, the same guy who built Hadrian’s wall in England.
§ An ancient Greek town, known for it’s sculpture and art (it’s art was transported as far as Rome)

This overabundance of history may by why it is treated so irreverently. On the plus side, this means they allow the kids and I to climb all over it. So we can see the layout of a building much better (and have fun).

Road signs are pretty easy to decipher here.

A picture of:
Two bumps = hilly road
A triangle with circles = beware of falling rocks
A car doing the hulu hoop = curvy road ahead
A car doing the hulu hoop with a mangled road barrier two metres on = someone didn’t read the hulu hoop sign
A mutant goat / donkey hybrid = there could be goats or donkeys on the road ahead

My favourite road sign is a car doing a hulu hoop over an umbrella. Which I think means, slippery when wet. Hulu hoops and umbrellas are a much cooler way of saying it.

In Turkey, it’s rare for a driver to indicate before changing lanes. But this is ok. Here, they don’t need to. Instead, they do what I’ve decided to call “Take an option”. It works like this. You are in one lane and you are thinking about changing to another lane. You drift across into the other lane, just a bit. Then you stay like that til you have made up your mind. The traffic around you has noticed your desire, and so have parted to let you into the new lane, should you decide to take up the option.
There’s no need to indicate cause everyone already knows what you want.
The only scary part is when someone in oncoming traffic is taking an option in my lane. I drift to the other side of my lane and give those guys as much room as possible.

In my last post, I said the landscape was shocking steep. Here's a pic looking down into Anzac cove (red seats on the beach set up in prep for ANZAC day) from the top of the Nek. Try charging up that into enemy fire...