Wombats and Cents

Greeting card frustration

2009-10-27T21:43:00.000+11:00

I recently tried to buy a greeting card for a friend who was in the hospital. After scanning the row upon row of trite humor and syrupy sympathy I gave up and went home, which is what usually happens when I try to buy a greeting card.

There are whole stores that are devoted to selling greeting cards (and a few other odds and ends associated with giving gifts). They would have you believe that there is a greeting card for every situation: birthday, graduation, wedding, illness or injury, and even death. Cards fall into a few categories: the ones with tasteless or almost tasteless humor, purporting to express something that can only be humorous if it is untrue, and therefore completely irrelevant; the ones with cute animals and fatuous statements; the ones with handsome photos or artistic drawings of the human body; and the ones that are blank. Actually, there are more, but those seem to be the ones I notice.

Each card displays a few key words on the front to make it clear its intent, so a birthday card will start with "This birthday..." and a wedding card will say something like "Congratulations on your wedding" as if to merely say "Congratulations" was not enough for the lucky couple to figure out what it was in regards. This is, of course, because the point of the writing on the front of the card is not so much to express any thoughts to the recipient, but to advertise the purpose of the card to the purchaser. The end result is that the card feels unnatural to the person for whom it is intended.

I inevitably buy the blank cards because, after a sincere effort to find a card that will help me straighten out my thoughts and feelings without actually requiring me to write them myself, I always feel a bit insulted by the simplicity of the commercial cards.

The word greet can mean both to address with some form of salutation and to grieve. This is convenient for the people who manufacture greeting cards, because they create cards not only for happy occasions, like birthdays, but also sad occasions, like the death of a loved one, and disappointing occasions, like injury. Despite the breadth of the occasions, though, there didn't seem to be one card that was appropriate for the one our friend was facing. You see, our friend was in the hospital with the big C. Not the "get well soon" kind, but the kind when the only type of treatment is morphine. The kind when you know the end is coming very soon.

So there I was trying to find a card for when we saw him for what would certainly be the last time. The sympathy cards didn't seem right: I didn't just want to say we were thinking of him. A "Get Well Soon" card would have been insulting. There were cards for when someone has just died, but nothing for someone who was about to die. It was clearly all too immense for the greeting card companies to face. After breaking down in tears, I went home and made a card with a sad face and filled it with my own thoughts about how we were happy we met, that we had become quite accustomed to having him as a friend, and were going to miss him when he was gone. And we do.

Rest in peace Graham.

Land of contrasts

2009-04-04T23:00:00.002+11:00

It has been an interesting summer here in Melbourne. We spent most of the summer trying to keep out of the oven hot temperatures with the hair dryer winds, including three consecutive days in the mid 40s (that's around 110F) with high winds. In the months of January and February we received only a few mm of rain in Melbourne (normal is about 80-90mm for that period). At the start of February there was a further windy 40+ day followed by a windy cool change that resulted in the deadliest and most destructive forest fires in Australia's history.

While the drought that started before I moved to Australia 8 years ago wares on, the town of Innisfail, in Queensland, was submerged under flood waters. Between January 25 and February 25 the tropical town received more rain than Melbourne has for the past four years! And this week Coffs Harbour, on the North coast of New South Wales, was inundated when some areas near the town received almost 450mm in 24 hours. Just in case you can't process mms, that's about 1.5 ft of water! I can't even fathom that much water falling from the sky in such a short period of time.

Finally, to keep us on our toes, we've felt two earthquakes in Melbourne in the past month.

Autumn has come, however, bringing cooler and wetter weather. The drought is still here, but we've finally had a few good rainfalls, and those fires that were set in February have been contained. Despite all the sensational news (I mean that in a bad way), we are doing well, as are our friends and family.

Hard to judge how rational the fear is

2009-02-07T12:41:00.002+11:00

A recent article in Salon.com about peanut allergy got my goat. Here's my reaction.

Fear is only irrational if it is out of proportion to the risk. The problem with peanut allergies is that, for many of us, it is difficult to assess the risk of us or our children becoming severely ill or dying from exposure to peanuts. Certainly, for some people, the risk became quite obvious the first time they or their child was rushed to the emergency room, but for many others the allergy is identified in relation to treating less sensational threats, like eczema or asthma. For those people identified through skin prick tests or blood tests as likely to have an allergy, or those who had a reaction to eating peanuts that was not confirmed by a physician, assessing the risk is decidedly more fuzzy.

If the average time from exposure to anaphylactic reaction is 10 minutes, then anyone caring for a potentially allergic person must know how to administer their epipen. Most people have never triggered an epipen and have no specialist training in recognizing an allergic reaction, so for them the best way to control the situation is to prevent exposure to the allergen. This is true not just for parents, but for childcare centers, kindergartens, and schools. For children who are too young to read the ingredients label, or who lack the life experience to know that something called "satay chicken" contains peanuts, it is pivotal that the environment they are in contain as few allergen containing foods as possible. This is why carers of children are increasingly choosing to restrict common allergens from places that are largely populated by children who are too young to protect themselves.

The author implies that many of the children described as allergic to peanuts or other foods are not. Though many people misuse or do not distinguish between the terms "allergy" and "sensitivity", it is not fair to denigrate the experiences of those who suffer serious discomfort from eating certain foods, whether they have been confirmed by a skin prick test or not. Neither skin prick tests nor blood tests are 100% predictive of allergic reaction or lack thereof. The Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy states

"When properly conducted, the skin prick test is a highly sensitive and specific test for the presence of allergen-specific IgE antibody. However, the presence of IgE antibody (as defined by a positive skin prick test) does not prove that the patient is clinically reactive to the allergen."

They go on to state that wheal size is not predictive of the severity of symptoms. Controlled food challenges, where the subject eats the food in question in a controlled environment, are considered the gold standard for determining food sensitivity.

My son, who suffered from severe eczema as an infant, has had multiple positive skin prick tests to peanuts (and never negative) but never had a reaction that could be definitively attributed to peanuts. Still, the allergist recommended avoiding all nuts until he was older. After accidentally exposing him to almonds with no negative effect, I foolishly decided to challenge him with cashews, to which he had a severe, but not anaphylactic, reaction consistent with allergy and later confirmed by a skin prick test. We now carry an epipen. As much as I would like to believe we will never need it, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore the recommendations of his allergist, who I must assume knows more on the subject than I.

Though many people with peanut allergies do not have life threatening reactions to eating them, the conclusion I've drawn from countless hours spent trying to determine how serious my son's allergy may be is that the medical studies cannot conclusively say that the severity of one person's reactions will always be consistent. Hence, he may have hives one time he eats peanuts and anaphylaxsis on another occasion. Then again, he may not, but how am I to know. And that's my point. Without more accurate tests to predict the severity of a reaction then one must conclude that a life threatening reaction is possible for anyone who demonstrates some kind of reaction.

I'm all for ridding the world of misinformation, and I appreciate the author exposing the questionable statistics of the FAAN and the motivations of Ms Munoz-Furlong, but I think the author has failed to provide clarity about peanut allergy. Despite any of his efforts to the contrary, he has produced an article that belittles those who express concern for the welfare of the children in their care. If a skin prick test predicted that a child in your care was probably allergic to peanuts, and whose doctor recommended avoiding peanuts and carrying an epipen, you would never forgive yourself if that child died because you did not take the advice seriously.

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie

2008-03-30T09:23:00.002+11:00

I became an Australian citizen this week. The final step in the citizenship process is a public ceremony in which I pledged allegiance to Australia and received a certificate of citizenship and an Australian native plant. It had the solemn feel of a school commencement ceremony, and it was a commencement of sorts.

My ceremony took part in an art deco town hall with a curtained stage at the front and balcony seating at the back. Half the ground floor seating was filled by other foreigners taking the pledge. The other half and the entire balcony were filled with family members and friends, there to acknowledge the metamorphosis.

During the ceremony we were told to introduce ourselves to our neighbor and say “I am an Australian.” The woman next to me, the wife of an Australian and mother of two Australians, repeated it over and over as if she couldn’t believe it had finally happened. For me it didn’t seem real until the next day when I was trying to explain to my three year old what the ceremony was for.

As the new citizens were called to receive their certificate and cross the stage I tried to listen to the countries they were from. Quite a few were from India, there were two other women from the US, a few Taiwanese, one Iraqi. I do not know the story behind any of these people stating their allegiance to the Australia but I can guess that for some of them it was a significant achievement, a huge figurative step forward in the opportunities that are open to them. To me, it felt like the logical next step on a path I was steered down many years ago, not entirely of my own choice.

I didn’t grow up dreaming of living in a better world. I was fortunate to be born into one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries on the earth. So when I left the US, it was not out of distaste for my homeland (though I do joke that it was distaste for its president at the time) but to be with the Australian part of my family. It took me many years to accept that I belong here and only recently, when I needed to arrange a new visa, did I start to realize how ridiculous it was that I needed permission to stay here. My husband and children are Australian. I own a house here. I do my shopping here (well, most of it), and occasionally I work here. I have all my daily and weekly routine worked out here. My friends (most of them) are here. This is not something that comes about over night. It took years to get to this stage. And though I may fantasize about moving back to some mythical place in the US that existed 10 years ago but not any more, I have no ambitions to go through the social upheaval and dislocation that comes with an international move again.

I thought it was interesting that we were supposed to say “I am an Australian”. I don’t think I would ever choose to say it that way. I would naturally say “I am Australian,” just like I say “I am American.” Am I an Australian? Well, technically I am, but do I feel like I am? I eat Vegemite, know the words to Waltzing Matilda, and have been swooped by a magpie. On the other hand, I have never seen an episode of A Country Practice, I can’t seem to develop a taste for Weetbix, and I’m still trying to figure out the appropriate way to use the phrase “fair dinkum.”

But now that I am an Australian am I still an American? I watched the first space shuttle launch, love peanut butter, and always dip my chocolate chip cookies in milk. But after 9/11 I didn’t fly the flag. In fact, I wasn’t even aware it was unpatriotic not to do so until at least nine months later. I don’t spend my life being paranoid about terrorists, nor have I ever thought it was appropriate to curtail the rights of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. Who knows what else I’m missing out on by living “overseas.”

It was the seventeenth century when the first member of my family arrived in the colonies that became the US. The most recent immigrants in my family were my great great grandparents. After a lifetime of being a member of one of the oldest families in the US I am suddenly one of the newest immigrants of a country. But sitting at the citizenship ceremony and listening to the mayor of Boroondara, who herself became an Australian only 6 years ago, and the member for Kew, who pointed out that more of the people in his electorate were children of people born overseas than those born in Australia, I came to appreciate the meaning of the phrase “a nation of immigrants.” I may have missed out on the childhood experiences of the people who were born here, but I share the experience of a significant number who weren’t: we all naturalized to Australia.

Cheers rang out as the names of the new citizens were called, and at one point someone from the balcony chanted “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” and got a few responses of “Oi, Oi, Oi.” At first, the chant seemed an affront to the solemnity of the occasion, but on reflection I realized that it was a celebration of the fundamental meaning of the ceremony: to be an Australian.

Am I less American because I have taken this final step towards belonging in my new country? I don’t think so. I think it is just the government finally acknowledging how Australian I've become.

Mix and match your duplo

2008-02-27T08:52:00.002+11:00

Cordless power drill

I've always known that lego (and now duplo, its larger cousin) was a fantastic toy. With a few blocks and a little imagination you can create a stunning array of things, from pretend power drills to guitars with strings to pluck (granted, not with particularly good tones). With the addition of a few specialized pieces picked up from the Legoville collections or Bob the Builder sets, you've got everything you need to create an extensive array of construction equipment.

Semi trailer with excavator like the ones we saw when they pulled down the house on the corner - using truck base from cement truck kit, wheel base from Lofty kit, caterpillar tracks from Muck kit, back hoe and cabin from Scoop kit, warning sign base from one of the Bob the Builder sets to provide the articulation between the truck and the trailer, generic pieces, and rubber bands to create the loading ramp.

My son loves tools, trucks, and tractors, so we have, in addition to a few basic sets of duplo blocks, a cement truck and Scoop (tractor), Lofty (crane), Sumsy (forklift), Muck (supposedly a grater), and Rolly (roller). We haven't actually started watching Bob the Builder in our house, which is probably a blessing, but which also means we aren't compelled to create the characters. The pictures show some of the things we've put together instead.

Guitar with rubber band strings

My only big gripes with duplo are the lack of hinges (you'll notice my makeshift hinge for the loading ramp on the semi-trailer) and pieces that click together in different planes, so you can build things at 45 and 90 degree angles.

Construction crane like the ones over the parking structure that is being built at the junction - using windows for the scaffold section, cabin from Bob the Builder sets, crane arm from Lofty set. The ladder is made from fence pieces turned on end.

Our son is interested in creating lego versions of things he sees when he's out, and I like the fact that he can imagine the real object even though the lego version is rough, at best. He has even created his own grinder, based on seeing one being used on the way to child care.

Wanted: waffle maker

2008-01-28T02:48:00.002+11:00

In seven years of living Australia I have seen specialized electrical equipment designed for a single purpose, such as cooking pizza, cooking sausages, baking donuts (aren't donuts supposed to be fried), grilling sandwiches, boiling rice, grinding coffee, making coffee, or baking bread.

So why is it that I can't find a waffle maker in this country?

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[Updated 2 April, 2008]

I got the Breville for my birthday. It arrived this week (a little late for the party, but who cares). I usually consider waffles a breakfast food, but we couldn't resist making them for dessert the night it arrived. It cooks well enough, and the non-stick plates are fantastic, but it's awfully small, making it sub-optimal for big groups.

On day two, my son wanted waffles for morning tea - I obliged, and then that night we ate the left overs for dessert with ice cream and chocolate sauce. Yum, yum!

Thanks again AB. We'll have to have you and the family over for brunch.

Don't be tied down by your furniture

2007-08-21T01:31:00.003+10:00

Whatever is produced in haste goes hastily to waste. -- Saadi (1184-1291)

A number of years ago, an old climbing buddy of mine graduated from college, got a job, and bought a couch. At the time his best friend, who was more attuned to sleeping under the stars than on a sofa, berated him for purchasing something that would tie him down, force him to have a home base, and prevent him from picking up and moving on. It was only the first step; it wasn't long before my friend had purchased a house that stuck him smack in the middle of settled.

My husband I lived in four different places in the five years before we moved to Australia. We were anything but settled; we were living frugally (him more so than me) and most of our furniture was what we had scavenged from home or found at garage sales, that emblem of grad school economy. Some of it was nice enough that it almost made the move to Australia (generally the stuff pilfered from my parent's house), but most of it was junk: old desks with rings from water glasses, shelves constructed from bricks and boards, and cheap pine furniture that we had constructed or stained ourselves. It was never meant to be permanent, just to satisfy a need until we moved on.

When we relocated to Australia we sold virtually all of our furniture to other frugal grad students and co-workers and bought new things in our new country. We were settling now, intending to stay here long enough to build our careers, buy a house, and have a few kids. Following the bed, our first purchase was a couch.

Being unemployed at the time, I spent ages looking for the couch. I went to every furniture store I could find, from the upscale Tailor Made sofa shop to the very pedestrian Sydney's package shop. I ended up finding a suitable couch at a middle of the road shop, where I mulled over upholstery for ages before picking a virtually solid pattern in a pleasing color called basil. Six weeks later, the new couch arrived at our rental. It looked just fine with the tan carpeting and the brown curtains, and fit quite well in our rather compact living room.

Ten months later we moved into the first house we owned. The couch was relocated to the middle of our new living room, where it also looked just fine with the tan carpeting and putty colored walls. However, not long after the move, we decided to take advantage of our newly acquired home owner freedom to paint the walls of our abode a buttery yellow color. Then we decided we needed more seating in the living room.

Suddenly our existing couch became a liability; the dusty green color didn't match anything, the living room was more suited to two smaller couches, and the style was no longer available. Three things saved it from a garage sale: 1) it was the most comfortable couch we could find; 2) we are too parsimonious to replace it; and 3) garage sales are a pain.

In actual fact, one more thing saved the couch from a garage sale: people in the inner east suburbs of Melbourne don't go to garage sales (do they even have them here?); they go to Ikea. I've never found any furniture from Ikea that I find terribly appealing; it seems to be made either of cheap materials or with cheap design (which is pretty much their mantra, though I'm sure they prefer the word inexpensive). The surprising thing is that it is not poor grad students who shop there. It is parents of young children, some of them not so young, and not terribly poor. And the things they sell are deceptively expensive, as if they make the stuff look cheap so you think you're getting a deal.

The philosophy behind shopping at Ikea, as one friend explained to me, was that they needed something now, but didn't want to spend money on something they'd want to get rid of in the future. Buying something that quickly falls apart releases you from any obligation to keep it when you want to update the decor. But it also shackles you to a piece of junk until that time arrives.

To be fair, it's not just about the decor. For almost two and a half years my son slept in the same crib that I slept in 30 years earlier and that my father slept in nearly 30 years before that. In the crib's 68 year history, it has been in storage for roughly 55 years. The mattress height cannot be adjusted, the side that lowers squeaks, and it doesn't satisfy the latest Australian safety standards, but it looks nice, and is sturdy and safe (in my opinion). The crib, which was made by my great-grandfather, was shipped to Australia at great expense. In fact, for the price of the shipping (which did include a few other small items) we could have bought a crib at Ikea that does have an adjustable mattress height, does not have a squeaky side, and would be so worn out after two kids that it could go straight to the junk yard. And when I consider that, I get a little bit envious of the people who did not have a 68 year old crib that was built to last.

If we had spent half as much on the couch we might have just given it to the Salvos, but I suspect that we would have kept it anyway, since as long as we can still sit on it why should we write it off? Part of me wishes that we had gone the Ikea path so we could replace our furniture when it no longer suited the decor, but I know that regardless of what furniture we chose we would still be stuck with
it, so it may as well have been a quality design made with quality materials.

Beware the Australian Trolley

2007-06-21T00:53:00.002+10:00

The classic American shopping cart has two wheels at the back that are fixed in a forward facing position and two wheels at the front that turn in the direction that they are pushed. For some reason, one of the four wheels always seems to have something stuck in it so that it doesn't turn well, or it swivels from side to side incessantly as you push the cart around the store. In contrast, the standard Australian trolley (as shopping carts are known to Australians) has four wheels that swivel and rarely seem to insist on a particular direction.

I give the Australian's credit for designing wheels that obviously rotate more smoothly, but every time I use an Australian trolley I curse the person who decided that four swiveling wheels would be a good idea, and every person after him who failed to see the wisdom of using swiveling wheels on the front of the trolley and fixing the rear two wheels in the same way it is done on everything from strollers to cars. Granted, the trolleys do have a very tight turning radius, but they are very difficult to control on anything but a perfectly horizontal surface.

For all the stress about child safety in cars (proposed legislation by the Australian National Transport Commission would require children to be in approved child seats until the age of 7), why is no one concerned about the kids who ride in these trolleys. The "seat-belt" that is provided in the trolley was clearly intended to prevent the child from climbing out of the seat, flipping over the trolley, falling from the highest point of the trolley, or pulling things off the store shelves. There are no security provisions to prevent a trolley containing a child from rolling down the parking lot or to protect the child when the trolley hits the curb side-on and tips over from the combination of the momentum it gains as it rolls sideways down a hill and its high center of gravity.

This hasn't even touched on the physical challenge of maneuvering a loaded trolley from the store to the car, up and down curbs, and through a parking lot on a hillside, or preventing your trolley from escaping as you load the groceries into the car. Unless the driving surface is completely horizontal, as you thankfully find inside the grocery store (but not, I might add, inside our local fresh food market), the trolley always rolls downhill. Rather than pushing on the handle to redirect the front of the trolley in the desired direction, you must walk to the side of the trolley to prevent it from going sideways, drive the trolley cockeyed, or pull on the handle and swing the trolley back into the desired direction. These techniques must be repeated until you reach either a perfectly horizontal surface or your car.

Once you reach your car, you cannot rely on pointing the trolley into the back bumper to keep it there while you load the groceries into the boot (aka trunk). In the US, the shopping cart has no where to go, but in Australia there's no such limitation. If the car is parked in the aforementioned sloped parking lot, then the trolley simply pivots to the side and starts its decent down the hill. Keeping the trolley in place, while using both hands to lift the well loaded cloth bags, requires hooking a foot around one wheel of the trolley in order to prevent it from escaping. Moving a toddler from the seat in the trolley to the car without causing collateral damage is an even greater challenge.

I once saw an Australian trolley with fixed rear wheels and was excited that it might be a sign of things to come. Surely, I thought, as soon as people see how much easier it is to control one of these trolleys everyone would be demanding them. But people must be awfully stuck in their ways, because that trolley disappeared, and when my local grocery store (the largest national chain) recently replaced their entire collection of trolleys I was disappointed to see the same old wheel configuration.

My new sewing machine

2007-04-14T16:31:00.002+10:00

I grew up around sewing machines. My first sewing machine, which I still have and use, was a 1976 Singer. It is built like a rock (and weighs about as much as one), and 31 years later still compares favorably against most modern home sewing machines. I've since added a serger (a.k.a. over-locker) to my toolkit, and have been fantasizing about a cover stitcher. But yesterday, when I went with my mother to help her pick out a new sewing machine, I was utterly charmed by a little chain stitcher.

The sewing machine shop, located in the heart of San José, Costa Rica, was the largest I've ever seen. It eclipsed the home sewing machine shops around the suburbs of Melbourne, where I live, as well as the one in Boulder, where I used to live. It even made the industrial sewing machine shop I once visited in Detroit look twinky. This place was big, and it was filled with table after table of new and used sewing machines, over-lockers, cover stitchers, and display cases filled with specialized feet and feeders for the various machines. The entrance was dominated by industrial sewing machines (Costa Rica has a healthy textile industry) and the interior was overwhelmed by domestic machines, some of which came with tables fitted with working foot pedals for people living with limited access to power (when was the last time you saw one of those for sale in the US - did it belong to your grandmother, or was it during the preparations for Y2K?). Upstairs, where you could go if you were escorted by one of the sales people, were two more racks filled with used sewing machines.

Only minutes after entering the store we noticed a virtual duplicate of my 1976 Singer sewing machine in a locked case along one wall, sitting next to a variety of other machines of similar vintage. It turns out the machine hasn't worked for a long time, but the shop agreed to fix it up and sell it to us for the very agreeable price of about $80. We never even looked at the new machines.

What really caught my eye, though, were the rows of small black hand cranked, cast iron chain stitchers. These machines were obviously sold by the store for ornamental purposes, but they were built like tanks, and I suspect they may be for general consumption in China, where they were probably built. The first man we spoke to in the shop said they couldn't sew. Though this was definitely true of some of the little machines, I wasn't convinced we couldn't make one of them work.

Not one of them was threaded, so I guessed where the thread would sit and how to get it to the needle. I also struggled with how the bobbin worked, until I looked closely at the mechanism under the plate and realized that the machine would do a chain stitch with only one thread. I was enchanted by the simplicity of it and determined to get one working. With the help of one of the shop assistants, one of the mechanics, and a new needle, we got the second machine we tried to sew. So now I am the proud owner of a little hand crank chain stitcher. It will probably sit on display in the living room, but when the year 2028 bug hits, I'll be ready.

Elimination diet: the end

2007-02-21T04:53:00.002+11:00

The long awaited end to our elimination and challenge diet has arrived. After three and a half months of monitoring everything my son and I ate, we can now go to a party without bringing our own food! During this period we challenged salicylates (twice), amines, and glutamates, and my son also challenged bread preservative. My son finished his second salicylate challenge a few days ago, and he'll be off the diet tomorrow (I finished a little over a week ago). I'm disappointed to report that the only thing I've learned about my son's skin condition from all of this is that my son does not have a severe reaction to any of these things.

That's not to say he didn't react, just that it wasn't obviously caused by the challenge food. The value of this knowledge is not to be dismissed, however his reaction to each challenge was difficult to interpret. As I've mentioned in previous posts on the topic, his skin never completely cleared. Even with periodic use of cortisone ointment, the eczema would inevitably appear after a few days on the elimination diet without drugs. The big question was whether the severity had reduced. At this point I've concluded that he is not unusually sensitive to any of the chemicals we challenged.

Though I'm eager to expand our vegetable intake, we won't go back to our previous eating patterns immediately. I expect to introduce certain foods with caution. For instance, our diet previously relied on high intake of tomato, which is high in salicylates, amines, and natural glutamates, and often associated with eczema. One thing I will introduce immediately is flaxseed oil, as I feel that the elimination diet is distressingly low in essential fatty acids (since everything we ate had to comply with the diet, even supplementation was restricted). He will have flaxseed oil instead of butter on his toast (I've discovered that when drizzled over toast with a little salt it is a totally suitable substitute for butter), and whenever he would have had butter or oil that is not cooked. We will also introduce a number of vegetables and fruits that are only moderately high in salicylates, and cut way back on meat, chicken, and sugar intake, which always felt too high to me.

Lessons learned
We didn't need to spend so long to learn what we did from this experience. We had to repeat challenges to correct early mistakes in execution. Even now, there are things I should do to make up for mistakes made in the beginning, but I've lost the enthusiasm to continue. If I ever have to go through this again, I will do a number of things differently.

What do I consider essential to success while minimizing the pain and duration of the diet? This is written in regards to my experience with eczema, but most of it applies regardless of the condition you are trying to treat.

Do the allergy tests first. You will have more success with the diet if you avoid all foods and other irritants to which you have a positive allergy test. If your doctor suggests it, you can challenge those foods and then reintroduce them into your diet if you do not have a reaction.

Get your hands on one or both of the cookbooks for this diet (Friendly Food and The Failsafe Cookbook). I use them nearly every day. The recipes are fantastic, even if you don't end up doing the diet, and Friendly Food, in particular, is a very good source for people who need to avoid eggs, gluten or wheat, nuts, dairy, or soy.

Stock your larder, experiment with recipes, and make some of the staples (like pear jam) before you start in earnest. Make a few things you can put in the freezer. It will be a lot easier to stick to the diet if you already know how to make a few meals that comply with it and know where to buy the ingredients. You will not have the option to make a last minute dash to get take away on this diet.

Rearrange your kitchen so that the food you will not be allowed to eat is separate from the food you are allowed to eat. For instance, put all forbidden food into a cabinet separate from everything else so you do not get confused or tempted. If you keep snacks in your bag or your car, make sure they comply with the diet as well (we used plain rice cakes and rye cruskits for this). In the refrigerator, designate the least visible shelf for the forbidden food (things that won't go bad during the three or so months you're on the diet, like ketchup and jam, and anything your family members insist on having).

As much as possible get your entire family to follow the diet when eating in the presence of the people on the elimination diet. You may find it handy if you allow the consumption of forbidden foods out of sight of family members who are following the diet, especially right after challenges, when you will probably have left-overs that you can no longer consume but you don't want to waste (for instance, we had cherries and carrots left after our salicylate challenge, so I sent them to work in my husband's lunch). They can also be used to slowly rid the freezer of forbidden foods.

If you have the flexibility, do the diet in the winter. Many of the allowed vegetables are not available or of poor quality in the summer and you won't be taunted by all the beautiful summer fruits.

If you have the flexibility, don't start before the holidays or lots of birthdays. Sticking to the diet is far more pleasant when you don't have to eat out frequently.

Take detailed notes. Keep a description of symptoms in your food diary rather than trying to rate their severity as a number. This will be much less subjective. Even better: get a person who does not know whether you are doing a challenge or in the elimination phase to evaluate the symptoms; it is very easy to let your own wishes interfere with your judgment.

Prior to starting the diet, find out how the skin responds after two weeks without cortisone. While eating your normal diet, treat the skin until it is clear, then take notes on the symptoms for two weeks.

Use the cortisone the way the doctor specifies (i.e. don't try to go
without). Use it as directed for the first week of the diet, when withdrawal symptoms are most likely to occur and to prepare the skin for a two week elimination challenge (see next point).

After starting the elimination diet, but prior to starting challenges, find out how the skin responds to two weeks on the diet without cortisone. A week after you start the elimination diet, do a two week elimination challenge where you do not use cortisone to determine if the elimination diet has resulted in an improvement. If not, consider what else you might need to eliminate or consider stopping the diet altogether.

Label everything you put in the freezer with 1) the contents, 2) whether or not it follows the diet, and 3) the date it was made. If you are avoiding amines, this will help you avoid eating meat that is too old. It will also ensure you don't accidentally eat the zucchini risotto you made for the salicylate challenge during your amine challenge.

Conclusion
Since eczema runs in families (I have it, my dad has it, my son has it), there's a pretty good chance any other kids I have will get eczema, and I may find myself going through this again. If it happens when they are only a month old, I will do the elimination diet immediately to see if it has any positive effect. I will also continue to look for other solutions to the problem. If nothing else, I've learned how to do this better the next time.

Getting lazy with glutamates

2007-02-13T09:05:00.002+11:00

Well, in what feels like a never ending quest to determine what food sensitivities by son has, we challenged glutamates last week. The challenge required eating a whopping 80 ml of soy sauce (4 Australian tablespoons, or 5 ¹/₃ US tablespoons) each day for three days. We were also encouraged to use Parmesan liberally. Technically, those were the only two items in the challenge, but we also indulged in a few other foods that contain glutamates (and amines, which we are no longer avoiding) but no other forbidden chemicals. We also continued to indulge in small amounts of glutamates during the three day elimination period that follows each challenge.

The most famous glutamate is Mono Sodium Glutamate, also known as MSG. It is widely associated with Chinese restaurants, but it, and a few other glutamates are often used as flavoring in packaged food. As it turns out, glutamate also occurs naturally in a range of foods, including aged cheese, soy sauce, tomatoes, peas, mushrooms, broccoli, and grapes and their products.

After about 50ml of soy sauce on the first day I couldn't take it anymore; I do not believe that one person could consume enough food in a day to disguise that much soy sauce. And after a night of anxious sleeplessness and a headache, I was content to finish the challenge right then. Was it the glutamate? I don't know - I also had a lot to do and a son who was no keener than I to eat that much of the challenge food, but it sounds like classic Chinese restaurant syndrome. Regardless, given that most of the foods where glutamates are found in high concentration are also high in fat I'll probably try to limit my intake anyway.

On day two of the glutamate challenge I phoned the dietitian because my two year old son had decided not to complete the challenge (he wouldn't eat anything that tasted like soy, and I can't blame him). The dietitian recommended substituting Parmesan, so we had pizza for dinner. That worked. I also cheated by indulging in a little Cambazola cheese, and we both cheated by having peas, both foods that contain glutamates and no other forbidden substances that are not part of the challenge. In the end, after eating lots of Parmesan, my son did not appear to react to the glutamates.

The day after the official end to the challenge, we went backpacking. I do not recommend camping while on this elimination diet, nor do I recommend backpacking with a two year old child, but that's another story. It was very difficult to find suitable foods. All pre-packaged camping foods were out of the question. Dried fruit was out (except for bananas, but we couldn't find those because of the recent banana shortage anyway). Most of the vegetables that we usually take were out. GORP was definitely out. No pepperoni or smoked fish either (we camp in style). We ended up taking lots of bread, chocolate and Colby cheese (which has amines, but we are eating those now), homemade cookies, oatmeal and powdered milk for breakfasts, and couscous, lentils, rice, and chickpeas for dinner. We cheated by bringing Parmesan and freeze dried peas and adding those to the meals (technically we should have been avoiding glutamates by then). To get vegetables we took fresh vegetables! Leek, potato, swede (which never got eaten), and green beans. Fortunately, we were hiking with someone who agreed to carry the food.

In theory, our three day elimination period that follows the glutamate challenge fell during our camping trip, but we cheated by eating peas and Parmesan. The reason for the elimination period is two fold - to distinguish a delayed reaction to the glutamate challenge from a reaction to the next food challenge, and because a reaction to one food can inhibit a reaction to another food if the second food is eaten too soon after the first, thereby masking the reaction to the second food. However, since my son requires cortisone after 10 days without, which must be followed by a further three day elimination period, it didn't seem necessary to remain strict about avoiding the challenge substance (glutamate) in this case.

On the way home from the camping trip we stopped at a pub. It was our first restaurant meal in over three months. I was surprised at how well they were able to cater for my son's curious eating restrictions. He had grilled chicken, boiled potato, and steamed peas and cabbage. As for me, I had my first non-diet meal. Now, a pub is probably not the first place you think of to break a fast, but that is where I found myself. So I had peppercorn steak with chips and salad. All three were disappointing and surprisingly bland. Fortunately, the Pavlova was better.

I'm eager to put this diet behind me because, despite my efforts to eat healthfully and provide healthful food to my family, I am uncomfortable with how limited our choice of vegetables has been and how much we've relied on meat and refined sugar. In an attempt to counteract the limitations of our diet over the past three months, I've started eating flaxseed oil on my salads, and I am keen to replace the canola oil we've been using in our cooking with olive oil. In less than a week my son will be finished with the last challenge he will do, then we will try to return to our previous, more healthful diet. However, after three and a half months on the this diet, I still feel compelled to write down everything I eat and I can't shake the feeling that I'm cheating every time I put a piece of fruit in my mouth.

Asynchronous challenges

2007-01-27T21:35:00.002+11:00

We're getting to the tail end of the discovery stage of our diet to find the cause of my son's eczema. Last week my son challenged bread preservative (three crumpets a day, whether he liked it or not; he liked it) and I challenged salicylates again. We'll do a glutamate challenge later this week, and then we have the option of challenging additives, challenging salicylates again (this would be my son only, as I have just done this), or starting the salicylate reintroduction.

Normally you don't repeat a challenge unless you have reason to believe the results will be different. I challenged salicylates a second time because we suspected that my mood from the first challenge may have been due to other factors, including the condition of my son's skin during the challenge and anxiety about the results. In contrast to my first salicylate challenge, which was done at the same time as my son was challenging salicylates and was our first challenge, this last week I experienced no listlessness or irritability, nor did I have any digestive discomfort, so I have concluded that I do not have a sensitivity to salicylates.

The argument for repeating the salicylate challenge with my son is that the results the first time were inconclusive; his skin, though possibly better than it had been prior to the start of the diet, was never clear of eczema, and the dermatologist pointed out that skin irritation that is already present will change intensity without provocation. We've also discovered recently that even when we clear all signs of eczema by applying cortisone and strictly follow the diet, it takes only three days for some irritation to reappear, so there is some background noise, making it difficult to ascertain the results of any challenge ('his skin got worse, but how much of that was due to the food versus what would have happened anyway'). We observed this pattern during the recent bread preservative challenge, when his skin slowly got worse throughout the challenge until we used cortisone at the end to clear his skin for the next challenge. The big question is: how much worse?

Perhaps the diet isn't working at all for him. Have I deluded myself into believing that his skin improved? Right from the start I struggled to find a way to codify the condition of his skin. With each new food diary (we're on our third) I have tried to clarify the meaning of the 0-5 scale that I ended up using. In retrospect, there has been much more value in the notes I've kept describing the locations and extent of the irritation than in the numbered scale the dietitian recommended, but I didn't work that out until I was into the second notebook and starting the challenges. Realistically, he needs to do the elimination diet for 13 days after clearing his skin with cortisone to find out what happens so we can use the results to filter the results of the longest challenge (salicylates: three days of elimination prior to starting, seven days of salicylates, and three days of elimination following). But honestly, after three months of this I don't know how much more of it I can stand.

We can skip the second salicylate challenge, assume that my son is moderately sensitive to salicylates based on the results of the first challenge, and start the reintroduction. To reintroduce salicylates, you eat a very small amount of a food that contains low levels of salicylates once every few days. After two weeks, if your symptoms have not worsened, then you increase the amount or frequency. You continue this until your symptoms worsen, then back off to the last level and maintain that (or less). But since my son's skin will worsen on its own, without the contribution of salicylates, this process would have us conclude that he can withstand no amount of salicylates.

So my conclusion is that we will both challenge glutamates this week, which requires eating soy sauce and parmasean cheese, then my son will challenge salicylates again. Hopefully we will either see a clearer signal or no sign at all (preferably the latter). We'll continue to avoid additives, but following the final challenges we will not be remotely as fastidious about what we eat.

Allergy tests reveal error in elimination diet

2007-01-13T03:47:00.002+11:00

We finally met with the dermatologist this month, who performed skin prick tests on my son to determine whether he has allergies to a number of common allergens. As it turns out, he is allergic to egg whites, dust mites, and peanuts. The good news is that he is not allergic to soy.

It is common for babies to have an allergy to egg whites, and also common for them to grow out of it by the age of two or three. According to the doctor, my son's reaction was mild, and the allergy is probably already diminishing, so we'll avoid egg whites until a skin prick test indicates that it's okay to challenge them again.

During our elimination diet we've eaten eggs regularly, and, looking back over our food diaries, my son's skin worsened most of these times. The presence of eggs in his diet has certainly clouded the results, and emphasizes that we should have done the allergy testing before commencing the diet. My hope is that eliminating eggs from his diet will cause a further improvement in his skin.

I'm annoyed about the dust mite allergy, but not terribly concerned. We will have to be more diligent about cleaning the house, and we are reconsidering replacing the carpet with wood floors rather than new carpeting. Fortunately, we were planning on replacing the carpeting anyway, so it's not a waste of good flooring.

I'm definitely more concerned about the allergy to peanuts. All the information I can find indicates that people rarely grow out of it and that any peanut allergy has the potential to be anaphylactic (translate: life threatening). This means we will never be able to be carefree about eating with our son again. Not only that, but we will probably have to give up eating peanut butter, Reece's peanut butter cups (not widely available in Australia anyway), and Thai food, due to the possibility of exposing him to peanut. I'm very frustrated at the moment, because I was given very little information from the dermatologist and will have to wait two more months before I can get more information from an allergist. A curious silver lining to this is that the incidence of peanut allergy is becoming much more common than even just a few years ago, so increased demand for peanut free food may make it easier to get it.

I thought my son's skin looked pretty good when we visited the dermatologist, but when the dermatologist chastised me for not using the cortisone I realized that the eczema irritation really was pretty extensive. He explained that if there was any irritation then the eczema could flare with no apparent reason and create confusing results during the food challenges, which of course perfectly describes what happened during the food challenges we've already completed. Therefore we are taking a different approach now, using the cortisone to eliminate all signs of the eczema (if it's even possible), use the elimination diet to keep it clear for a few days, then do the challenge.

We also met with the dietitian this week, who tried to decipher our food logs and concluded that my son is probably not sensitive to amines or soy (she had never heard of someone having problems with soy without testing positive to a soy allergy), so we have reintroduced those into our diet. He probably is sensitive to salicylates, and so we will slowly introduce salicylates into his diet after he finishes challenges for glutamate and bread preservative. Now that we know about the egg allergy, I'm tempted to redo the salicylate challenge, but that will depend on whether we can get his skin clear enough to make the signal stand out from the static more clearly than last time.

We've now been on this diet for more than two months and I'm getting tired of it. I thought we would be done with it one day, that we would be free to eat just about anything we wanted, but now I'm realizing that it was probably good practice for what lies ahead with the peanut allergy. Food that may contain peanuts is even more common than food that contains soy. Already I've found three things in our cupboard that may contain traces of peanuts, including the cereal my son has for breakfast every day, and it looks like we will be doing a lot of home cooking in the future.

-----------------------------------------
I found some more balanced information about peanut allergy (well, technically, my dad found it while I was lamenting about how alarmist all the information I found was). It says that only 1/3 of the children who test positive to peanut allergy with a skin prick test will have any symptoms, and that the vast majority of people who do have symptoms will get hives, experience abdominal pain, or start vomiting. The page states that allergies to peanuts that are severe enough to cause anaphalactic shock are extremely rare. Reading this made me feel much better, and when I consider how often I scraped peanut butter out of the jar with my finger in the first year of my son's life, I now recognize that if my son hasn't had a severe reaction by now, then he's not going to have one.

Defeated by amines

2007-01-01T07:26:00.002+11:00

It's been 62 days since we started our elimination diet to identify the causes of my son's eczema and I'm starting to feel defeated. We've finally completed our amine challenge and now my son's eczema is the worst it's been in nearly two months. During this period we've also faced two birthday parties, a Christmas party, Christmas dinner, and a week away with friends. All of these occasions were poignant reminders of how little "normal" food we can eat.

It took three weeks to complete the amine challenge. First we had to wait for his skin to clear from the previous challenge. Then we delayed the start of the challenge so it would not interfere with his birthday party. Next we had a false start when we found him chowing down on salicylate laden watermelon at a neighbor's Christmas party, and then we had to wait several more days for his skin to clear again before starting the challenge in earnest.

Amines result from the breakdown of proteins, and are found in chocolate, cheeses, old meat, fish, and poultry (including "fresh" meat that has been stored in cryovac packaging, meat that has been frozen for a long time, and ocean fish that is caught a long time before it reaches the market), the skin of poultry (and probably of cows, pigs, and sheep as well, but we don't usually eat these), a number of fruits and vegetables and products derived from them, and most alcohol products. For the challenge, we were required to consume bananas and chocolate in quantity for a week. We were also allowed to eat papaya, tuna, and Colby cheese. My son, who had never tasted chocolate before, was in heaven despite being restricted to very dark chocolate. The first night of the challenge we had tuna carpaccio and banana splits, and the rest of the week we indulged in toasted cheese sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies.

His skin actually looked quite good during the challenge, which was belied only by the curious red circles that appeared in his armpit on the first day. We were optimistic that we would soon be able to permanently reintroduce some foods into our diet, but three days after the end of the challenge we were faced with itchy eczema on his tummy, lower back and bum, his upper chest, the back of his neck, on his thighs, and behind his knees, with no alternative explanation to the recent amines.

The literature explains that there's little point in doing the remaining challenges (MSG/glutamate, Propionates, Sorbates, Benzoates, Antioxidants, Colors, Nitrites, and Sulphites) if you respond to both salicylates and amines because you will probably respond to everything else, which means we are now faced with an indefinite period on the elimination diet.

I now realize that I commenced this project expecting it to end after a month or so. Two months into it we still haven't even finished the first round of challenges (we still need to challenge soy, which would normally be done prior to salicylates and amines) and are likely to have to follow it for many more months before we can enjoy only a few more of the foods we ate before we started the diet without having adverse reactions.

At times like these it's tempting to say, stuff it, it's too hard. The food we eat is quite good, but the constraints of the diet are antisocial. We cannot eat out at all, and I've had to provide virtually all our food when we've gone to parties (except at one birthday party, where the host gets a gold star for making sure there was a meat, a vegetable, and an hors d'oeuvre that we could eat). When trying to plan a recent Christmas dinner with friends it became clear that it was too complicated to ask anyone to cook according to the
constraints of the diet, and it is now obvious that nothing ever satisfies the constraints of the diet just by chance.

So what's keeping me going? Quite simply, it's the prospect of eliminating my son's eczema, reducing the likelihood of him developing asthma and hay fever, and saving him from the fate of his grandfather, whose childhood was shaped by asthma attacks, endless trips to the allergist for injections, and his mother wrapping his cracked hands each night to soothe them.

Salicylates challenge more than expected

2006-12-13T21:15:00.002+11:00

After 31 days of a strict elimination diet, we've finally entered the discovery phase. Our first challenge, salicylates, was harder than I thought it would be. For the previous 31 days I had looked forward to indulging in strawberries, mangoes, cherries, pumpkin, and apples, and once again enjoying the flavor provided by curry and cinnamon. I thought my son would too; he was absolutely fixated on pictures of strawberries. But the food didn't taste as good as I expected, and I was surprised to discover that I didn't feel very well either.

We embarked on this diet to discover the cause of my son's eczema, which has been present since he was a month old. It could be anything he has contact with, including the pervasive dust mite, but since food proteins and chemicals can be passed through breast milk, and are one of the few things we have much control over, we decided to do an exhaustive test of foods to determine if any of them were the cause. Many food allergies can be diagnosed through skin prick tests or blood tests, but foods can also cause irritation without triggering an allergic reaction, and these sensitivities to food can only be determined by altering your diet. To find a food sensitivity or allergy, you first eliminate all likely causes of irritation from your diet for a period of time. This is the elimination phase of the diet. The next stage is to challenge your body with possible irritants. This is the discovery phase of the diet. For some irritants, the reaction may be reduced by avoiding exposure to the irritant for a while, so there is a period of developing tolerance following the completion of the discovery phase, and then you should follow a maintenance diet that minimizes consumption of foods that cause a reaction for you.

It is worth noting, since many people I've spoken with about this whole process do not seem to understand this at first, that you are not meant to stay on the highly restricted elimination diet indefinitely. Nor is it the theory of the diet developers that salicylates are inherently bad for everyone. Once you have determined which classes of food do not cause a reaction for you through the challenge phase then those foods can be reintroduced into your diet.

The first challenge
Our first challenge was salicylates. You may be asking yourself "What are salicylates?" It's a fair question; it's not an everyday word. Salicylates are a class of chemicals that occur naturally in fruits, vegetables, and nuts and are thought to function as natural pesticides. According to the research of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Allergy Unit, a surprising number of people respond to salicylates, meaning that they will have some sort of reaction if they eat a large quantity. Responses to salicylates vary dramatically, but can include migraines, rashes, irritability, restlessness, gastrointestinal problems, and asthma. Salicylates occur in almost all fruits, many vegetables, and virtually anything derived from them, including artificial and natural flavors, most types of alcoholic drinks, and aspirin.

What was the salicylate challenge?
The challenge required eating six serves of salicylate laden foods a day for a week (or until we reacted, which ever happened first). My own participation in the elimination diet was mandated by the fact that I was still breastfeeding my son, and anything I ate could be passed to him through the breast milk, so I anticipated participating in the challenge as long as my son did. The foods we were required to eat comprised:

mangoes
Granny Smith apples
cherries
nectarines
peaches
apricots
watermelon
cantaloupe
strawberries
pumpkin
sweet potato
asparagus
bell pepper
carrots
cucumber
zucchini
honey
cinnamon
curry powder
tea

There was no shortage of choice, especially since it is stone fruit season. On the first day, we ate strawberries on our breakfast, watermelon for morning tea, zucchini with lunch, mango and yogurt for afternoon tea, cherries before dinner, and a colorful stir fry for dinner.

Though we continued to stuff ourselves with red and orange fruits, both my son and I lost our appetite for the challenge foods pretty quickly. On day one, I had a mild stomach ache most of the day, and by the afternoon I didn't feel like doing much of anything. By day three, I was longing for cabbage, and my son wouldn't eat anything containing salicylates after lunch. Over six days of the challenge (I didn't last all seven) I had a stomach ache of some sort nearly the entire time. I was also irritable, emotional, and unmotivated.

Clearly I was responding to the salicylates, however, since my motivation for doing the diet was not to assess the cause of my own moods but to determine the cause of my son's skin problems, it took me five days before I finally clued in to the correlation between my mood and my diet. Even then, I couldn't stand the thought of missing out on two more days of red and orange fruits and persisted eating them for almost another day before I realized that I was not only torturing myself, but increasing the likelihood of suffering withdrawal symptoms, and stopped the challenge.

It has taken six days for my son's skin to get back to what it was before the challenge and it is now clear that he also reacted to salicylates.

What next?
After the challenge we went back on to the elimination diet. The first three days following a challenge are considered part of the challenge, as it is possible for reactions to be delayed, and also required to ensure there are no residual effects from the salicylates before the next challenge. My mood improved almost immediately but both of us continued to show signs of reactions to salicylates over that period. Since his skin has only just returned to its pre-challenge condition, we will wait a few more days before we go onto the next challenge, which for us will be amines. Tune in next week for the results.

Elimination Diet: The Dietician's Judgement

2006-12-01T01:15:00.002+11:00

A few nights ago I had a dream that I was eating miniature jelly beans. The following night I dreamt that I was eating steak bathed in ketchup. In both dreams, my immediate response was Why am I eating this? It will ruin the diet.

I've never had this response to a diet before, but then this diet is different. After 30 days, I can identify every item of food that my son and I have consumed. For the past 23 days I can count on my thumbs every item of food my son or I ate that we weren't allowed. And on day 30 a dietitian reviewed our progress.

The visit to the dietitian was the source of some trepidation. The severity of my son's eczema has reduced dramatically, so we've obviously done something right. We could be ready to start the challenge phase of the diet, which would mean indulging in fruits, vegetables, and spices. But the eczema is not gone, so maybe we've done something wrong. We could be about to face two of the hardest weeks yet, with no wheat or cow's milk. As the appointment with the dietitian approached and the severity of my son's eczema bounced around I got more and more concerned. It's no wonder I was dreaming about things going awry.

I met with the dietitian yesterday. She greeted me with a smile and asked how things were going. Then she examined the food log. I sat for a few minutes listening to nothing but the occassional sound of a page turning. She broke the silence by saying You're ready to start the challenges. Ready to start the challenges? I was ready to jump out of my seat. I wanted to do a little victory dance. Actually, I wanted to do a big victory dance.

Tomorrow I'll be having strawberries on my breakfast, watermelon at my picnic, taziki for my afternoon tea, and carrots and capsicum in my stir fry. I'll make lentil curry and pumpkin soup. I'll eat apricots, and cherries, and bake apple pie. And I'll do it all in the name of science.

I'm so happy about this new food freedom that I need to remind myself of the sour note: if one of us reacts to salicylates then we'll have to stop eating all these wonderful foods, and when the discovery part of the diet ends we still won't be able to eat them. But I'm not about to let that ruin my fantasizing now.

I still won't be allowed to eat miniature jelly beans or ketchup on my steak, but who'd want to when there are so many wonderful things to eat instead?

Elimination Diet: Weeks 3 and 4

2006-12-01T00:16:00.002+11:00

The In-law Challenge

Weeks three and four of our elimination diet were marked by the arrival of my in-laws. Prior to starting the diet I was so concerned about our ability to eat together harmoniously that I almost delayed the start of the diet until they left. I was dreading having to listen to snide remarks. I was afraid that I would have to prepare all of the food, rather than rely on mother-in-law to do some of the cooking, lest she undermine the diet by including forbidden ingredients. And I was concerned that they would not be supportive of the diet, let alone eat it. I underestimated my in-laws.

Perhaps it was not entirely fair to pin all these concerns on my in-laws. After all, being helpful seems to be in their genes. Many people have been curious about the diet, and very few people have made deprecatory remarks about the diet, but most people I explain the diet to can't shake the thought How could fruits and vegetables possibly cause a malady? and they only start to express an earnest interest in the diet when I reveal that my son's skin has definitively improved since starting the elimination diet. Of course, I didn't have the luxury of this information when I spoke to my father just before D-day, who was very subtle but obviously doubtful.

In contrast, I was pleasantly surprised by my in-law's support; my mother-in-law baked cookies and scones, was an excellent sous-chef, and even took up the challenge of making two meals. I did not hear one negative or unsupportive remark from either in-law during their two week visit. They happily consumed our failsafe food, and even marveled at how many ways you could prepare a leek. They graciously ate their forbidden foods (they arrived with a fruit cake, lemon butter, and pineapple poppers, and couldn't resist purchasing grapefruits for breakfast) out of site of the rest of the family. In the two weeks they were here, there was not one diet mistake that could be attributed to their presence, and I am still eating my mother-in-law's cookies. When they left, I was sad to see them go.

Elimination Diet: Week 2

2006-11-15T08:28:00.002+11:00

We have now completed week two of our elimination diet. You can read about week one in my previous post on the topic.

In the past week our diet has seemed almost normal. I go to the market, buy lots of good meat, chicken, eggs, and a little fish, plus a lot of pears, leeks, cabbage, green beans, and a few other vegetables. Now that I know what we need, and have the larder stocked, the market shopping is actually easier than it was before the diet. I've also found that following recipes is very easy when you already have all the ingredients, so I've been able to try lots of new foods without the hassle I usually associate with it. And the food, for the most part, has been really good. I'll be sad to relinquish the cookbooks to the library when they're due.

I must admit that I am starting to get a little tired of cabbage and green beans. We have one or the other every night. And my son must miss strawberries; when we read "I Am A Bunny" and "The Very Hungry Catapillar", we can no longer get past the pages with the strawberries on them. He keeps flipping back to them and calling out "straaaaw-be". Nevertheless, my husband continues to be amazed by the meals I am coming up with and is now quite content to be on the diet (especially when he gets to eat anything he wants when he's at work).

On a more positive note, I've been losing weight, despite eating absurd quantities of food, especially goodies like carob fudge, cookies, meringues, and homemade granola bars (now that I know what goes into them I'll never again consider them a healthful snack).

We had two major social challenges of the past week, both of which went very well. The first was a hike followed by a BBQ. I packed rice crackers and green beans to keep my son happy on the hike, and we brought all of our own food to the BBQ, including marinated chicken breasts, pear and bean salad (very tasty), a noodle and cabbage salad that replicated the one provided by the host, and a potato torte to share with everyone (there were two other beautiful desserts, so it's a wonder anyone found space for this one). My husband pigged out, eating some of everything we brought and also tasting everything cooked by the hosts! My son was really good about eating only what we offered him, even skipping the flavored rice crackers that had been left well within his reach before dinner. Only once did he notice the corn sitting on the table (one of his favorite foods) and beg, but fortunately we were able to distract him. Unlike our outing last week, there were actually two things I could eat: steak and potatoes, however the chicken and salad were so nice that I declined.

Our second challenge was last night, when we hosted a dinner for overseas friends. I did a poor job of selecting menu items and found myself juggling four pots at the stove right before dinner. But nothing was burnt or undercooked and everyone enjoyed the meal (lamb noisettes with pear glaze, steamed green beans, steamed red and green cabbage with a creamy leek sauce, and brown rice) and dessert (poached pears with sabayon). Next time I'm cooking a roast.

However, the biggest challenge of the week was Melbourne Cup Day, which closed the market Tuesday, when I would usually do the fresh food shopping. Since the market is only open Tuesday and Thursday through Saturday, I dropped into the local butcher, where I don't normally shop because the selection and convenience aren't as good as the market. I nearly bought three porterhouse steaks, until I noticed the butcher pulling out a big cryovaced piece of meat. When I asked how old the meat was, he said about a week and a half, then paused and said maybe two weeks. It was clear that he wasn't really sure. Amines continue to form as meat ages, regardless of how the meat is packaged or if it is frozen, so eating fresh meat is critical to sticking to the diet. We ate vegetarian for three days.

My son's skin no longer seems to be improving and I'm concerned that we will need to eliminate wheat and dairy. I feel like we should start immediately, but I'm procrastinating until I've had a chance to experiment with the recipes and build up an inventory of wheat and dairy free staples. Of course, I'm also hoping that the current flare is just the withdrawal symptoms taking their time to subside. I think I could happily continue this diet for quite some time the way it is, but to eliminate wheat and dairy would require major changes. Of course, that's how I initially felt about cutting out fruit.

How much is petrol worth to you?

2006-11-07T22:29:00.003+11:00

People like to whinge about the price of gas just as much as they do about the weather. This wouldn't be true if we all used our bikes to get where we were going, but I digress. Virtually every month I read a letter in our local automobile club magazine in which the author argues that the price of gas is fixed by colluding petroleum companies and that there should be a government inquiry into the matter. Some make a pathetic effort to support their annoyance, claiming things like "On my recent trip petrol (that's what they call it here) was $1.23/L in Tamworth and when I was in Brisbane only a few days later it was $1.18/L. Clearly this is a sign of price fixing." Upon reading that line of reasoning I was incredulous; hadn't the author ever noticed that the price of gas at their local station changes daily, if not hourly!

In the most recent issue (October 2006, not on line yet) a reader had very carefully detailed the proportion of a barrel of crude oil turned into the various petroleum products we use. Since the letter is not on line, I will reprint some of the figures he provided. It turns out that only about 27% of the 159 liters of crude oil in a barrel becomes petrol. 10% becomes kerosene, 15% becomes diesel, 22% becomes lubricating oils, 16% becomes cylinder oils, and 10% becomes tar. By his calculations, you get 42 liters of petrol from a barrel of crude. He goes on to argue that the price of petrol should increase by 0.6 cents per liter for ever dollar increase in the price of a barrel of crude and that the daily changes of 5 cents per liter are evidence that the market isn't working freely and government action is required.

Now, I applaud this person's detailed research and math, but he failed to do a reality check. Could it be that the price of petrol changes more when the price of crude changes because people want it more than the other petroleum products?

How much is a liter of petrol worth to you? Are you buying it now, at $1.10-$1.15AU/liter? Were you buying it when it was $1.25/liter? Would you pay $2.00/liter? No, you say? What did you say about $1.00/liter a few years ago? How much you're willing to pay probably depends on what you are using your vehicle for; If your business relies on moving things around, for example, then you have to figure out how to pay for the more expensive fuel or close up shop. But if you're driving to work, maybe you'll find a different way to get there rather than waste valuable fuel on it. What you can see, though, is that the value of fuel is not something you determine, or the petroleum companies determine, but all the people who buy the petrol. If you think that a liter of petrol is only worth $1.00 and everyone else agrees it's worth at least $1.10, then you're just going to have to go without.

The price of petrol is volatile because it the market is so competitive. There is no other good in Australia or the US for which the price is so well advertised, so easily determined without even leaving your car. At some intersections you have the choice of two or even three different petrol stations, all of whom have their prices clearly displayed in front of the shop in writing that even my half blind grandmother can read. And even though most people would willingly part with far more money to fill up their tank, they are always looking for a deal. In an environment like this, of course the price of petrol is going to jump around.

As we saw recently in our discussion about banana prices, there are some goods that people just won't substitute. Petrol is one of them. Vaseline is not. When was the last time you thought, Gee, Vaseline is getting very expensive, but there's nothing else I can use instead. Economists call this elasticity. Bananas and petrol (incidentally, the two items blamed for Australia's high second quarter inflation) have inelastic demand curves, meaning the price can increase a lot before people change their consumption habits. In contrast, Vaseline has an elastic demand curve. Besides, many of the products made out of petroleum, including Vaseline, are really just by-products, an opportunity to reap some financial gain from the left-overs of petrol production. Kind of like trying to sell the tops off your celery stalks. So when the price of crude increases, the change will be borne disproportionately by the purchasers of petrol, because the purchasers of Vaseline will just buy cocoa butter instead.

The volatility of petrol prices is certainly annoying, and makes planning difficult, but it's not in itself a sign of price fixing. Even so, why is a government inquiry the solution? Wouldn't we all be better off if the government used their time and energy to figure out how to promote alternatives to petrol and other petroleum products. By increasing incentives to use alternative fuels and more fuel efficient technology, the government could reduce the demand for petrol, which would cause the real price of petrol to decrease. By supporting investment in alternative energy, the government could reduce the country's dependence on unpredictable foreign suppliers, which is significant for both economic and security reasons. The government could and should provide a boost to the economy by supporting the growth of technology associated with alternative industries. And finally, these actions comprise a few of the many ways the government could be acting to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

But the price of petrol must still be too low because the government doesn't appear to be doing much at all.

Elimination diet, week 1

2006-11-06T22:30:00.002+11:00

I've never successfully stayed on an elimination diet, and I suppose this one is no exception. Despite all of my preparation, it turns out soy has been leaking into the diet in the form of bread and crackers. Beware of vegetable oil (it usually contains at least some soybean oil), soy flour, flour improver 472, and lecithin, which sneak into store made food. In a few weeks we may have to eliminate wheat, and then we won't have to worry about having soy in our bread or wheat crackers, but for the time being I'd like to find alternatives that don't involve making my own bread.

Ignoring the soy problem, which I'll deal with when I do the shopping tomorrow, I've been surprised by how easy this has been. The two cookbooks mentioned in my previous post on the elimination diet have a huge number of not only tasty, but surprisingly easy, recipes, and I'm sure this experience is making me a better cook. Here's a sample of some of the dinners we've had over the past week:

Pan fried fish with butter and garlic
Lamb noisettes with pear glaze
Yogurt chicken
Roast rack of lamb
Golden chicken (marinated in golden syrup and grilled)

All of our meals have been accompanied by at least two vegetables, usually steamed, but sometimes sauteed. I've discovered that steamed red cabbage is buttery, and that swedes can be cut lengthwise to make a nice compliment to green beans.

For dessert, or sometimes for afternoon tea, we have natural yogurt with pear, which is a combination we enjoyed before we knew about this diet. On Saturday, I made poached pears with sabayon, which didn't come out quite the way I expected, but were still extremely tasty.

I'm finding that recipes are unusually easy to follow because the list
of allowed foods is so small that I have all the
ingredients for many of the recipes in the cookbooks, which makes cooking by recipe easier than usual. I also feel less concerned than usual about how I allocate the vegetables we have, as long as they all get used by the end of the week.

Only once during the past week have I craved something I wasn't allowed to eat, which was chocolate. I resolved this by making a batch of carob fudge that I've been enjoying ever since (though I must admit it is a little too sweet and the recipe will require some fudging to get right). My son has been pretty good too. The first day he was a bit out of character to refuse all of the nice food I gave him, and all he wanted to eat was rice crackers. But since then he has been quite willing to eat everything and has rarely asked for food he isn't allowed to eat (even though he doesn't actually know that there are foods he's not allowed to eat).

We had our first big social challenge when we attended a birthday party this weekend. The father of the birthday girl had prepared an all organic spread that could put any caterer to shame: mini quiches, homemade sausage rolls, skewers of fruit, flap jacks (they looked a lot like granola bars), meringues, chocolate coated cream puffs, and a chocalate mousse roll with strawberries for the birthday cake. I explained that we were doing an elimination diet as soon as they
offered us food, which was pretty much as soon as we arrived, and they were very understanding. Fortunately, I had anticipated there would be a little food and a cake, so I came prepared with pear slices, crackers, and meringues (since I had eggs left over from my poached pears with sabayon of the night before), but it was a little hard looking at all the beautiful and carefully prepared food and not be able to eat any of it (especially since it was probably the highest quality food we will encounter at a birthday or Christmas party this year). The merengues had vinegar in them, the flap jacks had coconut in them, the sausage rolls were made with pork, the quiches had vegetables in them, the birthday cake had chocolate in it. Finally, we worked out that the cream puffs were okay, except for the chocolate on the top, so I ate the bottom and gave the top away, just so I could partake in some way. My son was even better than me. He was happy with two slices of pear and one of my home made meringues.

Now we come to the big question: is all this inconvenience worth it? Is his eczema improving? The short answer is that it is too early to tell. According to Sue Dengate's book "The Failsafe Cookbook," as well as our dietitian, we should expect withdrawal symptoms anywhere from four days to a week after starting the diet. We're still in that range, so we must withhold judgment for the time being.

I don't think either my partner or I would have considered our son, who is nearly two, to be any less agreeable than your average two year old. However, both my partner and I have noticed he has been less negative and more resilient in the past week than usual. Whether it is the diet or coincidence, we don't know. I suppose this may be exposed when we get to the challenge stage. I'll keep you informed.

Eating friendly food to challenge eczema

2006-11-01T05:37:00.002+11:00

When my son was about a month old, in the middle of a typically hot Melbourne summer, he developed a heat rash on his face. Rather than fading after a few hours, the rash spread to his chest the next day. When it hadn't cleared after a few days I took him to the doctor, who diagnosed eczema and told us to put cream on it. It slowly cleared up off his face, but there continued to be some part of his body covered in rash.

When he was a few months old he got a wicked nappy rash that would not respond to the traditional nappy creams. Once again it was diagnosed as eczema. This time the diagnosis came with a prescription for a low concentration hydro-cortisone ointment. The redness would reduce while he was using the ointment, but flare back up as soon as he stopped. Another trip to the doctor yielded a more powerful cortisone ointment, which would eliminate the redness while it was in use but did nothing for the long term. Finally, a trip to the tropics caused a marked improvement in his skin.

Sadly, within a few months his eczema returned. We continued to "manage" it using greasy ointments after every bath, avoiding the common irritants, and treating it with the cortisone when it got really bad. We've finally come to the conclusion that we need to put in an honest effort to figure out what is causing the eczema, which is easier said than done. The problems could be environmental (like dust mites) or food intolerance or allergy. Or it could be genetic.

So What Are We Going To Do About It?

Only a very low proportion of excema is caused by allergies, so it isn't as easy as doing skin prick tests (which are apparently unreliable anyway). We have decided to try the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH) Allergy Unit's simplified elimination diet for natural and artificial food chemicals. The aim of the diet is to remove all possible dietary causes of irritation until a marked improvement in symptoms occurs, then "challenge" the body with individual chemicals to determine which ones cause irritation. Challenges must be done with only one chemical at a time to avoid confusing signals, and must be spaced so that the signs of a reaction are clear. Since reactions to food can happen any time in the 48 hours after the food is consumed, and some challenges require large doses (to reflect the cumulative nature of eating those chemicals in everyday life), challenges must be spaced by several days. The PhD thesis of Anne Swain, head dietician of the RPAH Allergy Unit, explains the development of the diet, and details what chemicals, artificial or natural, are likely to cause problems.

The problem foods can be classified as follows:

Salicilates, found in most fruits and vegetables, nuts, and many oils;
Amines, found in a few fruits, and aged food including cheese, wine,
suction packed meat, frozen meat or fish (the Failsafe Cookbook
recommends buying meat fresh and eating it within two days or freezing
it immediately and eating within four weeks);
Glutamates,including natural, found in a number of really tasty vegetables (like
tomatoes), mushrooms, and a huge variety of foods;
Sulfates, which are found in dried fruit;
Nitrates and nitrites, which are found in smoked food;
Artifical flavours;
A few classes of preservatives, antioxidants, and colours (artificial and annatto 160b); and
Anything that contains "natural flavours".

To further complicate matters, apparently there is a labelling loophole in Australia that allows food manufacturers to omit ingredients from the label if they are a small proportion of an ingredient, so antioxidents are often used in the vegetable oils that are used to make many processed foods without being put on the label. This means that any item that contains "vegetable oil" must be avoided unless you have checked with the manufacturer.

This diet appeals to me for several reasons. The first is that I've never been a fan of food additives (this has been especially true since I read Fast Food Nation). The second is that the RPAH has provided a convincing argument through their research that naturally occurring salicylates, amines, and glutamates, and a series of artificial food additives can cause a host of problems, including eczema. The third, and final one I can think of right now, is that typically doctors recommend eliminating two or three likely triggers, which means you are likely to 1) not see significant improvement during the elimination portion, and 2) get false reactions during the challenges due to other triggers that haven't been eliminated. This diet minimizes both of these.

I decided to be sensible about this, so we visited a dietitian, just to make sure we will have proper nutrition, and also because I'm going to need all the encouragement I can get to stay on this diet, especially since I've never been very good at staying on diets. The good news is that we can eat as much as we like, as long as it's well balanced.

So What Can We Eat?

The food we can eat can best be summarized as follows:

Fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices: Peeled pears, or canned pears in syrup, leeks, chokos, cabbage, brussel sprouts, mung bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, shallots, celery, green beans, garlic, swedes (also known as rutabagas), potatoes, dried beans (except broad beans), iceberg lettuce, parsley (in small quantities), saffron, salt.
Fresh meat, chicken, and white fish (nothing that is pre-made)
Wholemeal or white bread with no preservative (no multigrain bread)
Plain crackers and cookies with no additives
Cereals without additives or corn
Milk, rice milk, oat milk, natural yogurt, vanilla yogurt, vanilla ice cream, eggs
Butter, select margarines, sunflower, safflower, and canola oils
White sugar, brown sugar, maple syrup, golden syrup, glucose syrup, rice syrup, carob powder
Decaf coffee (no tea of any type), whisky, gin, vodka
A variety of baking ingredients including flour, baking powder, etc.

The dietitian gave me a food list so exhaustive that it even dictates what vitamins I can take and what toothpaste we can use (mint is a huge source of salicylates, so most toothpaste isn't allowed).

Where Can I Get More Information?

Sue Dengate, who runs the extensive, but not very well organized Food Intolerance Network website, wrote a cookbook for the diet, "The Failsafe Cookbook" (she calls the elimination diet "Failsafe", which stands for: Free of Additives, Low in Salicilates, Amines, and Flavour Enhancers). Her cookbook provides a food list and a reasonably good explanation for why many foods aren't allowed. This is a good resource full of pedestrian recipes and substitutes for foods you're not allowed to eat. It includes a shopping list. Unfortunately, this book is hard to come by right now since it is between printings.

You can find a complete list of the additives to avoid on the Food Intolerance Network's website. One thing I noted when I first read about these, is that red dye #2, which has been de-listed in the U.S. since I was a kid (remember when the red M&Ms were taken off the market?), is still allowed in Australia.

The RPAH has also put out a cookbook, called "Friendly Food" (now in its second edition). This book also explains the diet, though it virtually ignores the role of food additives despite being clearly implicated by Anne Swain's PhD thesis. It is filled with pretty fancy looking meals. It also contains a shopping list and has the advantage of being readily available in Australian bookstores.

The Diet Begins

Today is day one. The preparation has taken several weeks. In addition to the visit to the dietitian, I have spent the past two weeks testing out recipes and tracking down ingredients. Yesterday I prepared an eating plan for my son's childcare, and tomorrow I will be meeting with them to make sure they know exactly what food they can give him and what to do if he eats something he isn't meant to.

I've been to four grocery stores, and three green grocers, a candy store, a health/vitamin store, and three pharmacies to find suitable foods. One thing that has struck me is how small the "health food" section is in the supermarkets. This should tell you something about the healthfulness of what's general available in supermarkets. Another thing I've noticed is how limited the health food sections are, as if the grocery store defines health food as food that no one would choose to eat unless they were avoiding a more mainstream food (i.e. rice pasta instead of wheat pasta, or carob instead of chocolate, except that I happen to really like carob, and it's so uncommon here that the big supermarkets don't have it even in the health food section). The other thing I've noticed is that all health nuts must be soy addicts, judging by the ubiquity of soy in that aisle (technically, I'm supposed to be avoiding soy in addition to everything else listed above).

In the spirit of my friend Ron, who went on a 10 day juice diet and documented everything he ate on-line, I will periodically post our progress (though not in such exhaustive detail). Incidentally, virtually everything Ron ate during those 10 days would not be allowed on this diet.

Wish us luck, and please, keep your cynical thoughts to yourselves, or at least save them until we're done. As I've already mentioned, I'm going to need a lot of positive encouragement to stick to this.

One Final Note

I have yet to find carob chips without palm oil, nor have I found a recipe for making them from carob powder. If you have one, please post it as a comment.

Food for thought

2006-09-08T14:10:00.003+10:00

"Where would we be without the humble banana?"
-- father of 11 month old, prior to Tropical Cyclone Larry

About a year ago I had a chat with a mother friend of mine about bananas. Every mother knows that bananas are an indespensible food with a baby or toddler; it comes in it's own disposable wrapping, requires no preparation, is easy to store, and is universally adored by young children. In this discussion, my friend proposed that bananas were a single market good; unlike other food, when the price went up, people would not substitute a different fruit. I denied it. Surely people would just eat apples, or mandarins, or grapes instead of paying exhorbitant prices for bananas. Little did I know that within six months I would get to witness the result of a dramatic decrease in the supply of bananas.

Australia has several banana growing regions and does not allow the import of bananas. The largest and most productive region is on the Queensland coast, centered on Innisvale. Innisvale happens to be the location where Tropical Cyclone Larry, a category 5 cyclone, hit land in March, 2006. It decimated the banana crop that was just about to be harvested, and the plants that would be producing bananas through the Australian winter. Almost immediately, the price of bananas doubled. The price has since risen to $15 wombats per kilogram, five times its pre-cyclone price.

Being the mother of a toddler, eliminating bananas from the diet complete is not an option, so we ration them. A single banana currently costs between $2.50 and $3.00 wombats. We regularly spend $15 on bananas a week.

Since Larry, the price of bananas has been a constant topic of conversation between me and my mother, who lives in Costa Rica. She constantly marvels that anyone would pay so much, and when she visited Melbourne recently (when the price was a mere $10 wombats/KG) she asked the green grocer about it, who replied that you would think that people would cut back, but parents just keep buying them (myself included).

In July the Australian goverment announced that the consumer price index had risen 1.6 percent for the quarter from March through June. This figure was higher than expected, and economists claimed the rising price of petrol and the cost of bananas were largely to blame.

When my mom bought 6 bananas for 76 colones today in Costa Rica (about 20 Australian cents, or 3.3 cents each) I started to see just how absurd the price is in Melbourne. In contrast, the typical Costa Rican earns enough money for a full day of work to purchase four bananas at Melbourne prices.

The good news is that the price of bananas in Australia is predicted to start falling this month.

A Good Book Is a Bad Thing

2006-08-02T21:36:00.001+10:00

I've alluded to this before.

Last night I finished One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. I've read it before, but when a copy of it landed in my husband's hands (see Book Crossing for how that happened) I decided to read it again, since all I could remember from my high school reading of it was the ending.

But a good book is a bad thing. Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's main character, Randle McMurphy, a good book cajoles you into abandoning your sensible routine, keeping you awake way past the prudent hour you normally go to sleep, and incites you to shirk your responsibilities until your formerly well oiled machine barely functions.

When I read fiction, I prefer not to know much about the story before I read it, so I'll try not to ruin it for you, except to summarize what you could work out from the back cover: The story, told by a patient in a mental institution, is about the power struggle between the Big Nurse and the new patient on the ward. The nurse is what I would call a Hook Operator (a term I picked up from the totally unheard of Operators and things: The inner life of a schizophrenic, a book I read 15 years ago, have never seen another copy of, and highly recommend to anyone for it's insights on office life alone, but also to follow the very interesting journey of the schizophrenic author). The nurse keeps everything under her control, not by using force, but by abusing power. McMurphy, the new patient, is boastful and cunning, and also trying to work the system in his own way.

This story is about so many different things: the abuse of power, the importance of fun, friendship, sacrifice, and redemption. I normally try to avoid "the classics" but I highly recommend this book. As Douglas Eadie says on the cover of my copy, "If you haven't already read this book, do so. If you have, read it again."

Oh my god, I'm a stay at home mom!

2006-05-18T00:20:00.001+10:00

This shouldn't be too surprising, since I haven't worked in over a year, but before now I was in denial.

Until my son was born I was earning more than my husband. I decided I'd like to stay home for the first year of my son's life so I quit my job, naively believing that I'd be able to find part time employment after a year out of work. Last month, I dusted off my resume, added my most recent experience, and sent it to a few people. The response I got was less than encouraging: "The chances of finding part time work in the IT industry are virtually nil."

Now, I'm not wedded to the industry. In fact, I'd be quite happy doing something else, but I'm not prepared to take an entry level position just to start working again. It's just not practical; working is too expensive to get paid beans.

The going rate for childcare in our area is about $75/day (wombats) and competition for places is fierce. If you already have your foot in the door, it could be a few months before you can pick up an extra day of care each week for your child. If your child doesn't already attend childcare, you can expect it to be a year.

Childcare covers the hours between 7am and 6pm, with hefty penalties if you are late to pick up your child, which means you have to be strict with your work hours. There's no option for half days, or any reliable way to pick up casual days (for those times when you really need to attend a meeting on day when you don't normally work). This is when the other types of care kick in: nannies and daddies. Which you choose depends on how much dad earns and how much you travel. If this is a rarity, dad might stay home for the day, but if dad earns a lot or you travel a lot, then a nanny is a cheaper option. The going rate for a nanny in our area is about $17/hour.

Not that I want to have my child in childcare for that much time. Sure, it's nice to have a break from changing nappies and conversations with someone who sounds like the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoons, but I'd still like to be one of the primary carers in my child's life.

Another hidden cost is the loss of government benefits when resuming work. If I were to work three days a week, for $20/hour, I would forfeit about $3,500 in government benefits, making my effective tax rate about 30%, compared with the tax rate of 16% for people without a child. Combining taxes and lost benefits with the aforementioned cost of childcare makes my marginal take home income only slightly better than if I were in the highest tax bracket. Of course, the Australian government makes it easy for all Australian parents to weigh up the cost of returning to the workforce by making the cost depend on your partner's income and your prospective income, tax rate, medicare levy, tax offset, family tax benefit A, family tax benefit B, and childcare benefit, not to mention the family tax benefit supplement, which they don't even remotely try to explain how it is calculated or who is eligible for it.

There are other costs to working: transportation, work clothing, out of hours baby sitters. I read a quote from one woman who was spending nearly $200/month on the magazines she read on the train!

Of course, there are costs to staying home as well, most notably the lost experience and contact with the industry that will ultimately result in lower wages when I return to the workforce, which could haunt me for the rest of my working life.

For now, I've decided to stay home a little longer. Each day I feel my market value slipping away, but I try not to think about that because if I am already unmarketable after one year out of work I in danger of becoming a permanent housewife if I stay home too long.

The digital eye sees things differently

2006-04-24T07:04:00.030+10:00

I recently attended a party with my son's playgroup. After the party, one of the mothers generously gave everyone CDs of the photos her husband had taken with his new digital SLR (dSLR). As I sat there scanning through the hundreds of photos, it slowly dawned on me that I would not have been able to take the equivalent photos with my digital camera.

The photos from the party were great. The subjects, almost exclusively one year old babies, were in focus, caught in the moment of smiling, laughing, opening a present, stealing a cupcake, discovering a new toy. The exposure was good, the colors were crisp, and the backgrounds were pleasingly fuzzy. Like I said, I couldn't do this with my camera.

What's wrong with my camera. The short answer is that it is about five years old. Although has a pleasing feature set for an amateur photographer (also known as an enthusiast), including aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual exposure settings, manual focus, a zoom lens, a flash, a remote control, burst mode (with auto focus - which is increasingly uncommon these days), and spot metering, it is slow.

This is reason #1 why I couldn't have taken the photos; babies don't sit still for very long. It's something I have been struggling with since my own baby started smiling. It took weeks of trying before I was able to capture the moment for the grandparents to see. So I started looking for a new camera (which is part of the reason the blog's been so quiet recently). With everyone complaining about the slow speed of digital cameras, surely the designers had done something to improve it.

And they have. I talked to some friends, asked strangers about the cameras they were using, found some reviews (if you're interested in really detailed reviews of digital cameras look at www.dpreview.com), and decided on one I liked. It was smaller and lighter than my current camera, and it had a 12x optical zoom. All I needed was to play with one a little to be sure it lived up to its hype, so I made a trip to the local camera shop and had a play.

It was peppy. It was so much peppier than my current camera. But my husband thought it could be better, so we asked to see a dSLR for comparison. Actually, not any dSLR, but the same model used to take the photos at the party. It was peppy. It was very peppy. And after taking a few photos with it, the compact camera felt just as slow the one I had at home. As we walked out of the store, we concluded our next camera should be a dSLR.

Then we decided they were too expensive.

Since I was stuck with my old camera, I decided to revisit it's functions to make sure I was getting the most out of it. After the shutter delay, my biggest gripe about my camera is the depth of field. Imagine complaining about images being too focused, but that's what's been bugging me; I cannot take photos with a shallow depth of field. This is reason #2 why I could not have taken the photos from the party with my camera.

Shallow depth of field: the subject is well focussed and everything else is blurry.

For those of you who aren't photography buffs, the depth of field of an image is the range of distances from the lens that appear crisp and focused. It is commonly used to reduce the emphasis on parts of the image that are not relevant. In the aforementioned pictures of the babies, it was the unfortunate background. It is also commonly used to give a two dimensional image a three dimensional feel.

The traditional thought about depth of field is that it is inversely proportional to the size of the opening of the lens (aperture) so larger openings yield images with shallower depth of field and smaller openings produce images with more of the image in focus. Aperture is measured as the ratio of the lens length to the diameter of the opening, therefore a longer lens has a larger opening than a shorter lens at the same aperture number. The largest lens opening for a lens is always less than the length of the lens, and most lenses are three to five times as long as their largest aperture.

Using the aperture priority mode, I opened the lens as much as possible and took a few photos of my son. Everything was in focus. I tried getting closer, so the relative distance to the subject (my son) and the background was greater. Everything was in focus. I got even closer. Now the background was slightly blurry, but still clearly distinguishable, and my son's face was starting to look distorted. No matter what I did, I couldn't get a satisfyingly shallow depth of field. Clearly there was more to it than just aperture.

The lens redirects scattered light onto the sensor, shown at left. A shorter lens (top) makes a smaller image on the sensor, but a smaller sensor means the image can still be framed the same as with a larger lens and sensor combination (bottom).

When investigating digital cameras I came upon the term equivalent length, which means the length of lens on a 35mm camera that would produce the same field of view. It's only natural that people would be interested in the equivalent length, since prior to the switch to digital cameras, nearly everyone used 35mm cameras and a large proportion of them had a sense of the field of view provided by a 28mm lens versus a 105mm lens.

One camera I looked at had a lens that was equivalent to 35mm at the wide end of its range, but it was actually only 6mm long. This is accomplished by reducing the format size or sensor. The image projected onto a small sensor does not need to be as large as the image projected onto a large sensor for the resulting picture to fill the same amount of the frame, so a smaller lens is used with a smaller sensor for equivalent framing. This camera's sensor was only 5.8mm across, or roughly 1/6 of 35mm. But was this 6mm lens really equivalent to a 35mm lens?

I found a nice explanation of depth of field versus format size at www.wikipedia.com. The smaller the sensor is, the deeper is the depth of field for a given aperture and equivalent lens length (where the camera is the same distance from the subject and the image is framed the same, assuming the same aspect ratio).

This is a really significant thing for photographers who want to use depth of field to their advantage to consider when selecting a camera. My digital camera's sensor is 7.2mm across. That means an image shot at 2 meters from the subject with a 35mm equivalent lens at F2.8 will have a total depth of field (from the near limit to the far limit of acceptable focus) of over 4 meters (according to the depth of field calculator found at www.dpreview.com), whereas with my film SLR it will be about 0.6 meters, and about a third of that with a 4"x5" format camera. Let's put this into context, if the image is shot in my living room, the background would always be in focus on my digital camera, but nearly always fuzzy on my 35mm film camera.

So when you see a camera spec that states the lens length as 35-135mm equivalent, you should now know that it isn't. As it turns out, only a few of the most expensive digital SLRs available on the market today have a sensor as large as 35mm film. The vast majority of consumer digital cameras (as opposed to professional digital cameras) have sensors between 1/9th and 1/3rd as large.

Incidentally, I've just recently started getting prints of my digital photos and have discovered that they all have a blue cast (well, really it's cyan). That's reason #3 I couldn't have taken the photos from the party. Maybe I will get a new camera soon.

The death of free to air?

2006-04-05T06:18:00.001+10:00

As mentioned in a previous post, I gave up watching TV. There was a caveat, that I would watch one or two of the best shows (where "best" is entirely subjective). Well, the new season has rolled around and the TV is still off, but the VCR is working pretty hard. I've got it recording the one or two best shows every week and now have eight weeks of them on tape with the intention of watching them when I feel like watching TV. So far, I've watched one hour.

Now, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is going to become a horrible mess, even with just two shows, trying to keep track of what's been watched and what hasn't, making sure the tape in the VCR has enough capacity, and is positioned in the right spot. But technology comes to the rescue (or would, if I were earning money and could justify the expense) in the form of a digital video recorder (DVR). Many of these little units (often paired with a DVD recorder) can record up to a hundred hours of TV, and allow you to pause and rewind live TV or start watching a show already in progress from the beginning while still recording the end, instantly navigate through your recordings by means of a menu (rather than having to scan through hours of programs to find the right spot), automatically select items to record using a broadcast guide, and provide a commercial skip function. Why has it taken so long for these to be widely available?

Now, the commercial skip function is not a new idea. It is nothing more than a 30 second fast forward that can be repeated a number of times and exists on my five year old Korean VCR. The difference is that with digital content, it is possible to instantly skip an entire ad break of predictable length without even scanning the ads in fast motion. Television broadcasters will have to become increasingly clever to force people to watch at least some of the ads. My guess is that the length of ad breaks will vary more and shows will be scripted so that there can be more ad breaks. There will be a premium on the last ad space in a break (or perhaps the last few in a longer break) as the first few will be able to be skipped more readily than the last without missing the return of the show.

As fewer people see the ads, they will become less useful marketing tools, and networks will have to become more creative about how to pay for the cost of purchasing or creating shows and delivering them to viewers. Advertising will become increasingly insidious and difficult to avoid. Shows will decrease in quality as they incorporate product placement to pay the bills, as seen in "The Truman Show" or "Survivor".

As people can watch whenever they want (after the initial broadcast) networks will no longer be able to use high profile shows to increase the viewership of the duds placed between them. Whereas we may brighten up at the prospect of fewer bad TV shows, the reality is that there will be fewer good TV shows, because they are the ones that cost money to produce. I suspect this will force free to air networks out of business or searching for a new profit model that includes either a subscription price (as with cable or satellite TV) or pay per view.

For those of you living in the US, the TiVo has been around for quite some time and provides the functions described above for a subscription. In many areas of the US high proportions of people already subscribe to cable TV due to poor reception. Not so in Australia, where cable TV does not include the free to air networks, but with only 2-6 free to air stations, depending on where you live in Australia, many people subscribe to cable just to have more choice. My guess is that the growing availability of DVRs will be the death of commercial free to air TV.

Some people don't care for economic expansion

2006-03-10T07:56:00.006+11:00

I just finished reading Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger, which is the story of the five years he spent exploring the Southern part of the Arabian Peninsula in the late 1940s. On the surface, this is a book about an explorer traveling through the deserts of the Saudi Peninsula known as "The Empty Quarter" and is classified as a travel book. But this book is significant because Thesiger was one of the first Westerners to travel the area, where he had the unique opportunity to live amongst Bedu and meet people from many of the tribes in the area. Though he never learned to identify the tracks of his camel, he was a keen observer of the people he traveled with and among, and has documented the lifestyle and values of a people who are now almost extinct.

All of the people in the area were Muslim. Many of the tribes he encountered were acutely xenophobic and anti-Christian. Material possessions were few; his travel companions generally owned camels, guns, the shirt they were wearing, and little else. Even settled tribes seemed to have very few possessions. His travel companions were willing to kill for their tribe or traveling companions as a matter of honor. They were generous to the point of poverty, always offering food to anyone they met while traveling, even if it meant they went without any food for the day or longer, and Thesiger's companions seemed incapable of saying no to a request, even if it threatened the provisions required to cross the desert. It is also clear that there is great variation in degrees between different areas and tribes, with some not so concerned about Christians and others calling Thesiger's companions infidels because they were accompanied by a Christian.

In the five year period in which Thesiger completed his travels the area was in constant turmoil. Tribal alliances were complex and the areas of conflict were constantly shifting. Thesiger follows these tribal conflicts like a local, and recounts tribal conflicts that consolidated power and facilitated exploration for oil in the period between his travels and when he wrote the book.

The rigors of the desert created a society that differs dramatically from our own Anglo-Saxon society. This book provides insight into where the Muslim religion was formed, and the growth of values that seem utterly foreign to many westerners, which is especially significant in the current climate of Christian-Muslim animosity and the global threat of terrorism.

Thesiger aspired to define neither Arabs nor Muslims in this work. However, his keen observations of the Bedu peoples amongst whom he traveled provide insight into the values of both. Thinking back on my geography education, reading this book would have broadened my understanding of the Middle East far more than the chapters of our text book on the topic managed. On top of all this, it details the challenge of crossing a desert five hundred miles across by foot, with only the provisions they could carry on their camels, amongst warring tribes. It's well worth reading.

Recycled clothes to ease the travelers conscience

2006-03-04T09:00:00.001+11:00

I bought a pair of high tech travel pants today, the kind where the material is partly composed of old plastic bottles. The tag had a picture of the aforementioned bottles awaiting conversion into these pants. As I started to examine the picture, I expected to see lots of Coke bottles; Coke is ubiquitous. But I saw only one or two. The vast majority of the bottles in the cage were water bottles.

I only rarely drink bottled water. It is generally reserved for occasions when I need the bottle more so than the water. I am fortunate enough to have lived my life in places where there is a safe supply of clean water delivered directly to my taps. Mind you, I did start filtering my drinking water a few years ago when we lived in a house where the water ran brown for the first few seconds whenever you turned on the tap. However, even when I travel, I usually drink the local water if I've been told by a local that it is safe (the one exception to this is when I visit my mother's house, where I can't stand the taste of the water after brushing my teeth).

A while back I went to Belize. I spent nearly a week in a small town that would hardly exist if it weren't for the tourists. On one of our excursions we noted that Coke was still delivered in glass bottles which were sent back to be refilled, but all the local tourists carried a disposable water bottle rather than a reusable bottle that they filled at their hotel. Each of these disposable plastic bottles came with a little plastic cap to cover the mouth piece, which was further wrapped in plastic to keep it in place during shipping. These bottles, caps, and little plastic wrappers were all over the roadside.

When I went to Spain a few years later, it was nearly impossible to get water that wasn't bottled; Restaurants didn't serve it and there were no drinking fountains. The expectation was that everyone would purchase their drinking water in a bottle. In fact, no matter how nice the restaurant, if you asked for water it was delivered to your table in its original plastic packaging, never decanted, so that it would be obvious that it was not tap water. I guess this is for the same reason that bottles of wine are always opened in front of the customer. I can imagine a stuffy old man quaffing his glass of water and puckering his lips as he says, "Hmm, a citrus bouquet, with rich mineral undertones."

About 90 billion liters of bottled water is consumed each year in the world. The Italians drink the most per capita, but Americans now drink over 4 billion liters of it. Friends of mine consume bottled water because they perceive it to be cleaner and more healthful than what is available through the tap. It pays to take care when purchasing bottled water, though, because up to 40% of it comes from a tap. When in the U.S., where community water supplies are among the cleanest in the world, it hardly seems worth the bother to get your water from a bottle rather than the tap.

Anyway, all this bottled water requires a lot of bottles. In a place like small town Belize where they barely have garbage collection, the bottles are as good as garbage. But in Australia and the U.S. they can be turned into pants that are designed to be worn on trips to exotic places with dubious water quality. It's appropriate that the people creating all that plastic waste are the same ones purchasing the high tech pants. It's too bad the recycled pants will reduce waste where the tap water is safe and not from the destinations where the pants are intended to be worn.

Why I'm teaching sign language to my child

2006-02-12T08:29:00.001+11:00

I guess I'm not an entirely conventional mother. One of the ways this evidenced itself was when I tried explaining to my child's day care minder that we were teaching him sign language. She reacted with surprise; she had never heard of hearing parents teaching sign to a hearing child.

To be fair, I had never heard of teaching sign to a hearing child until I noticed a friend of mine had an uncanny ability to figure out what her daughter wanted even though she wasn't speaking. Her daughter only knew about ten signs, but was using them to communicate valuable information. As soon as I found out about this, I acquired copies of Baby Signs by Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn and Sign With Your Baby by Joseph Garcia. Then it seemed like I was seeing references to baby sign all over the place: books at the bookstore, DVDs at the baby goods store, classes at the local community house, articles in the weekly baby newsletter. Most of the women in my mother's group had heard of it, though I think I am the only one who is actually using it. With all this exposure, I was surprised that someone in the childcare industry had not heard of it.

There area number of supposed advantages to teaching your child sign:

It takes years for children to develop the oral skills to say all the sounds in their native language. Manual dexterity develops much earlier and research suggests that infants develop the ability to use language before they develop the muscle coordination required to speak clearly.
Learning to communicate at an earlier age reduces frustration for both the child and the parents.
Using sign allows children to learn fundamentals of language earlier. Garcia found that children who learn sign language are speaking about objects at the age when children who aren't using sign are only starting to identify objects. Acredolo and Goodwyn concluded that babies using signs understood more words and learned to speak more easily than babies who weren't using signs.

My child can only say three words orally, but he's currently using at least five signs. Like all children, these words have a much broader meaning than a fluent speaker would attribute to the same words. For instance, the sign for potty may mean "I need to use the potty", "I have just peed", or "There's the potty". But what a relief! Instead of crying, if he has a sign for what he needs he silently moves his hands. I no longer need to guess if he is thirsty or hungry. When he signs "potty" I know he either needs to use the potty or needs a nappy change. Sign hasn't turned him into the angel child; he still yells when he wants something or when he is unhappy, but only when he doesn't have a more effective way to communicate or doesn't get what he wants.

He seems to be so excited about being able to identify something and share that with us. For instance, he recently started using the sign for "hat". He now signs whenever he sees a hat or a helmet, not only when he wants to put one on or look at it more closely, but also as if to say "hey, I see a hat and I know what it is, and I can tell you that I know what it is." This creates opportunities for conversation that would not have happened if he weren't initiating it. These conversations expand his understanding of the world and of English.

As it would be when learning any language, my son's pronunciation is at times difficult to understand. For instance, the sign for "more" can be confused with clapping (I'm still not sure which one he is using), and it took me at least a day to figure out his sign for drink. But now that his pronunciation is familiar, it is becoming very easy to understand him.

When I first started this process, I used signs from ASL. Then I started looking for variations because some signs are just too difficult for a young child with limited manual skills. I'm not opposed to making up signs, as Acredolo and Goodwyn suggest, and as I learn to understand my son's "pronunciation" I realize that the official sign doesn't matter all that much as long as we understand what he's saying. Since very few people he interacts with are likely to know sign, it doesn't really matter what signs we use.

It has taken very little effort to teach our son the signs he knows. Because I own two books on baby sign, we have an accessible reference to learn new signs ourselves. Then it is just a matter of using them at the right moment. As my son learns more signs and expands his interest in the world, I learn more signs to share with him.

All I want for Christmas is a pizza cooker

2006-02-04T23:32:00.001+11:00

I recently noted at the local home wares shop a window full of pizza cookers. This appliance looks like a large, round sandwich griller. I can't imagine why anyone would prefer to own a specialized appliance just to cook pizza rather than use their oven. Everyone already has an oven. Pizza cookers require storage space and are probably harder to clean than the pan you use in the oven.

Each year I note a new appliance like this on the market, something that is essentially the same as an existing, and possibly even useful appliance (I do find the sandwich griller very useful), but in a different shape or size. They are supposed to allow you to prepare something that you already prepare some other way. They quickly end up gathering dust in the most inaccessible cupboard available.

Why don't the home wares companies ever come up with something truly innovative. I'm waiting for someone to develop a compact, energy and space efficient system to wash and dry Ziploc bags. That's something I'd pay $100 for.

Your turn

2006-01-19T22:58:00.001+11:00

I know that blogs are new to most of my readers, so now it's time to introduce comments. Did you know you can add comments to my postings? It's easy: just click on the "Permalink" link at the end of the post. You will be taken to a page that contains the post, any existing comments, and a place to add your own comment.

Top five reasons to comment on this and other entries in Wombats and Cents:
1. You can share your opinion
2. You can create a dialog
3. You can let me know who's reading
4. You can let others know you're reading
5. You can tell me how the blog is going (verbose? airy-fairy? insightful? boring?)

When you submit a comment it will not appear on the page immediately. I review all comments prior to posting to make sure that they are appropriate (mostly to prevent spammers from using my site for unsavory purposes, and to make sure there's nothing offensive). I do reserve the right to delete part or all of a comment, but it probably won't ever happen unless you give me a reason to.

When you're done you can use the links at the top of the page or on the right side to read my other posts.

Writing lessons

2006-01-19T00:11:00.001+11:00

I feel a little let down by my high school English curriculum. For six years I read countless novels, short stories, and plays, I identified themes in spot quotes, and I wrote five to ten page essays purporting to explore the deeper meaning of these stories. Despite all that reading and writing, I have not been able to shake the feeling that I missed the day when the teacher discussed how to write a good essay (I missed very few days, so it must have only taken one or two classes).

I'm a huge fan of Tim Cahill's writing. Cahill, who used to be a regular contributor to Outside Magazine, has a style that melds personal experience with history and often has you thinking about the future as well. For non-fiction, he is one author I'd like to be able to mimic (another is Jon Krakauer, another contributor to Outside Magazine who writes with a very similar style). Why didn't we read articles by Cahill in high school? Why didn't we spend any time analyzing the writing techniques used in our endless reading list of the classics? I suspect it was because my high school English curriculum was more geared towards making sure we could quote from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ("Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes.") than to develop an understanding of different writing styles and how to mimic them. Not to suggest that mimicry should be the goal of any aspiring writer, but that it can and should be used as a valuable step towards developing one's own style.

Today I was very excited to discover an analysis of a typical article by Tim Cahill. If you haven't read anything by Cahill, I suggest you get a copy of his first book, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, which is a collection of articles on topics as diverse as the Jonestown Massacre and Bigfoot sightings. The aforementioned analysis is of a piece from Pass the Butterworms, a collection I haven't read, and is quite understandable even without having first read the article. I will be reading this analysis several times to glean everything I can from it. Hopefully it will have an effect on what you see here, but no one should hold their breath for that.

According to Stephen King, in his memoir/writing instruction manual On Writing, good writing comes from lots of reading and lots of writing with a few things like grammar and vocabulary thrown in (in other words, there is no formula).

With the exception of a few pages of Cujo when I was too little to be reading Stephen King novels, I've never read anything by Stephen King. I was so scared of the shadows in my closet that I have avoided scary books and movies ever since. And I'm not terribly interested in writing fiction. I never would have picked up his writing manual except that my mother was so enthusiastic about it that she sent me a copy. Once I started reading it I couldn't stop. I was hooked by the second page, which I suppose is why he is a bestselling author.

The book starts with an autobiography that exposes his insatiable appetite for horror, a love of writing, and a determination to publish, all of which started from a very early age. The second half of the book commences with a discussion of the elements of one's toolbox and relies heavily on Strunk and White's Elements of Style (he recommends that any writer own and study this book). The better part of the writing manual, however, is about how to manage story, themes, background information, and research in writing. He illustrates this very effectively with examples from his own writing history and samples of his writing. The postscript is about getting hit by a car and how writing fit into his recovery.

My only complaint is that he assumes that the reader is an aspiring fiction writer to the extent that he instructs the reader to stop reading if he is not. I found the book interesting, regardless of my non-existent desire to write fiction, because it demonstrates how one successful author cultivated his skills and develops his stories. This book would be a welcome addition to any high school English curriculum.

Reading On Writing made me want to read more of King's books, but I'm still a little afraid of the shadows in my closet.

Outsourcing international relations

2006-01-16T23:40:00.001+11:00

I got a phone call from India the other day. This is nothing new. Even though I don't know anyone in India, I get many calls from the call centers there.

Like anyone with a telephone who has lived in the same place for more than a few months, we regularly get sales calls. Everyone who has been subject to the litany of calls can attest to the poor timing; the calls inevitably happen just as you are getting home, just as you are cooking dinner, or just as you are sitting down to eat. They call during that precious period between when you arrive home and that ill-defined time when it's considered too late to call, which for a telephone solicitor is, thankfully, earlier than it would be for a friend.

What you may not know is that these calls also happen during your normal working hours. I discovered this when I stopped work to take care of my child. Now I can get an unsolicited sales call when I am feeding my son, changing his diaper, or putting him down for his nap. The timing of the call is annoying because it happens when you are at home at all. It is an invasion of our personal time (and space - I don't pay $30/month to have a phone line with the intent of making it easier for the telemarketers - wouldn't it be great if we could treat them like the trespassers that they are).

Okay, so you know how I feel about telephone solicitors, and my guess is that you share some of these feelings. I'm probably not the only one who provides an abrupt response when I receive these calls. My partner often engages in little games with the callers before telling them he's not interested. I'm sure some people give the telephone solicitors an earful before they hang up. I certainly have in the past. My standard reply when I get a sales call now is "Not interested. Please remove me from your list. Thank you." Then I hang up the phone before they have the chance to try to convince me otherwise. A few people are authentically sorry for bothering me and don't even try. Most callers I can hear starting their plea as the phone makes it's way
to the hook.

Like many things these days, the work of telephone solicitors is being outsourced overseas. I rarely receive sales calls from rural Australia, even more rarely receive them from one of the major cities. Virtually all of our sales calls come from India. This may make economic sense to the companies using the call centers to sell their wares. Labor is certainly cheaper in India than Australia. It probably costs less to call from India to Melbourne than from Adelaide to Melbourne (if my international phone card is anything to go by). And Indians speak English. In theory, it's perfect.

Unfortunately for the poor Indians, and for the companies employing their services, they don't actually speak the same language. Even though the grammar and much of the vocabulary is the same, the pronunciation is often so different that it is notably more difficult for a person from the US or Australia to understand someone from India than someone from their own country. Furthermore, it is immediately obvious that the caller is not a native Australian, which increases my irritation with the company using the call center; not only are they paying someone to invade my time and space with annoying sales calls for things I don't want, but they won't even pay Australians to do it (probably because it's such a despicable job that Australians demand a lot of money to do it). Unfortunately for the person on the other end of the phone line, they bear the brunt of this irritation.

Many of the people working in the Indian call centers probably do not have phones in their homes (according to the Economist, there are 4.4 land lines per 100 people in India - compare that with 54.1 and 60.8 land lines per 100 people for Australia and the US), and therefore do not understand how numerous and annoying sales calls are in countries like Australia. They must think Australians (and this American living in Australia) are terribly rude. But now, because of this peculiarity of international markets, there is probably more contact between Australians and Indians over sales calls than over cricket.

And that leads me to wonder what effect this new trend towards international call centers is having on international relations.

"TV is God"

2006-01-12T08:40:00.001+11:00

...or so said a friend of mine some time ago. I've always liked this thought, because whenever a TV is on, people can't help but watch, even when there's very little worth watching. I dislike restaurants with TVs for this very reason, because the TVs draw my attention away from the people I'm with and the conversation I'm having.

Of course, the problem with TVs goes beyond restaurants. Virtually all Americans and Australians now own at least one TV (some own many so they don't even have to pretend to be spending time with their family while they watch TV). In Australia, unless you have cable, there are only two to seven channels, depending on where you live, which limits your nightly viewing options. Still, I had somehow developed an addiction to shows four nights a week.

I recently gave up TV. When the season finale of Grey's Anatomy was announced, my response was "Thank God" (you decide which one). The Grey's Anatomy season finale meant I would no longer be tied to Meredith's weekly indecision about whether to stick with Dr. McDreamy. It meant I was free to spend one more evening a week doing something else, like write blog entries, or read a good book, or talk with my spouse! That's when I knew that I was ready to give up TV.

It was surprisingly easy. Two things conspired to make it this way. The first was the shift of dinner time to before my son's bedtime of 7:00 PM. The second, was that the networks obliged me by showing all the season finales and then starting the typically uninspiring summer line up. Every few evenings I wonder what's on the tube, and there have been a few times where I've just felt like watching, but then I remember that summer line up and decide to read a book instead.

Giving up TV has been great. I have more time to get things done, I'm better rested, and I'm reading more than I have since college.

Unfortunately, I know that once the long dark of winter consumes Melbourne, I'll be sucked back in. Hopefully, now that I've found so many other things to do during my evenings, I will only allow myself to watch one or two shows, the really good ones, if such a thing exists.

Raising children gets easier, I hope

2006-01-09T07:39:00.001+11:00

When my son was about four months old the father of a young girl told me, "It only gets harder." There aren't many crueler things a person can say to someone who hasn't had four consecutive hours sleep in almost six months.

I consoled myself, saying that if it never got easier no one would ever have a second child by choice.

Now my child is a year old. Despite the occasional temper tantrum (which is a relatively new development), it is easier than it was when I heard that cruel remark eight months ago. Maybe it's just a temporary reprieve, but then maybe a little rest was all I needed to be able to approach all the new challenges with a sense of humor.

Or maybe he just got off easy when his daughter was younger.

Books that changed the way I see the world, part 3: The Control of Nature

2006-01-03T09:38:00.001+11:00

Four months after it was hit, New Orleans is still cleaning up from Hurricane Katrina. The population of the city is down and city officials are lobbying the federal government for funds to build new and improved levees, reconstruct housing, and trying to encourage former residents to return.

Okay, I must admit that I probably didn't change many of my preconceptions about the world from reading The Control of Nature, but I still found it fascinating. John McPhee is one of those writers who can make any topic interesting, and in this book he provides three stories of man versus nature that seems particularly apropos in the aftermath of Katrina. For instance, did you know that the Mississippi River has been trying to change course into the Red River and the Atchafalaya swamps for most of the last century. It has been stopped by an ongoing dam project at Old River driven by the desire for New Orleans to continue to be a port. While the Mississippi gets increasingly shallower and more likely to flood as it fills with silt, the amount of water flowing from the Mississippi river to the Red river has been frozen to the proportions from the 1950s at great expense because of economic interests!

This book is interesting for several reasons. First, it illustrates how dependent our homes and property interests are to current geographical conditions. Second, it demonstrates the exhaustive amount of energy people will use to protect their homes and their property interests from changes in those conditions.

Currently the population of New Orleans is less than one fourth the population prior to Katrina. Some of these undoubtedly haven't returned because they do not have a place to return to. Perhaps some of these people have decided that it's easier just to stay where they are now. Some may have decided that New Orleans is too prone to flooding (if it weren't for all the levees the place would always be under water). But then there are others who are trying very hard to make New Orleans livable and encourage people to return.

Do we insist on living in places that require continual control of nature because we are too stubborn (or lazy) to move or is it because we are running out of more suitable places? Are the projects described in this book over the top or are they just extreme examples of the control we exert over nature everyday to make our existence comfortable? The book answers neither of these questions, but it got me asking them.

Your thoughts?

Wireless neighborhood

2005-12-27T07:58:00.001+11:00

My wireless network is on the fritz, which is pretty sad given how new it is (less than six months). It had a rocky start, which was followed by a month or two of blissful constant connection, and has now degenerated into only good reception punctuated by frequent drop outs.

What's changed, you ask? Got me.

Anyway, as a result, I spend a lot of time looking at my wireless network configuration dialog. Davis is there (it always is). Tudor Systems is there, slower, but visible. Maybe I see 1354 House, maybe not. My own network is never there when I'm looking at the dialog. Typically, the signal reappears minutes before my son wakes up.

Two things strike me as strange about this. The first is why I am getting a better signal from the network across the street than I am from the one in the next room. The second, is how our neighborhoods have changed; I learned the next door neighbor's last name from their network. Now, they're actually quite nice people, and I must admit that I knew them before I saw their network listed on my computer. I've even joked that I should just pay to use their Internet connection since I can never connect to mine. But isn't it peculiar how in this day of isolation from the people most physically near us we should have this kind of wireless introduction?

Finishing fiction

2005-12-23T20:55:00.002+11:00

I finished reading Life of Pi last night. I stayed up way past my bedtime to do so, and after I put the book down I concluded that one should never finish a good book just before it's time to go to sleep.

This is especially true with fiction, which often doubles its pace in the final chapters, turning everything you've absorbed in great detail upside down at the last second. I can remember reading The Princess Bride
for the first time as a 14 year old, crying with anger at the turn of events in the epilogue (this part was left out of the movie, by the way). Of course, that's the sign of a good book, one that leaves you mulling over everything you read in great detail to figure out some piece that is revealed to you in the end that requires revisiting everything you read before before you can know what it means.

Tunnel wonder

2005-12-23T07:03:00.001+11:00

I made a tunnel out of a box for my son to play with. He loves it. I need do nothing more than look at him from the other side for him to drop whatever he is doing to crawl through the box. In fact, anything that is remotely tunnel-like will get his attention: the previously forgotten play gym, someone's legs, the dining table (or more likely, the dining chairs).

I must admit a certain affinity for tunnels myself. As a child I always enjoyed driving through the tunnel from Detroit to Windsor; it never bothered me that we were going under a large body of water to do so. On the bus to summer camp we always held our hands up to the roof going under a particularly long and dark tunnel-like bridge. And I still enjoy crawling under the dining table with my son.

This affinity is clearly present from a young age, so what is it about tunnels that makes them so inviting?

Is the devil in the details?

2005-12-15T00:55:00.002+11:00

My son had his first birthday party last weekend and he received the usual assortment of toys, books, and clothes that you would expect for a 1 year old. Along with these came the packaging, which every parent knows, is at least as interesting as the contents for the first few days, which is how I came to be examining an old shoe box this morning.

The shoe box in question is red, with a white silhouette of a puma on top and bottom. It clearly contained a pair of athletic shoes at one stage, but now was being used to teach the concepts of "in the box" and "out of the box". What caught my attention this morning was the small writing on the end of the box: "Average contents: 2"

What could they possibly have meant by that? Surely, their intention was that the box would contain exactly two shoes until it got into the end user's hands and after that they would relinquish concern for the contents. As a purchaser of shoes, I would be extraordinarily annoyed if my new box of shoes contained one shoe or, even worse, three pickles. Nevertheless, it did pique my curiosity, and having nothing else to do as my son insisted I sit with him while he played with his new Duplo, I read on.

On the end of the box covered by the aforementioned label, are five more icons: a no battery image (do shoes require batteries these days?), a no swimming image, an image showing a running person moving towards a door with the label "escape", a warning that products may differ from the images shown (under a drawing of a wingtip), and and icon saying that shoes can only be sold in Paris! (Oops, that must have been my sleep deprived eyes. Upon further inspection, I see that it actually said they can only be sold in pairs, hence the "Average Contents: 2").

It goes on. Most of the stuff isn't worth mentioning (even the stuff I've already mentioned). I did like the list of suggestions for recycling, however:

Doll house
Place to store stuff you should have thrown out by now
Place to store photos you can't store on your hard disk

What gets me is this: Puma spent a lot of money employing someone to spend a lot of time to come up with this rubbish, most of which is seen only by the consumer after he has purchased the product and then probably not even then unless he is that tired of watching his child play with his new Duplo.

Which makes me wonder how much the shoes cost?

Children's Books

2005-12-09T20:06:00.002+11:00

My son is about a year old. Every night, as part of the bed time ritual prescribed by all of the child rearing "experts", we read him two or three books. At this rate, one can go through a lot of books.

Now the first thing that I have to say about children's books is that they are absurdly expensive: "A dollar a word" as one friend and parent said to us. Now, it's not really that bad. They're probably closer to $0.20/word, and some of them may even go less than $0.04/word. Still, can you imagine paying that rate for your typical novel? I've mostly gotten over this. If I find a really good children's book, I will simply ignore the price tag as I take it to the register and pay for it with my credit card so I don't ever have to acknowledge the actual cost.

My real issue with children's books is that on the whole, they are so bad. They insult the intelligence of the readers (both the children and their parents) by sloppily throwing together pictures and a few uninspiring notes with little semblance of a story. At the risk of committing a bit of copyright infringement I'll give you an example, the complete text of one of the board books we own:

Baby bunnies enjoy an early morning wash.
Heads down, tails up! Bunnies drink their breakfast milk.
One, two, three... Hide and seek is fun to play.
One young rabbit learns how to hop.
Cuddle up, it's time for bed. Goodnight!

Now, with the exception of an old college mate of mine who would have liked the cute pictures of bunnies, I can't see how anyone could enjoy reading this book once, let alone the hundreds of times a parent can expect to read each book they own. That's why when my son decided he liked to use this book as a teething ring I didn't discourage him until the pages started to fuse together and I started to worry about what kinds of glue he might be ingesting.

Fortunately, there are a few stars that shine through the dark, books with nice stories, clever rhymes, intelligent words, and good illustrations. They include words like "cavort" and "rapscallion". A few I've discovered so far include "Slinky Malinky", "Harry Maclary and Zachary Quack", "Edward the Emu", "Edwina the Emu", "Olga the Brolga", "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", "Barnyard Dance", and "But Not the Hippopotamus" (who can resist a story about a hippopotamus? It's just a fun word to say - try it).

Have you read these books? Do you have other suggestions or remember favorites from your own early childhood?

By the way, if you're ever giving a children's book as a present to a young child, make sure it is a board book, otherwise it will either be torn and crinkled or stored away to save it from that fate. I'm not sure at what age this no longer applies, but certainly beyond 1 year.

Couldn't put it down

2005-12-09T01:03:00.002+11:00

I've just finished reading Or I'll Dress You In Mourning, the biography of Manuel Benítez, El Cordobés, the bullfighter I mentioned in a previous post. It didn't take me long to read it (it has actually taken me longer to get around to writing the review). Plainly said: this was one of the most compelling books I have ever read. I could hardly put it down (only a year of sleepless nights with an infant was enough to get me to turn the light out each night).

This book tells the story of Manuel Benítez, a peasant born on the eve of the Spanish revolution. He grew up in a region with only three landholders who paid next to nothing to the local field hands, and the promise of a socialist republic was a popular concept. His father was quick to join the socialist militia when the fighting started and was imprisoned until his death when the war finally ended. His mother died quickly after a brief illness and he and his siblings were left to be raised by his oldest sister. Determined to become a bullfighter like most other peasant boys, he demonstrated a dedication to his cause that few people have, until he finally broke into the big time at an age when many bullfighters are considered washed up.

Despite knowing the fate of El Cordobés, which you can quickly gather from the captions on the collection of pictures, I found it difficult to put the book down for want of knowing what would happen next. The only disappointment is that the book ends in 1964, at the start of his illustrious career that still continues, 40 years later!

Drowning in the suburban mall

2005-12-08T22:01:00.001+11:00

I've sunk to new lows. Yesterday I made a trip to our nearby suburban mall. In four years of living at this address, I've only visited there twice, both times in the past few months.

It's supposed to be the best of the malls in Melbourne (there are five or six around the suburbs). A friend of mine, shocked when I told her I'd never been there, said she'd drive across town to go to "Chaddy", as it is known in the local vernacular. But on my first visit to Chaddy I was struck by just how similar it was to the shops in the city, a place where I have been blessed with a few too many pointless lunch hours.

On this recent visit the parking lot was filled to the outer reaches and the halls were packed with meandering hoards of people not quite sure why they were there. They were wandering the mall to spend their time more than their money, in pursuit of a purchase to take home as a souvenir.

One of the nice things about living in a moderately large city (no comments from the NYC folks, please) is that the local shopping areas are generally easier to get to than the mall, and many of them contain a great selection of stores, making malls mostly irrelevant for those of us shopping out of need (or at least perceived need). But in the mall, the marketer rules. Things are not sold because they will be useful, but because the masses are an easy target in our time of plenty. We live in a disposable society (I've said it before); things are produced to last only a few uses, at best, and we purchase as if we plan to use things only a few times. Nothing can be repaired for less than it costs to purchase a replacement. This behavior is not limited to our purchases, either, but that is a topic for another day.

I'm happy to say that the only thing I purchased during my visit is something I've been meaning to get for months but couldn't find at the local shops. I suppose that explains my compulsion yesterday to go there. It is a sad statement for me however, because it was a replacement for something that still works reasonably well.

Cloth vs. disposable?

2005-12-04T07:34:00.001+11:00

It's a very common question, but it almost seems rhetorical these days: will you put your baby in cloth or disposable nappies (aka diapers)? We live in a disposable culture, so it's hardly surprising that the vast majority of people (well, Americans and Australians anyway) choose to use disposable nappies without a second thought. The question also implies that one must use one or the other, ignoring the possibility that it might make sense to use cloth during the day and disposables at night.

The strange thing is that when you choose to use cloth nappies for your baby, even when you don't do it full time, you seem to be joining a bit of a fraternity (well, more likely a sorority). Since there are about 45,000 different cloth nappy products to choose from, none of which are carried in your local supermarket for examination, if you aren't careful you can end up spending hours reading about them on-line, where you will also end up reading a list of reasons why cloth nappies are better than disposable. And the list will inevitably argue that the time spent cleaning cloth nappies is marginal and actually not as much as having to go to the store to purchase disposables all the time.

Sure, if you're disorganized, you may find yourself making an occasional trip to the store to get an emergency supply, but most people would buy the nappies at the supermarket when they do their weekly shop. How can the 60 seconds it takes me to walk down the nappy aisle while I'm at the supermarket once a month possibly compare to the time spent on three extra loads of washing, drying, and folding I do each week to keep my 1 year old in cloth nappies during his waking hours.

What's happened to El Cordobés?

2005-12-02T01:38:00.003+11:00

When I was in high school I had the fortune to meet Manuel Benítez (El Cordobés), one of the most famous bullfighters of the 20th century. My family had an extravagant and festive dinner with him and his wife where we were entertained by his overwhelming energy and disregard for convention as he played the bull through the waiters napkins to the Paso Doble ringing out from the piano. At the end of the meal, we parted ways, with contact details scribbled on a scrap of paper that has long since been lost.

I am now reading the biography of El Cordobés (Or I'll Dress You in Mourning, which I'll review after I've finished). The book was written over thirty years ago and so does not cover most of his life. After reading the details of his youth growing up in Francoist Spain, I can't help but wonder what has happened to him.

I did a little searching on the web (as you do) and found surprisingly little current news. For someone so famous (in Spain) I thought there would be the occasional newspaper article in the past few years mentioning him, but not that I could find. Nor could I find any mention of his death. In fact, the stub article in wikipedia claims he's still alive. A little further digging and it turns out he gave up retirement and was in the ring (in Spanish) as recently as 2004 (at the age of 68!).

His predecessor, Manolete, died in the bullring not long after coming back from retirement to redeem his name after the public turned against him for retiring. It seems that anyone who makes it as a bullfighter (and a lot of people who tried but didn't succeed) are destined to die in the ring.

I'd be interested to know more about his recent life, if anyone finds anything (or who reads Spanish better than I and finds Spanish news about him).

Books that changed the way I see the world, part 2: Under the Banner of Heaven

2005-11-26T01:56:00.004+11:00

There are books that provide more detail to something you already knew or broaden your knowledge with something you knew nothing about. Other books cause you to fundamentally shift your view of the world. Under the Banner of Heaven is one of the latter.

I bought this book purely because I like the author, even though the topic was outside his usual area.

The book illustrates that religious fanaticism is the exclusive domain of neither Muslims nor foreigners and exists among homebred Americans. It also demonstrates that the publicized behavior of "religious extremists" does not necessarily represent the values of the greater population following that religion. "Under the Banner of Heaven" chronicals the events surrounding the gruesome murder of a young mother and her infant by two of her Morman brothers-in-law. It provides a detailed history of the Morman church and explores how extremist factions have formed and continue to exist.

Krakauer writes with a very unbiased tone and lets the reader come to his own conclusions. That said, reading this book completely changed my views on organized religion.

Bike lanes and ridership

2005-11-25T22:31:00.002+11:00

I went for a walk during the morning commuting hour yesterday, which I don't usually do. I was surprised by the number of people I saw riding bicycles through the neighborhood streets. This shouldn't be too surprising as I used to see a large number when I commuted by bike, but what I really noted was the high proportion of females and the number of riders who weren't clad in Lycra. In fact, I didn't see any Lycra. I take this to mean that there are more people using bikes to get around than you generally notice, which is a good thing for several reasons. First, bikes are superior to cars when it comes to pollution, fitness, and possibly mental health as well. They are quiet, consume less space, are less likely to severely injure or kill a pedestrian or bicyclist if they collide, and they don't use any fuel or produce greenhouse gasses. If we're not noticing them, that also means that they are less obtrusive than cars. Sadly, many people have given up riding and discourage others because they do not feel there are safe locations to ride.

Okay, so it should be obvious that I like cycling by now. You have probably also figured out that I think there should be a network of bike routes that rivals the network available for cars.

It's time for me to give credit where it is due: compared to many cities, Melbourne has a reasonably large network of bike paths and there are a number of bike lanes around.

Now that I've said that I can pick it apart: most of the bike paths around Melbourne are designed for weekend rides with the family, which is great if you only ride on the weekends with the family, but not very good if you want to use your bike for transportation, whether that means riding to work or to run errands. Furthermore, the bike paths tend to be poorly maintained with very rough paving and vegetation encroaching on the paths. Routes follow creeks, which make them scenic, but also circuitous. And there just aren't enough of them.

I hear that there are very good cycling facilities in various parts
of Europe, but I've never been to those places, so I won't talk about
them. I used to live in Boulder, Colorado, which is fantastic for biking. The city has really committed to providing good, safe routes for cyclists and the network of paths is so extensive that it was often faster and more direct for me to ride my bike than to drive my car. Furthermore, because many of the paths are along irrigation ditches and creeks, they are quite scenic and generally isolated from automobile exhaust. They are of excellent standard, with underpasses even for quiet neighborhood streets, and have good flat surfaces. The city plowed the more popular ones when it snowed (granted - after the roads) and swept them occasionally. The city also had bike lanes on some of the roads, which I used as well.

So I was pleased when my local council announced it would be spending more money to improve bike facilities. The first evidence I saw of this was the painting of bike lanes along one of my nearby roads. As is often the case with bike lanes, this one starts at the intersection with a busy road with no bike lane, ends at the intersection with another busy road with no bike lane, and does not intersect any roads with bike lanes (though it intersects many neighborhood streets on which bicycling would be appropriate). The city must have painted other bike lanes because I've recently read several letters to the editor in our local paper (sorry, it's not on line or I'd provide a link) complaining about the city wasting money on bike paths.

My first reaction was intense irritation at the car drivers who think bicyclists are not entitled to use the roads. As someone who has commuted by bike for almost 10 years, I've encountered plenty of drivers who act as though I wasn't supposed to be using the road. And I thought - hey, great blog topic. So I decided to do a little research on bike lanes, but was surprised by my findings.

It turns out that there is a vocal contingent of bicyclists who think bike lanes are a bad idea. As I read their arguments I couldn't help but agree with some of them. Essentially, they are saying that rather than improving safety for cyclists, bike lanes force cyclists out of the smooth flow of traffic and into places where it is dangerous for them to be (for instance, curbside of a car turning towards the curb - right in the US and left in Australia). They argue that the mere presence of a bike lane reinforces car driver attitudes that roads are for the exclusive use of automobiles and that bikes do not belong there. They believe the solution is to remove bike lanes and focus on rider education of how to manage traffic situations (what about driver education about who's entitled to use the roads?).

I must admit that when the bike lanes were painted on my local road, I was a bit concerned. When I was commuting (I'm at home with my child these days) I regularly rode one block on that road and then turned right (across the lane of oncoming traffic - for all you non-Australians). Because I would be turning right shortly after entering this road, I always turned onto this road into the right side of the lane so I was in position to turn right, and there was plenty of space for cars to pass me on the left. Now there is a bike lane to the left, which reduces the amount of space the cars have to pass and could cause drivers to feel that I actually belong on the other side of the road from where I am.

In other parts of the city, the bike lanes include the bluestone guttering, which is a dangerous place to ride. Many of Melbourne's bike lanes are shared use with car parking, and in my opinion, a good number of them are situated so close to the car parking that cyclists are jeopardized by car doors. The essential problem with bike lanes is that they seem to be constructed as an afterthought and with very little regard to how bicycles work and where cyclists may need to go.

Whereas I agree that many accidents are caused by the cyclists themselves, either through inexperience, lack of attention, or arrogance, I feel the bicycle education solution ignores what I consider to be the superior option: bike paths or shared use paths, like the ones I used in Boulder.

Unfortunately, what is really needed is for drivers of automobiles to acknowledge that the roads are constructed for many modes of transport and to respect the rights of all road users. It is possible to force respect of other road users by enacting and enforcing strict legislation, but in our car dominated culture, I can't see that happening anytime soon.

Incidentally, good bike routes are not the only facilities the council could provide to reduce the disincentives to ride, but that topic will have to wait for another post.

Wandering the streets for peace and quiet

2005-11-25T21:57:00.002+11:00

I took my son to his first session of child care this morning so I could get some work done outside of his naptime. However, since the session was when he normally napped, I had to wander the streets for an hour pushing him in his stroller to get him to sleep before the childcare session started so he wouldn't be too grumpy to survive the whole 2.5 hours. The irony was not lost on me.

Fortunately, I have just gotten a report that he has settled in very well and is doing better than many children his age do on their first day. After 11 months of not being able to leave the room without him complaining, I have just managed to leave him in the next suburb without him getting upset and I'm wondering why I didn't do this ages ago.

Send fresh produce for Christmas

2005-11-24T07:22:00.001+11:00

I have vague memories of my grandfather sending us a box of pears for Christmas. I suppose there was a time when this would have been a really big treat, but I think by the time I was a child there was pretty good fruit in the grocery store at Christmas, so I always thought it was a bit of a let down.

I would have thought this tradition had died a long time ago, but it turns out that you can still send a box of fresh produce as a gift. And in my humble opinion, this one would be even more disappointing then that box of pears.

Is your dictionary missing something?

2005-11-22T03:40:00.002+11:00

Half the time when I look up a word it's not so much because I want to know the meaning as where it came from. As much as I like to know the etymology of a word, I'm too cheap to buy a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and our many lesser dictionaries are missing this information for most words. Of course, when I'm at my computer, I often use dictionary.com to look up words and it does not provide etymologies.

Fortunately, I've just discovered etymonline.com, which is for etymologies what dictionary.com is for definitions.

Books that changed how I see the world, part 1: Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice

2005-11-21T21:03:00.002+11:00

I'm sure most people go through this when they start their blog, but when I was brainstorming what to write about, I couldn't help but think of my favorite books, not necessarily books that I would read over and over, but ones that really impacted me. I'm always eager to share a good book with someone who's interested, so here's the first installment in my list of books that changed the way I view the world. Needless to say, I highly recommend every one of the books that make it onto this list.

Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, by Mark Plotkin

I dragged this book around for five years before I finally had time to read it. When I did, I couldn't put it down.

I always knew the world's rain forests hold plants that can be used as medicines, and this book provides living details of this, but the book also helped me see the many ways in which the developed world is impacting the native cultures, and the conflict that exists between protecting those cultures versus transitioning them to interacting with the developed world.

There are many sides to this interaction: the missionaries who try to convert "primitives" to Christianity, the aid workers who try to improve living standards and health, the anthropologists who study their culture as an oddity, the tourists who appear to have so much wealth. Western medicine plays a particularly complex role in this tango between cultures. All of these things are illustrated as the author recounts his experiences living with several tribes in the Amazon over a number of years. Reading this book gave me a much greater understanding of the issues surrounding previously isolated cultures and the struggle that exists between retaining their identity versus integrating into the wider world.

The story is a race against time and, even though the author is an ethno-botanist, the story is compelling.

A music library on 4 disks

2005-11-20T01:18:00.004+11:00

Our CD player died a few months ago. It wasn't anything special, but it was a five disk changer, which was nice because it meant I could park a few disks in it for a while without getting completely sick of them. Anyway, now it's dead and so not much use.

For a little while we just didn't listen to music. It wasn't hard. We had just had a baby and there wasn't much time for leisure anyway. When we started to miss it, we looked into getting it fixed and found that, as is so common these days, it would cost almost as much to repair it as we originally paid for it. We looked into replacing it, but everyone is selling (one disk) DVD players these days.

The DVD player! I had forgotten that it could play CDs. So we decided just to use the DVD player to listen to CDs.

This had its drawbacks, the biggest being that it could only hold one CD. Most people would have bought an iPod to solve this problem long before it got to this, but we're too cheap. We persisted for a while.

Somewhere along the line we got a new computer with a DVD burner. I don't know what we expected to use our DVD burner for, but we got it anyway, then kind of forgot about it. Eventually we remembered that our DVD player plays MP3s.

It took a week of concentrated disk swapping to rip our modest CD collection into the computer and another few days puzzling over why iTunes had rearranged all the songs in my "musicals" playlist when I burned them to CD as a test. I never did figure it out, but decided to persist and burned one DVD containing a third of our music library. Initial tests were promising. For some reason, the renaming problem that occurred on the CD did not occur on the DVD, and the directory structure was surprisingly useful. I especially liked that the highest level of directories was for genre. The only problem is that the first two albums worth of music on each of the disks skips in our DVD player, a minor detail that I will resolve by burning another few disks.

So for the past week I've been listening to music almost non-stop and haven't heard the same song twice. I'm still not through the first disk, and I'm hearing music that I'd forgotten about and really enjoying it.

The solution's not perfect, but it's working pretty well for now, and when I do get an iPod adding music to it will be as easy as plugging it into my computer.

Update: The DVD player didn't like dealing with so many songs. Eventually we relented and got an MP3 player (but not an iPod).

Identifying your audience

2005-11-18T13:58:00.001+11:00

Okay, post #2. It's not much to you, but it's taken me some time to get here (way more than the half hour or so since the last post). You see, for a while I was concerned that someone might actually read what I post. Why post, you ask. Good question. Call it a learning experience (though I hope many of my posts will be worth reading nevertheless). Now, I've realized that the real concern is that no one might read what I post. It makes it hard to identify my audience, which is one of the first things you are taught to do in your high school English class.

What is a wombat?

2005-11-18T13:30:00.001+11:00

You may know this already: a wombat is a furry, fat, nocturnal marsupial that comes from Australia, which is where I live.

So what does a wombat have to do with cents? Not much, except that when I moved to Australia from the US the exchange rate was almost 2 Australian dollars to 1 US dollar. It made for very confusing conversations about the price of housing with friends and family back home, so we decided to call the Australian ones wombats, though technically they probably should have been called roos or kangaroos, since that's what's featured on the $1 coin.

So what does this have to do with this blog? Again, not much really, except that it will undoubtedly be flavoured by the fact that I am an American living in Australia.