Democracy

This is a useful article, discussing two different forms of democracy.  For what it's worth, I'm clearly in the personalist camp.

Another cat?

A new cat has made herself at home around our home.

We first met her last Tuesday evening, when we looked out the window and saw her wandering around our property.

Wednesday morning she was still there.  She was super friendly, and when we stroked her we found she was also super skinny.  Honestly, she may not have had too many days left of life.  She desperately needed help.  Ignoring her was not an option.

The problem was that though she was super friendly to us, there were huge tensions between her and our other two cats, Maggie and Kitty.  Giving her a bit of food and letting her simply hang around our property was also not an option -- there would be huge cat fights.  And when Maggie gets stressed by this sort of thing she tends to pee on our beds or clothes (she has already peed once on Mama's clothes on Thursday because of this new cat).

So, we took her inside, fed her, and closed her in our bathroom.

We took her to our vet to see if she was microchipped.  Sadly she is not (why don't people microchip their cats?).  The vet said she is female, and probably around five years old.

We contacted a few vets in the area to see if there are any reports of missing cats like her, put notes in the neighbours' letterboxes, checked the lost listings on LostPet.co.nz, and put a found listing on LostPet.

So far, no sign of her owners.

Mulan and Miya have named her Mushroom (full name Mushroom Soup, short name Mushy).  They are hoping we will keep her.

Our next door neighbours initially said they wanted to keep her, and we took her over to them a couple of times.  But they don't seem to be doing much work to encourage her, and she keeps coming back to us.  They don't seem to have heeded our advice to initially close her inside their house.

Again, that won't work for us.  We don't want cat fights and pee in our beds.

Our best solution for now?  To control the interactions between Mushroom and our (other?) cats, until they get comfortable with each other.  We are locking Mushroom in our bathroom at night (Maggie and Kitty always get locked inside at night), and she goes outside during the day.  We are giving her breakfast and dinner in the bathroom.

If we do keep her, it'll be a slow process to get the cats comfortable with each other.

Oh, here is a photo Miya took of Mushroom a few days ago:

Solo dad-ing again

Mama is away in Australia at the moment for work, so I'm solo dad-ing again.

It's just a short trip, from Friday morning to Tuesday night, and the time is speeding by quickly.

One of Mama's many jobs is that she is part of a Hong Kong TV documentary team.  Currently they are doing a documentary series on Westerners who had an influence on early modern China.  This particular episode is about Morrison of Peking, and so Mama is in Melbourne interviewing some people about him.  Prior to this, Mama was also the main researcher for the episode on Sir Thomas Wade.  I understand that while they are in Melbourne they'll also spend time planning their next documentary series, on education.

---

The fact that Mama is away has probably given more salience to a couple of things I recently read/watched.

The book I am reading at the moment is a collection of short stories by various authors, edited by N. K. Jemisin (who I wrote about recently).

The stand-out story for me so far (they are all excellent, by the way) is Caroline M. Yoachim's Carnival Nine.  It is an incredibly powerful story about life.  I found an online version of it here.  I highly recommend it.

Another story about life (and death) is this video about Herbert Fingarette, who tells us that "being 97 has been an interesting experience".  I remember reading some of Fingarette's works when I was at university (he was one of the big names in Chinese philosophy).

Homeschooling neighbours wanted

Our next door (crosslease, shared driveway) property is for rent.

Anyone want to live next door to a homeschooling family?

(PS, the photos are old -- reality is a little different!)

Don't fall for Jordan Peterson (again)

I see that Jordan Peterson is giving some talks in New Zealand over the next several days.  At least so it was reported in the entertainment section of the NZ Herald.

Last year I briefly mentioned him, and linked to a few articles and videos which clearly point out where he goes wrong.

The funny thing is that almost no one reads my blog here ...  ummm ... okay, that is not the funny thing.

Anyway, the funny thing is that almost no one reads my blog here, and almost no one comments on it, and yet my brief blog comment last year about Peterson actually got a response (the comment was via Google+, which is now dead, so the comment is gone, I think).

The comment was from a Peterson fan who questioned my criticism of him.  I asked if the commenter had clicked on the links I had provided in my post, to see the clear explanations of how and why Peterson is wrong.  The commenter replied no, they didn't have time for that, but they would go and see his shows.

Homeschool athletics day

You might remember that back in November I mentioned that we were planning a homeschool athletics day.

Well, we had it on Wednesday.  And it went really well.

As I said before, I was sort-of in charge of organising it (alongside Sandra at HASCA).  And I must admit that in the days leading up to it I was a little worried about the expected number of kids attending, as well as the expected number of parents helping out.

The thing is, homeschoolers are not so great at reliably committing to something.  Or communicating their commitment.  One never really knows how many homeschoolers will turn up until halfway through that event.  There are always last-minute issues.  A "yes" is a maybe.  Silence is a maybe.

We really wanted a decent number of kids, so that everyone would have someone their own age to compete with.  I was hoping for over 100 children, and in the end we got about 90.  In some age groups we had several kids (eg we had nine 11-year-old boys), while in other age groups we had much fewer.

We also needed a decent number of adults helping out, so that we could run six events at the same time and the kids could rotate around and do all the main events.  I'd worked out that we'd need about 25 volunteer helpers, and right up until the Wednesday morning we'd only been able to get about 15 solid commitments.  So, I'd had to plan an alternative event programme that relied on fewer volunteer helpers, running fewer events simultaneously.

But just before we started we got enough parents stepping forward and we ran the full event programme.  For what it's worth, this is the programme we ran:

	Track		Games	Discus	Shot Put	High Jump	Long Jump
9:30am Start	30m	4-		13	12	10	11
	60m	5
		6
		7	4-	9	8	14+	7
		8	5
		9	6
	100m	10		10	14+	12	13
		11
		12
		13		7	11	9	8
		14+
	400m	10
		11
		12
		13
		14+
Lunch
	100m	5		12	13	11	10
		6
		7
		8		14+	7	8	9
		9	4-
	200m	10	5
		11	6	11	10	13	12
		12
		13
		14+		8	9		14+
		7
		8
		9
	800m	Open
3pm Finish

It all went so well that we are planning to do it again next year.  Hopefully the word will get around the homeschooling community that this is a fun yearly event, and we'll get even more kids next year.

(Meanwhile, we are starting to think about the homeschool swimming day.  We've booked the pools for Wednesday 20 March.  Now all we need is an experienced swimmer to step forward and organise things.)

Responding to the questions of a four-year-old

This is a nice essay.

Rock climbing

Mulan, Miya and I have just got back from our local indoor rock climbing wall.

Inspired by Miya's abseiling at MERC the other day, we decided to head on over to the rock climbing wall at the Birkenhead Pool and Leisure Centre.  We took our lunch and were there for over 5 hours.

This was the first time that the girls had done rock climbing.  As a university student I used to climb a fair bit, but it must be about 20 years since I last pulled on the harness.

The climbing instructor at the leisure centre showed us the ropes, so to speak, and we signed a few forms to say as much, and then for the rest of the time we were pretty much entirely on our own on the climbing wall.  (I think in all the time we were there maybe a couple of climbers briefly came and went on the wall.)  I guess all the normal people were at work or at school.  Homeschooling is a great life!

I belayed both Mulan and Miya, but if I wanted to climb I had to I put my life in Mulan's hands.  Fortunately she is a good learner, and the instructor taught her well how to belay me.

We all had lots of fun, and we returned home with pleasantly aching muscles.

Mulan and Miya took lots of photos of our day:

And here's where the old man reminisces about the olden days:

This was also at the Birkenhead wall, back in 1997.  This photo was in the local newspaper, alongside an article describing how the four of us were planning a three-month trip to South America to do some climbing.  Long story short, we went to South America, but things definitely didn't go as planned over there.

MERC again

We've just come back from a day at MERC, again (we did it back in December).

It was another excellent day.  Good learning, good fun, and a warm, blue-sky day.

Again, they were divided into groups of 12-ish children, and did three different activities.

Unfortunately, Mulan was allocated to activities in which there was nothing really new for her.  First up, she did giant stand-up paddle boarding again, although this time the waves were bigger so instead of paddling they bounced around in the surf.  Secondly, Mulan repeated archery.  And thirdly she did kayaking (though again without paddles and instead playing in the surf).

Miya was a bit luckier, and did a couple of new activities.  First, she did sailing.  They learnt a bit about water safety and how sailing works, before helping to put up the sails and heading out to sea.  The sail boats they were in held six children and one adult, and Miya says that she had a turn at controlling the boat.  Secondly, she did raft building.  Last time, Mulan's raft building was with plastic barrels that had to be tied together.  Miya's was a bit easier as she had to tie together kayaks.  Thirdly, Miya repeated abseiling.

I'm thinking we will probably not bother re-doing MERC in the near future, until the girls grow a bit more and they are placed into different activities.

Kayak

We bought ourselves a kayak on Wednesday.

We had our first paddle with it yesterday afternoon.  It works very well!

We live about five minutes walk from Lake Pupuke, so we just wheel it along the footpath and down to the lake.

It's a two adult plus one child style, so the idea is that Mulan, Miya and I will be able to use it together.  As the girls get older they'll be able to go out on their own.

The package deal came with just two paddles, but we found that, if we all paddle synchronised, all three of us could work and so we'd avoid any lazy freeloaders.  Miya's spot also doesn't have the clip-on comfy padded seat, so we may look into getting an extra for her, too.