This weekend I'm grateful for... happy endings

Lousy blogger that I am, I forgot the update to the Protect Medical Research campaign.

This fortnight I've been grateful for good sense prevailing, and the medical research budget being maintained. Good news. I will hang up my activist pants for now...

Brought to you by Maxabella Loves.

This weekend I was grateful for a familiar face

Oh, that's right, I have a blog. Fortunately it's safe to leave your blog alone for a bit while you're busy doing other things.

It's not quite the same as leaving your 4-ish month old baby asleep in your car at the local shopping carpark while you nip around the corner to do.... who knows what... for at least 10 minutes. 10 minutes being the length of time I stood there wondering whether you would be coming before the police arrived.

Fortunately for me, most of those minutes were in the presence of Andrea, a mum I often see around the area. We agreed that this had moved out of reasonable behaviour and called 000. Just as the police were dispatched, the mum turned up, was fairly uncooperative about the 000 operator's request that we check the baby was ok (fortunately bub wiggled for the first time just then), and rapidly drove off in tears.

It was an odd situation that I hadn't been in before- calling 000 is definitely an unfavourable judgement on someone else's parenting decision. I was really grateful that Andrea turned up when she did- I was never going to leave the baby alone, but knowing the point at which I could say "there is no reasonable explanation for this" was definitely a 'problem shared is a problem halved' situation.

Part of Maxabella's Grateful linky.

Image: ALEF.net

Cures not cuts: protect medical research for children's health

Rest in peace, little Elliot- who was only a few weeks younger than Big Bro when he died from a brain tumour in February.

"Without medical research there is no hope for the families of sick children."

This weekend I am grateful for... humour

This week has been busy in the research world, and not finding cures- trying to get the government to listen. Rallies and all! And work itself has been hectic. When things are hard in the office, I love that release when suddenly it all gets too much and we collapse into giggles. Maybe that's how these reseachers felt at the prospect of losing their jobs? (One is my friend.)

So this weekend, inspired by Maxabella, I'm grateful for humour.

Learning about... medical research funding

I took the boys down to the Melbourne Rally for Research today, and tweeted in the twitter version at the same time. It was pretty exhilarating. We stood with 3 ladies who'd come down from the country, a KPMG health economist and a heart transplant recipient- and 4000 other supporters of research.

Big Bro had, unprompted, been talking about his version of the issue at Kinder on Monday- "Big Julia needs to STOP and start respecting doctors who want to make sick people better"- so much so that the teacher asked me for more information! She also asked me to discuss the rally with him in terms of "togetherness", a topic that they're starting to cover as a class. It was an interesting thinking point for me, too- the togetherness of researchers, clinicians, patients and patients' friends and families.

There has been a heap of coverage today about the issue of why medical research needs funding by the Australian government. The whole issue was addressed pretty well in this piece from 7pm project (which I have never actually watched in person, 7pm being prime bed-preparation time); it's from about 3-7 minutes (unless you want to see the QLD infomercial!)

Discoveries Need Dollars: don't cut the cures.

This Weekend I am grateful for... playdates

This week my Maxabella-inspired Grateful post is for that wonderful currency of parents- the unaccompanied playdate. We've just started them this year, and that whole "it takes a village" mentality of sharing the occasional kindy pickup has been fantastic, both as dumper and host. One child down on Thursday, and when Little Bro took a nap I slept. And when Little Friends come here, they nick off to Big Bro's room and apart from the occasional update on where "dads and babies" is up to (we've sung six songs and the baby won't sleep) I feel like I'm juggling half a child less. Long live the playdate!

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On a separate note relevant to a previous Grateful post, the medical research funding cuts were on the news tonight. Still on :( There are rallies in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Twitter on Tuesday at 1-2pm AEST (12-2 for Twitter). If you're around any of those then, why not make some noise for a healthy future for your family?

Image: http://giovanniworld.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/iou.jpg

If you'd had breast cancer, would you want the government to help you?

So it's real: the Federal Government thinks that "ordinary Australians" won't care if 1600 medical research jobs are cut, research programs are terminated and clinical trials of lifesaving treatments are cancelled.

I bet ordinary Australians would care if medical research had helped their family survive a five generation history of breast cancer.

Discoveries Need Dollars. Protect Medical Research.

The weekend I am grateful for... my job, my outlet and some answers

Oh that's right- I have a blog.

I was reminded by this email from my kind cousin -which will be addressed in another post (promise)- and realised that it has been more than a week since I have looked at my blog, let alone two weeks since I have posted.

The reason, and subject of this week's Maxabella-inspired, MultipleMum-hosted Grateful Post is my new job. It's awesome and it's wonderful and it's super crazy BUSY!! B asked last week, "would you have imagined that there was a job out there for you where you can claim reading newspapers and books, and using Facebook and Twitter* were all part of a day's work?" And best of all, it was what I needed (but my blog didn't)- an outlet to write.

So, dear readers, I'd be grateful for a couple of answers-

1. is writing juice a finite resource? I feel like my reserves are low once I've fueled the work words. Or is that just my energy reserves?
2. do your colleagues know that you blog? And do they read your blog? Mine know- because it came up in my interview- and it's been mentioned broadly, but (I think) they haven't seen my blog. Partly because I know it's got lots of unedited (in a bad way), rambly writing and isn't beautiful or highly successful or anything. Not that I'm ashamed of it... but it's just not that... professional. Is that just me, or do other bloggers feel like that?

*Yes, as of a couple of weeks ago, I tweet. @_vTg_ but so far it's been more about me than children and gardening, hence my lack of connections between here and there.

This weekend I am grateful for... medical research

I heard a rumour this week that the Federal Government is planning to cut medical research funding in the May federal budget, as part of the broader savings agenda needed to pay for flood rebuilding and other spending commitments like the NBN. While I have no problem with paying for these important projects, I do have a BIG problem with the apparent presumption that Australia can afford to cut medical research funding. Facebook and Twitter campaigns have already started to spread the word about why medical research needs ongoing funding- and as of Sunday there is a website! Things are moving quickly!! I thought it was worth using this week's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post to say why I'm grateful for medical research:

1. Medical research improves our health and saves lives.

Case in point: this is Little Bro.

Born in 2008, saved in 1928. 100 years ago I don't know if Little Bro or I would still be around. When I was 37 weeks pregnant I had bacterial pneumonia and spend a few nights in hospital being pumped full of penicillin and other antibiotics. If it hadn't been for medical researchers who developed penicillin as an antibiotic, including the Australian Howard Florey , who knows how Little Bro and I would have fared. There's so much that we take for granted in our lives- immunizations, lying babies on their backs to reduce SIDS deaths, cardiac pacemakers, humidicribs, taking folate while pregnant, IVF- which are the result of medical research.

2. Medical research is good for the economy.

I'm not an economist, but those in the know (like Access Economics) say that for every $1 that the government puts into medical research, $1.17 is returned to the economy. Medical research improves the health of the country, reduces medicare costs and decreases hospital stays.

Medical research is the best investment in your life.

Are you grateful for medical research?

Disclaimer: my entire career has been paid for one way or another in large part by the Australian and US research budgets. But I'm grateful. Very grateful.

PS. And I'm top of Maxabella's linky list!! Howzat?!

PPS on Saturday. Thanks for your supportive comments. The Discoveries Need Dollars Facebook page has just posted a touching story about Ava, a little girl given the gift of hearing with the Australian-invented Bionic Ear.

Is medical research funding small change?

I guess every mum has their moments of minor indulgence: for me it's 15 blissful, uninterrupted minutes of News Radio in the bathroom every morning (10 if the natives are restless). This morning it was very nearly my last 15 minutes as I choked in the shower hearing that the budget for promoting the Coalition's failed Work Choices legislation had been a cool $100 million.

One hundred million dollars. And what did that achieve? An electoral rout and a "never again" tag (for what it's worth). And I guess there were some jobs and profits made at advertising agencies and the media outlets that ran the ads as a silver lining.

The obvious question is, what else could the government do with $100mil?

I'm no economist, but I can spout what I know about: the cost of medical research. You know, that thing that saves lives...
Yesterday it was announced that the federal government would invest $107million over the next five years on nine largescale Australian research programs addressing complex research problems like how to improve the health outcomes of Australians with developmental disabilities or who have suffered strokes and developing new treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Maybe workplace reform is about as complex a problem as any of these... But is advertising a failed campaign worth five years of medical research?

Image from http://www.vectorstock.com/assets/preview/203801/dollar-cash-injection-vector.jpg

Justine Clarke for the Senate?

I am normally a believer in the procedure of the Australian parliament, but yesterday's efforts at a speech performance by South Australian Liberal Senator Mary Jo Fisher (below) really did verge on the bizarre. I thought politicians' staffers were meant to prevent massive gaffes like this... Fortunately in the twelve overnight hours they have woken up enough to remove the following from Senator Fisher's wikipedia entry:

"Fisher proved herself to be mentally deficient when she decided it was an effective debating technique to do the Hokey-Pokey and the Time Warp in the senate during a discussion about a carbon tax." (You can still see it in the "View History" tab)

If this is how the senate operates these days, may I make some nominations for the next election?

This works best if you can run the two videos simultaneously :)

Candidate 1:

versus

Candidate 2:

Let's leave performing to the professionals, Senator Fisher. Your predecessor, Amanda Vanstone, could have told you that.

Beauty in biology

And now for something a bit different: beauty in biology, from the Wellcome Trust Image Awards. If only I lived in London so I could see the exhibition for real; half a world away I'll settle for sharing the real pixels with you.

First, for my neglected gardening followers, a garden friend:

Honeybee

DAVID MCCARTHY AND ANNIE CAVANAGH

Next, a guess what...

Mouse retina

FREYA MOWAT, UCL

(Isn't it beautiful?)

Speaking of beautiful:

Ruby-tailed wasp

SPIKE WALKER

And finally, my favourite:

Blood clot on a plaster

ANNE WESTON, LONDON RESEARCH INSTITUTE, CANCER RESEARCH UK

Who would have ever thought there was beauty in a used bandaid?!

PS. Does any clever person out there know how to make my columns wider? I'm sick of good pictures being chopped off! In Blogger I tried Design>Template Designer>adjust column widths and got "this is not possible for this template".

Book of the week: Marvin K Mooney will you please go now

I don't have a consistent rationale or criteria for selecting a Suburban Sonnet-inspired Book of the Week, so this week it started with this:

Which is of course a Zike-Bike to anyone who knows Marvin K Mooney by heart.

This "just" another rollicking, rhyming, nonsensical Dr Seuss- in this case the theme being:

the time has come, the time is now, Marvin K Mooney will you please GO NOW.

Marvin is then offered a series of suggestions, including:

"you may go on a Zike-Bike if you like". Big Bro often pores over the picture, trying to work out how the Zike-Bike works. Must say, I never had the heart to say that it was just made up- which is fortunate, given there is a real-life one out there in the world!

This weekend I'm grateful for peace and calm

Hello, strangers- yes, I've been MIA in the Real World. Funny how three weeks of "not working" was harder work than "working". I was actually quite looking forward to starting The New Job. And, I'm pleased to say, I really enjoyed the week!

The Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post brings me back to the Blogosphere. It's certainly been a week- and month- in which I've been counting my blessings. So this weekend, as they say in the classic blogs, I'm grateful for:

Peace: my friend T writes about living as an expat in Bahrain on her blog From Melbourne to Manama. Check out her posts this week about living through the protests there.

Calm: of the seismologic variety, in this part of the world. Christchurch, I am thinking of you. Again, but much more.

Should relatives attend a baby's funeral?

Should family members attend the funerals of a 3 month old and an 8 month old baby?

Should family members be able to choose where the funeral is held?

If the family had no money to cover the costs associated with the funerals, should the taxpayer pay some costs associated with a funeral?

These were some of the questions that have been raised by certain politicians in the last 24 hours, most prominently Tony Abbott and the opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrisson. Of course, their view has been influenced by the fact that the funerals were for Zahra El Ibrahimy and Sam Husseini who were drowned, along with their mothers (whose bodies were never recovered) and about 30 other people while scenes like this were underway:

It disgusts me that this debate had to be a debate at all. We are in a country that already provides bereavement payments to the poorer members of our society; why does this even have to be a question? Let the families grieve.

I am relieved that some members of the Coalition have come out against this dirty piece of politics, and that the mood in the mainstream media (and even The Australian!) seems to be one of compassion (and common sense and decency).

Rest in peace with your mothers, Zahra and Sam.

Image from news.com.au

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Postscript- there is a much more thorough discussion and a lot of insightful comments at the only politically-skewed blog I read, Grog's Gamut. One anonymous comment I found particularly pertinent was:

I understand the Defence department paid travel costs for 60+ soldier colleagues to come from Darwin to Launceston for the memorial service for Corporal Richard Atkinson on Monday. Two of his closest mates were flown back from Afghanistan to be there. This seems as appropriate to me as flying seven people from Christmas Island to Sydney for the funerals of their families.

Hardly accurate to suggest there is something strange about the Australian Government paying for funeral travel costs in such cases.

FEBRUARY 16, 2011 9:13 AM

This weekend I'm grateful for.... freebies and almost freebies

This week's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post comes after a week in which my wallet was left a bit plumper than usual. So I'm grateful for:

- freebies: the postman came knocking twice this week, leaving a frequent shopper reward bottle of wine and a lucky winning of three recipe books (thank you Expatriate Chef, for whom the postage to Australia wasn't so free). Both are good things to have in the house once the kiddos are in bed.

- almost-freebies: it was the week that I rediscovered my old student hangout, Thresherman's Bakehouse in Carlton. A $5 slice of quiche was massive enough to feed two hungry boys, and $7 gave me a loaf of bread, four Turkish rolls and four mini-quiches for the freezer from the baked-today bargain table. Then, this morning we happened across a "megagarage" sale, and for the princely sum of $7.10, walked away with two "never hung" Maisy prints, a Captain Feathersword outfit and a My Little Pony coveted by Big Bro, who has already had his 10c-worth brushing out its Rapunzelesque mane.

Image from http://www.ahajokes.com/

Book of the week: The Cable Car and the Dragon

The Cable Car and the Dragon- Herb Caen.

Big Bro and I brought this book out in honour of Chinese New Year; it's the tale of two exotic creatures who both wanted a taste of a a different life. Charlie, a San Francisco cable car, is on the top of Nob Hill late one Chinese New Year's night realises that after "running up and down San Francisco for sixty years, (he) has NEVER seen a Chinese New Year's Parade or a Chinese Dragon". So instead of turning left towards Russian Hill, for the first time in his life he turns right, and ventures off the tracks into Chinatown. There he meets the dragon Chu Chin Chow, who for sixty years has lived a reclusive life in the hills across the bay, emerging once a year to head the Chinese New Year Parade through Chinatown.

This is another of my childhood books, probably bought when we visited my aunt in San Francisco when I was three (or else sent from there later). It's quite a wordy book- the recommended age of 4-8 years seems quite appropriate- and goes into details of the history and mechanics of cable cars, which Big Bro enjoys. It couldn't be set anywhere else- it's very much a San Francisco tale, with mentions of Nob and Russian Hills and particular streets. If When we take the boys to San Francisco I'll be making sure we take the Cable Car over the same tracks, looking down over Chinatown. Who knows, we might even ride Charlie.

One of my favourite bits of the book, which I always make sure I read, is the dedication:

For my son Christopher, who, having had the taste and judgement to be born in San Francisco in 1965, knows quite a bit about cable cars and dragons. He also knows enough about his father to listen to the following tale with an air of polite disbelief.

Book of the Week was devised by Suburban Sonnet

This weekend I am grateful for.... handymen

This week's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post is about that wonderful species, Handy humanis, the common handyman. B and I are not at all handy when it comes to home repairs, and we are quite happy to contract out. It's definitely worth the cash, cuppa (always, always white with one) and two biscuits.

This week we decided it was time to have our front door trimmed to fit our house's La Niña dimensions (which evidently have a different lean from the El Niño version). This was all achieved, and I was grateful for Jon the Handyman's handiness. Even more so, as I swept away the wood shavings and collected the offcuts I realised that I am even more grateful when I encounter that rare subspecies Handy humanis cleanupafterwards. Even so, it's nice to have a front door that opens.

Image from http://find-a-handyman.com.au/, which I didn't use to find a handyman.

This weekend I was grateful for... Happy endings and beginnings

Better late than never to get in my Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post? TenTwelve busy days went by, but somehow blogging (much) wasn't part of my busy schedule. I'm was left with lots to be grateful for, like:

- happy endings: my long awaited "out with the old" part of my career change finally came, and I was surprisingly calm. I realised I had been subconsciously preparing for it long before it was decided. When you leave a research lab, you are definitely expected to have your affairs in order. (for reasons explained by Lady Science, whom I'm still laughing about). I made lists, sublists and lists of lists, and when my last day came, somehow I was able to calmly stroll down for lunch with a bunch of lovely colleagues, and head out the door on time. And it was all good.

- happy beginnings. Not coincidentally, my end of old job coincided with Big Bro starting at "Big Boy Kinder". He had been looking forward to it since the open day last August, when he discovered they provided scissors for the pupils' use (big plus point for Big Bro). I had been looking forward to it for, oh, almost two years when I visited it and decided it was THE kinder for us. (Because, y'know, attend the wrong kinder and your life goes down the toilet... Not). So I was very grateful for Big Bro having a happy- if tiring- first day.

- oldie-but-goodie recipes. We ended up hosting two lunches last weekend so I happily applied myself to the oven, stovetop and drinks cabinet. I'd forgotten how much of a doddle pavlova is, and also got round to making a Pimms cocktail, which went down very easily in 38 degree weather (fortunately I realised this would happen and went half strength). Good food, good company: it's the Good Life :)

- time to cross some items off the never-ending list. I'm currently in-between jobs (!) and discovering that even without children there are only so many things you can fit into the day. And the internet hasn't been one of them- I've barely been home! It's nice to feel productive, but at this rate I'll need a holiday from my not-quite-holiday!