Persian Fire
by Kimliatach

Safely in Sydney and enjoying the hospitality of dear friends.

Almost finished listening to ‘Persian Fire‘ by Tom Holland. This is the second book of his I’ve read and again I am amazed by the way he can string disparate threads of history together into a cohesive narrative. I am also amazed by how much of ‘The 300‘ is actually historically accurate. The book and film are far from without fault and there is a fair bit of artistic licence at play but the actual blow by blow account is surprisingly close to the mark. As recounted from the record by Holland and as compared by me to my own fallible memories of both book and film from years past.

As with the previous Holland book I have had a number of misconceptions corrected and learned a great deal about civilistations who’s innovations in government and diplomacy are still in effect today and I still have maybe 3 hours to go.

 

Late Mail
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.

Monkey Day
by Kimliatach

It is Monkey Day.

Not of real significance to me.

Part of my daily teaching routine is checking the ‘On This Day‘ Wikipedia page. It is always the day of something, though I’ve never noticed this one before. Monkeys are cool, apes are even better. Cut out Palm Oil!

 

Image from my collection, origin unknown, even Tinyeye is of no help. 

 

Tomorrow we depart on our festivus adventure.

Today we have created a web of irrigation poly that will allow our nominated waterer to set three timers every other day and thereby keep our garden alive in our absence.

Our rough itinerary includes;

A night in Orange, a few days in Sydney, a night on the road north, a few days in Brisbane and a week in Maleny before making the return trip to Cobar.

I need to get packing and I’m hoping to put the sewing machine to work before bed.

 

Recolour Tool
by Kimliatach

I found a new tool in Illustrator today.

Now I don’t know if it has been there all along, or if it is a brand new feature. It could certainly have saved time in the past and it is always funny finding a new feature in a tool you use near daily. I am reminded again how little of the total available functionality I actually use regularly, but also by how cumbersome and broken some of the seemingly basic features are.

Anyway this tool is rocking my world right now; The Adobe Illustrator recolour tool:

Found in the top bar when a coloured object is selected.

When clicked this little beauty will bring up the following window in which a complete list of every colour used in the object is displayed and is directly editable within.

In addition to that I have finally got my head around live symmetry in Illustrator. Which I have wanted for ages it is irresistibly entertaining. A bunch of face doodles and some luridly coloured mandalas later, I am ready to focus on some real work.

 

 

There has also been a gate hung which makes… Fence complete!

Scones made and naps had, last day in Cobar for a few weeks tomorrow.

A good day.

Habit Forming
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.

Links

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.

 

 

A Couple of Days
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.

Make

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.

Art, Media & News

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

 

 

 

30 Days
by Kimliatach

I am unwell and I need to paint so I’m keeping this brief.

Extra sleep paid off. I was able to meditate, chat with a relative, make lunch and listen to the other half of yesterdays 30 days talk.

For the last two weeks N has had her headphones in and been nodding along to the ‘30 Days of Genius‘ course from Creative Live. It has started a number of interesting conversations. I finally bit the bullet and signed up two days ago.

Today’s talk is by Seth Godin and it is going to need revisited, lots of very interesting ideas. The talks are interesting enough that I encourage you to sign up solely on the basis of the two I’ve listened to so far alone.

To share

Data from the OECD study of technical skills show the distribution among skill levels across countries as well as the average for all OECD countries.

I read this earlier and well, it explains a lot.

 

 

 

Morning Routines
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.

Media

My season breakdown and debrief of Westworld to follow in a day or three.

Creative

Forms to fill in and art to make.

Super Lame
by Kimliatach

Accomplished a lot of tiresome little admin jobs today. Shuffled my Super around, and stopped multiple accounts from charging for insurance. I have managed to reduce my super portfolio to four companies now. The eventual aim is to get it all into Australian Ethical, but it seems like every employer I have dealt with in the last few years has had a prearranged relationship with their own industry or other Super fund.

Yes it is dodgy, no it is not illegal, I’ve checked. So I have one fund for each school system I have been working in as well as the AusEthical account I periodically roll everything into.

What should be illegal is each fund automatically adding life insurance and deducting insurance premiums. The fund the local Catholic school is affiliated with, which as I only do occasional casual work with the school has only a small deposit, prompted the whole process today as I recently discovered that they had halved my deposit in fees alone during over the course of the year. They will also likely charge some bullshit exit fee when I close the account and roll the deposit over to ethical after my last pay from that school.

Also sorted health insurance again which has been pending since we got back.

Fencing, like the construction of a fence, a swim and good bit of Lego construction consumed the rest of the day.

Politic

While there is some good news from Standing Rock.

Unbelievably despite very vocal and clear opposition prior to the past state election and election commitments to the contrary. both the Queensland and Federal Governments appear to be rolling over and digging deep into the public purse to build the Carmichael mine.

Super lame behaviour.

 

 

 

 

Footprints
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:

carbon-footprint

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.