9 Jun 2014 hypatia   » (Journeyer)

Saturday 9 June 2014

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

— Douglas Adams

I’ve decided the same applies more generally to life experiences. Anything that happens before you are 10 (20?) is the natural order of things and you should take it as read that it will probably happen practically every day.

Thus it was with today’s visit to the Australian Museum’s Tyrannosaurus exhibition. This isn’t New York; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more-or-less complete fossilised skeleton of a dinosaur before. (I was living in Orange when most of the Canowindra fish fossils were found, but… fish. I feel a bit bad for Canowindra: your teeny town gets a world-leading fossil discovery, except, it’s fish. Sure, now I’m interested. But now I’m not a kid.) But V is four, and so I guess he presumes he’s going to see a T. rex most months of his life from now on. It’s a good exhibit, I feel like Andrew and I should take a day off work and go and see it by ourselves, without a world-weary four year old in attendance.

The weather of the last few days has been very un-Sydney-like. Sydney weather likes to set in. It’s not just “mostly sunny”, it’s unrelenting non-stop ultraviolet being shot into your brain. It’s not just “showers”, it’s flash floods. But these last few days have been truly showers; about every thirty minutes a sudden dump of rain gets spat in from the ocean. Difficult to plan around.

We’ve continued with the trend of V’s social life eclipsing ours. This weekend we went to the pool in order to try and teach him to jump in the big pool (no), Tumbalong Park where he ran in the fountains despite it being the first weekend that feels like winter and it being just as cold as the big pool, Georgie’s second birthday party, the dinosaur exhibit and the bike playground.

This feels like, and is, way too much stuff, but V continues in his pattern of some years now of being very difficult to entertain when we’re inside our house. There’s a wide world out there, and he’d camp in it if he could. Hrm, now I have a horrible feeling camping is in our future. So a never ending series of expeditions is currently the lesser of two evils.

Meanwhile, in the future looms The Great and Terrible Business Trip of 2014, namely, me taking A to the US for business for a fortnight, leaving a week from tomorrow. Every time I think about it I realise there’s a new complication. I need to take 100% nursing compatible clothes (which overlap not at all with my preferred conference wear). I will need to be back in my hotel room every evening at 6pm-ish when she turns into a pumpkin, which will be a significant dent in conference socialising. I can’t use taxis for airport transfers because she would need a US-approved rear facing car seat for every one. I am not taking a stroller either, so I’ll be babywearing her non-stop.

Val asked me whether people had been giving me negative feedback about this trip; I replied that they have, but in a resigned “well, this is exactly the kind of thing we expect of you, Mary” way.

Syndicated 2014-06-09 12:40:57 from puzzling.org

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