Wombat babies

I propose that baby wombats are almost as cute as baby musk oxen! (evidence below)

Modern Day Pangea...

I found this image today and I am quite intrigued by it - have not done any research to see if it is geographically accurate but it is food for (my) thought anyway! (btw the picture should be a link)

Thursday Morning Road Patrol

 Frost this morning was. Super heavy!! Brrrrrr!!!

Cars well behaved though... Not like last week when I was half way across the first double landed side with traffic stopped , flouro 

vest on, waving flours flag with child in tow and car speed through on the far lane a metre in front of us...

I

wtf?!!

:(

seriously.  < - - that is a link btw

Friday Morning: Road Patrol

Thursday Morning: Road Patrol

ANZAC Day 2013

For the fallen, and those who came back, and those who stayed home, and those who conscientiously objected...



Many Nelsonians turned out for my local ANZAC Dawn Service this morning and our nearby township of Motueka's service where the Motueka Baptist Church Minister Lyall Scheib told those gathered "May we never take for granted the freedom we enjoy". Amen to that!
I do believe they are mistaken to say, in the article, that this year is the 99th commemoration of Gallipoli.
We do often hear about and associate ANZAC services with Gallipoli as the landing date (25th April 1915) is the date in April that we use for ANZAC Day and NZ/Australia remembrance. I was pleased to hear reports from a few different Dawn Services mentioning lesser known campaigns this year such as the Maori Battalion's efforts to regain Florence, Italy and the Anzacs trek into Ethiopia to oust the guerrilla Italian troups.

We had a lovely service this morning - my only complaint was that the speaker rushed the Ode of Remembrance - a pivotal part of the service and, in my opinion, not to be read without pause.

 I am including the painting below this year. It is by Bob Kerr and depicts NZ conscientious objector, Archibald Baxter, enduring "Field Punishment no.1". You can read more about it here.

This ANZAC Day I have learnt about a very special ANZAC service held at a small memorial at Flock House near Bulls to commemorate extraordinary members of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force whose contributions are often overlooked. Horses, riders, and supporters of the Bess Society, gathered again this morning to pay particular tribute to Bess, one of about three or four New Zealand horses to serve through the entire WWI campaign and return home. Her war service is etched into the stone: Main body 1914, Egypt 1915, Sinai 1916, Palestine 1917-1918, France 1918, Germany 1919, England 1920.

You can find more info here and here. There is also a lot of interesting info here.

Horses in war - a particularly poignant subject for me...

And of course, no ANZAC Day will ever seem complete to me without my 2011 blogpost honouring my ancestors involved with military operations in the 1900s.

Thinking about going to Gallipoli for ANZAC 2015...

It's not raining.

I just bought 2 unicycles.
I also just ruined a perfectly good snack by savagely munching the inside of my cheek.

Resilience vs Entitlement

I have titled this post Resilience vs Entitlement because my society seems to have created for itself a set of processes and infrastructure where these two concepts are in opposition.

We've had a particular spell of near drought followed by about 7 days of rain - culminating in a severe "weather bomb" in our urban area (second highest hourly rainfall on record for any region in NZ).
Losses could well be as much as 16.8 million dollars.

It didn't take long for people to turn their fingers of blame to our local council. I understand the despair of property damage and the fear that comes of owning things.

Our communities have become more sophisticated in many ways. 

We have created modern western environments that have come a long way in terms of organised process and infrastructure. However, I see more and more how this "spoils" us and gives us a sense of entitlement for things that get damaged, broken, lost.

 In the olden days when this kind of thing happened all your things were gone/damaged, the end. The community rallied around and helped each other  but hand outs weren't invented and councils (if they existed) intervention wasn't expected. You had a sense of fortitude and moved forward. 

Now we have an increasing number of people feeling they are entitled to compensation - expecting the council to provide them with a safety net for life - like it is a giant ultra-realistic video game with unlimited money and lives.

In my experience having insurance keeps people stuck in the trauma of the event often for years with the fighting for your payout, waiting for decisions etc. People can't make a clean break in many instances and start their life anew. They get stuck in resentment, loss, anxiety and blame.

If any blame was to councils from me it would be for not finding ways to foster resilience and community strength. 

Which do you find more attractive - a sense of resilience or a sense of entitlement?

The council didn't make it rain, nor did they tell you to live where you live. They don't make earthquakes or tsunamis. They are doing the best they can with the skills you voted in for them to make the most people they can have safe dry housing, clean water, sanitation etc etc.
Further more (and arguably more importantly) YOU are your council.
 Please don't wait apathetically by (while you scurry around earning money and gathering more things) until an event like this to interact with our council!

Banning Banning

I am blessed with a holistic brain.

What I mean is,  my brain is awesome at connecting the wide and varied input I deliver to it - my synapses fire into the Tardis that is my mind and snippets of info rub up against thoughts and other facts and form little gangs of newly hatched ideas. 

These gangs of ideas act like magnets to attract other snippets and form new opinions which I should really bother to share more often.

I have been thinking about gun control and regulation.
And I have been attending a number of digital education seminars and workshops again lately (I say again because I did this about 8 years ago in my other life too).

The following is what happened when these two main things rubbed together in my Tardis.

In the digital education world we "tsk tsk" and shake our heads when we hear of schools banning cellphones and BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices) from schools (I would like to say Learning Environments but in this instance the institutionalised term, schools, is more appropriate).
The ideas behind that banning are numerous but include things like "If we ban them we will stop cyber bullying" or "If we exclude unauthorised devices from our network students won't be able to sext*"

We "Tsk tsk" because it is not the cellphones or the BYO devices that are the problem. We shake our heads and wonder why those Learning Leaders are ignoring the challenge of some student led critical thinking. We are sad because of the missed opportunities to use our key compentency tools to develop Digital Citizenship and foster positive online morals and values.

We think, when has sticking our heads in the sand and shutting down discussion ever made a significant contribution to our issues? 

Let's talk about cyber bullying and the impact; let's unpack the issues surrounding sexting and create a dialogue about what is really going on.

We need to move past the dictatorship of Cyber Safety and empower students to be responsible self governed Digital Citizens.

My best friend lives in America and each day we yak and yarn about what is happening in our worlds. Guns and Boston Bombings have been a big part of that lately. We talk about gun control and stricter laws and the constitution. 

But is gun banning any different than cellphone banning?

 I mean, I am all for rights, but the constitution was written back in the day when you were lucky to get one shot off per minute and semi automatic weapons weren't even something you imagined in your wildest dreams...

We all need to encourage a dialogue into the weapons equivalent of Digital Citizenship... especially now that we have 3d printers.
Maybe the discussions are one in the same - empowering all citizens to get on the same page in terms of mindful self governing and away from forcing a big brother dictatorship through wilfully ignorant misdirected and ill-informed exertions of "rights".
Encouraging focus on the deeper issues rather than floundering in the squeaky wheel surface features.

Meanwhile...what does it mean about me that I would like to ban banning.....

*sext/sexting -electronically sending a nude or partially nude picture of yourself (apparently about 1 in 5 young "white" students has sexted...)

Dream Cake

So... early this morning I woke up from a dream where I invented a cake.
It was a kind of sponge (which I have never attempted to cook or even seek out to eat) it had pink wafer biscuits stacked in it in two long columns (another thing that doesn't feature on my radar of things I ever eat).
So because the wafer biscuits are too short one side (of my weird dream invented cake) has the column of them starting at one  end of the length and on the other side of the cake they start at the other end and are stacked up from the bottom of the cake to the top on both sides
Instead of being squared off at the end like like the sponge image below it is still a long loaf type shape but the end is cut so it is pointed so you get a good view of the wafer biscuits top to bottom in side .

*shrugs* NO IDEA What, why etc. LOL.

Feel Inside (and stuff like that)

Speaking of art...

Car blinker bulb changed in 2min 43 secs flat!

Art is

Everything
                  anything

nothing

Dentist

Not the horror it used to be and hence I don't even mind the fee while I am able.

Too Many Pies on the Dancefloor....

I hate to blame Jamie Oliver for my bad eating habits after all he does to improve Britain's but.... he had to go and make the Kate and Will's Wedding Pie and I was in a "look at my awesome new slow cooker" phase.... hence too many pies for Shiney!

They say the first part is recognising you have a problem so as punishment I shall now prescribe my own words as "Food for Thought"

curse blurry!

The challenge of willy-nilly student experimenting with the camera is the disappointment of fabulous shots being blurry!
The upside is that now we have a learning opportunity!

Visa Ground Hog Day

so.. at the visa place...
 I get my visa (25$) and the lady gives me a wee print out thing and I am reading it while she is doing my payment and I notice it says valid until July 2013 so I am like... "hey!"
 and I say to the lady.. "HEY.... does this mean I don't need another visa until july 2013?"
 and she says "yes."
 and I say "so I am probably still covered from the last visa I had seeing as I went last Dec"
 and she says "yup."
And I am like.. "ummm"
and she is like.. "well, now you have the new one so it covers you now"
( e.g. I should have brought this up before as now I am already processed on the new one! GRRRRR)

and then I thought to myself, as I am sitting there in dumbfounded contemplation and comparing the travel agents to the tax department, I bet I didn't need to get the last one either seeing I would have already been covered from the one before.

GRRR bad people.
and so I think, well I am gonna put this piece of paper in my passport so next time I know I don't need to get one and this doesn't happen again.

So I open up my passport and there is a little piece of paper identical to the one I am putting in... so I am like GRRRR I did this exact thing last time!!!

So this time I think I need to put a sticky note on the outside of my passport that says DO NOT NEED TO GET VISA BEFORE JULY 2013!

grrrrr

Nitro Circus LIVE

I am still kicking myself I didn't know these guys were in Aussie in May & June!

JUNE!

Where does the time go???