List your obsessions

Look back at this over the last 18 months, and it's pretty obvious that the things I think most important are Climate Change, Iraq and my family. As my family's mostly private, that tends sometimes to lead to a bit of a two-toned theme to this blog.
I'm not bothered with that. If I look back on this in 10 years time, that shouldn't surprise me. If I and the net were around to look back on it in 50 years time, the perspective would be somewhat different.
Probably one of the most important things happening in the world now is the deaths of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people every year trying to get to the West, or being deported back to another country and murdered there. That this is not a "story" is because of the reasons that drive people to try and migrate here: the devastating consequences of neo-colonialisation. Thousands more die every day as a conseqquence of the starvation and warfare that are a result of this neo-colonialisation.
And it's not in the news. It's not discussed. Conservatives or liberals or revolutionaries - nobody in the West is discussing it. Because we are collaborators in an act of genocide. Like the Polish peasant in 'The Sorrow and the Pity' who would claim that he didn't know what was going on at Auschwitz, we'll tell the future that we didn't know.
Not that this should come as any surprise to an Englishman. After all, we've had an empire intent on genocidal acts for the best part of a millenium.
So I thought I'd write this quick note on the net. And then at least it's out there. We did know. We do know.
And we're doing nothing.

Gorilla on the loose

So, strange story today. A silverback gorilla escaped from his enclosure at the Rotterdam Zoo today. He seems to have jumped over a ditch, which is unexpected because he's supposed to be scared of water, then sat next to a woman who began to scream. So he smacked and bit her and dragged her around, then let go of her and went to the full restaurant where everyone had tried to hide. He smashed through the glass door and scared the shit out of everyone in there, injuring a couple more.
Eventually he was shot with a trank dart.
He was born and raised in Berlin, where he also escaped in 2004 (without anyone being hurt), before being moved to Rotterdam the following year.
Apparently this picture is of him (Bokito) yesterday. Doesn't look too happy.

Once again then, zoos aren't good for animals. The primary argument here would be that in the wild his chances of survival are minimal, but let's be honest. As long as you're charging people by the thousand money to come and gawk at him, caged together with his woman and child, then it's pretty clear where the primary motive lies. If zoos want to reinvent themselves as conservationary institutions, then a radical rethink is required.
Apparently Bokito tends to agree.

New pictures here underneath from The Guardian.

Subtropical Storm Andrea

Throw away the calendar, hurricane season is here!

Well, that didn't take long. The first named storm of the Atlantic season got called Andrea 3 hours ago. Nothing spectacular is forecast for it - nothing more spectacular than its mere presence that is, but as the chance of it being named was put at 10% just three days ago, that means little.

Radishes and Polar Bears

So a few days ago I ate the first thing out of the little vegetable plot I've made in the garden. A quarter of a radish. (Of course, I picked a whole radish, but shared it between 4 of us. I'm not sure how it works when there's five).
April's just finished with Koninginnedag and a four day weekend for me. It's been the hottest April on record by a country mile. Over here, almost 5 degrees above normal for the month. It was the climate of the South of France (according to the KNMI, normal for Nice). Rather pleasantly, the Med & the northern Sahara have been having heavy rain and cooler weather, which emphasises how unpredictable Climate Change will be. In many respects, it wouldn't surprise me to see some greening of the Sahara - at least at the fringes - and with the recent rain and the earlier reports from Mali & the Western Sahara, that optimism might yet be borne out.
Another piece of positive climate news was that the Kilimanjaro glacier appears to be disappearing more slowly than was thought, and its receding has more to do with the lack of moisture in the air blowing in from the Indian Ocean rather than the rise in temperatue - it seems that the temperature at the top of the mountain continues to remain below zero.
Ice in the Arctic has been in the news again - the National Snow and Ice Data Center has issued a press release suggesting that the ice loss in the Arctic might be faster than previously thought. However, I'm rather suspicious of this one, as it's extrapolating on part of a winter, and not taking full account of the very cold March and April that hs been there so far. It's looking at September ice loss, rather than an annual mean as well. Just smells of dodgy science.
More positively too, the Anatarctic ice sheet is currently thicker and larger than usual going into winter.
All of this is making me refine my own ideas about Climate Change - I continue to be very suspicious of the Black/White scare story that is being put about. I still suspect that the current political climate has more to do with the dwindling oil supply than the real climate change; and as usual we're seeing scare stories and media hype in place of science and strategy.

The kids have been away again last night, staying with friends, and Es & myself managed to go out and see a movie which was pleasant to be able to do. We've been giving ourselves a bit more time together lately: it's something that you really need as a preganant couple, so to speak, and something we usually tend to underestimate how much we need.
One last thought that crops up since the last mail, is how disapponting the whole cricket winter has been, and how much of a gutter it was with the final day of the Eredivisie last Sunday.
But at least - Scunny are Champions! Bring on the Premiership!

Happy

So I'm sat outside in the hot sun, drinking a beer, listening to Black Uhuru, reading a comic, following the cricket, and following Scunthorpe's push for promotion to the Championship.
It's too hot for the time of year, but the hottest April day ever in the Netherlands was 1904. We're the hottest area in Europe this weekend. Alaska had the 3rd coldest March on record last month, so the ice pack is in better state than I'd expected. My bronchitis is fading again (and the Independent reports on the front page what I know - I need the sun to be really healthy!) Work's finished for the day, and with my laptop I could do it from home. Es & the kids are at the playground/shopping, so it's quiet.
This could, with a little luck, be a TRULY GLORIOUS SUMMER! (Caplocks hit by accident, but seemed serendipitous, so I'll leave it at that :-)

Oh, and as a belated afterthought - this happy moment has only cost me about 200K and up to 40 years of my life :-)

All quiet out there

I was just rereading some old posts. Mine's a classic blog really, in that it's purely written for myself. I don't know if anyone else ever reads it - occasionally there seems to be a visitor from somewhere else, probably the MT List crew, who hangs around the site to read a few pages.
Funny really that keeping a diary that's theoretically accessible to half the world's population is probably less read than if you wrote in a book and put "Keep Off" on the front.
I like what I've put down on here over the last 18 months. It reminds me of things, it makes me think of things, it's coherent to me at least. There's a regularity here - no more than 2 or 3 weeks absence at most, that I don't achieve with any more serious writing. And it's written to be read, which is different - most of what I write currently is in such an early draft that it's not for reading - unless, of course, it's for my work. Alot of my work these days seems to be writing too, sometimes proposals, sometimes just carefully political emails.
Curious what the future will bring.
Well, being curious, what do I stumble across but this:

The Future Ground Based Air Defence System (FGBADS) is an integrated mixed and layered air defence system consisting of a Command and Control part (BMC4I) and a weapon system part (VSHORAD and SHORAD) for low and very low-level air defence. It is a “system of systems” with “plug and fight” quality. FGBADS has the capability for creating a Local Air Picture (LAP) and exchanging it with other air defence systems. Furthermore FGBADS handles Air Space Control and integrates the external Recognised Air Picture (RAP) into its own air picture. The sum of these capabilities means complete situational awareness in the most optimal form. FGBADS completely controls the usage of the VSHORAD and SHORAD weapon systems.

So WTF is this shit? Some mad fucking Command and Conquer geeks, or is this some real shit? I can clearly see this is something to look at when I'm in a more sober condition. First response ( and if you use the words "first response" they probably launch something or other) is that it's some sad wannabe Dutch action.

The net's a damn weird place. Wish we'd never let these looney's out to play.....

Spudjacking

Apparently there is not one single reference to spudjacking anywhere on the interweb thingy. So here's the first.
Having spent many less than ecstatic hours either grubbing in the semi-frozen dirt or half-frozen on the backs of tractors in the drk hours after school, helping harvest the magnificent potato, I think I'm entitled to at least raise the issue of spudjacking. Further digressions on agricultural heritage and child labour can wait till another time.
I'm starting to teach our kids about growing plants. It's a real simple thing, but gives them lots of pleasure. I suspect it might be useful knowledge for the future. At least if they understand that growing vegetables involves care and nurture and effort, be they relatively minimal for the return. (Animal farming is much more intensive, and if you remove the demands of intensive farming as well, then you start to understand that the old peasants might have had a reasonable amount of free time on their hands if the local lord of the manor wasn't hopgging it all with his stupid demands.)
Might even get them to eat their veg.
Only in dreams.
Work has taken off. Had a sort of new job at the usual place, and then not, in the last couple of weeks. Or rather, i have the new job, but as usual I have to do it for a year first before I actually get the job and the cash to go with it. Still, it's a really interesting thing to do - launch a new business effectively, and migrate a legacy business into the new online model.
Shame we manage to have timed this to coincide with baby number 3 arriving. It's been a while since a baby came into my life. I hope I can remember how to do things - it's a strange concept again, and I'm looking forward to it, but hoping that it gets the attention it deserves in my life. Everything is hard to fit in already, so I'm either going to be exhausted or underperforming or screwed up, or probably all three somewhere this summer.
Still, I'm pretty decent at hanging the different threads together, juggling the different balls.
Only in dreams.

Actually, in dreams in the last few days, i've been in a tornado, and been running through the mountains of Catalunya up by Andy's place. I'd like to go there next year. Might go StormChasing too if there's enough money with all this yuppie work.

Online TV

Today, I'm quite excited about being able to watch England play cricket. Live streaming TV online, via P2P application. The quality's not 100%, and the line falls out sometimes, but it's like the old days. It's the first thing for years that has reminded me what it was like online 10 years ago or more. That feeling of being in early on something very big kicking off. And of course I'm not in the first wave, but this is fairly new all the same. I don't yet know why, but it's mostly Chinese so far. Very cool, there's lots of sports out there. Which is a difference from a decade back: the geek quotient is high, but the uptakers are almost normal. Are geeks getting cooler? Are jocks getting geekier? Or - are we all nerds now?

Lots in the news these days about climate change. Or, as the Yanks insist on calling it, Global Warming. I think I shall have to start hanging out on http://www.realclimate.org/ a bit more.
I can't shake some mistrust of this sudden adoption of the issue by the media, by the politicians. Even Bush getting on the bandwagon, and meanwhile signing a treaty with Brazil for ethanol takeup - which is potentially the deathknell for the Amazon. That photo of Lula hugging Dubya was sickening.
And I suppose the worry is that the talk is not about how we change society, but how we get round the issue of our environmental activities. It's not addressing fundamentals, but looking for workarounds. As an IT bod, I'm used to workarounds, but I'm all too aware that they're only postponing the ineviatble day of dealing with a failed system.
And I don't really trust much of the eco lobby. Lots of them are not my cup of tea. Others are essentially criticising one part of the system and not looking at it as an integral whole. I don't like the way the discussion about climate change is being divorced from the discussion about Peak Oil. I understand the point a mate made that politically speaking, the environmental impact of our society would not be made clear if predictions about climate change took into account the effects of the Peak Oil scenario. But I don't really go along with that point.
Apart from the fact that politics makes poor science, and poor science causes all sorts of problems, I also tend not to believe that two disasters cancel each other out. I think Climate Change and Peak Oil are going to be compound disasters, at least from the point of view of human society, at least from a Western point of view, and doging debate and rigging the political agenda isn't helpful, because then we're allowing the politicians to set the agenda and take over the debate and the realities are going to get obscured in bullshit about ethanol and Iranian nuclear capabilities and all the other bollocks that passes for justification and action.
I don't trust neoCons talking about alternative energy and I don't trust middle class eco lobbyists talking about changing the world. And I don't trust the RCP talking about Great Global Warming Swindle.
In fact, I don't really trust any of those groups talking about anything.


I wonder what's going on with the magnetic poles? Maybe it's time to reread Ken Kesey's Sailor Song...

Sport

Alright, it's funny. Being a married man that watches his sport. I don't know what happened. The weird thing is, my favourite ones to watch, with the exception of cricket, are winter sports that i don't do - namely skijumping and skating.
So I've just been watching the skating from Salt Lake City, and it was Sven Kramer at the 10Km, the Cruyff of skating. Absolutely unbelievable. I've never seen a top race like that with one guy - who was in 5th at that stage - getting lapped. Kramer was 20 seconds ahead of the next guy, and knocked something like 10 seconds off his own world record. Which he set the last time he raced 10km. I can't think of anything comparable in sport that I know of where someone is so far ahead of all other competitors. He's almost literally a lap ahead of the rest. And he's only 20. Of course, he might burn out before the next Olympics, but he seems to have a real basic sense of self - he still comes across as a typical 20 year old. And what he's doing is stuff that Tiger Woods or Roger Federer can only dream of - he's not lost a race all year, sets world records almost at will (and not the Sergei Bubkov adding half an inch sort of record, but pulverising them), and is king of the world.
Knowing the ways of the world, this will probably all end bad. Apparently he's already got a supermodel girlfriend, and let's hope he doesn't chase mediocrity like van der Vaart. Still, one of the pleasures of watching sport is the moment. Tonight, I shared an experience with Bart Veldkamp. Such a race, he said, you just sit back and watch with your mouth open, drooling, at the perfection of the moment.

Focus

Lots of things going on. Work is insanely busy, most people at work don't even know what's going on. I can't write about it either, lots of NDA stuff applying, and on the off-chance that I forget to delete my sig when sending a mail from my home address, I'd best keep it out of here.
There was a "controversial" docu on Brit TV last night, 'The Great Global Warming Swindle'. Mum mentioned it on the phone this evening - as usual, she likes to test you on sensitive spots. I think I surprised her back though knowing that the guy who made the film was a nutter from the RCP.
World Cup kicks off on Tuesday. England warmed up in traditional fashion today by getting thumped by the Aussies.
And of course, got a pregnant wife, trying to get the book first draft finished, two kids going through kids' stuff. It's all busy times.
But it's enjoyable. I don't know that it's appropriate for me, but at least lately I'm using my mind a bit. There's room for more in there - I've started an audio lecture series on the history of Ancient Rome, and still need to sort out the Project Management certification. But it's weird, after years of relative flabbiness, the brain is still able to get into gear with minimal warming up. Kind of reassuring.
I've actually still got a bit of a headache today. This is what I get for drinking half a dozen pints last night? Man, I'm getting old quick ;-) So can't say I'm into much coherence here. Looking forward to having the laptop, then at least I can sit on the couch and do this...

Night in Heaven

Well, I've found myself listening to Erasure. Now, this isn't something particularly to be proud of, but there you go, it's happened nonetheless. Of course, it's to do with a feeling, a memory, and in this case it's back in the late 80's, just before we kicked off acid house. A Saturday night down at Heaven in those days was quite the celebration, nevermind that we were in the midst of AIDS, and incidentally just about the worst period in British popular music since 1954. Being 19 and acceptably cute, I managed to stay out and party regardless of being broke. For example, I remember staying with Chris, but his girlfriend was coming over on Saturday night so I had to be out the house. No problem, I just went to Heaven and danced all night. I actually didn't go home with anyone that night, but fell asleep on the Circle Line about 7 AM. I think the most embarrassing moment was when I was fucked up on poppers and speed, amongst other things, and started chatting up this cute guy, only to realise after 10 seconds or so, that it was a reflection from a wall of mirrors. I looked around in semi-petrification, but nobody had noticed - it wasn't exactly what you'd call an observant crowd in many ways.
Heaven then was a world for me alone. I wasn't part of any gay scene, and even when I knew a few other bi's, and a few gay guys, we were in a punk world where there was neither money nor inclination amongst most of them to go to these nightclub decadent parties. It probably wasn't politically correct or something.
That's one of several negative points I can make about our scene - that they're very uptight about music. It has to be from one of the approved bands, or at least an approved genre, to be acceptable for playing in public. This is a very teenage concept, created from peer pressure, so in many ways it's an example of all the petty oppressions that anarchists are supposed to oppose. And one consequence of this peer attitude of course is that the music that's deemed acceptable is relentlessly straight. There'll be no Weather Girls in the Vrankrijk and no Marc Almond in the Binnenpret. You might get Bronski Beat once a year at a push, but only because Jimmy had such a tediously PC image.
I must admit, I thoroughly enjoyed my hedonist days. I remember going down the IT, which was Amsterdam's equivalent of Heaven, being not only in the unusual position of having enough money to buy a few beers, but also totally speeding off my tits direct from Dave's - at the time, the number one speed dealer in Amsterdam. He'd wished me a good evening, and proffered yet another swig from the bottle of Jameson's and off I'd tootled with my ill-gotten gains (and I can't remember where the money had come from. We're not talking alot here, but I probably had a geeltje in my pocket, which was rare back then). So stood in the queue to get in and pay, I noticed a line of boys around my age walking in a line in another door. They were all cute and knew where they were going, so at the spur of a monet, I tagged on the back of the line. I've read that tagging on the back of a line trick in loads of books, from Lord of the Rings on down, and never believed it would work, so wasn't expecting anything but a knockback, but I got let through. Up some stairs and down some corridors we went, and I never got a chance to talk with anyone. I think we ended in some VIP area. Frankly, I didn't hang around, and went to check out the masses., down the stairs on the dancefloor. Of course, I could have missed a night out with some boybands and Hollywood producer. But frankly, it looked more like another cheap pimped night, and that was never my scene.
A pimp once tried to sell me to a News of the World reporter, and to this day I don't know if it was to fuck me or to give an interview about the Poll Tax riots. Frankly, neither was appetising, so muttering some obscenities about Wapping, I got out of the taxi and went back to the squat.

Two news

Ma Tambo died the day before yesterday. I can't say I knew her, although we met sort of, but she sounds like on of the old school. Apparently she was well known in diplomatic circles, yet at the same time she would work as a nurse, without special recognition and the same slogging hours as the other nurses.The first true post in this blog was to do with a woman very like her.Rosa Parks.
Adelaide 'Ma' Tambo was similar. Her husband Oliver was President of the ANC in exile, and he retained the post even after Mandela was released and they returned to SOuth Africa. She took an early stance against the corruption and tyranny of Winnie after returning, leading a walkout of women from the Women's ANC group. But by all accounts she was herself a very strong, even domineering, figure. I suspect that she had a bigger influence on the anti-apartheid movement than any of us know.
I danced alongside Oliver Tambo and Jesse Jackson, and I guess the woman I vaguely remember being there was probably Ma Tambo.
Obviously my being there was a bit of a mistake, the result of being alone on a demo and being the only white boy in the middle of 3000 ANC & SWAPO comrades toy-toying up Oxford Street. Probably somewhere there is a photo of the fact, because there were lots of camera flashes as I stood there in the front row. Doubtless the journos were snapping in case I turned out to be the son of someone well-known.
The news today has been leading with the IPCC report on Climate Change (or, as they call it in the US 'Global Warming'). The report is being trailed as a harbinger of doom; yet personally I found it rather an inadequate compromise.
In trying to attain credibility, it seems to have sacrificed any theory, perhaps even integrity. Temperature rises are forecast with a range that is essentially meaningless. The sea level rises are equally flakey - deliberately excluding any Greenland or Antarctica glacier melts by all accounts - despite forecasting temperature rises up to 4 degrees.
There are though, some positive signs. That this is finally news, that there finally appears to be some consensus on action, that even the bosses of energy corps and Wal-Mart in the US seem to be getting round to the understanding. Of course they have to some day if they want to survive, let alone old Hubbert's Peak threatening to wipe out their business and their system.
There will only be one story in the coming years. Iraq and the other resource wars have to be recognised as parts of that story. There is only this: how we treat the world we live upon, and how that world treats us.
The last few days, perhaps irrationally, I feel a tad more optimistic, that we may finally act together.

So, the year's getting rolling. It is, of course, more of the same essentially. There's no new insights as such. I've got more of a perspective on fuel use, which was an interesting prism through which to view Bush's State of the Union, which was - from that perspective - two thirds concerned with securing energy sources. The very warm winter in the States has also driven cynical merkins to suspect that there's something going amiss with the climate, and even concede the faintest possibility that they may bear some responsibility for the situation.
If I were an astrologer I'd be tempted to look for something or other in retrograde or occulting or eclipsing or whatever. There seems to be change and strife and disruption around - or perhaps that's just me? At work, at home, looking around me, there seems to be shifting sands and uncertainties, disruption, change and dis-ease. It's nebulous, difficult to put a finger on, but I feel there's something tangible too - something coalescing into events.
In many ways, this is the typical weekend - not like last week, when I finally put the floor in our bedroom. We do have a party for Esther on Sunday coming up, but that should be fairly chill.
Of course I watched the ski jumping last weekend. Jan Mazoch had a horror fall. To be honest, I'm surprised he's still alive. I thought he was done for when I watched it.

Reasons to be cheerful...

So, the Aussies finished their hammering of England in the early hours this morning. Goodbye then especially to Warne & McGrath. They were bloody awesone, and even if England were rubbish this series, those two have been bowlers beyond comprehension.
Noticeable was that Shane & Pigeon & Justin Langer were all tehre with their kids in arms, running around on the ground, that their fathers wanted them part of the experience. Of course I understand that - if I was in the same situation I'd do the same. But it's only in about the last 10 years that this has been acceptable - that men, and especially sportsmen show that their life is about their kids and not just a narrow focus on the sport. It probably started with Bergkamp & Beckham - at least that's when I noticed it - but now it's standard practice for a young dad. For the English team, fathers have been given leave from Tests, even flown back from Asia, to be there when their kid is born , and that's something inconceivable a decade ago.

Other reasons to be cheerful: plastic semiconductors and 100 dollar laptops. Greening in the Sahara. Climate change actually moving up the Western political agenda (Gordon Brown says it's one of the top two, the Democrats are talking about it).
I think we have to move beyond politics, beyond revolution & representation: we're into survival realms now. Preconceptions to the wayside and let's see what happens.

It's going to be a long hot year.

Time flies but aeroplanes crash

New Year's Day too done and dusted for another year.
I used to wonder why people said that time went quicker as you got older, but the last few years it has done just that. I think this is largely to do with the lifestyle though - the married with kids, working 47 weeks a year, 9 to 5: well, who wouldn't get hypnotised into a sort of daze living like that? Days seem much longer when you go to bed at 4 in the morning and lurch from hangover to hangover. Luckily, I booked a couple of days extra holiday from work again so I don't start back on the treadmill till Thursday.
Should be off to the pool tomorrow, but looks like the kids might be getting sick again. I swear we have our own private germ unit here.

Serious

Difficult to get serious when, again, a few Christmas drinks to the good. Probably it would be sensible to have a quiet day at home tomorrow building a Civilization of some sort.
Can't be worse than being sober and watching the cricket. Still, even for the poor buggers there at the MCG, it must still be fun as a life. I wonder where England are touring next winter?

Ashes to Ashes

I've managed to miss writing anything about the Ashes this winter, which I suppose is just as well. If you can't speak well of the dead, say nothing at all - or something like that. It's been an absolute bloody mess from an English point of view, but even that doesn't stop me enjoying my holiday by being able to stay up a bit and follow the cricket from afar. In fact, so far tonight sounds like about the best session of the series for England - Ponting and Hussey both out for single figures. And in fact, Clarke goes too as I write. Time to turn on the radio I reckon.
I've started reading the book I got for Christmas about 'The Long Emergency'. The full title is 'SUrviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty First Century'. PArticularly relevant is the concept of cognitive dissonance, applied to a society - in fact, to a species. Essentially this comes down to ignoring the broader context of what is happening in your environment in order to focus on the smaller - perhaps, more handleable, details. And so most folks worry about how to pay the rent, or the mortgage, and miss the disasters looming over us. I guess it's a survival mechanism as well to some extent, but one which is actually leading us into disaster.
Time to evolve again I reckon.

Nice day?

Well, Christmas is nearly over, for another year, and to be honest I'm too pissed to type. It was a good one, and a merry Christmas to anyone reading this. It was good fun, and I've been busy from beginning to end, so either some of it passed by me or I caught the true meaning of Christmas, I'm not sure which. Perhaps someone can supply a sit-com happy ending and let me know?
Anyway, it was great to see everyone tonight - 14 people in all I think, so I reckon there was some good grub distribution.
This is nice now - everyone gone home or to bed, and a bit of funk (to remember James Brown, who died today) . I've got a feeling that tonight is a Christmas to last a little longer.
Kisses and merry Christmas to you all!

All trimmed up

So, here we are. Christmas time again. I'm a huge fan. How can you not be? - the room is full of lights and colours, I'm off work and allowed to drink from mid-afternoon till early morning, and there's all that goodwill concept kicking around.
Willow's birthday tomorrow morning. She's started to be a bit more able to deal with this double excitement - we can claw her down from the ceiling now and then.
I'm cooking a huge dinner on Christmas Day - I think the guest list is about 15 people. So I'm presuming they're not going to want to sit and listen to the cricket from Australia at 2 in the morning.
Shane Warne announced his retirement a couple of days ago, following the all-too-easy regaining of the Ashes. I never saw him play live unfortunately, which is a shame as he's one of the greats of all-time.
I'm having a decadent Christmas again this year, helped out by having my first Christmas bonus. I'm well into the realms of middle class territory - my kids are certainly going to grow up middle class at the least. It's a strange thing.
I'd like to be optimistic. I have lately had a few inklings of optimism, which is curious for me. Sure my personal life is fantastic in many ways, and even though I detest wage-slavery, I am at least reasonably OK with it at the moment; but neither of these are justifications for true optimism.
The greening of the Sahara: reading recently that the Sahara has - contrary to expectations - actually been greening lately, rather than desertification increasing - now, that was good news. Such things are few and far between though.
So, for Christmas, when we can at least have a little optimism, when we can perhaps think how the world could be a better place, when we can think that - if it's not necessarily a wonderful life, it at least bears that potential - and celebrate.
Most importantly of all, is the depth of feeling that we can allow ourselves by having some time out to contemplate. That's why I like to take a couple of weeks at this time of year. It was originally a winter solstice festival, and it's an appropriate time of year, when there's little agricultural work to be done, to contemplate. That I miss Luna is still an intense feeling. But I'm also looking forward - to next year and another new baby! And sheer joy at my two daughters. Amazement at my love, my Esther.
I also have precious old friends, some of which will be joining us on Christmas Day for dinner. And new friends too.
I guess the point of these ramblings is simply that I'm lucky and happy. And even though most things seem to indicate that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, there a few signs out there that just maybe there are also reasons to be cheerful...

Briefly

Christmas holidays start in two days for me. Lots of things I want to catch up on. So this should be busy here.
One of the worst things though, is the baiji being declared functionally extinct.