Day trip to Jurien Bay

Do you know how hard it is to do a coast to hills transect with three kids under 12?

Not that hard actually if you go with their interest levels. I would have liked them to observe how the vegetation and soil changed as we went from the eastern outer metro to the coastal part of the Wheatbelt. They were mostly interested in getting to the beach so we just ended up pointing out sand dunes that were covered in vegetation and having quick chats about why the vegetation is important for holding the sand together, and how the soil colour changed from browny-red clay to sand to white sand.

Six

I am a terrible parent.

6yo has actually been 6 for a while. Doing the birthday post got lost in the shuffle partially due to general life busy-ness and mostly because his birthday celebration was quiet and laid back by his choice. We didn’t go anywhere as all he wanted was for his best friend to come over and play Skylanders. He had a couple of friends come over and they all played Skylanders. He apparently wants a Skylanders cake next birthday as we didn’t manage one this time round.

Why have you forsaken me?

JJ and 6yo are making pancakes, 6yo searches the fridge for toppings.

6yo: Dad! I can’t find any jam! JAAAAAAAAAAAM! WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?! Oh wait here’s some, never mind.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

ko sipna 2 sequel

10yo: can I do memrise?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: can I go give Daddy a cuddle?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: na go’i ko sipna
6yo: what does that mean?
Me: no. go to sleep!

I wanted to wrangle the permission attitudinal in there but couldn’t recall it off the top of my head. Also needed an .i but eh.

Guinea piglets

This house is more Menagerie than The Menagerie was. Newest additions from left to right: Popcorn, Lucius and Nightshade (which may actually be Knight Shade as I suspect it was named after a Skylander), belonging to 8yo, 10yo and 6yo respectively. We’ve had them for three days so far and they’re settling in slowly. Cats completely do not care about them. Tali has sniffed them both in the cage and in my hand and been great. Angus just wants to bite them. Which then of course stirs Tali up and he wants to play too! Working on that -_-

Stage whispers and biggenising

Earlier today:

JJ: (whispers to 6yo to put a banana into the pancake mix they’re making in the kitchen)
me (yelling from computer room): I can hear you from here.
6yo (stage whispering): Dad stop stage whispering!

Just then:

6yo: Dad can you give me a boost up for the stuff I’m biggenising?
JJ: …you want me to help you make that bigger?
6yo: yes please.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Ferrets, fishing, horsing around, one awesome quarry, and stuff like that

Photos from the last couple of weeks. After 10yo had sent off an enquiry email to WAFFS, they put is in contact with a lovely lady in the area who let us play with her ferrets and answered all the questions we had and then said we should head up to the AGM the following day if we didn’t have any plans as people brought their ferrets to these things. We didn’t have anything on that morning (unfortunately parents in law were off travelling so we couldn’t visit them while we were in the area) so we trotted along to go have a look.

New computer contemplation - specs and dilemmas

My iMac is about three years old. It’s kicking along fine, as long as I don’t do anything too hardcore in the 3d department. We’re having slight issues there, as in Blender starts lagging and acting strangely (like failing to realise that I’ve “released” when the pen is off the tablet) when it has to deal with over 2M polys.

This is the machine I want to get:

Mac Pro

• 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache
• 64GB (4 x 16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
• 256GB PCIe-based flash storage
• 2x AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM
• Apple Thunderbolt Display (27-inch)
• 3 year warranty

Unfortunately I don’t have $14 197 kicking around (and if I did I wouldn’t after I’d dropped it onto the mortgage). It goes down to $12 097 if I go down to the 3.0GHz 8-core with 25MB of L3 cache and $9 997 if I settle for the 3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache. Additionally I’d have to get some extra drives for storage because I opted for the smaller built in drive with the intention of expanding externally. Ideally I’d like one of the Pegasus RAIDS that you can get bundled with it but unfortunately I’m not yet a proper studio with a budget for these things (as is I’m lucky to be in a position where I can start scraping together money for the next machine as soon as I’ve bought one as it takes about that long to save up, but sometimes other things like unexpectedly large vet bills or planning on buying another house and moving into it can interfere with that).

Hailing from Satan

6yo: Daddy you’re from Satan!
JJ (laughing): How’d you work that one out?
6yo: Coz you’re a DEMON!

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Surveillance is creepy even in kids books

Me (reading Dr Seuss’ Sleep Book to 6yo): On a mountain halfway between Reno and Rome, we have a machine in a plexiglass dome which listens and looks into everyone’s home…
10yo (interrupting): That’s…really creepy.

Yep.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License