Ms Fifikins

Or when too much music is never enough!

For those who haven’t twigged it’s mah birfdai on Friday! MIML™ being the gorgeous lovely man he is suggested he get me an iPod for my birthday as mine was cactus, even after he had replaced the battery. Of course my big surprise was on Saturday when he gave it to me almost a week early! Hehe! Now to fill 120gb of Classic goodness!

So I have been ripping cds from my collection and filling the harddrive on Matilda the Macbook. A lot of this is classical and/or choral. A lot I have never listened to and some I have forgotten how beautiful it is.

Take:

The Silver Swan by Orlando Gibbons

Now this has to be one of the most beautiful pieces ever written and I remember singing it at school- I think it was a Speech Night or something. But anyway! I have also included other selections in my iTunes that I have never listened to- Franck, Scriabin, and Novák to name but 3, but also some classics that I know I will never listen to, like Nana Mouskouri!

I suppose at least in doing this I will never have to go hunting for them and, er, torrent pay to download them if/when I do want to listen.

Oh and the funny thing- CDs I paid $32 for in the early 1990s are now on iTunes for around $15. I really doubt we will be paying for music in the next 10 years anyway.

And for those wondering if MIML™ has anything up his sleave for my actual birthday- he has promised me a bukkit! I know! My own bukkit!I hear he has sent out a search party even…

more cat pictures

And as an aside for Shakespearian scholars who read my bog (you must be out there!) I am not saying that I need more music to gorge myself and stop listening and stop thinking about other people who I think about a lot (Hi MIML™!) I can haz iPod to fill!

Yes from swearing cakes to dead ‘orses to boobs! This is a pretty good ad- well the message is one that needs to be heard anyway! It is a subject that is close to my heart and again I will say that all expectant parents need to go to a Breastfeeding Education Class. If you are in the Cairns area come to one of our ABA local group ones.

Well it is my birthday soon and I do like cake…

It’s my birthday in 13 sleeps. I know. So hard to believe I will now be on the ‘to late’ side of mid thirties. And yet I still look much younger (please humour me!)

Now if you were wondering what to get me, well I do need a new box grater of all things and I could do with a pedicure or a massage… But these really caught my eye:

I mean what the! Obviously for those with more dollars than sense. And I never wear that much eye make-up so they probably wouldn’t suit me. Oh and I don’t think they are noise reducing. But I do think there are other things you could spoil me with for US$6400 than blingy earphones!

Yesterday was the dreaded Athletics Carnival for year 3-7 kids at Imogen’s school. When Imogen was a toddler she had quite severe asthma that necessitated several stays in hospital. When we moved up here her asthma basically disappeared. Until this year. I have been told by health professionals and parents of other asthmatic kids that this year has been particularly bad for asthmatics.

Now Immy’s asthma has usually be brought on by colds. We knew that if she had a cold it would lead to wheezing and we would see the tracheal tug and cart her off to hospital and if her oxygen saturation level was below 95% she would be admitted. The thing that triggered her asthma a few months ago appeared to be exercise however. Strangely enough, it does not seem to be triggered by dancing or swimming, but by running.

I believe in physical activity for kids and I believe in the HPE syllabus set out by the Queensland Studies Authority. The kids have one PE lesson a week and one swimming lesson a week. Their classroom teachers are encouraged to look at health and both the kids have been exposed to this side of the curriculum in the classroom.

But back to athletics!

Now it may have been a few years since I actually did any curriculum studies at uni, but I still know where to source the syllabus documents. From the Queensland Health and Physical Education syllabus I quote:

Key learning area outcomes
The key learning area outcomes highlight the uniqueness of the Health and
Physical Education key learning area and its particular contribution to lifelong
learning. During the compulsory years of schooling in the Health and Physical
Education key learning area, students develop the knowledge, processes, skills
and attitudes necessary to:
• select and use information and apply problem-solving and decision-making
strategies to:
–make informed decisions about health, physical activity and personal
development;
–evaluate their own actions and the actions of others;
• develop a strong commitment to promoting equity, acknowledging diversity
and establishing supportive environments with respect to health, physical
activity and personal development;
• reflect on and evaluate the influence of biological, social, cultural and
environmental factors on:
–their own and others’ health and personal development;
–their own and others’ attitudes towards, and participation in, physical
activity;
• promote the health of themselves, others and their communities;
• accept their responsibility as an individual member of a group or
community to create and maintain environments supportive of optimum
health;
• develop and refine motor skills necessary for participation in physical activity,
and acquire and apply movement concepts to enhance performance;
• develop positive attitudes towards participation in regular physical activity
and an appreciation of the benefits of physical activity and of the aesthetic
and technical qualities of movement;
• enhance their own and others’ self-concept and self-esteem, and develop the
skills for creating and maintaining positive interactions and relationships.

Now the syllabus is broken into three strands:

1. Promoting the Health of Individuals and Communities
2. Developing Concepts and Skills for Physical Activity
3. Enhancing Personal Development

Now I have looked through these outcomes and nowhere does it say ‘Students will be able to compete against each other in races of 80, 100, 200, 400 and 800m and shotput, long jump and high jump.’

A few weeks ago I had tears from a certain 10yo girl who did not want to run in any of the races. She said it made her wheeze and she was sure she was going to come last anyway. Basically she didn’t want to embarrass herself. I said I would try and speak to the PE teacher. Time slipped away and the note came home in the diary from her teacher last week basically asking if Imogen was fit enough to be running at the Athletics Carnival. I took the oportunity to say of course not, but she could still do the Shotput which she had apparently qualified for.

So we get to the day. We have kids in running skins, we have kids in tears who don’t want to run. We have the 4 housegroups with kids from both campuses chearing louder and louder for their houses. But did this day relate to any of the outcomes listed above, let alone the assessable ones listed under the strands? Not really. If anything it went against some of them- it did not provide a supporting environment for many kids and at the end of the day all it did was glorify bodies. Of course if they had just stood up in assembly comparing leg lengths and muscle sizes and weights there would have been an outcry, but because there was competition it was ok.

These kids had spent an entire term of PE lessons training for the Athletics Day. You could see in the 800m events the kids who sprinted to the front and tired at the end, or the good athletes who stayed back, but still left their run too late. I could not see any point to the day. A lot of the kids who won do Little Athletics outside of school. Cathy Freeman did not win Gold in Sydney by an hour of PE lessons a week! Likewise they do not expect the kids in the orchestra or choir at school to perform at concerts and assemblies and the like by the hour of arts lessons they get each week.

It is time schools woke up to the waste of time that is placed on Athletics and Swimming carnivals and actually looked at the PE syllabus and created ways that kids could have fun with physical activity and promote healthy living and give the kids skills to maintain this healthy living throughout their lives.

I think Immy summed it up rather well when she asked me what job would require her to run 100m really quickly. We decided that if she was a bomb disposal expert who cut the wrong wire she would have to run fast, but really! C’mon schools! Let’s entrench healthy habits in our kids. 15-25% of kids would have received a ribbon or medal yesterday. For a lot of the rest it left bad memories that they will remember for the rest of their lives and could very well lead to bad attitudes to physical fitness and wellbeing.

Here endeth the lesson!

You couldn’t believe just how many times Dermie features below (or could you)?

‘I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father.’   (Shane Wakelin).

‘Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.’  (Mick Malthouse – Collingwood).

‘I’m going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes.’   (Peter Bell – Fremantle – on his University Law studies).

‘You guys line up alphabetically by height.’ and ‘You guys pair up in groups of three, then line up in a circle.’
(Barry Hall Sydney Captain at training).

Brock McLean (Melbourne) on whether he had visited the Pyramids during his visit to Egypt ‘I can’t really remember the names of the clubs that we went to.’

‘He’s a guy who gets up at six o’clock in the morning regardless of what time it is.’  (Kevin Sheedy on James Hird).

Jonathan Brown, on night Grand Finals vs Day Games – ‘It’s basically the same, just darker.’

Ron Barassi talking about Gary Cowton ‘I told him, ‘Son, what is it with you. Is it ignorance or apathy?’
He said, ‘Barass, I don’t know and I don’t care.’

Barry Hall (Sydney) when asked about the upcoming season:  ‘I want to kick 70 or 80 goals this season, whichever comes first.’

‘Luke Hodge – the 21 year old, who turned 22 a few weeks ago’ (Dermott Brereton).

‘Chad had done a bit of mental arithmetic with a calculator.’ (Mark Williams).

‘We actually got the winning goal three minutes from the end but then they scored.’ (Ben Cousins, West Coast Eagles).

‘I’ve never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body’  (Luke Darcy).

‘That kick was absolutely unique, except for the one before it which was identical.’ (Dermott Brereton).

‘Sure there have been injuries and deaths in football – but none of them serious.’ (Adrian Anderson).

‘If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again. (Andrew Demetriou).

‘I would not say he (Chris Judd) is the best centreman in the AFL but there are none better.’  (Dermott Brereton).

‘I never comment on umpires and I’m not going to break the habit of a lifetime for that prat.’ (Terry Wallace).

Garry Lyon: ‘Have you ever thought of writing your autobiography?’
David Swartz: ‘On what?’

‘Well, either side could win it, or it could be a draw.’ (Dermott Brereton).

‘Strangely, in slow motion replay, the ball seemed to hang in the air for even longer.’ (Dermott Brereton).

Some observant viewers may have noticed this blog had a meltdown yesterday. I discovered the culprit was a rogue media player I had installed as a plug in to embed Quicktime videos without the need to link. The result was it botched the layout in certain browsers.

I suppose I have been aware of all the web standards talk, especially after those wonderful evenings with Molly in January, but I have thought that it didn’t involve me. Well having a stoopid plugin ruin a layout in certain browsers made me grrrrrr…

I pretend I don’t know much about coding and operating systems and the like, but I probably know a little bit. (Hey Griff- have you cleared your cache recently? ) I know that I describe myself as a blonde mac user and this positions me in a certain way, but one of the truths is that with web standards, everyone should have equal access.

I used Safari as my web browser of choice for many years. Last year, it decided to have a spacco when trying to access hotmail, so I found that I was still using Safari, but had Firefox open in order to read my hotmail. Then when this blog evolved, I discovered Safari didn’t like the visual formatter WordPress had so I chose to write blog posts and do blog related stuff in Firefox. Before long I moved almost all my workings to Firefox. Now I use Safari as my feed reader because it tells me exactly what feeds have been updated and what I have already looked at.

Now Firefox hasn’t been without its hiccups. It irked me that in my blogroll, I ♥ Risotto! was not shown with the ♥. It is now with FF3, but I wonder if it will be in this post. Of course when I looked at my blog in Safari it was there.

I love some of the add-ons I have installed for Firefox, especially Adblock Plus. And I have been able to install an Aussie dictionary- no more red underlines whenever I type colour or summarise!

So yes, I am pretty much set on using Firefox for most browsing activities. Now have you tried Firefox? Look, the reason I ask is that some bright spark thought it would be a good idea to try and create a world record for downloads of Firefox. Yep, you can read about it here! So get to it. Even if it is not today, I do recommend downloading it and having a go.

Oh and if my blog looks strange or different to what it has looked like in the past on your browser, please let me know!

O hai! I can haz lolcats on mah blog!

Yes! I feel I am turning into a video sharing service, but meh! This is a little cool: