Playing for the crowd at the Perth Chinese New Year street parade.

The crew kick off for the 2013 Perth Chinese New Year street parade.

First thing I noticed attempting to swing to theAbysmal time, it's HARD now, because Monday was technically the middle of theAbysmal week and we kind of like having weekends with the person who works full time out of home, and also I've just noticed that something awkward has happened between my two copies of the converter.  The form says it's C03r and the block in the blog sidebar says it's C04c.  Meantime the official version says it's Month 2 Day 2 (I expected to be a day ahead and two days sometimes due to observing leap years on different years).  So for now I'll have to keep track of tAT but continue using Gregorian.

Tao

It's been a while but we're slowly getting back into it.

A few days ago I took an old sock (tucked into the waistband of my shorts to help with scenting) and Tali's giant rope bone to the footy oval and we did a couple of easy tracks to see if he remembered how to do it.  He had exactly no trouble remembering how to do it, and the fact it was a black and grey sock on green grass probably didn't hurt.  He can at least use both his eyes and nose at the same time and even managed to find it when I draped it over the fence above his head.

I have a "family tree" in MacFamilyTree which contains a lot of family saplings as it contains every named major and minor character and several unnamed but otherwise important ones (such as parents of siblings, as you need to list parents to be able to link people up as siblings).  The main part of the family tree seems to be tracing The Art from Taha'ne through Ter'wyn down to My'rai (currently the last descendant on the list, the character is about 8-10 in my head in his current state and I also have an idea of him as a teenager but only have snippets of story for him) which is rather entertaining as there is 1723 years between them.  That's a lot of characters even given that the Dragonkin live an average of 120 years.

Seeing as I'm rejigging everything else anyway I think when I throw the boulders back in the river it will be following theAbysmal Calendar.  It's going to make date conversions interesting (suppose I better write that module at some stage) but even in the current rudimentary stages I'm finding date projections and calculations easier with theAbysmal than with the Gregorian (where I need to look at the calendar because it doesn't always visualise correctly in my head).  Yes I have actually had a plan for this year (since November in fact), no I haven't written it down and sorted out all the final details yet, I'm working on it.

Tao

Stuff to keep going

Bookwork for pocket money was working out nicely (up to the point where it fell apart catastrophically from September while the dental work was being done and then again in December because of silly season).  Been pinged for not doing literacy and numeracy every day again but none of us feel like bookworking it every single day and I honestly don't know how much more literate and numerate I'm supposed to be getting after reading every single night (they are read to and the big ones read passages aloud, more if we can get them to read more), voluntarily playing Reading Eggs, counting how much pocket money they've saved up and how much more they need for whatever it is they want to get and working out how many blocks they need to build this thing in Minecraft and other random bits and pieces that seem to magically crop up without too much deliberate intervention by me.

Because I always seem to manage to completely forget how to do something this basic.

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That's how old my Little Big Boy is.

My goofy scrawny scrawnlet with a prodigious appetite and no apparent storage area chose to go to Maylands Water Park for his birthday (aka "The water park we went to for Dylan's birthday") where he had a round of mini golf with Daddy:

He lost because "Daddy and his calcubrain"

Mini golf was followed up by a dip in all of the pools and many attempts at swimming:

"See if you can do it without touching the ground!"

In no particular order:

• no more massacres (that's everything from American schools to mass murders politically correctly defined as "war")
• free quality education for everyone (including how it's received)
• equal access to resources for everyone
• marriage equality for everyone
• everyone for everyone

Happy solstice/theAbysmal New Year/Yule/Christmas/end of the world/whatever you celebrate at this time :)