just another day...

if i’m going to come back blogging, i might as well do it properly.

I’ve had a series of discussions with mostly american folks in a forum over the last few days.

it started with this one.

i think i must be kinda thick or something, because there's this thing that i just don't understand.  here in australia we had what was at the time, one of the worst mass shootings in the world in port arthur, tasmania in 1996.  35 people were killed at the hand of one man, many more injured.  after that, gun laws were introduced with and guns became a lot harder for the average homebody psychopath to get hold of.  nothing like this has happened since.

this is absolutely a simplistic view.  but surely you can start with gun laws and work on mental health, video games, parental responsibilities and whatever else will undoubtedly get blamed for this tragedy.  what the heck are people thinking they are defending themselves from, that they NEED a semi-automatic anything?  it's never the hardened criminals you need to defend yourselves against, it's the average joe blow whose mind breaks down, for whatever reason, and in this case his mum has guns in the house, because she's allowed to.  i'm with the boys here, i just don't understand.  I'm a mother of children this age.

that went well, so i tried this.

I can't believe or understand how anyone, the day after one of the most horrific shootings in your history, can defend a perceived need or right to own and use semi automatic weapons. You want to defend yourself and your home go buy yourself a pistol or something and be prepared for the far reaching consequence of using it. But how bad a shot are you that you would need 30 round magazines and how many people do you anticipate invading your home?
Reinstate that legislation Bush allowed to run out on semi automatics.just start with that for your future children's sakes.

and then i went here in respose to a uk comment

There was Dunblane in 96. I remember because i was living in Kinsale, co. Cork at the time. And then tighter gun controls were introduced and nothing of that magnitude ha happened since. Same in Australia after Port Arthur. I do like me a country where lessons are learned and acted upon in the first instance.

and then back to those us friends, and if you read between the lines, you’ll see i had some back up.  not american though.

Maybe, BECAUSE we're foreign, we can see the wood for the trees.   We can see the blindingly obvious, where you are blinded by obfuscation, the second amendment and the overwhelming nature of the task.

You know what, i'm not concerned about your civil liberties, your right to bear arms, your right to protect your 'castle' the gun culture in which you grew up or your belief that you wouldn't make it home from work alive unless you carried a gun.  (This isn't directed just at you personally, by the way, I'm summing up a number of arguments here).   Yes, there will always be a black market and criminals will always have guns, because they're criminals and they have no regard for the law.  No, you're not some random small country.  And while you throw your weight around telling the rest of the world what to do, your people are shooting your children.

 

Charlotte Bacon, 2/22/06, female (age 6)

Daniel Barden, 9/25/05, male (age 7)

Olivia Engel, 7/18/06, female (age 6)

Josephine Gay, 12/11/05, female (age 7)

Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 04/04/06, female (age 6)

Dylan Hockley, 03/08/06, male (age 6)

Madeleine F. Hsu, 07/10/06, female (age 6)

Catherine V. Hubbard, 06/08/06, female (age 6)

Chase Kowalski, 10/31/05, male (age 7)

Jesse Lewis, 06/30/06, male (age 6)

James Mattioli, 03/22/06, male (age 6)

Grace McDonnell, 11/04/05, female (age 7)

Emilie Parker, 05/12/06, female (age 6)

Jack Pinto, 05/06/06, male (age 6)

Noah Pozner, 11/20/06, male (age 6)

Caroline Previdi, 09/07/06, female (age 6)

Jessica Rekos, 05/10/06, female (age 6)

Avielle Richman, 10/17/06, female (age 6)

Benjamin Wheeler, 9/12/06, male (age 6)

Allison N. Wyatt, 07/03/06, female (age 6)

Patronise me all you like, I just don't get how you can defend this man's, or his mothers, 'right' to own the weapons that did this. 

 

and then there was a question put to me:  but why should we let the actions of one man dictate the actions and choices of so many others? It's not rational to do so. 

 

No, quite right.  You should make no personal sacrifices for the good of the whole.  Your personal sacrifice being that of giving up the right to own a weapon that can kill a dozen people at the pull of a trigger.  It's not rational to ask that.

In Australia, if  you have a legitimate need to own a gun, if you are a hobbyist, even if you just want one, you can apply and be granted a licence.   Not a semi automatic, but something you can go hunting wabbits with, or roos,  if that's what floats your boat.     Like you need  a licence for a car. Because they're weapons too, and you have to have lessons in how to use one of them before you're allowed in charge of it.  In this random small country and in yours.

I'm not saying ban all guns.  You can shoot each other one bullet at time if you want.  I'm saying, ban THOSE guns.   Because until you do it will keep happening.  I wonder how many of those parents will continue, if they ever did, to argue in favour of that second amendment of yours. 

And then a few more details about the Australian experience, seeing as they asked

Well i think mostly they were just, you know, asked to get a licence.

Here's another bit of a statistic, because i'm sure you're all loving my Australian gun history lesson, yes?

Since  Port Arthur there has been not one mass shooting incident (apparently this is sadly distinguished by four or more deaths) in Australia.

In the nine years preceding Port Arthur, there were 10 such incidents such as Strathfield, Hoddle and Queen streets, with 66 deaths, the majority caused by citizens with no prior criminal record but clearly with access to weapons.  So the trajectory was clearly rising.  And now it's not.

Culturally, we are pretty similar to our American and British cousins, and have our own fair share of media sensationalism, video game violence, mental health issues, etc. 

And then i ended on this, just because you need to know when you’re hitting your head against a brick wall, and the only thing you’re going to affect is your head.  And i wanted them to know that i was, you know, balanced.  And because my heart breaks for this mother, and i think it’s compelling reading.

I just read this and wanted to share it.. everywhere.. really.  Guns are a part and i'll continue to argue that, but my heart breaks for this mother and others like her and mental health should clearly be in the discussion as well.

http://gawker.com/59...m-lanzas-mother

 

 

I can’t help wondering if what i’ve learned over the last few days, is that those who are anti-gun-proliferation are against it for the good of the earth they live on and the lives – all the lives – it contains.  those who are pro-gun are pro-gun for themselves, for those they love, for their rights. none of that pro-gun group can provide an argument in how it’s for the good of the country.  except to perhaps, you know, assert their second amendment right to overthrow a government that now has i dunno, things like surface to air missiles and nuclear bombs to protect itself with rather than muskets.

messy christmas life

 

I wasn’t going to do anything like a December Daily this year. 

I’ll admit, that sometimes I’m not the brightest tool in the shed. Or the sharpest.  Or whatever the heck that expression is.

I upgraded all our computers to Windows8.  I’m looking forward to checking out a Windows8 phone next year and I like the idea of all our stuff being in sync.  Like Apple but with choices.  Windows8 appears more of a service pack than a major upgrade, underneath the fancy new start screen and rather missed start button it’s still pretty much Windows7 but with some cool bits.  I especially like the curfew/parental controls.  I don’t think the kids do.

But anyway, between that and an unfortunate series of circumstances, involving changing from shooting jpegs to shooting raw, and where those files go, a dell repairman and some too-breezy hard drive reformatting,  i managed to lose about 8 weeks of photos from last November to January.  All of Christmas is gone from both my (raid1 mirror) hard drives and my external hard drive.  Except for those photos which i printed and scrapped here here. (yay!) 

And all i have of Phoebe’s birthday are the photos that i gave Lou to post on the tattered angels blog here.

 

But with the Windows8 thing i set up a new desktop background and now in seasonal spirit it flicks through my December Daily from 2010.  And reliving each photo as it flashes up on the desktop is really precious and i’ve been loving all the moments i’ve nearly forgotten and now never will, and still it’s taken me until the 14th of December to realise i should be doing it again this year. AND EVERY YEAR!.  And fourteen days for me to click that if I’d done it last year I would have at least 25 memories of last christmas instead of a single (double) page. The last year on my blog is the most notoriously unrecorded of all since i started seven? years ago, and those photos are now lost.  This could be my backup’s backup if only i learned my lesson.

 

So without further ado (or fancy digital templates) welcome to the first fourteen days of Christmas 2012.

 

I don’t know what it is with me but whenever I’ve got two or three family members lined up on laptops I feel an urge to take a photo.  We only own one television in the house, but now, unintentionally, we have more laptops than we do family members, and for some reason it amuses me.

 

Frank got Christmas down from the roof on the 1st of December.  I probably should have taken a shot of his grumpy bum up the ladder, but it didn’t occur to me.  Opening the boxes and seeing the happy inside makes me forget all that bit. That, and maybe vodka.

 

It’s still the 1st of December.  I’m not very good at these one-photo-a-day rules.  It was some impromptu game of catch where you had to fling the ball over the hedgerows in the fields opposite.  I took this shot from inside the front screen door.

 

 

 

 

And.. we’re onto 2 December.  Every year we go to the same christmas tree farm and I try my damndest to keep the pylons out of my shots, but this year i decided to let them in because it’s part of our reality.  Our christmas tree farm is right next to the pylon path.  Shit happens.  Miss Flowerhead Junior scores the funny expression shot of the day and then Frank lets the kids believe they just chopped down the christmas tree, because the last saw-stroke is the one that counts, right?

Laptops.  See?

 

Check out my hedge trimming efforts?  It was a fast grower but if i had my time over i probably would have gone with something that didn’t totally dwarf the house.

 

Kids got new bikes for Christmas this year as their main expensive present, and they got given them early because .. well because Frank was here to pay for them and you can’t hide two bikes in our house.  There’s barely room to store them let alone hide them.

 

 

Kitty.  He may look like he’s posing, but anyone with a cat knows they’re never that co-operative.  He’s plotting.  Probably the downfall of that bauble. Or me. Or the dog.

 

Talk about awkward family photos.  This gorgeous sofa (i miss it already) was a hand-me-down twelve years ago.  I booked in a hard waste collection, but we put it out on my birthday and it was too good an opportunity to not get a family shot in.  I had my camera on the other side of the road on a stool and used the remote shutter thingy.  This shot was the best of a dozen and i challenge you not to bend your head slightly when you look at it.

As a side note, under the tab of random things that amuse me, is that we went to the new TGI Fridays for dinner that night for my birthday, with my mum and buns.  And when we got back, the sofa was still there but the little $10 wooden ikea stool across the road had been swiped.  (obviously of course, i had taken my camera with me and never used it to record the long island iced teas, the mammoth meals, the teachers from the kids school on the table next door…)

 

Of the things that make this Christmas stand out, this year it might just be the whole Tolkein thing.  I’ve recently finished reading The Hobbit to the kids and of course we’ll be lining up on Boxing Day with the rest of the country to go see the first movie instalment.  I’m amazed it’s not ‘There and Back Again’ but actually  “Just a Bit of on The Way There’ and they’re turning this into three instalments.

I’m resisting moving on to reading the Lord of the Rings to the kids, because I’m not sure the book will capture their imagination just yet.  It can get a bit tedious – all those ‘begats’ and backstories (like the bible).  I remember I scanned and skimmed quite a lot in my first read of Lord of the Rings, and i was 12 or 13 at the time.  And it’s harder to get away with scanning and skimming when you’re reading aloud.   The movies, however, have been going down a treat.  Complete with popcorn.  I could totally see an argument for dividing the trilogy into more than three movies because there’s so much missed out them, and already Phoebe in particular is totally caught up in the fantasy and wants to know more detail.  I may, actually, end up reading them aloud.  I’m such a soft touch.

 

 

And it’s possible I’m a little obsessed with shooting my christmas tree.

 

This is one of those shots where I don’t want to crop out a single, busy detail (i think you can click on it to see it bigger). From the tomato sauce and drink bottle on the bench, to the Christmas to do list on the fridge, the washing on the chair and the beautiful flowers sent by my brother for my birthday, and you can just see the tops of the advent calendars on the coffee table.  Don’t crop it all out i say – these are the things you will want to see and remember in years to come.

 

A christmas layout i’ve done for this years art wall.  Christmas tree shots are such a farce in this house, and any shots past about the third click of the shutter either come with a great deal of bribery, begging or threatening. It’s nice to remember back in the day when they just did it because they wanted to make their mum happy.  Bless.

 

So there’s more.  I think this takes up up to the 10th.  Santa christmas lists, mothers of the three musketeers, experimental bokeh shots and more to come!