technonaturalist

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There was much excitement and trepidation at Wannabe when Chess, our bossy little evil Pekin bantam went broody, and amusement when the more demure Tempest decided that she, too, would also like to hatch some eggs.

We were pretty thrilled to have broodies, as one of our long term plans was to increase our flock naturally, including letting the broodies raise their chicklets, and bring in new blood every so often to prevent too much inbreeding. This idea has since expanded to JJ planning on developing his own chicken breed.

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It’s the hottest driest summer ever in Australia (except in Queensland and northern WA where they’re experiencing floods, and meanwhile in Europe where they’re having longest coldest winters with craziest snowfall). Here in Perth most of our rain happens in winter with drips and drabs here and there in late autumn and early spring. We don’t usually get rain in summer. The last few days I’ve felt quite at home while a large number of my friends have been complaining of the oppressive, stifling, terrible humidity.

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When my little big boy and his agemates hit kindy age (normal 4 year old kindy), I commented to a long time friend from back when Southies (better known now as Perth Natural Learning Network, website in the works and there is a Facebook group) first started up sometime near the beginning of 2007 that their social life had suddenly exploded with everyone’s kids having birthday parties and playdates and whatnot. She quite enthusiastically said yeh, she loved it. I also find it enjoyable, though at the time for me it was more of a conscious noting of the fact that I had a child that was getting towards the stage of “big” (ie school aged) kid. I was slowly but surely moving out of the realm of “mum of babies and toddlers” and into “mum of big kids” land.

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Mostly for family, as I mentioned in the last post we’re usually with one of our families at Christmas time. This year is a rare occurrence, the last time it happened was almost 6 years ago when I, at the end of gestating 5yo, decided flat out that I was not going anywhere.

Firstly, let it be known that we have no Christmas tree (though I am seriously contemplating one of these Fruut trees). My family, who love their Christmas trees, may or may not be aghast to discover this was the best I could do:

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The lovely Ursula (also known as SulaMoon) over at deviantART gave me and another friend of hers pearwood a dragon for Christmas.

I think it’s agonisingly cute. Ursula is an amazing artist.

So. the provider I’m using for my reseller account got itself taken out by a zero day exploit, which apparently wiped out their main drive and most of their backup drive.

My possibly incorrect interpretation of the email they sent out suggests that the attack was just on the one server. I’m wondering if they were silly enough to have the backup drive in the same machine or if they were just unlucky enough to have triggered the attack or had it running while doing a backup.

I survived the alpha iterations! Learned a bit but didn’t end up helping much (or at all really) aside from something like a bug report and confirming a UX issue. So now we’re sitting on beta1 and I feel slightly more confident putting stuff here as from memory the betas are upgradeable. Alphas are not.

I remembered to export my Views this time so didn’t have to completely redo them :) I’ve left out the links view though as I’m formulating a better idea on how to do that page, the feed and the fynposts though were a bit of naffing around and twice over was enough. I’m slightly miffed that Zemanta isn’t picking up the editor but I’m currently not sure if that’s the fault of D7, or some component of the editor (it’s Wysiwyg with TinyMCE). Somehing there has changed as it works fine with D6. Hoping that they’ll upgrade Zemanta and it will miraculously fix everything.

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Pocket money and birthday cards.

And that’s just two of an infinite number of possibilities. 5yo has recently started writing the names of his friends from !school group on the backs of envelopes. It all started with the first birthday party of one of them a couple of months ago, in which both 5yo and 3yo, with a little help from me, wrote “Happy Birthday from [their name]” on a piece of paper, decorated it, and then stuck it into a similarly decorated envelope, and wrote the child’s name on the front.

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Perth Natural Learning Network Dwellingup Camp

Once upon a time when JJ and I only had two kids, we slowly amassed a collection of camping gear including a three room mini-house, sleeping bags rated to -5C, and a pile of crockery from BCF and various army surplus stores. All this was foiled when I got pregnant for the third and last time.

Over the weekend just gone we added a fold-up accordionesque queen sized bed with blow up mattress and a bunk camp bed to our arsenal and sallied forth to Lane-Poole Reserve in Dwellingup with a wonderful group of people, our partners in thoughtcrime, fellow “unschoolers” from the newly named (but not newly formed, been going for at least two years) Perth Natural Learning Network.

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Last Saturday (1st of May), the parents-in-law took us to the Gravity Discovery Centre in Gingin.

It is well worth a visit. Once they got over the toy corner, the kids, especially 5yo, had a great time checking out the exhibits in the main building, particularly the chaos balls, the “pod racer” (big metal sphere with two magnets being held just off it by wires), and the giant gravity funnel that you can spiral tennis balls down. We raced up the leaning tower and my legs are only just recovering (I blame the extra 10kg+ I was backpacking the entire day), and we went on a “solar system” walk, which is an incredibly scaled down model of the entire solar system that from the sun to Pluto is a bloody long walk, we got as far as Uranus before we turned back. The kids were getting tired and my jelly legs were being pathetic and not holding up.