Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Scully’s pedigree

Saturday, 16 June, 2018

The breeder we got our puppy Scully from has sent us her pedigree papers. We get to see details of her ancestors for three full generations. Turns out our little puppy has Scandinavian ancestry!

Her father’s registered name is Haggai Nordic King, who lives in Queensland, Australia. His father is Erik the Viking at Haggai, from Norway, and Erik’s parents are Super Sonik’s Cool Attitude from Sweden and Chocolate Dreams from Norway.

Nordic King’s mother is Betty Noire, and her parents are Franelle Black Magic and Skylark. All from Australia.

Scully’s mother is Madeleine Lemaire. Her father is Bob Marley, and his parents are Shibo Shiraz and Billie Holiday. Madeleine’s mother is Cheyenne Autumn, and her parents are Oscar Brun and Miss Juniper, again all from Australia.

These are all the registered pedigree names, excluding the breeder names, which are often prepended. Our Scully’s registered name is actually Sweetooth Scully, as the breeder name is Sweetooth.

In other news, Scully is making progress on all of overcoming her separation anxiety at night time, toilet training, and general obedience training, though we still have a way to go with all of them. We haven’t yet had a day without a toilet accident in the house, but we’ve managed several with just one accident, which is fairly pleasing. She’s pretty good at sitting on command, except when she’s distracted by other interesting things to do. She’s definitely learning better behaviour. All in all, decent progress for just on two weeks of ownership.

Oh, and she had a vet appointment last night, together with out kitten Mulder, just for general check up and worming and flea treatment. It was great sitting in the waiting room with a bunch of other people, and the vet came out and called, “Mulder and Scully!” Several people giggled.

First major puppy milestone

Monday, 11 June, 2018

A major first last night. We went through the entire night without Scully peeing in her pen.

It did involve me getting out of bed four times to take her out into the winter rain to go on the wet grass, but she slowly seems to be getting the point of the activity.

Unfortunately this was followed by an accident in the house after wake-up time, so we’re still working on our first 24 hour period without toilet accidents.

Puppy log: Sunday 10 June 2018

Monday, 11 June, 2018

Well this is annoying. Lots of people in our apartment complex know we’ve recently got a new puppy.

Today there was an unsigned passive-aggressive note stuck in all the lifts and near the garbage room, complaining about people leaving dog droppings around.

My first reaction was: “Wait. Did we fail to clean up after one of the times when little Scully missed the puppy pad we put down??” Then I thought “No, we definitely cleaned up every time. Even at 3am last night when I went down with her and we stood in the cold rain for five minutes, and she went, and I suddenly realised the dog dropping bag dispenser on the leash was empty – I picked up the droppings in my bare hand and took them inside to dispose of.”

Then I saw near the garbage room in the garage was a pile of droppings. BIG droppings, from a much larger dog. Okay, definitely not a slip of the mind with our puppy.

Then I got angry, because everyone knows we just got a new dog, and many people have seen us doing toilet training in the garage area. And now this gutless passive-aggressive note writer has left notes everywhere saying someone’s leaving droppings lying around.

Well. I did two things.

1. Cleaned up the mess. I used the dog enzyme remover we’ve been using to make sure the floor was really clean.
2. Emailed the Owners Corporation secretary to tell him that (a) it definitely wasn’t us, (b) I cleaned up the mess anyway, and (c) I was upset that someone left an unsigned note rather than do the right thing and clean up the mess and then report it to the Owners Corporation.

I was strongly tempted to do:
3. Leave a reply note saying essentially 1 and 2 above. Signed with my name and apartment number. And that leaving unsigned notes rather than cleaning up messes and reporting them through proper channels was un-neighbourly.

In the end I restrained myself and didn’t do 3. But now no doubt there are a bunch of our neighbours thinking “They got a puppy just the other day”, “Now someone’s leaving droppings around”, and joining the dots.

Sigh.

Puppy log: Friday 9 June 2018

Monday, 11 June, 2018

I just started OneNote pages to record information about our new pets, Mulder the kitten and Scully the puppy. Birth dates, adoption dates, contact details for where we got them from, microchip numbers, dates of vaccinations, worming, vet visits, etc.

I was going to name the section they are filed under simply “Pets”. But my wife had a much better idea.

So now I have a OneNote section labelled “X-Files”.

Puppy log: Monday 4 June 2018

Monday, 11 June, 2018

So… if you have a new puppy, how do you do anything?

Do I just have to take the next 6 weeks off work and say “screw it” to all my deadlines? By which I mean not just my paid job, but also putting all my webcomics on hiatus, because I ain’t getting any work done on them, even having had the last 3 weekdays off and being at home full time.

Heck, I’m barely managing to eat, drink, and shower.

Puppy log: Sunday 3 June 2018

Monday, 11 June, 2018

The morning after night 2 with new puppy Scully.

First of all: I’ve never raised a puppy before. I had no idea they howl all night until they get used to not being with their mother. I’ve learnt the hard way. Literally all night. 7+ hours non-stop until we finally called a stop to it by emerging from the bedroom.

Secondly: I’ve absolutely smashed my all-time record for no sleep. I haven’t had any sleep at all for two full nights. So 49, going on 50 hours now.

But let me reassure you, there is no way on Earth I am going to get behind a steering wheel until I manage to get some sleep.

Puppy log

Monday, 11 June, 2018

I’ve recently acquired a toy poodle puppy, who we’ve called Scully, to accompany the kitten Mulder who we adopted from PetRescue about a month ago. I’m the cat person in the house, and my wife is the dog person, so we decided one of each would be sensible.

However, neither of us had experience raising a puppy, and we had no idea how much work, how much constant supervision, and how exhausting it would be to get her through the first few weeks of house training and feeling confident and safe without her mother. We’re just over a week into this process and definite progress has been made, but there’s still a big way to go yet.

The result of this need for uninterrupted vigilance is that my wife and I are both taking a lot of time off work, and while we’re at home we have no time to do much else other than monitor Scully, unless we’re both home and one is looking after her. The secondary result is no new Game of Thrones episodes until things settle down to let us squeeze in an hour of TV watching again.

In the meantime, I thought I’d start blogging our experiences raising Scully. I’ve posted a few short notes to my Google+ and Facebook accounts, but realised it might be better to put them here for posterity more under my own control, and link across. To start with I’ll copy some of those posts here… (see next few posts)

Ethics & photoelectrics

Wednesday, 21 June, 2017

This morning I was setting up the school classroom for teaching my Primary Ethics class when one of the Year 4 boys in my class came up to me and asked, “Can you explain the photoelectric effect?” This is a nine or ten year old kid, remember.

He has no way of knowing I have a Ph.D. in physics, and so yes, this is actually something I know about and can explain to people. I tried to tone it down to a nine-year-old’s level.

“Well, it’s a thing that happens when light hits some materials, like metals. The light hits an atom… do you know about atoms and electrons and …”

“Yeah!” he says, in a tone of voice that indicates “of course I do, who doesn’t?”

“Okay,” I continue, “The light hits an atom and it makes an electron jump out of the atom, so it can then travel through the metal as electricity.”

“Hmmm,” says the boy, “Does the electron just jump up to a higher energy level shell, or does it jump completely out of the atom?”

I skilfully hid my internal jaw-drop, as I replied, “All the way out of the atom.”

“Huh,” he said, “Well that’s pretty simple. I don’t know why someone else told me it was so hard to understand.”

He want off to his seat, and I started teaching my class…

Primary Ethics

Tuesday, 25 April, 2017

Here in Australia, scripture is still taught in schools. One of the problems with this is that scripture classes eat up some of the scheduled classroom time, and children whose parents don’t want them to attend religious education are specifically not allowed to do anything during that time which might give them an academic advantage over students attending scripture. So the students not attending scripture are typically not allowed to use that time to study, or do homework, or do anything else that might be “educational” in some sense. Often they just sit in a room and watch videos.

About 15 years ago, a group of people decided to do something about that and offer secular ethics classes during this time when other students are doing scripture. Since the scripture classes purport to be offering ethical education, it couldn’t be argued that the non-scripture children were doing anything additional.

However, this campaign fell foul of religious interest groups, who felt that ethical instruction without religion was inherently evil or something. The religious groups fought long and hard to have secular ethics classes banned from schools.

I’m pleased to say, however, that they lost the fight and some years back a completely non-government-funded volunteer group called Primary Ethics was granted permission by the NSW Department of Education to offer ethics classes as an alternative to religious scripture in New South Wales primary schools. The curriculum very specifically does not attempt to teach children “what is right” or “what is wrong” – rather it teaches them skills in critical thinking, and that many issues are complex and that not everyone agrees on what is right or wrong, and the value of considering things from other people’s points of view.

Since its inception, Primary Ethics has grown to be extremely popular, with many parents (including many religious ones) wishing to enrol their children in ethics classes. The problem is, being non-funded, Primary Ethics needs volunteers to actually teach the courses.

Recently, I volunteered to become an ethics teacher, and I just completed my training (which includes federal police background checks and clearance to work with children). I will be starting tomorrow, with a class of Year 4 students (about 9 years old). I’m proud to volunteer my time to teach a new generation of people the principles of ethics and critical thinking, and I hope they all go on to become better adults because of my efforts.

Now and the 80s

Saturday, 21 January, 2017

So, I realised what the current world situation feels like.

I remember growing up in the 1980s. As kids we were existentially worried about a lot of things.

  • We worried about AIDS – a frightening disease with no cure that could turn into an unstoppable epidemic.
  • We worried about the ozone hole – a major environmental issue that could lead to vastly increased rates of cancer and deleterious effects on plants and animals.
  • We worried about global nuclear war – a political danger that threatened to kill pretty much everyone in horrible ways.

It seemed like there was a pretty good chance that none of us would have the chance to grow up to be adults, because civilisation might well not last that long. It was this background of all-pervading existential angst that underlaid the 80s.

But now isn’t an exact parallel to the 80s. The difference back then was:

  • We had medical science that people trusted to do life-saving research and less ineffective folk remedies, anti-science, and unhealthy paranoia about “germs” leading to rampant overuse of antibacterials.
  • We had an international agreement to ban ozone-depleting chemicals, and every nation carried through with it within a few years, rather than ignoring it as “too hard”.
  • We had Russian and American leaders who were actually working together to try to defuse hostilities and reduce the threat of a major war.

Oh, and the other good thing about the 80s was that angst led to a decade of cool protest songs and other music. :-)