Rock climbing

 Miya's 10th birthday was a month and a half ago.

She'd decided she wanted to go rock climbing, but Covid happened and we had to postpone.

Finally, yesterday, with the Covid Alert Level back down to 1, and the school kids back at school, the family spent a couple of hours at Northern Rocks, a bouldering centre just five minutes drive from us.

It was brilliant, and we all had an awesome time.

What's great about these bouldering walls, rather than the old-style climbing walls, is that we don't need to rope up with belays and so on.  The set climbs, all colour-coded for different levels of difficulty, are never too high to need ropes.

Predictably, the girls got into it very quickly, even though they'd only been rock climbing once before in their lives.  Mama was not too bad, either, and did most of the orange climbs (the easiest level).

Northern Rocks has a special on at the moment, that first-timers can come back at no cost for the next week to climb as often as they want.

We took advantage of that, and the girls and I went back again today for another hour (just paying for shoe hire).  The three of us are all working on purple climbs (third easiest level, after orange and blue), with me mostly getting them and the girls sometimes getting them.

We took our camera this time:

The biggest challenge for all of us right now is that our hands are a bit sore, with blisters and worn fingertips.  But we'll quickly recover.

Miya is keen to continue with climbing, and we're now looking into getting a membership there.  The thought is that we stop our YMCA gym family membership and instead get a membership at Northern Rocks.  We're also looking into Miya joining a class there from term 1 next year (too busy this year!) -- we hear that if Miya progresses past purple level and starts on green then she should be good to attend the more advanced Thursday class.

Athletics: congratulations Mulan

Mulan competed in her first ever senior athletics competition on Saturday, and, in her first competition of the season, came away with two PBs (personal bests).

These competitions happen most Saturdays at Mt Smart Stadium, so I'll probably get bored with reporting them here each week.  But for now, well done Mulan!

The results are here.

Mulan got 4.44m in the long jump and 1:12.27 in the 400m.

Mulan and Miya also joined the children's training session in the morning before the competition, working on relays, hurdles and triple jump.

Philanthropy

 This is a very useful article about philanthropy.

As Brian Leiter rightly points out when commenting on this article,

There should be no need for philanthropy; the state should impose an essentially confiscatory tax on all income and wealth above some appropriate threshhold ($10 million?  25 million?).  Then we could have a civilized society!

As I've said before, I like the idea of an inheritance tax acting as this essentially confiscatory tax.

Money makes money, and inter-generational wealth often grows from merely being there and not because of any special ability/effort of the children of wealthy parents.

As I see it, wealthy parents deserve, and have the right, to give a comfortable life to their children.  But excessive inter-generational wealth creates many social problems and harms.

My suggestion is that each child receives an inheritance of something like at most 100 years times the median yearly income (in New Zealand this is currently 100 x $52,000 = $5.2 million), and then any remaining assets are 100% taken as tax.

This inheritance would still be enough so that all children of super-rich parents wouldn't have to work a day in their lives, and could comfortably live off their parents' money.  For example, they could have a $2 million home, and then invest the remaining $3 million, with a simple 5% return giving them $150,000 a year to live on.  These children would still be comfortably in the rich category without working at all.

I read that Donald Trump inherited over US$413 million.  I wonder what the world would be like if he had been given just one or two percent of that and then lived his life in comfortable, lazy obscurity.

Athletics: Aspire Development Academy

 For the past few days the girls and I have been at Mt Smart Stadium doing athletics.

We'd signed Mulan and Miya up for the Aspire Development Academy, a training camp for 10- to 17-year-olds.

(Mulan has decided that athletics is now her number two activity, behind ballet, and this season we're planning on doing a lot more athletics competitions and training.  For the past few years we've been focusing on music on Saturdays, so not attending athletics competitions, but from now on athletics will be Mulan's Saturday priority.)

The camp was excellent, and I highly recommend it.  Miya, in the 10-to-11 years group, had two days, while Mulan, in the 12-to-17 years group had three days.  We were there from 9:30 to 3pm each day.

What I especially liked about it was that we had a bunch of 50 or so kids all extremely motivated and just loving getting outside and having a serious run around.  They were all pushing themselves hard (and sometimes it was pretty hard work!), and happy to be pushing themselves hard.  There is a huge satisfaction to be able to control the body with strength and speed in that way, and the kids were getting it.  It was an inspiring environment to be in.

The coaches were also all excellent.  For me, coming back into it after 20+ years, it's interesting to see the big-name athletes from my day now there as senior coaches.  Amazingly, my old PE teacher from secondary school was coaching there, too -- Mulan and Miya had a few super-beneficial sessions with him.

As far as I could see, the only downside to the camp was that there were too many kids for the coaches to do a lot of fine-tuning with individuals.  For the most part it was group sessions rather than precise one-to-one technique adjustments.  While this was perfect for both Mulan and Miya, given the level they are currently at, I can see how some more experienced teen athletes may outgrow this type of camp and not get as much out of it.

Goodbye Kitty

 Our cat, Kitty, died last Thursday.

Kitty has been a huge part of our lives since we first met her back in June of 2011, when we were living in China.  At the time I wrote about it here.

Kitty was a smart cat who could open doors by jumping up and pulling on the door handle.  She also loved getting up into high places.  She'd jump higher and further than our other cats, then look down on them comfortably smug.

Very quickly Kitty became part of the family, and when we moved to New Zealand in November of 2014 she came with us too.  Her trip took six months, as she had to social distance in managed isolation, first in Hong Kong and then in New Zealand.  She shared her quarantine hotel with Maggie, our other cat from China, and in that time they got extremely close; they'd often sleep on beds together, wrapped up tight around each other.

Kitty enjoyed her life here in New Zealand.  She'd climb onto the roof of our two-storied house and sleep in the sun, then meow at the top-floor window by my desk asking to be let in.  She figured out how to unlatch a window, and sometimes let herself out at night until we put in a more secure latch.  She was the only one of our three cats who learnt how to use our smart microchip-activated cat-flap.

We first realised something was wrong with Kitty in January, when we noticed her breathing much faster.  X-rays at the vet showed that she had cancer in her lungs, and there was nothing we could do.

As the cancer took over, Kitty climbed less and less, tiring quickly and easily.  For the past few months she stayed close to home, and during the Covid-19 lockdowns she was almost always with one or other of us, sleeping beside (or on) us as we did our thing at home.

We'll never know how old Kitty was.  We knew her for nine and a quarter years.  She was always a tiny little cat, and never grew in the time we knew her.

Kitty was a lovely, friendly, gentle cat.  We all miss her hugely, and it continues to feel strange her not being around the home with us.

Book review: The man who mistook his wife for a hat

Back at university, almost 25 years ago, one of my majors was psychology and in particular I took courses in neuroscience and abnormal psychology.

At some point in a class they must have mentioned Oliver Sacks, and out of interest at the time I read his 1985 book The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

Sacks, by the way, was a neurologist, and the book is a collection of chapters discussing some of his patents he got to know over the years.  The title of the book comes from the first chapter, and the man, Dr P, really did attempt to pick up his wife's head thinking that she was his hat.  He had visual agnosia which meant that he was unable to visually recognise faces or familiar objects.

Fast forward a bit, and a few months ago the children and I watched Awakenings, a Robin Williams and Robert De Niro movie based on Sacks' book of the same name.

(I highly recommend the movie, and the girls enjoyed it.)

Anyway, I thought Mulan might also enjoy reading The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, so I requested it from the library.  I've just finished re-reading it, and have passed it on to Mulan.  (I don't expect Mulan to read all the neurological details, but I thought she might find the stories of the people interesting and thought-provoking.)

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is truly a fascinating read.

First and foremost, Sacks has a delightful storytelling style.  Sacks is incredibly good at humanising his patients -- they are decent, real, (mostly) normal people, who just happen to have had something happen to their brain (injury, illness, stroke, epilepsy, migraines, etc) and consequently they perceive or interact in the world differently than most people.

To me, what I find so fascinating is how our perception of the world is tied in so much with our physical brain.  A little bit of damage/change to this part of the brain, and suddenly one has a vastly different perception of the world.  Sometimes these differences are clear defects, but Sacks has a way of also opening our eyes to the ways in which these differences become a true part of who these people are.

And in doing this, as readers we are likewise prompted to re-consider who we are in ourselves.  In everyday life we often like to think of ourselves as whole and united, as individual selves in control of our interactions in the world.  These sorts of neurological case studies deeply question this perception of ourselves, and for that matter our perception of reality.

Mulan's athletics is off (again!)

 And Mulan's Interprovincials athletics competition is back off again.

A few weeks ago I wrote it was on again, but a few days ago we heard it was off again.  Too much Covid-19 uncertainty.

Mulan is grumpy!