This will hurt me...

Henry has been in training for the Coolangatta Gold for some time now. We've had in running up and down sand dunes all over the State, just last week we were at Opossum Bay and not only did he break his own record, he managed to wrestle a number of Great Whites in the process!

Henry again. I love the little bloke an awful lot, and very much enjoy his company, but by golly he is always 110% full on. There isn’t a lot of down time when he’s awake and firing on all cylinders. Take the scene above: I’ve just spent five minutes setting the baby, but now Ezra is screaming again and Jen is attempting to calm him, I’m cooking dinner, and all I have to do is toss the couscous (ooh err...?) and we are done. I’ve already given the lad a cheesy spaghetti thing that he seems quite taken with. He’s being nice and quite which means “I must check on him”, and wouldn’t you know it, cheesy spaghetti everywhere! That said, I am supremely confident that as he grows, Henry will turn out a fine young man. Dictatorial tendencies aside, he already says "please" and "thank you (well, "ta") unprompted, and has a terribly sweet nature underneath all of the vigour. All we need to do is channel the vitality towards good , rather than evil .

So Henry has invented this time machine, so I’ve gone back and for some reason that I can only put down to tiredness, I keep getting snapped for American high school yearbooks. I thought that I would share some with you. Here I am in 1970 , majoring in Economics and sporting a healthy side part. I support the war in Vietnam, but am prepared to lie about it to impress girls. I shall never leave a University once I enter it. I am not proud of that. Here I am in 1976 . I am a Drama major, as the skivvy will attest. I am quite the ladies man. Secretly, however, I lust after the captain of the men’s water polo team. I will get a gig in reasonably successful syndicated sitcom in the 1980s, and will milk that until death. I am confused about how that makes me feel. Here I am in 1978 . I am more interested in smoking pot than my Art major, but I do draw lots and lots of cartoons featuring evil goblins tying up vixens with enormous breasts. I will live with my ‘Mom’, really get interested in Th...

Yesterday evening was pregnastics again, so Henry and I entertained ourselves while Jen was out doing whatever it is that a roomful of heavily pregnant women do when corralled together. Today’s photograph is testament to the fact that Henry was in terrific form. In fact, we managed to cover most of the amusements that have consumed our evenings of late: Dinner Vacuuming Piggy bank emptying Piggy bank filling Singing Dancing Piggy bank emptying Piggy bank filling Reading books: (last night we enjoyed The New Baby , Guess How Much I Love You , Meg and Mog , and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ) Piggy bank emptying Piggy bank filling Wrestling Extreme hugs Piggy bank emptying Piggy bank filling Tower building Tower destroying Drumming Forward rolling Piggy bank emptying Piggy bank filling Cubby house building Cubby house dismantling Deep breathing Dessert Piggy bank emptying Piggy bank filling Relaxing You will have probably noted the preponderance of piggy bank-related activities. Yes, H...

I found yesterday a very nifty little application – Wordle – that lets you generate ‘word clouds’ for just about anything you like. For the uninitiated, word clouds are simply groupings of words with the most-frequently-used words in the larger, bolder font. The visual effect of the grouping is that of a cloud. Now, I decided to whack in all of the words that I have posted on this blog over the past couple of months and see what shows up. In my defence, each post has “posted by Kris McCracken”, so I am not SO vain as to refer to myself quite as frequently as the word cloud suggests. [I have had a little trouble with the HTML on this, so have posted the cloud as a JPG file for the moment. Hopefully I can get it sorted at some point.]

I like accents. I like accent archives. I like how he guy from Wellington is trying very hard to say "six" rather than "sex". I would like a beautiful but harsh Germanic woman to tell me how naughty I've been, but that really is another matter for a wholly different website! Try out the the Speech Accent Archive , where the aim is to exhibit a large set of speech accents in English from a variety of geographical and language backgrounds.

I thought that I would do something a bit different today, and take the camera with me to record my trip to work this morning. I've been looking at people's blogs a bit of late, and have seen all sorts of interesting accounts (pictorial and otherwise), of life in all sorts of places, from Alaska to Ghana to Romania . So I thought that I should add little old Hobart to the list, as well as record it for myself, for future reference. As someone who is really into history on all levels, sometimes you forget that if you don't leave some trace your own little existence; it's bound to just disappear! So here we go my trip to work on this Wednesday morning, March 5, 2008. As my bus leaves at 7:30 am (sometimes earlier, sometimes later), I'm out the door by 7:20 at the latest for the walk to the stop. Today, Henry and Jen accompanied me to see me off (and were themselves headed off for a brisk morning walk!). So we said our adieus, and went our separate ways. Jen, by e-m...

Here are some of the more interesting things that I learned over the past year, with thanks to the BBC News Magazine ! [Click on the link to read more] Adding milk to tea negates the health-giving effects of a hot cup. Dishcloths can be purged of 99 percent of their bacteria from just two minutes in a microwave. About half of China's population can’t speak the national language, Mandarin. There are approximately 30,000 wild parakeets currently living in London. You can get mobile phone coverage from the summit of Mount Everest. As part of their performance reviews, female civil servants in India are questioned about their menstrual cycle. The true secret to happiness is learning to accept misery. Until the late 1990s, the nuclear warheads of the Royal Air Force could be activated using a easily obtained bicycle lock key. Cats can be police constables in the UK. Chickens can be diagnosed with depression. In Iceland, 96% of women go on to some form of higher education. There have bee...