Happy Birthday Josh!!!!!

Tomorrow is the boy's 21st! Hard to believe it really! It all goes so damn fast doesn't it.

Josh is, in my unbiased view, a very balanced and grounded kind of man. OK, 21 isn't OLD, but I've noticed that he's really rounded off over the last couple of years. Yup, definitely!

He's quite different from me in that respect... and he's a very social person. I was looking through Josh's facebook pics the other day, and here's a few that illustrate how communal he really is..

Communal farting...



Communal yawning...



communal standing on one leg on a post...



communal going 'nuv nuv nuv'...



communal nursing of a sick mate....



communal car sharing...



communal funny walking...



communal passing out...



communal pointing...



communal saying of 'oh NO... sheeeeiiis gonna blow cap'n!'



there are lots more but you get the picture! Another skill he has is the ability to distort his otherwise chiseled features into very unflattering poses... and still be man enough to put them on his page!





...some of them were probably beyond human capability before now....!

this one for example... .after some bad coffee?...



or this!



GOD! Someone buy him a horse!

But I'm not really surprised. He's always been his own man... and taken on all comers. I don't think he EVER had a toy gun! Those many who know and love Josh, know that he knows his own mind and speaks it, sometimes too plainly, but sometimes with great sensitivity and grace. I can honestly and humbly testify that he has at times shown himself to be more of a man than I was, and I've really learnt a lot of life skills from him that have made raising the other kids in my life more fulfilling.

A long time ago now, he was passionate about my little pony toys... and this picture was taken when he'd just got a new jumper knitted by his grandmother (my Mum).



He was SO chuffed with it!

Even now he's a bit less macho than most of his mates....



... but he's always been able to get himself across somehow..



or this time at our wedding as my best man...



when he excelled even himself!



often a showman...



there have been times when he was spotty...



or inquisitive, especially with books..



and he's always liked parties....no matter how small...



...even when he only invited himself!



Here's one of my favourites:



Another thing that I've always loved and appreciated is his support of his sister Molly. There are LOTS of pictures over the years that evidence this. Here's one of a long time ago...



and here's one from recently.... same love, same guy, just older.



He's really great with his little sisters too, and they REALLY miss him.







Here they are saying goodbye the last time Josh was here in Oz...





He can be thoughtful..



...and he smiles a lot...





..and he's so cool...



... that even camels fancy him!



...ooooh YES!



Giz a hug!



Happy 21st Joshie... We ALL love you!

"Always remember you are absolutely unique - just like everbody else" Mead

Interesting book I’ve started reading this week. It’s one that I’ve had on my Amazon wish list for absolutely ages, and whilst I was ordering a Sykpe camera for Molly off Amazon recently, I decided that I’d treat myself to it, it wasn’t very much.

It’s called ‘Composing a Life’ by Mary Catherine Bateson. I’ve been wondering what she’d be like as a read because her father Gregory Bateson is one of my favourite writers on anthropology, [double bind theory amongst other brilliant things] particularly a book he wrote called ‘Steps to an ecology of mind’, in which several chapters are essentially a father daughter conversation with her. Her mother was the equally famous anthropologist Margaret Mead, who’s life was more career oriented than Mary’s.

Coincidently, last night I went to a meeting of the Brisbane RSA which was hosting a talk by an Australian couple who are developing a sustainable village about 4hrs drive north of Sydney. The gent was the speaker, and at one point he quoted Mead… ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has’. I was sitting there, still holding my new book by Mead’s daughter, thinking how funny it is that these kinds of synchronous things happen. But then something happened just now that was even weirder! Margaret Mead was mates with Ben Spock the best selling author [Baby and Child Care 1946] and paediatrician (Mary’s paediatrician as it happens) and he had been influenced by her in his advocation of breast feeding on demand rather than at preordained times. I’d just read about that, when Daile walked in with a grimace on her face saying that she’d just seen a thing on the box about an 8 year old girl that was still breast feeding! (Plays the Jaws music!)

Anyway, I digress…. (I get that from my mother you know). Mary’s book begins by talking about the fact that we have embedded in folklore the idea that exceptional people pursue objectives through their lives as if it were a straight line plotted as if from early cognition to completion or death, as if they were able to hold it as a pilgrim’s progress or a guiding vision and as if it were a single rising trajectory from which their very greatness prevents them from wavering. Life of course, is not really like this, at least it isn’t these days. What I love about what she’s getting at is that life is an iterative and flawed process, but in my view, so much the better for it.

I know this is getting to be a theme with me, but as I’m maturing, which is a shorthand for getting a little less vain, I’m less and less worried about all that social ‘climbing’ or ‘success’ rubbish and more and more impressed with genuine connection to a society, a human principle, a modesty of genuine proportions.. which is of course immense and impossible to fake well, and just plain kindness.

Bateson quotes one of her dear friends to illustrate that a life is emergent and crafted very often from fragments of opportunity or hope, snippets of time, and deft manipulation of opportunities that to a younger person would be an insult or irrelevant. The passage of time is, I’m sure, the ONLY tenuous passage, that leads on occasion to the kinds of wisdom that Joan Erikson seems to exhibit here as she describes her shaky start in the jewellery business as a mother in her mid to late thirties:

“I used to find places in the house to work, a hole here or a hole there, and after I’d gotten far enough along so I could do something, I asked a man who was a very good craftsman in Berkley to let me work in his workshop and he promptly said, ‘No way!’” Joan laughed. “So I said, ‘Well, just wait a minute, I’ll tell you what I want, I want to learn a few skills from you. I’m not good enough to be your apprentice, but there are a few things you could teach me on maybe a Saturday morning to keep me going.’ And he said, ‘I don’t even know if you have any skill or imagination or anything else.’ I didn’t have much to show him, just a few things I had made, but I guess that I was kind of persistent, so he gave me a box of junk – you know, when you’re working you always have some bits and pieces here or there – and he said ‘Put me something together out of that.’ And when I did he said ‘Humph, so when can you come in?’ It was very sweet. My gosh, craftsmen are so nice. When they’re nice they’re very generous. I went on doing that for quite a while, coming in with a list of things that I needed to know. But the next year he left to teach, and when he left he gave me his workbench and the tools he didn’t want to take with him. At that point I had to find a better workshop, so I added something onto the garage for a little place to work”. Several years later Joan’s designs were appearing in regional and national exhibits. But doesn’t she sound lovely?

I’ll stop for now… I could really REALLY bore you. I realise that, but it’s so refreshing to see people that are so syntonic (to use a word that Joan uses).

Girls being girls, and Dads being busy...

This week, Phoebe presented me with the following article that illustrates "Clara's Curls' from the Nutcracker ballet. She was very matter of fact about it when she told me that she was going to do this to her own hair and she set about preparing the things she'd need. We first discussed it over breakfast, and actually did the deed before bed. She was really excited by the prospect, and was really chuffed that she was going to see a 'new curly me' in the morning!



She cut out the bits of kitchen cloth... and we sprayed her hair with my charcoal fixative (aka cheap hairspray).

This is what the sleeping beauty looked like.



In the morning, her hair looked like tight little springs sticking out of her head! It said on the instructions that you're supposed to leave it in for about 2 hrs... oops! But after Daile had come to the rescue and combed it for a bit... it got a lot better. She went off to school with a little more bounce than normal!



Here's some pics (Mum) of the second kart. It's called 'Lightening' by request. (The other one is called 'The Sting').

Just before varnish...



and just after...



Recently Matilda's class did a dress up day at which the whole class including the teachers, got dressed up as they would have a hundred years ago. Matilda got quite into the idea and willingly (much to our surprise) wore a dress and brushed her hair!



We were invited to a dance after lunch, and I managed to get off work.




This is a square dance... and frankly I felt like a bit of one! Ha.







Last weekend I did a nice little job for a student at QUT. It's actually going to be a chair believe it or not!