Nah~nah ne Nah~nah.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink of it deeply, or taste it not, for shallow thoughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking deeply sobers us again. - Alexander Pope





At the beginning of each academic year our umbrella sends out the paperwork ~ which consists of a math paper, a comprehension paper & a vocab paper  ~ which are mostly designed to keep the government of our backs as proof that we are actually doing some academic work.  In our case this is necessary.  Star has dysgraphia.  We do very little written work.  I read aloud a lot.  We watch a lot of dvds.  Star does music ~ & a little German.  We do Home Ec because Home Ec is a necessary survival skill.

This year's papers were worse than usual.  I had to walk away from the math.  The sight of all those numbers & graphs & funny diagrams asking stupid questions made me physically ill.  I could feel the hole opening up in my head as all the numbers fell straight through!  Besides neither Star nor I had ever heard of most of the mathamatical terms being used.  I shrugged & told her to just do her best.  Star, who is unfazed by these things, did what she could ~ which was very little ~ then took pot luck on the rest.  She then sang her way through the remaining 2 papers while wiggling & squiggling & jiggling away, most of her attention obviously on things musical rather than things academic.  Which is the way Star does things.  Always.

Our aversion to math is well known on this blog.  I make no bones that homeschooling a bright but reluctant learner is no bed of roses.  Worth it, yes, but not necessarily easy.  I have been told, more than once, by the academically gifted who are competant in the sciences, that with an attitude like mine I have no business whatsoever homeschooling my child.  I have been berated to death from certain quarters about the disservice I am doing my child.  Really? 

See we got our marks back today ~ & I didn't need the marks to tell me what I already knew because I know my child very well indeed.  Our supervisor apologised profusely.  She had sent Star the wrong math paper & was astonished at how well Star had actually done with it given we have covered almost nothing that was actually on that paper.  However Star's math is not what our supervisor wished to discuss.  She was bursting to tell me that in both vocab & comprehension Star had scored in the 99th percentile!  Which doesn't surprise me.  Not even given that most of her attention was elsewhere at the time.

Most homschoolers score very well in Language skills ~ & well above state schooled children.  Even so Star has surpassed herself.  See we don't do standardised tests.  Haven't for years & years, not since the NAPLAN when Star was so bored by the whole process she drew a most amazing picture on the comprehension paper & applied her spelling rules in new & innovative ways!  I figured I didn't need the stress & refused to participate any more.  Which has meant we don't get feedback either.

Do you know how rare it is for any child to have such a comprehensive vocab & to not only know the meaning of the words but be able to use them correctly in a sentence?  So tell me again why I shouldn't homeschool my child?  Some days I revert to being ten just so I can go, Nah~nah ne nah~nah.

Dearest in Doghouse & other tales of woe

The singing group from hell.  Twice a week we transformed Mr Frace's choir room into a kind of chamber of musical horrors.  Randy Mitchell ~ baritone.  Doug Porter ~ monotone. Pail Pfeiffer  ~ no tone at all.  And of course ~ me. ~The Wonder Years

You ever have weeks like that?  They suck, don't they.

It began with the car.  With 3 other people all vying to drive the car I am rarely behind the wheel these days though strange clanking noises simply worry me rather than enlightening me.  Anyway I heard no strange rattles & I wasn't driving so could not be blamed for the car's sudden cessation of forward momentum.  I was, however, running for a boat when this happened & neither of the men in my life could get the car going again so Star missed rehearsal while I tried to hunt up a working mechanic on the island.  Mechanics we have, just none of them likes to actually work. *sigh*  Eventually one arrived & pronounced the alternator belt had gone.  This strange piece of equipment, which I had never heard of before, is apparently responsible for the car battery charging.  Without it the battery flattens faster than you can sneeze.  The car was, however, drivable ~ so long as every time we took it for a spin we then removed the battery & put it on the charger.  For days our life revolved around the car battery because the mechanic was loath to work in the dark or the rain or on weekends or....!  So absolutely fascinating. Not.

There are worse things so we simply shrugged & got on with it.  The next thing was Star arrived at my bedside in the middle of the night to shake me awake.  This could in no way be construed as good news!  I don't know what to do, she whispered.  I padded after her sleepily to find the hot water system had sprung a leak & was showering the ceiling with boiling off~peak water & it was streaming down into my pantry!  In the ensuring chaos everyone arrived in various states of undress to contribute to the mayhem & Dearest, attempting to turn off the water turned off the electricity.  This apparently caused every computer in the house to crash!!!!  In the absence of Liddy the title of *Computer Technician* falls to me so I spent the next morning on the phone with our provider retrieving passwords & reconfiguring 4 computers!  Our present provider at least provides technicians who speak understandable English!

Meanwhile Ebay has changed it's policies so the money to pay for all this mayhem is tied up in their system!  We are being rained on by the bucket load, the temperature has suddenly realised we are in Autumn & the cats are in serious meltdown.  Kirby thought snuggling in with me last night was an excuse to chat sociably whenever a subject came to mind & I was woken by very enthusiastic kitty~kisses this morning!  The next full moon will probably see me baying the moon & howling like a dervish through the mangroves.

Notwithstanding, the band plays on ~ or in our case the choirs.  For those in Brisbane: the Queensland Festival Chorus is performing at St Stephens on Saturday March 31st from 8pm to 9.30 pm.  I can guarantee the music.  While not exactly a new choir it was previously drawn from QPAC, AVAE, & Exaudi.  Now it is a choir in its own right.  This is this year's opening performance.

The People & the Book.

Sometimes you can be lucky.

That was how I felt when I read Geraldine Brooks Year of Wonders.  Wonderful book.  Beautifully written.  Interesting historical basis.

I am not so sure I feel the same way about People of the Book ~ though I enjoy the punning on the title.  The main character, Hanna, annoys me.   I find Hanna & the plot elements around her contrived ~ & I really don't feel the need to know about other people's sex lives.  Just, no.  Ok?

On the other hand, as I have found with all Brooks work, she has done her research & the facts upon which she has based her fictionalised account of the Sarajevo Haggadah are fascinating in & of themselves.

What is a haggadah & what makes the Sarajevo Haggadah so special?

Haggadah means telling & during the Passover seder Jewish families retell their time of slavery in Egypt & the miracles God performed there to set them free.  A Haggadah contains prayers, readings from the Torah, instructions for the Seder, old and new commentary on the Exodus, and sometimes songs.  What it usually doesn't contain is pictures because pictures contravene the biblical injunction to make no graven images. The Sarajevo haggadah has pictures.  Lots & Lots of pictures.

Which brings us to our history because at one time, Spain, that pot of hotblooded headstrong Lotharios was anything but.  It was largely controlled & influenced by Islamic Moors & had, unusually for Europe at the time, a well educated, well read populace with great religious freedom & tolerance.  The saying went The Christians raise the armies, the Muslims raise the buildings & the Jews raise the money.  Certainly the Christians raised the armies.  Isabella of Castile was busily doing that for a good part of her life, eventually managing to unite Castile & Aragon, freeing both countries from crippling debt & laying the foundations for modern Spain.  In the process Isabella, who seemed to think she was the personal spokesman for God Himself, announced the expulsion of all Moors & Jews unless they converted to the Christian faith ~ which is not important except for one minor thing;  the Jews of Spain were a little more liberal in their interpretations of scripture & it was for them the Sarajevo haggadah was originally made, probably as a wedding present.   You can read about its varied & colourful history here or google Mr Wiki.

It survived the inquisition, WWII & the Bosnia~Hertzigovia conflict.  It's fascination is not just in that it is incredibly old, perhaps dating back to the 1300's, but that it's illustrations are still so bright & colourful & depict things like Jews celebrating a seder.  The academics got their hands on it [cheap at the price] & now the likes of you & I are never likely to set eyes on it though several facsimiles have been done, the more recent a loving reproduction on traditional vellum, just like the original!


A reproduction is never going to reproduce the stains of a life lived: the wine, the salt water, the insect wings casually caught between the pages.  It is upon these things Geraldine Brooks hangs her story, tracing the journey of European Jewry through the worn pages of the haggadah.  As a literary device it only sort of works.  All the stories are left unfinished & hanging ~ a ploy that really annoys me however *realistic* [questionable] such a tactic might be. Each *story* is broken by Hanna's own journey to her Jewish roots but her problematic relationship with her own mother I find implausible & distracting.


On the whole I did not find People of the Book as satisfying as others of Brook's work but there was enough of interest & fascination to get me to the end.  Have you read this?  What did you think?

One Pink Dog.

One of the makeup artists once dyed my dog blue with vegetable blue.  ~Mia Kirshner


All is not well with my soul.   *sigh*  My instinct is to go to ground & wait for *This too, to pass*.  Unfriendly & unsociable of me & probably unhelpful to the state of my soul so I am going to share with you one of the weirder things that has come my way recently.

The photo is not the dog in question; the photo is c/~ of Photobucket who are so accommodating about providing pictures of really weird things. 

Star & I are not much of ones for exercise, which serves no purpose.  For the life of me I cannot figure out why anyone would pay to be tortured in a gym ~ but people do.  Some strange souls even seem to enjoy it.  Star & I are not of their company.  However we do enjoy a leisurely walk in the cool of the evening.  This in no way can be construed as *exercise*.  We dally.  We meander.  We most certainly do not get our heart rates up.  It is an excuse for Star to drap herself all over me because, "Don't touch me!  I don't like being touched!"  Except on her own terms, of course.  It is an opportunity for me to peer into other people's gardens & perhaps surreptitiously nip a stray tendril overhanging the footpath, gather the prettiest feathers, & gaze in wonder as the first stars appear hazily through the dusk.  I embarrass Star.  Don't Stare, she hisses.

Sometimes staring is the only possible response.

So we were leisurely walking home through the gathering dusk, urged on by my Star who objects when the mozzies arrive in black droves to being vampired, when we came to the house on the last corner.  The house has a big picture window out the front & new tenants & would not normally attract my attention.  The yard is bare & dull, the house a butter box of the less interesting kind & there is no garden; not even a cat  basking in the fading sunlight.

Glancing incuriously towards the house my gaze was suddenly arrested.  The pale curtains were pulled back & fastened by big hot pink bows [that alone was enough to make my jaw drop] but dead centre of the window was a tiny white mop of a dog with hot pink ears & a hot pink tail!  I gawped.  [Isn't gawped a lovely word?!] I couldn't believe that anyone could do that to an animal!  Star had to drag me away.  I just couldn't believe my eyes.

So there you have it; the latest craze ~ lap dogs dyed to match your decor.  Last thing I ever expected to see on the island!

It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir. ~ Connie Willis.


I'm not sure how it happened but I am singing with one of Alison's choirs.  We are rehearsing Monday nights.  Star is happily adding up all her driving hours.

There have been big changes with Star's music this year.  There has been a change of rehearsal venue.  There has been  a culling of Star's choir.  This has meant more professionalism & closed rehearsals.  I cannot gripe, not really ~ I got to sit in rehearsals for years & years, but I am going to any way because like it or not I am still carting Star round & I have to be there ~ but now I can no longer sit in on rehearsals.  I cannot afford the movies every week ~ or the coffee shop.  The library is shut & I'm not a window shopper.  I'm not a chatterer either so hob~nobbing with other dispossessed parents is not my thing either. Which means I sit.  I read a lot but the new venue is noisy & not to put too fine a point on it I am bored out of my tiny Celtic mind. 

Still it's once a week.  I figured I could survive once a week.  Eight months & counting down ~ then Star is on her own.  Then Star got her invite for Alison's community choir.  According to Star, if she had her drathers she would do music, music, music & nothing but music till the skies fell & the seas overflowed the dry land.  I didn't even have to ask to know that Star would want to do this too.  I ummmed.  I Ahed.  I dithered.  So good at the dithering.  I asked her to let me think about it because the thought of sitting for more hours in a draughty auditorium cooling my heels when I should be snuggled up in bed with my cats did absolutely nothing for me at all.  I can do rehearsals.  I'm a little quirky that way.  Rehearsals fascinate me.  Watching a maestro pull something amazing from nothing at all constitutes a minor miracle in my book.

Then I got an invite too.  And now I will let you into a little secret.  Auditions have been going on for months but I have never once auditioned for Alison.  Sssssshhh.  I'm not convinced she's ever even heard me sing ~ though I have sung in her impromptu choirs before.  So if I get to play in Star's sandpit it is a whole 'nother ball game 'cause I get to have some fun too ~ so we said Yes!

I really should think these things through better.  I said yes ~ but my music reading is dodgy.  I know what the notes say but I do not hear them in my head the way Star does. I can get my alto & soprano lines muddled.   I have no sense of rhythm & it took me ages to figure out I was having trouble with my timing because we were singing in 3/4 not 4/4.  I really should not be let loose in these things. 

I had trouble from the word go.  I have a limited range.  I can't hit anything in the top four octaves when doing warm ups.  I know that so just open my mouth.  No sound is allowed to emerge.  Then everyone else, who have done QPAC with Alison, moved into their sections. *sigh*  Star sings bottom altos.  I know I can't get down there.  Obviously not a bass ~ or even a tenor.  Nothing on earth would have got me headed towards the soprano section so by a process of elimination I'm singing 1st altos.  This is where my voice seems to sit best but harmony is for musicians.  I'm not a musician.  My head wants to sing the melody line. The music only tells me it's going up or down; I cannot hear it in my head so thanked the Lord quietly that the young woman next to me seemed to have a really good idea of what she was doing & a nice strong voice for me to pitch against! Whew.  Survived!

Have a listen; We are singing this:

The Missionary's Mother.

Knickerbocker, Knickerbocker, number nine



He likes to dance and he keeps in time


Now let's get the rhythm...
 
I have lost the rythmn of my days.  This makes me a cross & ratty woman.  The house is a mess.  This depresses me but the thought of cleaning it all up depresses me more. I prefer to do my housework late at night because there is something extremely satisfying in knowing that unless the fridge raiders go completely beresk my work will stay that way for at least 8 hours.  Nothing depresses me more than having everything neat & tidy & some ape come along & promptly turn it into a  pigsty again!  Unfortunately I have a light sleeper who screams at the first chink of china.
 
I have lost the particle of time I had carved out for bible study & prayer .  Dearest has changed his sleeping & waking patterns so now I must needs find a new iota of time ~ something not easily done in this house!
 
I am not one of those happy women who can run their own, & everybody else's, lives with aplomb.  I'm a potterer & a ditherer & sad to say halfway through cleaning up I am likely to start reading whatever I've just picked up & get completely sidetracked.  This sad lack of focus does not apply to reading or study.
 
If I had the backbone of a jellyfish I'd just get stuck into it & do it.  I don't.  I tentatively poke at it.  If it moves I run for the hills.  Three times this week I've psyched myself to tackle my house.  Three times I've planned my attack in my head.  Three times Liddy has popped up to skype!  Once was to chat.  Once ~ who knows?  Once for our cheesecake recipe.
 
Good grief!  And this woman calls herself a Christian! Cleanliness is next to godliness, right?  How on earth did such a Ditz end up with one child on the mission field & another preparing to go?  Well, I'll let you into a secret; I didn't have anything to do with it.
 
I mightn't be able to manage my life without a massive meltdown but that's ok; God's got my back.  He's got a head for details.  He doesn't forget anything.  He hasn't forgotten I promised Him my children back.  He hasn't forgotten that every night of their growing years we prayed that they would love & serve God.  This is not liscense to be lacksadaisical.  It just means God can plug my holes because He does know what I'm like.  All the trying in the world is not going to magically turn me into a competant housekeeper or a  purposeful parent.  It does mean He gets all the glory.
 
And however strange my parenting may sometimes have been it served it's purpose.  The picture is of Liddy aged about 12 months.  She is wearing the most gorgeous little dress her Ma made her & she looked like the most beautiful little doll ever, very sober & just walking.  We took her to a family wedding with all the Aunts & cousins who are completely baby mad & swooped on her ooohing & aaahing & wanting to pick her up & squeeze her with cuddles ~ an operation that mortified Liddy.  She spent the whole weekend screaming for her mother any time anyone else so much as looked at her!  Her mother complied.  Nothing much has changed.  Liddy pops up on skype, I'll answer.  The house can go hang!

A Tale of Two Houses.

It always amazes me to think that every house on every street is full of so many stories; so many triumphs and tragedies, and all we see are yards and driveways.~ Glenn Close

The house I grew up in was a modern house.  I did not love it.  It had no character.  Oh, it's walls were straight, it's windows sealed,  the roof never leaked, & my mother was, & is, a most extraordinary home~maker.  She worked hard to make her home beautiful & even harder to keep it as neat & tidy as a new pin.

The house was long with one long, slightly pitched roof that the possums used to race along in the dead of a night that was punctuated by blood~curdling screams when a possum misjudged & flew off the end.  At the eastern end the t.v antenna pierced the sky.  It provided the perfect perch for kookaburras & magpies to dive bomb the pool.  It was fibro: easy care, easy maintainance & perched amongst the sandstone & funnel webs on the south side of a steep hill with waterfrontage along the Port Hacking River & great views of The Royal National Park.  My father bought the land for a song when it was so far out of town we were little more than country hicks.

When I was a child the flannel flowers & Christmas Bells grew in riotous profusion but they are delicate plants requiring stable eco~systems & by the time I left home they were no more.  They will not return.

The house looked like what it was: a '70's kit home with all the mod~cons ~ & don't get me wrong.  I appreciate the mod~cons.  And it did have some stories to tell after 20 odd years with my brothers for it was Mark who decided to brew ginger beer under the house.  Too much sugar resulted in a massive explosion one night.  Five minutes later there was a gentle tinkling sound as one by one all the bathroom tiles slide down the wall & shattered on the floor.  And there was the night the whole house shook & my mother, who is a light sleeper, shot up~right in bed demanding to know, "What was that?"  My father, who was anything but a light sleeper, sleepily mumbled, "Just the possums on the roof, dear.  Go back to sleep."  Which simply goes to prove that the possums on our roof created the same amount of shake as a small earthquake.

It was Mark who accidently sat on the cactus by the front door & spent some time with his bottom in the air while his mother & aunt pulled out all the spines.  For a great many years John kept a salt water fish tank opposite the dining room table & you were liable to eat your meal while the tank residents ate eat other!  It redeemed itself the morning were were woken by my mother's excitement to find a tankfull of tiny, newborn seahorse!  However John also kept blue ringed octopus & they were escape artists extraordinaire; you were liable to find their shiveled dehydrated bodies all over the house.

There was a certain blandness to the house I grew up in.  The Celt in me responded to something wilder & more eccentric.  I found it in my Aunt's house ~ though I think only she & I loved it with a passion.  The more practical sorts were horrified by its faults.  My father never cared for it after he spent all of one holiday replacing the white ant riddled cedar roof beams during a monsoonal summer.  We children where thrilled to be living under tarpaulins with buckets under all the drips & half the furniture sitting out on the lawn!  As an adult I have a fellow feeling for my mother & aunt, who were less than thrilled.  Or perhaps it was the fact that half his bike ended up in my Aunt's fancy set of steps.  That it had been sitting in her garage for several decades was beside the point. 

Trafalgar Vale was a generous house; muddly, worn, sturdy.  I used to love coming up the old wooden steps to be greeted by its particular smell: the garden of course, rich, red soil  harbouring a plethora of plants steaming in a tropical broth; wooden boards baking in the sunlight; dust motes dancing in the ribbons of filted light streaming down through the wisteria & alamander & through the louvres of the enclosed side verandahs ~ but most of all the smell of thinners & turps pungently underpinning everything.  My Aunt painted on one of the side verandahs & the smell of her oils & turps permeated the whole house.

My aunt was a gardner.  She did not care for housekeeping or cooking.  She painted so she could buy the plants she couldn't beg, borrow, scavange or downright steal.  Anytime she walked anywhere any stray tendril overhanging a footpath would be snapped off & carted home where it would be popped into a container of potting mix & lovingly coddled into new life.

All these things created a heady mix but the thing that drew me & held me long after the house itself was sold & all the heavy, burdensome furniture parceled out to thrift shops, was the sense of history.  Magpie like my aunt had somehow accumulated most of the family treasures & all of the stories.  You could spend hours rifling through the boxes of photos of Victorians & Edwardians, with their piled up hair & billowing skirts.  My aunt knew all their names & each had a story.   My Aunty Bell, so tiny grandfather could pick her up with one hand; she played the piano beautifully.  My grandfather ~ who grew the only Tamarind in Brisbane.  Uncle Norman, who went away to the war & never came home.  They might be dead & buried, decent Christians every one, but their ghosts lingered in that house & it was no surprise to me that shortly before she died my Aunt was found propped up in bed having a tea party & merrily chatting away to people who had long ago departed this earth!

I've always been a sucker for a good story.  My Aunt's house had a library full of them.

An education & a half.

That's why I ended up leaving school - because it required so much time ~ Shawn Fanning

  I left school in 1975 ~ thus ending 13 years of enforced misery. Even now I can think of nothing worse than being forced to endure the unrelenting company of my peers! It wasn't that I was bullied or particularly picked on but each day was a challenge to not stand out from the crowd, to fit in, while being acutely aware that you did not fit in.  I wasn't pretty enough ~ or sporty enough or clever enough.  I wasn't into clothing or hair or make~up ~ & I had brothers so boys had no especial interest for me.  And children, even ditzy children like me, are realists; school was a given.  One knew one had to endure it.  No point in complaining ~ not in our house, though I did know one little boy who did rather well at complaining enough to get out of school quite regularly!

There were some compensations to the unrelenting boredom, the stale lunch box lunches, the peer jockeying & the dreaded math lessons.  I was reading off the primary charts & at least my primary school had an exceptionally good library with a most wonderful librarian & the older I became the less often I was to be found on the playground & the more likely it was I would be curled up, forgotten, in some cool corner of the library.

I went to a State Primary school.  It took me 6 years but I finally chose my friends rather than merely struggling to fit in with the alpha group ~ who accepted me but did not miss me when I departed its vapid company.  They were friendships destined not to last because my parents did not like our local high school, which had a really, really bad reputation, & chose to enrol me here. 

This was apalling.  It wasn't the hours of travel each day that bothered me.  I can read on trains ~ & I did.  No, it was quite simply the fact I didn't know a single other solitary soul in the entire school!  And my math was so awful I got put down in the class for dummies ~ where I was chronically bored because all the good literature went to the A stream!  Within a week another little girl from my primary school arrived but this was no solace as she was incapable of holding a conversation without telling you the price of everything ~ a quirk that astonished me as much as it apalled me.  Fancy being able to hold all those numbers in your head, let alone think them important!

The school I attended was nothing like the bright & shiny school depicted in recent photos.  It was  still a relatively young school & the place this showed up the most was in the library!  It did not have a good library.  It was well equipped in every other way.  The science labs were state of the art ~ no consolation to someone who refused to even consider a subject where you had to cut up dead animals!  Uh~uh, not this little black duck!  And forget Physics or chemistry; they required far too much math even if I was vaguely interested [I was not] in the how & why of things.

I was strong in the arts & quite capable of reasonable grades with an minimum amount of work ~ & it didn't take me long to figure out if I locked myself in my bedroom with the pretence of doing homework, I would be left alone to read.  I wasn't a terribly social child & it's a good thing I didn't have more of an inclination towards wickedness because the most interesting people I knew where very wicked indeed.  They grew pot in the neighbour's tomato patch & when they harvested it they smoked up a storm in his potting shed ~ resulting in the fire department being called out & expulsions all round. 

We had the most awful science teacher; an Arab who made it plain he considered the teaching of science to females a huge waste of his time & whom every class he taught behaved so dreadfully he eventually locked one class in their room at lunch.  They promptly climbed out the 2nd story windows & negotiated the window sills to enter the next classroom & escape.  I did not behave badly.  This was prime reading time so far as I was concerned & because I was quiet & no bother to anyone I was allowed to get away with it  The sheer impossiblity of my cheating on an external exam left him bewildered at how I had managed to snag an A when I had patently paid no attention whatsoever in class.

Then there was the delightful day when the surfie chick crowd arrived at school completely off their faces on acid ~ & one girl freaked out so badly her friends removed her to the boarding house sick bay.

History, which I liked, & French, which I might have liked, were very badly taught.  Lovely people ~ just  not cut out for managing classrooms of obstreperous teens. In 13 years I can only remember having 2 absolutely brilliant teachers & it is no wonder I looked forward to their classes, paid attention, mostly,  but for the most part drifted through my days with my mind on far more interesting things than what was going on in the classroom around me.

I spent 6 years, five days a week with these people.  I know things about some of them even their nearest & dearest don't know.  I left school & never spoke to any of them again.  Not really.  I rang my *Bestie* when her father & young brother perished in a light aeroplane accident.  Three pilots on board & they still hit the deck.  I went, once, to a reunion dinner at an Indian restraunt 6 months out of school, barely said two words all evening.  Couldn't wait to escape.  The gulf between us had only widened & we had absolutely nothing in common any more.  I have never desired to attend an Old Girls Reunion.  I have no desire at all to go back or find out what any of the people I spent so much time with ended up doing with their lives.  It unlikely to have been overly exciting.

What about you?  Do you keep in contact with old school chums?  Attend Renunions? Or are you like me & thank God you never have to go back there ever again?!

To Be, or Not to Be...

Mad, adj.: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. ~Ambrose Bierce


I learnt early I was not the brightest caboose on the tracks.  Round about grade 4 they used to issue standard I.Q tests to all the State School children, of which I was one at the time.   The selected intellectually superior were given the option to attend the gifted school.  Both my brothers made it without even trying.  I did not.

See, the tests are loaded.   Without saying a word the implication was that Math & Science mattered.  They came first on the paper.  Naturally I couldn't do any of it.  I never got to the rest of the paper because English was no~where near as important as Math & Science.  It took me a long time to realise I wasn't dumb; I just operated slightly differently to the rest of the world.

It took me so long in fact I had children of my own who started saying things like,"Speak English, mum", when I thought I was.  Then they started going, "Thanks to you, mum, my friends can't understand me."  As a family we have an extensive vocabularly ~ & we do not necessarily stick to English.  There was a time, because the words, Shut Up! were forbidden, when Star took great delight in telling people to Dun do beal! or Fermer la bouche!  Admittedly I once caused great consternation by muddling up my gentiles & genatiles.  I knew the difference but never having heard either word actually pronounced took pot luck & got it wrong!  It happens.

Forty years down the track I now know a lot about what *giftedness* looks like ~ & it is often not what people expect!  The intellectually bright are often not academically inclined.  More often not.  Many hide a learning disability.  Others concentrate on one area to the exclusion of all else.  I know I did.  As an adult I can run down the checklists put out for these things & tick all the boxes relating to language, interests, concentration ~ & not a single one relating to math, science, logic.    My mind does not work that way.

I can run down these lists & tick all the boxes in one area or another for every single one of my children ~ which is incredibly scary because I do not have a single academically inclined child.  I have 2 whose intellectual ability is downright scary & one of them has absolutely no idea how to manage his life.

With an election looming in Queensland,  Education is once again in the spotlight.  There is lots of noise & pollies making promises that mean nothing & less than nothing because you cannot make people learn.  You cannot fix a problem by throwing money, & more money, at it.  You cannot motivate the intellectually able with standardised education because they have no interest in standardised anything.  Many become intellectually numb because most classrooms are beehives of boredom rather than centres of learning.

I do not have the answers.  I know we have got it very, very wrong.  One system is not going to fit every child.  It is not even going to fit *most* children ~ there being no such thing as the average child.  What I do know is that every child is gifted in their own way because God delights in diversity, in variables, in difference.  It is people who try & make one size fits all education.  I am not even convinced that there are certain things *everybody* should know.  What is important is that people know how to find out.

And here's a thought: probably the 2 greatest inventions of all time are fire & the wheel.  Both were invented by people who could neither read nor write & were unlikely to be able to count.  Makes you think, doesn't it?

Rabbit V Lab: Rabbit wins.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits. ~ Dame Edith Sitwell

It is places, not people or things, that leave an indelible impression on me, sinking down into my very bones to stain them with the scents & colours of the past.  More than the house I actually grew up in my Aunt's house stains my memory.  There was a generosity & wildness to it's nature that appealed to me that was lacking in my own well ordered home ~ for the most part.  We owned animals so there was the exception.

I am not sure, given a choice, that my mother would ever have owned pets.  They are never as easy to govern as children & can't be arbitarily ordered & inevitably a lot of their care fell to my mother but my father was a well known softie & so we owned both a cat & a dog, various fish in a tank on the kitchen bench & for a time budgies ~ then never again.  Their escape into the wild was far too traumatic. 

Then my youngest brother, Mark, began school & a whole new world of possibilities opened up for Mark promptly became friends with a family who owned & bred rabbits.  Now in Australia rabbits are declared vermin & you need a special liscence to own & breed them & in some states, like Queensland, even desexed & kept as a pet you are not allowed them & they will be removed & put down.  Even the travelling Pet Animal Farm that goes round to all the schools is not allowed a rabbit.  N.S.W is not so strict & so long as your animal is desexed & properly housed you are allowed to keep a rabbit as a pet.

Mark began his propaganda campaigne.  He raved about the cuteness of the rabbits.  He visited & explained how they were housed so cheaply & ate grass  or the odd lettuce leaf so wouldn't cost anything [perish the notion!] to feed.  They were cute & cuddly & mummy rabbit had just had babies & there was the most adorable snow white bunny & he would dearly like a little white rabbit all his own!  Either Mark's tactics were extremely effective or, more likely, he simply wore down all resistance with his persistence because my father promptly built him a rabbit hutch & in due time a tiny white rabbit arrived on our premises.

It looked very cute.  Butter wouldn't meltish but it had a nasty mind!  My mother, who is a fair & just woman & takes all her responsibilities seriously, felt sorry for Snowball [yes, originality is not the name of the game] cooped up all day in his hutch so each morning when she went to hang out her load of washing she would let Snowball out of his hutch to gambol at her feet while she worked.  Gambol he did, happily keeping her company & staying within easy reach until the moment she decided it was time to go inside & finish her chores~ at which point Snowball promptly disappeared under the cubbyhouse from whence it was impossible to extract him.  No amount of celery sticks, lettuce leaves or carrot sticks was enough to lure him close enough to be grabbed until he tired of the game & wandered out into the open waiting placidly to be picked up, roundly scolded & deposited back in his pen.

Snowball was not the cute & cuddly type.  He was a biter & an Alpha Male of the most notorious sort & I learnt the hard way why rabbit kicks are so dangerous.  Despite this I was rather fond of Snowball.  He had one redeeming quality for which I would forgive him multiple sins; he did not like the neighbour's labrador!

The neighbour's labrador & I had issues.  I'm not really a dog person though, on the whole, dogs like me & will happily slobber all over me given half a chance ~ & there have been dogs I have been fond of, even liked, though none have captured my heart the way my cats have.  The neighbour's labrador was not one of them!

I have heard all my life what wonderful family dogs labs are; how child friendly; how docile & biddable & trainable yadda yadda.  For my money they are the stupidest mutts on the planet & the one dog I loath with a passion! 

There was a period when I would arrive home from school to start walking down our drive ~ our long steep drive with it's towering gums & burgeoning bracken winding its slippery way down, down, down through the stippled green till the rich smell of mould & eculypt was overpowered by the salt smell of the sea & piles of carrageen ~ when the neighbours mutt would promptly arrive, on cue, wrap his jaws firmly around my wrist & escort me home!  OK, bird dog, so it didn't actually hurt & I wasn't frightened but I didn't need escorting down my own drive to my own front door either!  I used to dread the Lab's arrival with a great & fearful dread.  Perhaps I just wasn't firm enough but I could never dissuade the stupid thing.  If I put my hands in my pockets he simply gripped my wrist through the cloth & all.  If I held them away from me, he lept for them.

Then one day The Mutt came wandering down our drive while Snowball was loose in the yard.  Snowball was definitely an Alpha Male & the territory was all his because both the cat & the dog were females!  He took one look at this great hairy monster invading his territory & his ears stood straight up.  He raised himself on his haunches for a better look & his eyes took on a steely glint.  He took a giant leap & biffed the Lab a good one around the ears.  The Lab turned tail & fled yelping up the hill with Snowball in hot pursuit!  Go Snowball!

I went away on camp.  When I returned Snowball was no more.  R.I.P.