A Free Man

Regular readers of A Free Man may know that one of my life long quests, much like Superman, is fighting for justice and pointing out inequity when it crosses my path. For example, the fact that Dr. O’C has celebrated two Mother’s Days in her first year as a Mother and I have had no Father’s Days. Zero. This is due to the byzantine wanderings of our family,different holiday calendars and the universal plot to screw me. Well, dear readers, that’s all going to change on Sunday because it is Father’s Day in Australia. And I am in Australia. And I am a Father. So, time to pony up, Baby Z. A matching “World’s Best Dad” coffee mug and T-shirt are always a nice gift. Or maybe some Georgia Bulldogs gear…

Odd time of year for Father’s Day as I will be spending at least the first part of the day waking up ridiculously early to listen to American football games on the internet. As week 2 of the NCAA football season kicks off, I feel like I need to rectify something. As a couple of my grad school friends never fail to point out, I have a tendency - in my undying loyalty to my undergraduate alma mater - to forget about the institution that gave me my Ph.D. and thus current career, the University of Missouri. I’ve written about why my devotion is focused on the Dawgs, but with Mizzou starting the season in the Top 10  as well and with a win over No. 20 Illinois last week, I really should share the love a bit for the school that added the Dr. to my name and several thousand dollars to my annual earning potential (not to mention provided me with a mate). So from this week on, I will give the trials and tribulations of the Missouri Tigers at least a little bit of time every week. Roughly equal time for almae matres (nourishing mothers). As for showing support, I’ll make the same deal I did for Georgia gear: send us some Z sized Mizzou gear and we’ll reciprocate with some Antipodean styles for your little Tiger.

Both the Dawgs and the Tigers are going to have it pretty easy this weekend. Despite an easy win over Southern last week, Georgia dropped to the two spot in most polls. This is actually a good thing as it’s number 1 that everyone guns for, so let them go after the Trojans rather than my boys. Takes the pressure off for a tough season. A bigger loss than the ranking was the loss of starting D tackle Jeff Owens, who is out for the season with a “freak” knee injury. First Sturdivant, now Owens - we can’t keep losing the big guys and win a championship.

We’ll be OK without them for this week as Georgia welcomes the Central Michigan Chippewas into Sanford Stadium on Saturday.The Chippewas are back-to-back MAC champs and are thought to have a good chance of winning that conference again this year. They’ve also got a dark horse Heisman candidate in QB Dan LeFevour. (As an aside, I thought all NCAA teams were supposed to jettison their Native American nicknames. What’s up with the Chippewas? Is Central Michigan racist or something? All the more reason to beat them up on the gridiron.) At any rate, we all saw what the Dawgs can do to teams from upstart conferences with hot shot quarterbacks. This game should be largely the same. I think Central Michigan will hang with the Dawgs for a bit and may put some points on the board, but Georgia brings it home in a rout: Georgia 45, Central Michigan 24.

Mizzou’s win over the Illini (Another racist team?) last Saturday was kind of a bittersweet one. The Tigers’ offense was spectacular, putting 52 points on Illionois. But they had to do so because the D gave up 42. With a defense this porous, Mizzou’s time in the Top 10 is likely to be pretty short-lived. The good news is that they’ve got a patsy to work with this week in Southeast Missouri. The Redhawks of Cape Girardeau, Missouri represent the Div I-AA Ohio Valley Conference and are riding up the road to Columbia to collect a check. No real contest here, just the question of how many points Tigers’ Coach Gary Pinkel piles on - Mizzou 55, SEMO 20.

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Your Number 2 Georgia Bulldogs host the racist Central Michigan Chippewas for a 3:30 p.m. Eastern (5:00 a.m. Sunday in Adelaide) kickoff. The game’s available on internet radio or ESPN’s Gameplan.

And the hapless Southeast Missouri State Redhawks have a date for a thrashing with Your Number 6 Missouri Tigers in Columbia at 7:00p.m. Eastern (8:30 a.m. Sunday in Adelaide). No options for international fans I’m afraid.

Hurray, hurrah! Mizzou! Mizzou!

Sic ‘em Dawgs!

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You’ve got to love happy endings. In what could be Dr. O’C’s final post here on A Free Man, we get just that…

At some point my attitude to motherhood started to improve.  I don’t know when that happened, but it did.  I am a better mum than I thought I would be.  For the first few months, I would tell Z that I loved him, over and over but I don’t really think I meant it.  I said it more to convince myself of that fact.  I know that I was meant to feel this unconditional love for him.  Instead I didn’t really feel anything for him.  Sure he was a cute baby and it was nice when he smiled, but it could have been any baby.

Initially we had planned that I would take 4-5 months off work, but when February loomed I couldn’t go back.  I couldn’t put this helpless individual into day care 10 hours a day.  I didn’t know how it would work.  How would I get up, walk the dog, get Z and myself dressed and out the door.  Plenty of people do it.  I just didn’t know how it would work for me.  It comes back to my fear of new things or a new way of doing things.  A fear I never knew I had before Z was born.  I walk the dog the same route every morning.  I get up, walk dog, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, dry hair and leave for work. In that order, every morning.  I don’t think I ever changed it.  It was the most efficient way of starting my day.  But looking back, was I inflexible and stuck in my ways?  With Z, although it took a long time to establish, I was used to doing things a certain way and couldn’t imagine fitting work into it.  I also couldn’t imagine that I would be comfortable leaving him with anyone else.

The irony of the situation is that before I got pregnant and even during my pregnancy I worried if I was capable of taking a whole 4 months off work.  I thought that would be pushing the limits of my sanity.  I am a social person, I love to talk, interact with people and find out about them. But mostly I knew that I would go insane if I stayed at home with a baby (and I kind of did).  If Chris could have taken paternity leave, I think that we would have both jumped at the chance.   And now here I was, not wanting to go back to work because I was both afraid of the logistics of doing what millions of people do every day, getting themselves and a baby ready and out the door in the morning and I was getting attached to this little person, whom I had had very little emotional connection with so far.

Chris and I had been discussing a move to Australia for a while.  Well to be honest, Chris was ready to go, but I loved my job and had negotiated a promotion for when I returned from maternity leave.   Problem was this promotion almost certainly required me to travel internationally every month.  Not something that was going to work with a small baby.  I know my company would have worked with me and changed the job, but to be honest I was probably looking for an excuse not to go back.  An excuse to not change my finely tuned routine and put Zach in the care of strangers.  Pathetic I know.  Instead of getting into a new routine of going back to work, I embark on a trans-continental move, involving two adults, a baby and a dog.  What the hell was I thinking?

I was thinking that it would be nice to be home after 8 years spent overseas.  It would be nice that Z has family around. A Nana whom he adores and who gives him sups of tea and biscuits, who he goes crawling half way across the house to when he hears her saying ‘Nana Nana Nana’. (She is determined that they be his first words).  It would be nice to have someone to tell me how to do things.  Simple things like when it is safe to give Z a piece of bread and not choke, when he is sick enough that he needs to see a doctor.  Someone to baby sit so Chris and I could have a night out, go see a movie, have a meal.  Someone who cares and loves him as much as we do.  It would be nice to be around friends who are having babies who Zach will grow up alongside.

Don’t get me wrong, the move was incredibly stressful.  I was moving home, but Chris was moving to a place he had never visited, a place where I grew up, knew people, had extended family.  I didn’t really know what the job market was like for either of us.  I didn’t know if Chris would like it.  I felt like if it didn’t work out for us that it would be my fault, that we would have wasted the better part of $15K moving our life here and worse still, we wouldn’t be in the financial position to do anything about it.  Dealing with importation of a dog into Australia is not an easy thing, not to mention importing Chris!  It might actually have been easier in hindsight to stay in Oxford.

But things have worked out so far.  Chris has got two jobs, both in areas he wanted to explore and on Monday I started a new job, a good job doing exactly what I had hoped I could do when I came back to Adelaide.  The next few months aren’t going to be easy, getting up, walking the dog, getting myself and Z fed and dressed, and out the door.  Not to mention establishing myself in a job that is challenging and WAY out of my comfort zone.  But I have more confidence that it will be ok.  That I can do it.  That Z will adapt.

I really didn’t think that having a baby would teach me anything about myself, that it would reveal numerous faults.   And in those early few months, I didn’t ever think I would get to the stage where I would look at my baby, my son and say I love you and actually mean it.

Now, about that final post thing. I can’t convince Dr. O’C of anything, not for lack of trying. But maybe you all can. I’ll leave it in your hands to persuade her to keep writing.

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“She’s got eyes of deepest blue
He’s got hair that’s green
Everybody’s got nice stuff but me
I wish I had the kind of cash
To make heads turn when I walk past
I wish I could live in luxury
Everybody’s got nice stuff but me…”

-The Dead Milkmen - “Everybody’s Got Nice Stuff But Me”

As our bus pulled away from Oxford on a cold late-March morning, Dr. O’C uttered the phrase that I knew would define the next month or so of our lives:

“We’re homeless with too much luggage.”

And that was the case as we trundled our way down to Oz, via family visits on the way. Living out of a few suitcases, going places but nowhere fast. It wasn’t easy, but it was manageable - especially with an end date, a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I was delusional, but I figured most of the stuff that we shipped from Britain would get to Oz shortly after we did. I assumed that I’d be reunited with my computer, the bulk of my clothes, my books, my kitchen knives, and so on. If you had told me that four months after leaving Britain we would still be living out of the same suitcases, well, I certainly would have packed more socks.

But, nearly four months to the day that Simpsons Removal and Storage came and collected our worldly possessions I’m still cycling through the same handful of underwear, still staring at blank walls in our new home, still cursing at the creaky old Mac laptop. I’m still shivering my way to the bus stop in the morning in a completely unsuitable jacket (that I nearly threw away when we left Sweden). And Z has grown out of all the Georgia Bulldogs clothing that we brought with us. At least that’s what Dr. O’C tells me.

Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, how long does it take for a container full of personal itemes to get from England to Australia? Is four months a long time? Average cargo ship takes 32 -40 days - less than six weeks - to make that voyage, which begs the question - where has our stuff been?

Well for the first two months, it sat in the Simpsons Removals and Storage* warehouse in Kent. You see, when Dr. O’C negotiated the deal with Simpsons (this was during her “Don’t Get Done, Get Dom” phase) they neglected to point out that despite being a moving company, they actually suck quite badly at moving things. This lapse in providing us with accurate information sort of foreshadowed the remainder of our experience with them. Customer service is not Simpsons Removal and Storage’s strong point. They neglected to let us know anything about our shipment, they neglected to let us know when we owed them money, they neglected to let us know when payments didn’t clear properly.

To be fair to Simpsons**, as uninspired I am to do so, it’s not all their fault. They finally got our container to Melbourne in late June. For the last month it has been sitting in Customs in Melbourne waiting for inspection. It was inspected and contraband was found in the form of a stupid little wooden seagull, common in seafood restaurants all over the Atlantic seaboard. Australian Customs prides itself in protecting Australia’s borders from the entry of illegal and harmful goods, potential terrorist threats and unauthorised people. And apparently tacky sculpture. The best part? We had the option of paying Customs $90 to destroy the seagull or $260 to irradiate it and make it safe for Australia. I guess you’ve got to pay for all that protection somehow. To add insult to injury, we had to wait another week or so for the customs agents to come back and burn the damn bird.

Barring any unforeseen circumstances the 36 boxes containing the physical trappings of our lives will be on our doorstep by Thursday.

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* I’m repeatedly naming Simpsons Removals & Storage, the shipping company from Kent (UK), because I’m hoping that when ‘Googled’ this post will be available for people who are thinking of using Simpsons Removal & Storage for their move. Don’t do it.

** That was Simpsons Removal and Storage.

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Sometimes I think I’m a masochist. As I mentioned in my last politically inclined post, I listen to a lot of podcasts from all over the political spectrums. One of these is Bill O’Reilly’s radio program (The Bill-O The Clown Show,  if you listen to Keith Olbermann). Now, I should point out that I generally listen to O’Reilly for the entertainment value - I like it when he yells at people and calls them pinheads. O’Reilly is long on vitriol and short on facts.

As long as you recognize this, you can enjoy O’Reilly’s show for the humor of it and it is an indication of what’s going on in the mind of the Far Right. The problem is that a lot of people don’t seem to reognize that O’Reilly is one of the great comics of his generation. They take him seriously. They go to him for news and analysis of the news. That’s some kind of scary. It’s not the narcissism, you get used to that, it’s the repetitiveness. O’Reilly seems to subscribe to that idea that the Right has taken on recently that if you repeat something often enough it becomes true. No spin indeed.

O’Reilly’s ranting this week has been based a lot on the current economic woes. He likes to repeat the same accusations against his bogeymen - “the liberal media”, the “Far Left loons” and “socialist Europe” who offer “cradle-to-grave entitlements, big federal apparatus, high taxation, all the things that the Democratic Party wants to introduce here in the United States”. One of his shows this week was about taxes. How the Dems want to raise everyones taxes to pay for their social entitlement programs - standard Right Wing chatter from the “independent” O’Reilly. He cites the crippling tax rates in Europe and other “socialist” countries with enititlements like single-payer health care that prevents their citizens from dying.

A lot of what O’Reilly had to say this week didn’t ring true. I’m now paying taxes in my third different country and I’ve never really felt that there was that much of a difference in the amount that I pay in taxes in any of the three. So, I decided to do a bit of research into tax rates in various countries. I used my income as a gauge and compared the individual income tax rates in a “low” tax country like the U.S. with a “socialist” country like France and a couple in between - Britain and Australia - where the tax rate is higher, but government services are more plentiful. Things like single payer health insurance, government subsidized maternity leave and generous unemployment benefits. I’m not going to tell you exactly what I make, but let’s just say it would put me solidly in the middle class. When did that happen? When did I become a member of the bourgeoisie?

• In the USA someone earning what I do would pay 28% of their salary as federal income tax. Depending on the state in which I lived, I may owe up to another 10% in state income tax. Again, depending on the state, I would pay between 0 - 10% on all goods as a sales tax. For example, if I lived in Utah (god forbid) I would pay about 33% of my income in taxes before sales tax. If I lived in California, that pre-sales tax rate would be 38%.
• In Britain, I would be paying a whopping 40% of my income in tax as well as 17.5% on top of goods that I purchase (except necessities like food).
• In that bogeyman of the right, France, I would also be paying 40% income tax rate and 19.6% of goods and services, so similar to the rate in Britain. But as in the UK, health care would cost me virtually nothing.
• In Australia, I’ll be paying 26% of my income back to the government and a surcharge of 10% on top of goods. At my income rate, I add another 1.5 % of my income that goes toward the national health service - so a grand total of 27.5% before sales tax.

So, Bill-O’s got it half right - people in “socialist” France or “capitalist” Britain do pay more to the government - but depending on what part of the U.S. you live in, not much more. And if you tack on the amount you pay for health insurance in the U.S., the amount of money you lose when you take time off for maternity leave or are unwillingly out of work and the like, I’d be willing to bet that you’re paying more.

That’s the thing, I really resented paying taxes in the U.S. because it wasn’t clear to me what they were paying for - sure, I want to support the NIH, NSF, NEA - but in 2007 nearly 20% of the federal budget went to pay for defense and an equal amount went to pay down the national debt. In the same year in Britain the top two budget items were health and education. This is why, even though my tax burden in Britain was higher, I didn’t mind paying it.

Australia was a surprise. Before you consider any government “entitlements”, I’m going to pay less in taxes in  Oz than I would be in the U.S. Now, the Australian health care system is not as good as Britain’s or France’s. We may in fact, once Dr. O’C starts working, be required to buy private health insurance or pay an additional 1% of my salary in taxes. A Free Man, who is a big advocate of nationalized health services, was not impressed by this. Nonethess, the biggest budget item in Australia is social welfare programs. Unfortunately, number two is “general government services”, in other words the massive Aussie bureaucracy. So, Down Under, I’m paying less but maybe getting less as well.

The take home message? “You get what you pay for?” “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes?” I guess so. More importantly, be careful about what you hear, especially in this election season.  The other day, Bill-O was shouting about buying land in Ireland if Obama raised his tax rate to 60%. Now, I know you’re probably calculating whether or not it would be worth it, but let’s take a look at reality.

I looked at Obama’s website for information about his tax plan. Unfortunately, it is notably lacking in specifics, facts or hard numbers. So, Bill-O could be right as far as I know. But, the highest tax rate in the world is in Denmark at 63% and even though the Danes are the happiest people in the world, I doubt that Obama will be looking to Copenhagen for his tax policy. For comparison, I looked at McCain’s website and the Republican nominee is more specific. He says that he will lower the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% and will “keep the [individual] tax rate low”. These were the only numbers on either candidate’s fiscal pages. Unfortunately, McCain fails to point out that only the largest corporations pay a 35% tax rate.

The fact of the matter is that no matter who gets elected, most people will pay about what they paid in taxes last year. This is about what people in most of the rest of the Western world pay - plus or minus a few percentage points. What may be worth looking at is just what you’re getting for your money.

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The more observant (annoyingly retentive) of you may remember that I wrote a post a few weeks ago scoffing at, even mocking the Australian ‘winter’. I derided both the Aussie version of the bleak season and Aussies themselves for being fragile and delicate when the temperatures dropped below 15°C.

Well, I want to humbly retract that post. As I shivered my way to the bus stop this morning, grass crunching under my feet, I realized that Australia has a proper winter. For the last few weeks it has either been raining - and I mean raining, not drizzling, showering or sprinkling - or bright and cold. There’s no snow or bitter cold, but it’s tangibly winter. Short days, jackets, umbrellas, winter. It’s not that the winter here is terrible. No, I don’t get to the beach as I would like to, but it’s bearable. The problem is that in A Free Man’s world, winter never seems to ends.

If you’ll recall, having survived a fourth long English winter - the season that puts the blight in ‘Blighty’ - we left Britain just as the daffodils were starting to bloom. Just as the promise of spring was on the horizon, we were on a flight out of the country. After a couple of weeks in Sweden (as gloomy as Britain but with snow) and Florida (the closest I’ve seen to a summer in what seems like decades) we headed cross the equator into the Antipodean autumn. 

Eight or nine months of winter is one thing, but I’d like to argue that the ’summer’ of 2007 in Britain may as well have been a winter. It rained, rained and then, just for fun, it rained some more. The Thames came unstuck and Oxford was partially under water. Oh, and then it rained some more.  If you look at things in that glass half empty kind of way, it’s basically been winter for us since November of 2006.

As I write to you today, from my own personal Narnia, I’m beaten. I lay prostrate to the gods of winter. What will it take - a virgin sacrifice for Boreas? A snow temple to Skadi? Do I have to slay the White Witch? Because, I’m ready to do whatever it takes. Go on and get Papa’s slaying gear, Baby Z.

The good news is that there are only 39 days until the First Day of Spring. Glorious spring.

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I’m always a sucker for scientific small talk. At a “Baby Housewarming” (don’t ask), I was talking to a woman about her little boy. He was a very quiet child and slightly reluctant to wade into the baby melee. “Yes”, she said, “he’s very shy, but both his Dad and I are as well.”  I don’t know much about behavioural genetics, so don’t know whether or not you inherit social skills. Is there a Wallflower allele? A Social Butterfly mutation? Future Science Tuesday post, perhaps.

If there is a gene for sociability, Z’s got the Social Butterfly variant. He doesn’t get it from me. Once I get to a party or a dinner or drinks, I usually do OK. I just dread the thought of trying to interact with my fellow man, have done since I was small. That’s one of the downsides of moving country every few years - you get comfortable with a social group and then take off. At the new destination you have to start again. It’s actually been a lot easier since we moved Down Under. The Australians, for the most part, are outgoing and vivacious and draw you out of your shell whether you want to be drawn or not. Having a baby, and friends with babies, means that you have an easy topic of conversation at most social outings.The boy seems to be finding it easy as well.

Making friends at Z’s age seems to be very tactile. I guess if you can’t use verbal communication, then your hands are the next best alternative. The problem is that these kind of friendship gestures run the gamut from “Aww, isn’t that cute” to moves that would be illegal in the World Wrestling Federation. I’ve opted for the former for the photos in this post, but Z seems to prefer The Bushwhacker type of interaction - eye gouging, face scratching or just the good old-fashioned Double Gutbuster. On multiple occasions this weekend, at multiple kid parties I’d hear a kid screaming, glance in that direction and see Z - looking pleased with himself - on top of the screaming child. Nobody says anything, polite company and all, but as I’m pulling my child off theirs I’m pretty sure they’re making judgements on my parenting skills.I wonder if “bullying” is genetic. He gets that from his Mum.

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Neither the title nor the song from which it comes has anything to do with this post. But I’ve been playing this less racist version of the Rolf Harris classic all weekend long. I challenge you not to get it stuck in your head.

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There was a crazy guy on my bus home last night.* I’ve encountered enough people that have crossed over  that invisible line that separates “sanity” from madness line in my time to recognize one when I see one. As we were getting on the bus we briefly made eye contact and I saw that slight wildness in his eye, that need to be understood.  It had been a long day, and I just couldn’t fit that much crazy into my commute home, so I sat about as far away as the confines of a city bus allow. Shame really, because a conversation with this stringy-haired flourescently vested fellow might have made this a better blog post.

This particular crazy man was one of the ghost talkers - he spent the ride having apparently one-sided debates with phantom companions. Some of these got pretty heated, so much so that they occasionally earned him nervous glances from the other passengers and even broke through the sonic buffer that my iPod provides. But he was mostly harmless.Seems that every big town, and probably small, has a whole subculture of people that - let’s put it kindly - march to the beat of their own drummer.  Some of them are frightening, some (like your man on the bus) are mildly irritating and some are entertaining. There’s a guy that I see on my way into work in the mornings who rambles around Adelaide’s Rundle Mall singing the same tune over and over. He’s not particularly talented and I’ve not a clue what the song is, but he seems to not care one way or the other. A few years back, when I lived in Seattle, one of my favorite local characters was a fellow who used to wander Pioneer Square and Downtown singing Al Green songs. Only Al Green songs. He was actually pretty good but like the Rundle Mall singer, other people’s opinions seemed of little interest to him.

There was a big part of me that really used to envy these guys. From the outside of their heads - things seemed pretty good for them. Obviously I don’t know what goes on in the inside - what’s shaken loose. But, compared to myself, trudging through life Atlas-like with the combined weight of all my problems on my shoulders, their lives appeared simple, even happy.I’ve been pretty quiet on the blogging front lately. A fair bit of that has to do with work and not really wanting to spend any more time on the computer when I get home. But some of this has to do with the absence of that weight that I used to carry around on my back. I firmly believe that most good writing is fueled by angst or conflict or melodrama.** I don’t know if its age, exhaustion with the energy that being angstridden requires or what but lately, I’ve been tacking toward the street singing state of mind. I just don’t feel it so much these days. I even find myself singing, sometimes, in the street. Maybe that’s how it starts, with a quick chorus of “Jelly Man Kelly” on the way to the bus stop and then it’s a slippery slope to “Let’s Stay Together” on repeat and yelling at invisible assailants on the 721 bus.

This tendency to break out into song stems from the fact that things are pretty good for your underwhelming narrator. On the crazy man bus last night I got to thinking about things and realized that I’m approaching that El Dorado of the spirit I’ve heard referred to as “happy”. I like both of my jobs, a definite improvement from the recent past. I’ve got a beautiful family. I live minutes from the beach (13 to be exact). I’ve got feets to walk, arms to reach and ears to listen. And, crucially, I seem to be developing an ability to leave the buts behind. Like, for example, but:

1. We’re still borrowing a car.
2. We’re still renting a house.
3. Said house is way the hell  out in whoop-whoop.
4. My daily commute is pushing two hours round trip.
5. Australia does, in fact, have a winter and it is now.
6. My family is very far away.
7. I don’t get to the beach nearly as much as I would like to.
8. Dr. O’C won’t let us get the cable TV so we can watch something other than “Home and Away” and reruns of “Neighbors“.
9. I only get to see my son awake for about half an hour a day.
10. I have to do something this weekend that I really don’t want to do.
11. I don’t have enough money to buy an iPhone.
12. I appear to be getting older at an alarmingly fast rate.

Huh, when I put it all together like that, it’s actually a bit depressing. But the fact is that on a daily basis it’s all manageable. And actually liking my job, from someone who spent far too long in a job that I hated, makes all the difference in the world. That list above is daunting, but I don’t actually face it up on a daily basis. I can ride the bus home, and just chill the hell out. Just enjoy what’s in front of me. I probably smile sometimes for no reason, occasionally whistle a happy tune or tap the rhythm of that tune a bit too vehemently. To the random observor, maybe this whistling tapping glint-in-the-eye guy looks a little bit crazy. Maybe that’s why the seat next to me is often unoccupied on the busy bus trip home.

* I realize, dude, that “crazy” is probably not the ‘approved nomenclature’, but just don’t care that much.

** This post has really just been a long-winded excuse as to why I’ve not written a thing this week. And an opportunity to show off my kid. Sorry to put you through that.

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“In the winter time
When all the leaves are brown
And the wind blows so chill…”

I was thinking this morning that what my site needed more than anything else was more Steve Miller. What better way to fill that requirement than as accompaniment to a smugly self-satisfied post about the Australian winter.

One of the 900,000 things that worried me about moving to Australia was the timing. By arriving in late April we would be coming into late autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. What made this worse was we had just trudged through another soul-destroying British winter. Well, as was the case with most of my anxieties, this one proved groundless. Thus far, as this gratuitous baby photo attests, the winter in Oz has pretty much exceeded the “summer” in Blighty.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to go sing “Rock ‘N Me” on the beach.

Popularity: 9% [?]

If you are a man, have reproduced and live in North America, most of Europe, Asia and Africa - then chances are you woke up this morning to be greeted with a breakfast of runny eggs and burnt waffles and, depending on career choice, a new tie/hammer/hand gun. But if you’re me, you were awoken with a prod, an “it’s your turn to get up with him” and a stale scone as a morning meal. (Insert adagio violins here.) You see, Dr. O’C managed to hit both the British Mother’s Day and Australian Mother’s Day in one year, and reaped the rewards of both. I, however, missed my first Father’s Day in Oz last September and am missing my first rest of the world Father’s Day today. Suspicious timing for the move, hmmmm?

Despite not even receiving a new pair of socks in recognition of my ability to keep a defenseless child alive for nine months, I’ve gotten a bit reflective (sappy) about my role as the pater familias.* I’ve been thinking about how much things have changed in the nine months since Z came into the world, how much my tolerance for another human being has grown. No matter what the scamp is doing, no matter how frustrated I get with him - whether it be for trying to eat the dog’s food or puking on my head I’m still delighted to have him around. I understand why parents put up with endless shit from their kids, why they bail them out when they’re in trouble and why they defend them beyond the point of reasonableness. For me there is something about looking at my child’s face and seeing a little bit of me and a little bit of the woman I love looking back at me. When I see that familiarity, no matter what the boy is doing - smacking my iPod repeatedly on the table or chasing the dog whilst roaring like a maniac - I can’t help but be in his thrall.

What was I writing about? That’s right, Father’s Day, which it is everywhere in the world except Oz, Luxemborg and Nepal (oh, and New Zealand). If you’re not in any of those places and if you’re a father I’d like to wish you a Happy Father’s Day. To my friends, “real” and cyber, around the world - Happy Father’s Day. But particularly to my own Dad. We’ve had our ups and downs over the years. One of the gifts of becoming a father is that I now understand him better. Love you Dad.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Today’s a bank holiday in Australia, apparently in recognition of The Queen’s birthday. I’m not sure which queen we’re honoring. The current monarch Elizabeth II was born in April and  the last ruling queen, Victoria, in May. (Lest you worry - this is Wikipedia info, I’m not a closet royalist). Whether it’s in honor of one of those two monarchs or just some campy Sydney cabaret singer, it means we get a long weekend. We’ve made the most of the old gal’s day, spending it watching men in shorts that are far too tight run around and beat the shit out of each other in the midst of winter. God Save The Queen.

Arizaphale, who despite us trashing her parents’ car does not seem to hate us, invited us to join her family at an Aussie rules football game. It was a local match between the Sturt Double Blues and the North Adelaide Roosters (check out the bobble heads on the latter’s website). Now, I’ve only really seen this sport very late night on ESPN and I don’t think it’s a fair representation. It’s fast-paced, slightly brutal and the players seem to wear no (and gents, I mean no) protection. At the local level, it’s fantastic because you can sit right up on the field, all the better to cringe along when some poor sap gets planted head first into the grass, and during the quarter breaks everyone goes out to the turf for “a kick and a catch”. Z, as you can see below, has already begun training.

Now for something completely unrelated. The observant of you may have noticed that my blogroll has disappeared in favor of a trim and tidy list of my favorite recent posts. This is not because I’m getting all snobbity nor a result of my extreme narcissism, just that it was getting a bit unwieldy. You’ll find the whole beast behind the “Must Reads!” tab at the top of this page. Have a look and see what you think. I’m still fiddling a bit, so any feedback would be gratefull received. Dr. O’C, a bit resistant to change of any kind, has already given me an earful.

“May she sedition hush
And like a torrent rush
Rebellious Scots to crush
God save the Queen.”

Popularity: 8% [?]