by Kimliatach Safe and sound in Brisbane though still a bit shell shocked from the drive. We are in Brisbane until Christmas day, lots to do and many people to see.
Updated yesterday’s post with the first response.
I’ve still been posting plenty of arthropods to Insta, haven’t shared them here in a while. This is merely the most recent.
And Brisbane welcomed us with a lovely afternoon storm.
by Kimliatach Safely in Orange.
We’ve forgotten surprisingly little in our packing and nothing we cannot do without. We are however without Christmas cards.
We waited for the postman to depart this morning and I was glad we did as my EFF Sticker pack arrived just in time along with some mail spam from a Charity which has now outspent my one time purchase/donation soliciting more money from me in glossy printing. Unfortunately despite paying a princely sum for good quality printing and ordering almost three weeks ago, our cards did not arrive in time. Oddly the component of the order you would think would take longer, a personalised mug, has come. Compounding the irritation our card design includes the year and will thus not be useful next year.
by Kimliatach Today I finally got to mess around with the local public school’s 3D printer. I am really looking forward to putting it through its paces. I’ve received the keys for my classroom and begun scheming the decorations. I’m also getting my head around the finer points of the NSW Syllabus and my practical planning requirements.
I am have adopted a new app Loop. I have no particular attachment to this one app, just the function it performs and I will likely experiment with a few to find my ideal over coming weeks. The app I was recommended isn’t available in my ecosystem, but the principle is worth a shot. I do respond well to gamification as a general rule.
So for now my daily habit prompts are:
Drink 5+ glasses of water – my glasses are large ‘Loop’ doesn’t allow for repeated reminders throughout the day without making extra habits anyway.
Get 7+ hours of sleep – reminder at 11PM.
Eat Clean – We are aiming for less than 3 meat meals a week and I eat way too much sugar, hummingbird style.
Meditate – 6:10 AM daily.
Gratitude and visualise – Count my blessings and picture goals.
Make or Play – With all the things.
Blog – Everyday.
Move your body – Everyday some way.
Now I am not off to an altogether flying start, but it is working.
Today the boys woke early and the orphan lambs we are minding for a day or two were desperately hungry so no meditation for me. We ate free range chicken meat for tea and I’ve had plenty of sugar. I didn’t drink water from after breakfast until I got home, though I’ve since made up the difference. I haven’t run, danced or worked out. I have counted my blessings and visualised my future class room. Making is listed as separate to blogging because although some posts do tend towards works in and of themselves the purpose of this blog is accountability about art and creative endeavours and on that note I’ve art to make.
Finally can put a name to the debating technique that stopped me watching Q&A pretty religiously a few years ago. when an IPA rep spouts ten spurious statements in as many sentences entirely confident that their opponents cannot hope to rebut even a fraction of them it is a Gish Gallop. A debating technique taking full advantage of Brandolinis Law; The amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that required to produce it.
Sometimes it is nice just to be able to put a name to things.
by Kimliatach Having lost my voice teaching four days in a row I crashed hard Thursday night. Friday night N and I attended a staff Christmas party both still quite unwell. I found out that I will likely have a 4, 5, 6 composite for 2017. Which is exciting and daunting. Saturday was spent in recovery, not so much from the party at which we took it very easy but just from the general malaise of the foul lurgie that neither N or I have completely kicked yet.
I have put a few hours into a now very nearly complete T-shirt design. Which is not one of my main projects, has mostly just been a warm up activity but has been hovering about, nearly complete for weeks. I have been feeling very frustrated about how many unfinished projects I have on the go.
Finished building the new fence which will allow us to get our hens back when we return from our trip away for Christmas. Need to lay out an irrigation system over coming days so that watering is as easy as setting the timer every couple of days for my brother in law.
Collected the family sewing machine and now ready for the next stage of foam costume making. The next build video is edited but awaiting a a clip or two more to be shot for completion of those particular elements.
Still listening to ‘30 Days of Genius‘. Each talk has at multiple times had me conducting self analysis on goals, priorities and risks and relationships. Definitely a positive experience so far. In keeping with this I have been continuing the Headspace meditation program though I haven’t achieved daily commitment to that yet.
N and I just completed ‘The Left Hand of Darkness‘ by LeGuin and ‘The Annihilation Score‘ by Stross in audio. We are now alternating between ‘Religion for Atheists‘ and ‘The Long Earth‘ both rereads for me.
This long form investigative piece from Buzzfeed just further demonstrates how far they have come as a media organisation. As well as showing how morally depraved the American healthcare system is.
Finally got N to agree to watch some more of the new Black Mirror‘s. Now only have one episode left.
I’m still not ready to talk about all that bugged me about Westworld.
One of my most long anticipated games looks to be fundamentally broken.
I am in love with these boxes but I honestly have no idea what I would do with one.
Drawstring timber box by Paolo Del Toro
by Kimliatach A common feature of almost every productivity text I’ve ever read is the creation of a good morning routine.
Mine is a bit ah, haphazard.
On a good day I rise, shave, shower, make coffee and food and have time alone for about twenty minutes to read, meditate or workout prior to our Gro Clock announcing to the boys that it is time for them to rise at 7AM. On a bad day the boys wake up and bang on the shower door. There is no peace, no serenity, only Zorg. Or at least two little boys ravenous for banana toast and attention.
Today was good day.
For a blessing I had 45 minutes of sweet peace.
But… I accomplished nothing with it. Partially because I went to bed at midnight and particularly whilst unwell 6 hours is simply not enough, but also because the inexorable time suck of the internet drew me in. Nearly an hours unproductive browsing later and I still wasn’t feeling awake, I hadn’t worked out and hadn’t prepared lunch.
Sleep is the first key factor to address. As of now I have an alarm set for ten to eleven. To be in bed by. Meditation, language tapes and workouts are all very difficult to engage in when it is a battle to be awake. Here’s hoping this can help.
Making lunches vies for pole position as my least favourite part of work. Typically with work guaranteed the following day we make a dinner with leftovers suitable and container them up the night before, failing that I’ll make sandwiches prior too. With the day to day uncertainty of relief that hasn’t always been possible and there have been a lot of long uninspiring looks in the cupboards at 7AM.
My season breakdown and debrief of Westworld to follow in a day or three.
Forms to fill in and art to make.
by Kimliatach Today I calculated a rough estimate of my lifetime carbon footprint.
I based my figure on the results generated by a variety of online carbon footprint calculators all of which are a bit cumbersome and I had to make a lot of assumptions. Generally I have erred on the side of more rather than less carbon. I have accounted for every piece of airplane travel I have ever undertaken as either SYD to LON flights or BNE to MEL flights. I have averaged half the electricity usage in my house over two billing periods and multiplied that by my thirty eight years. I have claimed responsibility for the entirety of the pollution produced by my family car, a 2011 Hyundai diesel wagon over a 15000km distance year again multiplied by my entire life. In similar fashion I have accounted for food, public transport, entertainment, electronics, furniture and waste disposal, generous estimates all and with no shortcutting for good behaviour like the limited meat consumption we are striving for or the lifelong composting of food waste.
I have to this point in my life been responsible for something on the order of five hundred and seventy seven tons of carbon emissions.
Using the 25 story ‘Gotham City Building‘ from the Brisbane skyline for scale. 577 tons as 8.2m cubes stacked in an array would approximate something like this:
It seems to me that a significant problem among climate denialism is a lack of imagination. I don’t suffer that problem, quite the opposite in fact.
My average output appears to fall somewhere between nine and sixteen tons per annum. The significant amounts of plane travel this year have pushed me upwards of twenty tons.
Damn right I live in the first world.
If I continue to err on the generous and I give myself a generous lifespan of say ninety six years my lifetime output will be one thousand four hundred and forty seven tons.
But I have decided that I want a Carbon Positive life.
I want to make sure I take more carbon out of the atmosphere in my life than I put into it. Leave it better than I found it as it were. To that end I am going to actively reduce my own emissions but I am also researching meaningful carbon offsetting techniques with which to meet this goal.
One of the concrete things I took away from ‘This Changes Everything‘ (Which you really ought to read) is that most carbon offsetting is total bullshit. Lots of dodgy operators and Howard era economics like ‘not cutting down this forest is a carbon offset’. Even so if I were to take the easy option and use, for instance one of the tree planting services listed here, as they are at least actively removing carbon from the atmosphere, I would be looking at a cost between eighteen and twenty five thousand dollars. Which needless to say I don’t have to spend. The how to accomplish this goal will is a work in progress.
Lots of ideas floating around, more are welcome.
Doubtless lots of work to do.
by Kimliatach We spent the evening discussing the implications of this alarming but not easily dismissable prediction.
Urlembed didn’t actually work btw.
There is a follow up to the video in that article here.
No 3D printing today, the staff member I was to do handover with was off unwell.
Caught up on correspondence with a number of people. Going to bed early and looking forward to a productive weekend. We have a fence to build, costumes to work on and we have been scheming an obstacle course for the boys. Starting simpler than this spectacular example though.
by Kimliatach
I survived bullying. I was called gay from late year five until I left high school and went to Tafe in the city at the end of grade 10.
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t gay, not even slightly. It didn’t matter that family members and family friends were gay and I didn’t have issue with it. The label stuck, provoked a reaction and haunted me for years. The staff mostly didn’t get involved. Close friends wouldn’t hang out with me within sight of school peers. School was a pretty unrelenting misery, I have but a handful of good memories or lasting friendships from that time, barely any which were from within my actual year level. It was a dark and depressing period and it marked me for decades to come. Distrust of authority, body image issues, loneliness and trust issues as well as an overwhelmingly negative view of academia are among the lasting effects I have dealt with and I believe largely overcome.
I have been thinking about posting on the topic for some time. My high school cohort is going to celebrate a twenty year anniversary of a year twelve I didn’t attend this year. I didn’t attend the ten year and I have no compulsion to attend this one. I have mentally forgiven my antagonists but I have no desire or need to see what has become of them.
The announcement that thirteen year old Tyrone Unsworth committed suicide after a campaign of bullying based on his supposed sexuality touched a nerve. It is deeply sad and disappointing that people are still dying for who they love in supposedly progressive societies the world over. I believe his death could have been averted if people had stood up for him, challenged his antagonists and demanded better from them. The school will doubtless have to audit its monitoring and management procedures. I hope that among their responses is the introduction of the Safe Schools Program
There will be a lot of baying for blood from “concerned citizens” targeting the alleged bullies families and the alleged oblivious staff of the school. This is deeply unhelpful. Believe me when I say that there was a time when I wanted to see violence visited upon my antagonists. I and the thousands of other bullying victims around the world understood, to our shame, a little of what drove the Columbine boys to their awful end. Every authoritarian punishment based response to bullying I have observed has backfired, often badly. I have seen restorative justice both succeed and fail to deal with victimisation of students peers. In fact the only actually successful anti bullying technique I have ever encountered is the ‘Method of Shared Concern‘. Blaming and hating on the perpetrators doesn’t help the victims, it just makes the perps better at hiding their crimes.
The anti-LGBTI Aus Family Association responds to Tyrone Unsworth’s death: pic.twitter.com/Hl2y0fGy44
— Lane Sainty (@lanesainty) November 25, 2016
Programs which normalise acceptance, compassion and community are the strongest weapons we have against bullying and the bigotry and medieval morality of an outspoken group of religious fundamentalists should not be permitted to get in the way of their implementation.
Homework and preparation for the big drive.
Tomorrow morning we embark on a four day expedition to visit Candlebark and explore the surrounding suburbs.
by Kimliatach I have been booked in for a day next week to do handover and orientation with the public school’s still quite shiny and new 3D printer. I am not yet sure if I will have a class of my own or the TRS (everyday relief position) but work is pretty much guaranteed for 2017, which is a great relief. Time to brush up on my 3D modelling skills and start rebuilding my classroom resources.
After mixed success leading guided meditation with a year 6 class today. I have resolved to have another go at daily meditation starting tonight. Headspace is my guide of choice (and what I used in class).
An altogether exhausting day, compounded by a very rough last night means I am to bed directly.
I did whip up this first take on a channel header for Ytube before dinner.
A nice find while looking for resources to demonstrate good poster design this morning:
by Kimliatach This afternoon I’ve planted out a bunch of seedlings and tinkered with a few panels of the new fence. I aim to paint some before bed. Last night I completed two sketch cards and I’m trying to keep momentum.
I had a 7:45 call in, which is very late, for a day with a three/ four class with no run sheet, my favourite kind of relief day actually. It means I can be something altogether and completely different. I can treat them as my own class for a day and expand the students horizons of what learning at school can be like. Today after a brief introduction we did writing on demand about which skills we would prioritise developing and how. I have been using diy.org as a good example of how complex skills can be mastered by a process of discovery. We spent reading groups reading from a selection of one act plays and poetry books grabbed at the last minute from the library. Later I took them to the computer lab for an Hour of Code and in the afternoon we did a drawing lesson in which stick figures were banned and star figures were introduced.
An idea occurred to me during a numeracy activity that I should formalise my thoughts on the way a few different maths concepts like area and perimeter are taught in the form of instructional video Vlog entries.
It is Westworld night but N is down with a headache, hopefully only dehydration. It is getting so hot here after a year of summer a bit more Scottish weather would be lovely.
The Glenfinnan Monument as viewed from the lookout for the much more famous Glenfinnan viaduct on a wet July/August day.