Halloween food

So I got a bit ... well... enthusiastic at Halloween this year.

Not posting pictures of the 12 kids under 6 years old that came to my house, in case one of them wants to be police commissioner in some future where halloween is a moral outrage. Or photos of my giant sparkly fake eyelashes, which were fun! but if electronically public they might stymie my own ambitions to be a police commissioner in the future (or something). Or the bit where the lizard kid tried to wrap the skeleton kid in toilet paper to make him a mummy. That was fun. Although I should have supplied cheaper toilet paper. The supersoft paper just kept breaking.
There were monster drawing games, much screaming and running and hide and seek and BOO!, but all my other game plans dwindled when the little boys (and my daughter) started chasing the chooks around the block screaming, and the other little girls sat in their princess outfits and asked politely for some textas and started drawing butterflies and writing long words like "because".


I shall post pictures of my WATERMELON BRAIN
complete with hemispheres, the main lobes - OK not enough sulci and the gyri are too fat but it's not bad for 20mins from an engineer not a neurosurgeon.
I challenge any neurosurgeons reading this to make a better one. And post a comment.

Not my idea. I googled Halloween Food and found this. In the spectrum of brains posted in the comments, mine comes out pretty nice looking. 

 

Am I being too competitive? Is competitive brain carving in the Mummy Olympics?

Here is all the food.
Brain top right.
Dragon dropping cream puffs with chocolate top left.
Banana chips supposed to look like sliced vertebrae
Eyeball eggs - which were very tasty but nobody was game to eat them at first
Ghost bananas - how cute!
Mandarin pumpkins,
Slices of apple cut into mouths with teeth made of almond flakes
Fish fingers with almond flake fingernails

And there were also baby frankfurts wrapped like tiny mummies, instructions here,
which disappeared between putting them out and getting my camera. (I think the lizard boy ate them.)
Although if you are making them don't cut the puff pastry into strips. Cut it into one continuous spiral, Wrap each frankfurt, making sure there's a spot for the eyes later, and break it off. Much less fiddly than all those little strips.


What fun.

I shall have to do it again next year.

Acclimatising him to not belonging

It was my eldest's first 'footy day' today. This means the whole school dresses up in football supporters' gear. Where we live, that implicitly means Aussie Rules, but if you have another religion, just picture your own junior sports day of football/rugby/Irish football/American football/whatever.
This is kindof what the other kids looked like - although in order not to have to chase permission from parents, I've ganked this photo from somewhere else that already got permission:

Football t-shirts, hats, scarves, shorts, all in their own teams, all items of clothing approximately the right size, some signed by football players, many very well used from AusKick on the weekends.

This is what my son ended up wearing:

A Korean soccer t-shirt in Mens XL, numbered with the 2006 world cup team captain.
Were there any other soccer/rugby/Irish football/American football supporters at the school?
No.
I did try to get him a football t-shirt in roughly his size in time for footy day, but I didn't try very hard, ie. I didn't see any in the windows of the op shops (read: thrift stores) I happened to walk past in the week before.
But then my husband and I discussed it, and we figured that it is actually may not be a good thing to spare our son the feeling of being different. He is a bit unusual. We are all a bit unusual. He might as well get used to it.

Nevertheless, I found myself fretting a bit. Had I sent him into the proverbial bear pit? Would he get teased, taunted and ostracised because it didn't fit?

He was just fine. He said he had to explain his t-shirt a bit, but then his friend Jack found a small logo with a tiger on the front of it and told him he was definitely a Tigers fan, and he ended up the captain of the Tigers team in the 5-on-5 games the school ran on the oval.
Just goes to show, if you're a confident enough 5 yr old, you can be a (Caucasian) Korean team captain of an Aussie Rules team.

Lexski's Rules of Professional Corporate Ambition for Mums of Young Kids in Male-Structured Professions

So you took maternity leave and watched the grads you trained go past you. You suspect your boss or company is taking advantage of you but you don't necessarily know who to confront, what to say, how to negotiate the raise you deserve. And then you pick up the kids at daycare where tireless, brilliant women being substitute mums are being paid less than half your hourly wage, and that your mother or grandmothers never got to go back to work after marriage, or only after 10 or 15 years looking after you and your siblings, or threw away their university training and professional ambition to support their man, and ran the school council.

Here are my working theories about how to get ahead despite it all, achieving professional success during this really tough period.

1) Get your head straight. 

Own your professional territory. Be clear on what you are good at. If you're the expert on writing project bids for wastewater treatment plant upgrades (hi K), or a very slick MRI radiographry team leader (hi D) or the senior associate who specialises in medical malpractice suits (hi B), then that's your turf. Defend your turf. Don't let some uppity manager who is actually in a position to show up 5 days a week, and routinely operates on 8 hours sleep, and has time to regularly go to the gym, swan in and pretend to be an expert in your territory if it is your territory in the organisation.

Don't let the little voice in your head tell you that you're a fake, that you don't deserve to work, that you can't do it. I keep a couple of my best project outputs floating around my desk, and when I hear that little voice, I pick up a particularly fabulous track layout and remind myself that I am indeed very good, and this is something I did when I was really good. Everyone has bad days, even aforesaid well-rested gym-going uppity manager. Own your talents and your outputs and don't lose heart.

2) Always be well groomed, but pitch it to your context.

• Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. 
• Always have nice hair. 
• Take care of your shape and complexion. 
• If you decide to wear makeup, don't overstate it - no tacky blue fake eyelashes, no bright eyeshadow, strong lipstick only if it matches your clothes.
• Don't dress sexy. It not only distracts the 90% male employees from hearing what you are actually saying, it can create the impression that you are too lightweight to deserve a more important position, and you may have to peel off the admirers later on. 

Having said that, cultural standards are important. In Australia, a very talented part-time woman can be promoted - a bit - despite being very scruffy and somewhat rude. In France, she can be occasionally rude but she must be impeccably groomed. In Germany, she can be plainly dressed but must always conduct herself properly. In South East Asia, she must cover her upper legs and wear a modest neckline, but sleeveless tops are fine, upper arms can show. In West Coast USA, legs - good legs - are a promotion advantage.
And having said that too, dressing just a little sexy in a marketing or client-facing role can help subconsciously persuade clients to choose you or your product over someone else. But if you're applying for a technical managerial role, sexy will mostly backfire.

3) Make it look easy. Don't tell them how hard it really is.

Firstly, accept that this is the biggest injustice of all. You're hiking up a mountain in lead-lined boots while your male colleagues are taking a stroll along a tropical beach in the sunset. And you can't let them see it.

Never ever complain about lack of sleep, child waste or bodily fluid emissions, all the things you had to organise, all the picking up of objects, cleaning, laundry, mum's taxi driving that you do all day, every day that you're not in at work. Never ever complain about how you haven't been out to dinner since your second child was born, and that it has been so long since you went to a cinema that you suspect they've all turned into crumbled Parthenon-like ruins. Never ever let them know your childcare woes. Talk about your kids, but only charming, funny, nice stories. Never puke stories or sibling-inflicted injury stories. and never ever ever let your colleagues know how you lost the plot and yelled at your kids, or retreated to the toilet for a cry.

Men can stand around telling stories about their young kids' digestive tracts and bad behaviour, and how they couldn't cope. For some reason, it's a monstrous career-limiting move for mothers. If you want to be in charge, you don't want your colleagues to have enough information to imagine you doing your mum-work.

Be super-organised, to avoid family or professional catastrophe. Use all the backups you have, because you will need them. Find corners to cut, and rest in the tiny spaces in between. 

And re-frame. Remind yourself that you are good, you are ambitious, and you are among the first generations of women to have the opportunity to have kids and a career. Don't look at the injustice. Relish the opportunity to sit in one spot and have a hot cup of tea, uninterrupted. And then think how nice it is to go to the toilet by yourself.

4) Career progression is nonlinear. Being a mother now will make you a rocket-propelled professional woman later on.

You are not missing out. You are not being passed over. You are laying the foundation for a career which will take off when your kids are finishing primary school. Just remember to:

Develop a reputation in your territory. 

Meet people, make contacts, and try to maintain them a bit. It's hard. Don't worry too much - most men aren't that much driven by contacts, and frequently let them lapse for a decade or more.

Keep your professional development current. Work out how to take refresher courses where you can. Consider part-time higher degrees.

Remember that you are kung-fu training in stamina and all kinds of management skills, Every time you have a meeting with clients on 3 hours sleep, with a trail of spew down the back of your shirt, you are training yourself to accomplish magnificent things in those lead-lined boots. When you take the weights off - when your slightly older kids sleep every night, make their own lunches, and organise a lift with James's mum to tennis practice - your extra capacity will give you an edge.

I am not making this up. I have been reading some biographies of extremely accomplished professional mothers, and this is a common theme. Many felt like they were struggling to tread professional water, and then their kids got to secondary school, and their own careers dramatically - and often unexpectedly - exploded.

5) Surprise, Fear, and Ruthless Efficiency.

Being a woman in a male-dominated area means you are often a surprise. The first time I showed up on a construction site, the very surprised men very politely tore down some girly posters before they invited me into the depot. You can use the surprise to your advantage, to gain exposure or boost your reputation or just stand out from the crowd. Another time on that same worksite, I had pink bows in my pigtails when I borrowed an angle grinder from some civil contractors, and I rapidly got a reputation of 'don't mess with her, she works like a man, she can use an angle grinder'. Even these days, when I introduce myself, sometimes a man asks "Hey, did you really once borrow an angle grinder?"

I know you are sometimes scared. You are scared for some very good reasons, including quite simly post-pregnancy prolactin making you more vulnerable to anxiety and fear for some years after a birth. But the men - particularly the real misogynists - are often more scared of you than you are of them.
You know your stuff really well. Determined female professionals almost always do.
You have all these strange powers, like asking people how they are, and listening to the answer.
You have not been put off your career after years, maybe decades, of other men trying to put you off. Not even having kids can put you off. You're like a doberman.
You don't even want their job. You want their boss's job, at a minimum. And you know you can do it, because after running a successful client meeting now with a vomit trail down your jacket, you will be able to do their boss's job better than they could.

There is no option but ruthless efficiency, because you don't have time to faff about discussing redundant design options when you know you have 12 hours to finish the project requirements analysis and system architecture, buy a badminton racket, sew a dance costume, do last year's tax return, find an appropriate present for a cousin's 6th birthday, and take someone to a medical appointment in some hard-to-get-to outer suburb.
Many of my male colleagues find this in and of itself, quite surprising and quite scary.

6) Know the limits of your body, mind, and spirit, and look after yourself.

• Watch carefully for signs of vitamin and mineral deficiency (D, calcium etc), have your blood tested, and take supplements if the doctor says. Watch for things with a family history (eg. thyroid problems, heart disease, skin/breast cancer etc.) and have regular checkups.
• Watch carefully for the early stages of a viral illness, and find a way to back off a bit, have a large one-off dose of Vitamin B & C, eat lots of turmeric and garlic (both antivirals), get more sleep until you feel better.
• Watch your mental health. Depression, anxiety, panic attacks can creep up on a person. If you're doing it tough, ask your loved ones to keep an eye on you and to help you seek help if they think you're floundering.
• Bearing children is brutal on the pelvic floor. Do your exercises, wear liners, and take a change of undies in your handbag if you might need it.
• Take care of your feet, back, wrists, knees, neck. You might schedule regular physio or massage.
• Eat well. Plan meals ahead of time, and consider bringing a packed lunch rather than getting takeaway. Stop eating leftovers off your kids' plates. Avoid foods that you notice make you less alert at work (eg. a sugary soft drink at 3PM is generally a bad plan). Snack on apples, carrots, boiled eggs - not chips, donuts, chocolate brownies. It will help your shape, your self-image, your professional abilities, and your mood. And it will help how your male colleagues see you too. It's weird and very unfair - they might not notice Darren drinking four liters of Coke a day and getting a pot belly, but they can be scathing of Lynne's second chocolate biscuit and drop comments about her fat arse. 
• Try to find a way to get exercise in. Go for a brisk walk around the office every lunchtime (bring sneakers). Or wake up earlier than the kids (haha!) and go for a run, go to a morning yoga session (helps the pelvic floor too), or set up your bike on the trainer and get a precious half hour in before real life kicks in. You might set yourself a fitness challenge, like training for an ocean swim or a long ride. 
• Do stuff that makes you happy. I knit and garden and read and type things like this, it makes me happy.
• Notice when you're tired, switch the computer or TV off, and get enough sleep.

I shall take my own very good piece of advice. I am tired. I'm going to sleep.

Why I buy yarn - Energy Conversion (Part 1)

I don't really buy yarn.

I buy potential energy. I buy a tight little bundle of what might become something beautiful. I buy the promise of many hours of happy activity and a sense of satisfaction and achievement afterwords.

I buy energy storage. I store any extra optimism, imagination, and anticipation in my yarn. See, I know that sometime in the relatively near future I will be bogged down in mundanity, or stripped of enthusiasm, or curled up on the bed exhausted and about to lose the plot with many many hours to go before any backup arrives. I know that if I place the new yarn just there within view of my bed, I will be able to see it in my time of trial, and I will tap into that stored potential energy, re-ignite my imagination with what it might become, re-ignite my hope and my optimism and get enough energy to keep at it.

I buy a place to store love. There are many people who I love, but who I can't say that to - because of context, or history, or simply the limitations of the English language. So I knit something for them and give it to them and both of us know that its sole purpose is to say "You are important to me and I love you". A special ball of wool or alpaca earmarked for some specific person - or intended for some generic project but knowing that I'll probably give it away when it's made - is a ball of love.

I buy threads of connection between people in time. Knitting connects you to all those knitters in prehistory and history, dust and bones under the ground or sitting in suburban yarn and coffee shops or (like me) in front of the TV with a thread coming out of the coffeetable drawer, subcontinental slum workers finding time to work on a child's jumper after a 15 hour shift in a toxic environment, or an adult orphan crying from grief trying to concentrate on a garter-stitch scarf to take their mind off their mum's death. Everyone knows a knitter- their nan or aunt or their gay uncle Brent (hi Brent!). Knitting also teaches your fingers a skill and technique which your mind doesn't need to know. This skill was passed on orally, then stored in pattern books and old items, copied and re-invented again and again, now it's carefully filmed onto YouTube and discussed interminably on forums. I buy the necessary ingredients to connect with all those people in all those places and times, just by holding some sticks, moving my fingers, and waving a bit of string around.

I buy hope - for myself to be able to make something, and when it's done for me or someone else to love it.
I buy just a little bit of fear - that I will never be able to do the yarn justice. That it will languish on my shelf and be forgotten and eventually eaten by moths or taken to the tip by some callous and uncomprehending future daughter in law. That I will end up a crazy old lady with sausage-swollen legs living on beans, and a house full of clever home-storage-solutions embarrassingly stuffed with yarn. Maybe this is what stash anxiety is about. I have to be careful not to buy too much yarn.

I buy interpersonal energy in a compact, dense form. I aim to convert into other forms of energy - anticipation energy, work energy, finished energy, gift energy, generosity energy, gratitude energy, lasting and meaningful human energy. I don't buy it because it's yarn. I buy it because it's energy.

Scrutiny: the effect of the gaze of others.

For almost all people, scrutiny changes our personality. 

Modern neuropsych (like my new favourite Daniel Kanemann) holds the view that a personality is a cumulative picture of how a human being acts in context, rather than something core to a psychological being. Change your context and your personality changes. You may not like this idea, that the 'you' reading this is as ephemeral as the things that come and go around you. But I bet you've asked yourself, and been unable to answer, questions about how you would be in a radically different context. How would you deal with being a prisoner of war in Changi in 1948, or do you think you would be one of the 80% of people who would have turned the dial up to 'fatal' if you were participating in a Milgram experiment?

Being watched changes how a human being acts. 
Human beings in aggregate also moderate our behaviour under scrutiny in statistically measurable ways. For example, crime is more effectively deterred by whether or not you are likely to be caught than the severity of the punishment (you can Google Scholar it yourself cos I'm not enthusiastic enough to link it.)

Not changing under scrutiny is considered a failure of empathy. The DSM IV (don't have a V around) also contains a selection of psychological disorders (autism spectrum etc) and personality disorders (narcissism, psychopathy etc) which include this as a feature. Also, one of the key features of paranoid schitzophrenia is the opposite; you feel like you are always watched, always under scrutiny. The 'watchers' and the 'followers' and 'everyone knows all my bad secrets'.

How good is your calibration? 
How much do you think you are under scrutiny, compared to how much you are actually under scrutiny? Most of us assume a much higher level of scrutiny than is real, especially for social contexts that you care about.("Oh god, everyone saw me trip on the way into the formal!"). We also assume scrutiny from above, not from below (people in senior management are statistically more likely to be corrupt - and psychopathic too - than those in middle management. Ought to find the link to reference it but I do want to get to sleep.)

The nature of the watcher also has an effect. 
Consider these:
Would you speak the same way in a meeting if the CEO - or equivalent person with a very big hat in your context - strolled in and sat quietly in the corner? Or if the cleaner was dusting around you?
Would you change the way you rebuke your kids if another parent came to the playground? Or a policeman? Or perhaps you wouldn't if you noticed a homeless lady with a shopping trolley on a park bench within earshot. Assume scrutiny and change behaviour from those socially above, not from below?

How much do you watch others? 
Do you watch and judge other parents at a playground? Do you think it's amusing when juniors squirm and stutter when you walk in and sit quietly in the corner? Do you care whether your partner's clothes are neat and stylish or scruffy?



I've been thinking in particular about the effect of scrutiny in my own context and thoughts have been swimming a bit. Specifically the following:

• How will the 'right to privacy' will work in the internet age, given the ease and availability of data mining and individual profiling for targeted marketing (Thanks, Google) among other things.
• What would have happened with greater transparency in banking (w.r.t. the GFC), big business (I reckon my CEO is a bit corrupt and I don't think that's unusual), politics (federal election pork barreling coming up) and specificl lobby groups (US senate, petrochemical industry, guns lobby, secret service etc) 
• What's the mental/emotional impact of both greater and lesser scrutiny, combined with the fragmentation of social structures w.r.t. previous generations (which used to provide nice easy rules about who to watch, who to be watched by, how much to care etc). 
• How easy it is to live well in isolation and in a ! Social media allows us to blurt every last 150-char thought on Twitter to a squillion other motes in the prokaryotic swamp of electrons and web pages, and how many people's time and life energy is wasted scrutinising others. How do you tell who is worth your scrutiny in the swamp? How do you tell if you are worth scrutiny? How do you shut out the scrutiny and comment of a troll - can you even shut it out of your brain the way you would shut out an obnoxious 7 year old in the shopping centre who yells at you "Hey lady, you're a smelly poo!"
• The constant relentless mind-crushing cross-referencing and cross-scrutiny of my new favourite lab rats, the school pick up parents! God they dress up and put makeup on for the pickup. They check and cross check each other. Who's in gym clothes? what brand? how new the shoes? does her body show evidence of actually going to the gym? Who is in which designer clothes? which shop did she get them? can she match jewellery to an outfit?
• How do I feel about WikiLeaks running for the Australian Senate with the philosophy that universal scrutiny of everyone important, and thus almost total transperancy of almost every powerful organisation is: (and all of these are contentious)
• inevitable in the information age
• ultimately a good thing
• a good reason and purpose for a widespread political & social campaign.

Increased scrutiny can do wonderful things.
It is one of the easy ways to improve the quality of a company's output (you will write better doccos if you know that person X is going to read them, you will manufacture better thingums if you know there is a quality control).
It is one of the easy ways to reduce corruption and misbehaviour (that's what journalists are for
It is one of the easy ways to connect with people (he noticed that she was watching him across a crowded room..... ) but not just romantically (Mum, did you see me jump?)

On the other hand, scrutiny can be a weapon.
 Do you remember Year 8? Specific kids were always the target for scrutiny and ridicule. There's a particular tone that girls use on the sacrificial scrutinee, regardless of the substance of the taunt: "You've got your socks up!" "Can you believe it, she's pulled her socks right up!" "Socks-up socks-up Josie's got her socks-up"
Boys - as is often the case - use very direct language, making scrutiny a clear threat. "I've got my eye on you, Smith. You put one foot out of line, and ..." or "Look at him. How pathetic."
Also crushing is invisibility. You do your best: change your clothes, take up the right sport, modify your language, and the cool people don't see you, don't look at you, and apparently effortlessly exclude you from everything. The message is, you're going to be a bag lady in a park when you grow up and I refuse to direct my gaze at you.
Here's a paradox - year 8 was awful for just about everyone. Super cool kids ended up targets for ridicule. The nasty teasers and threatening kids were struggling to fight their own invisibility - either in the yard or in their out-of-school context. Your own calibration was poorly tuned. But you learned a lot about scrutiny as a weapon and it probably gave you a healthy cautiousness about excess transparency.

Scrutiny can get to the point where paranoid schitzophrenics are accurate and well calibrated. For many celebrities, no amount of paranoia is too small. The British Royal Family are under outrageous scrutiny - cameras from adjacent mountains photographing the royal breasts; radio 'personalities' prank-calling a hospital and triggering the suicide of a nurse. I am sure they have a secret service division devoted to being paranoid on their behalf. Are they sacrifical? What about the Hollywood celebrity set? Do we make them go spectacularly crazy for our aggregated need to scrutinise? Do we focus on them, easy clear targets, in order to not have to work out who to scrutinise and under what circumstances in our disconnected but cacophanous lives?


I certainly don't want all my deepest darkest secrets or less-than-perfect actions blasted open to everyone whose opinion I care about. Especially where I don't think they were my fault, or I don't think I could have done better without structural change to the system at the time. For example, I don't want my wonderful husband to have seen what happened when I raised my voice at our kids at 7PM last week after too many days on shift. I wasn't at my finest and I am embarrassed. Nobody is going to catch me and sanction me for getting a little upset. I will try not to, but I think I will probably end up doing it again.
I also think we all need space for secrets in order to keep a sense of ourselves, our identities, independent from the context imposed by the others that watch us. That tiny voice that says "my secret is my own and nobody can see it" might be the thread in a mind that stops it from becoming paranoid.

Finally, the watchers need to be paying attention to watch. Anonymity and hiding in large numbers has always been - and will continue to be - a very effective individual protection, for people in a population and for pilchards in a school.

And so I hope, for the sake of your brains, that there are enough times in each of your lives that nobody is paying attention. Campaign for scrutiny and transparency and accountability, but keep your secrets - choose carefully, go for small ones, ideally legally and morally clean ones - but keep them and treasure them! Plus I strongly recommend that you keep them off electronic media.
If you are one of the few under constant scrutiny, good luck. Your mind is being bent out of shape by it, but it is probably a sacrifice for the common good.

Global warming freak out

Last week, I had a global warming freak-out.

So being trained in statistics, I went to find a bigger sample of people. First I tried a straw poll of other parents at the school pickup waiting area revealed that most of them have had one too in the last 12 months too. Emily’s mum confessed to a nightmare about post-apocalyptic life in a bunker in a verdant Antarctica. James’s dad freaked out after reading an article about brown coal, and promptly called a solar company to get a quote on a rooftop PV array. On the spot, Emily’s mum asked James’s dad for the solar company’s number. Perhaps having young kids makes parents feel like we are not individuals, instead our kids are the tip of a genetic tendril stretching into the future. And in a +5°C world, we fear there’s not much of a future for them.

And then Sam’s Mum told us about her freak-out: that the smart meter recently installed on the outside of her bedroom wall was giving her brain cancer.

Then Lachie’s mum started talking about her sister’s anxiety about being tailgated by taxis.

All of a sudden, the conversation shifted into a very typical school pickup set of topics: rotating and apparently disconnected anecdotes about other peoples’ wacky anxieties and the equally wacky measures they employ to cope with them.

So the next day, I tried another experiment: I asked about global warming fears at the lunch table at work. I sat with about 10 men, all employed as infrastructure engineers, ranging in age from 22 to 60+ (I’m too polite to ask).

Once again, two people started to talk about their genuine freak-outs and subsequent sustainable/self-sufficient lifestyle measures, and then somebody shifted the pattern. This time, two programmers in their mid-30’s started joking about the potential threat to hops production and thus to the supply of BEER! Oh no save the BEER! they said, and led us onwards into stereotypical blokey alcohol and sport driven conversation.

On a data set of two, my working theory was this. Discussing global warming is like holding onto a wet eel - we can’t get a grip. Many people have a sense of unease, and will discuss fears and findings and scenarios one-to-one, but in a group there is always someone who will divert and unravel the conversation, and maybe the rest of us are all too happy to be released from thinking about it.

So I went looking for data point number three: A group of my old uni friends: several environmental science graduates now consulting to industries like mining or contaminated land, several doctors, a few engineers, a few biomedical scientists, a few others. All but two are parents of young kids. Once I told my freak-out story and opened the conversation, it was not derailed. They were all very sure that climate change is real, here now, and a big problem.  The enviro scientists kept producing stories about recent climate data, and how the models are surprisingly accurate. One of the doctors held our complete attention for 25 minutes talking on link between economic development, population health, and carbon output. We discussed drought and storms and the models for shifting weather patterns, food shortage, transport challenges, and the disproportionate political power of vested interests industries like mining and petrochemical energy. We shared what we knew about carbon capture and storage, energy generation and demand side management of fixed electricity loads, how cholera spreads after a natural disaster, and where our infrastructure and lifestyles are most vulnerable to gradual climate change, or larger more frequent catastropic weather events. Every one of us, in our professional life, had come across a reason to think very seriously about man-made climate change and what might be done, is being done, isn’t being done.

But in several hours of discussion we never touched on what all this might mean for our kids. It was just too scary, and too easy to give up hope.

In my view, the problem at the heart of the “climate debate” is this.

1. Climate scientists know that climate change is happening, due to human emissions of CO2. We know that the global climate system is a bit like a freight train: heavy and slow to start, but we’ve got the accelerator up full-bore, and just because we don’t know what the top line speed is or when it’s going to get there, we know that top line speed is
   a)    very bad for most life on this planet, and 
   b)   really very hard to slow down.
2. A small but increasing number of professionals are finding that their work touches on how climate change impacts on people. Actuaries calculating insurance risks need to take increased frequencies of ‘freak’ events. Botanists and zoologists are consistently discovering species shifting into new territories following climate change: Victorian alpine species are at risk from snow-less winters, and the ‘Cockroach Line’ has almost shifted from Canberra to as far south as Melbourne. A civil engineer spoke about how they’ve been redesigning our stormwater and sewerage systems for higher tides. and bigger floods from storms.
    
3. Psychologists have identified, and are starting to discuss, a new type of illness:
   Climate Anxiety.
   It’s particularly prevalent in certain demographics: late adolescents and young adults (whose brains, it turns out, are supremely adapted to thinking about ‘big picture’ issues like God and death and climate change); mothers of children under 5 (whose brains, it turns out, are triggered by pregnancy hormones to adapt to protecting their children and learning to manage daily life with the huge adjustment that the little one’s arrival entails); those with a history of anxiety issues (whose brains are flooded with anxiety neurotransmitters anyway!) and the very old (whose brains haven’t particularly been identified as changing, but whose thoughts are suddenly turning to God and death and the past that they’ve witnessed and the future of their bloodline and their loved ones).
4. Many of the rest of us don’t want to think about it. We just want to work, and get paid, and buy stuff hoping it will make us happy, and watch TV in the evenings so we don’t have to think. And we are the ones with jokes about beer, stories about taxis, thousands of ways of shutting down the conversation before that third tentative person can put their thoughts into words for the first time.

Here’s the thing. The freight train is getting faster. It’s about bloody time we start, and persist with, conversations about what to do next. Don't let others shut you down.

The things i don't do.

I am a busy person.
I hang out with my 3 kids under 6 years old.  I am flat out with 14 loads of laundry a week, plus endless cooking, cleaning, picking up small plastic objects, fixing cuts and brusies, bathing kids, arbitrating, comforting, and inventing games. We pull off great feats of daring together: new garden beds, Ikea furniture, cakes, elaborate cubbyhouses, guests and parties, and we are bravely learning to ride bikes (mee tooo!), as well as growing & harvesting a nice edible garden and picking wild foods down the creek. Expeditions too. We don't flinch to take the kids overseas when the opportunity arises - since DS1 was born, we've gone with kids to North America three times, Hong Kong, Europe via Bangkok, plus dozens of domestic trips.Three kids to Europe was gutsy but extremely fun.

I also work, and love my work. It's only 20 hours a week at the moment (haha! only!), but when I had 2 kids and was pregnant with the third, I was working a 4/5 equivalent load in 3 days. A month before #3 was born, I was project engineering stuff. Including the commute, a 12 hour day in the office becomes a 15 hour day away from the kids. And then I often find myself finishing a technical document at home at 11PM and on the weekend.

And I love to knit, weave, spin, dye, sew, quilt. I need to make the kids new quilts this winter. I aim to knit 10km a year, spin 3kg - and for the last 3 years I've busted those goals by October. My kids are always dressed in handmade clothes, and my friends' new babies usually get handknit gifts.

People whinge to me: "It's not fair. How do you do so much? I never have time and I only have (3-n) kids." 

So here is a list of things I don't do, in order to get the above things done.

1) I don't go to the supermarket. Ever, if I can help it. My husband bakes. We get vegies delivered, meat comes in bulk and gets frozen, and as for the rest, I pick it up whatever I can wherever I am (eg. toilet paper was selling for a good price at the Korean grocer last week. So as I walked past from the station, I picked up 36 rolls of white gold, and a 25kg bag of rice, and loaded them into the pram and made the 1 yr old walk the last 500m back to the car.)

2) I don't keep track of fashion. I don't know what colour is hot this season, whether tiger print leggings are still cool, or how high my heels should be. I stick to classic cuts of clothes and make a feature of being a little bit retro, and I wear the colours and shoes that I like. Always neat and elegant, though. I don't usually shop for clothes either - I have a collection of female relatives (mum, MIL, grandmother, aunt, SIL) who have great taste in clothes and I love wearing their cast-offs.

3) I don't preen much. My nails are short and never painted. (Nails would get in the way!)  I wear little makeup (except at work) and typically only put lippie on in the carpark when I've arrived right before I hop out. I get a haircut every 6 to 8 months, and I choose a cut that will look just fine straight out of the shower. I have hairy legs for 6 months of the year and just wear long pants or dark stockings. My husband loves me anyway.

4) I don't go hungry and I don't eat crap food. If I want to change my shape, I do it with exercise not starvation. As for donuts or chips: a sugar flat or indigestion can ruin the rest of an afternoon's activities, they're just not worth it. I don't have much processed food in the house (cos I never go to the supermarket) and I don't choose it when I eat out. We fly with a couple of bags of raw carrots (the first time they were confiscated at San Francisco Airport quarantine I was highly indignant!) and before a long trip I pack a snack box of something like leftover pasta, cucumber salad, cheese slices, a couple of sandwiches and a banana.

5) I don't consider housework to be my job. I have a cleaner once a fortnight - a privilege of a professional career. If the house gets really feral, I set up miniature cleaning competitions to share the load: we race to see if Dad can vacuum the lounge room faster than the boys can put all their clothes away in drawers or Mum can pick up all the puzzle pieces. We clean up for guests, but mostly we keep a habit of putting 5 things away every time we go past somewhere (even the 3 year old!) and this manages the clutter. Broken objects get fixed or chucked out. I am hard-nosed about not keeping things "just in case": that's what op shops are for!And because I avoid shopping, we don't have the usual trail of small plastic toy bits associated with three kids under 6.

6) I don't watch TV. Or if I do, it's no more than one episode a night, and I knit or work at the same time, and DH marks papers and we're not really watching. I don't bother downloading - I never get to it. I have no idea where any sitcom is up to, and I don't get a twinge if i miss out on the latest sci-fi masterpiece at the cinema. It will be on sale at JB Hi-Fi sometime next year and I can buy it and watch it in instalments.We have an analog TV and are considering not upgrading.

7) I don't waste an opportunity. If I hear about a book I really want to read, I reserve the talking-book from the library and listen to it up and back to work instead of music or talkback. If we can organise leave and flight bookings, we all travel with my husband on a work trip. If it's raining and we want to go walking and won't have a chance for weeks, we put raincoats on and go anyway.

8) I don't have coffee with friends very much. My kids don't do babycinos - they can't sit still for very long - so I don't try. We invite friends on a train ride, or to join us at the beach, or to come over for an afternoon of painting and playdoh. I would love to go for coffee but our lives are too full and too fun.

9) I don't kid myself about what is needed to be good at something. Ten thousand hours. If I am serious about it, I find a way to throw time at it (like knitting). If I can't give it time anymore, I don't expect to be that good (like rockclimbing). Same with the kids. Either they do regular guitar practice, or they can skip the lessons.

10) I don't punish myself. If things don't work out, I don't get caught feeling like a failure. I re-frame my thoughts - what worked well, or what was I really in my heart of hearts trying to do, or how can I learn from this and do better next time? Most things will have another opportunity coming around again. When things do work out, i let myself be totally stoked.