Walking and weaning

Ryan stopped breast feeding and started walking in the same week at the end of May. He is almost up to running. He loves swings (laughs delightedly) and went down the slippery slide backwards by himself several times today, very happy with himself. This despite me waking him up prematurely and having a cold.
We were all counted on the Australian census tonight. The online form worked very well.

Conversation all gone dry

My skills in this area were never the best but now they seem to have deserted me. Probably something to do with spending all my time in the company of a person who's verbal output consists of a parroting of animal noises. I say 'baa' he says 'baa'. My Dad claims he said 'out' the other day but he hasn't repeated it. Any suggestions for conversational enhancement accepted.
Ryan, said boy, is now one and is content to get about on all fours, especially with knees up bum in air. He's in no hurry to walk unaided, which is fine by me. He's fast enough already. And he's usually a very happy smiling companion.

Goanna

HPIM1058
Originally uploaded by Robubble.

In the New Year of 2006 we managed a two night camp out with the baby boy in a deserted wilderness site in the Budawangs. Lizards and kangaroos roamed around.

Back 1 year

We've been back in Aus 1 year this month. It's flown by with the baby boy arriving in April.

I made contact with a colleague from Sydney Uni. He's gone to Arizona to work with another ex-colleague. Makes me *start* to think about working again or at least start getting my brain back in some shape. How do you start to catch up with academic reading? It's necessary to pick a pretty narrow topic, of real interest of course, then go to it. However, it's not that easy to get hold of some articles if you aren't in an institution with subscriptions to journals.

Better go. It's late on Christmas Eve. Handel's Messiah is playing on the TV and the boy is peacefully asleep (until he wakes between 2 and 4 am for a quick liquid snack). Long day tomorrow driving to the rels for Christmas lunch.

Computer buggings 2

I've found another string of question marks. It happens when you do a paste special in Eudora and the dialog box comes up with the options "????" or HTML. The "????" should be "Text" I assume because that's what happens when I select it. I can't work out how to Google this mystery either. Variations of "message question marks dialog box windows XP" haven't revealed much.