Dee’s solution to an escaping puppy – the fence to end all fences. We even have a gate! Using the treated pine posts that used to be the dog yard (and which Jared and I ripped up last time he was visiting), we’ve dug holes and wired up some proper dog-fencing. Each panel has a tensioning wire at the top and tent-pegs at the bottom, so she’s not getting over OR under. I’m so proud of this effort – Dee did most of the work, but I helped in my lunch break yesterday so I get to claim partial credit.

Next outside project is to tear up the pavers, mow and weed the lawns, and maybe hoe the ground flat to let new, soft grass grow on the only piece of flat land we have – the future site of any play equipment we get for young Jules, so keeping Lucy out should avoid any nasty grass-mines (I swear I stood in the same one three times yesterday – in bare feet!). A few retaining walls, a little concreting, and we’ll have finished stage one.

In the nick of time, too – I’m not sure if Crazy Duck Lady and friends actually DID anything on Sunday when we were out for dinner, but Monday morning the short, temporary fence was pushed down (Dee thought it was me and I thought it her) and Lucy’s chain unscrewed i.e. one link joining two shorter chains was “twiddled” open, so she could’ve theoretically escaped AGAIN – and no doubt Duck Lady would’ve shot her “in self defence”. We can’t say for sure that it was funny business, but I’ve never seen a chain link untwiddle itself. I’m putting up a webcam this morning for when we chain her up outside, in a nice visible location, just in case she gets some funny ideas.

Waiting on a wifi webcam from Hong Kong now; if its any good I’ll buy a bunch more and setup Zoneminder security system.

We didn’t know how she got out, but “hardened” the perimeter in various ways: more wire, nails, tent-pegs so she couldn’t tunnel under, etc. A few days later she got out again but this time we were home and vigilant and Lucy made it as far as the driveway before I was after her with a leash.

I reached the bottom of our driveway in time to see Lucy sniffing around the neighbours front yard, whilst said neighbour, rather irate, harrangued her from the porch. Mongrel this, mongrel that. I collected my dog and faced off with an apoplectic middle-aged woman. “She bit my duck! She bit my duck! That cost me $100 vet bill! I’ll call the council!” I promised to come back once I’d put Lu back inside.

She was raging! Pointed out paw prints in the mud, but grudgingly admitted she’d not actually seen Lucy do anything -indeed, she hadn’t seen Lucy before that day. When did it happen, I enquired? “Yesterday,” she sputtered! Ah, but Lucy wasn’t out yesterday. “The day before then,” she groaned. I agreed to pay the vet-bill, all the while protesting Lucy’s innocence – considering it “neighbour tax” and helpfully warning her about the many dogs in the street, not to mention the area. She was nice as pie once she had the money in her hot little hand.

Then yesterday we were putting the final touches on a dog proof fence — 6-foot high, staked into the ground, made from electrified adamantium — and Lucy, recognising the inevitability of yard-bound life and wanting one last fling, saw her opportunity and made a break for it. She’d been somewhat under house arrest for the interim, chained up when we were out and supervised when she went out for a pee, so we were quickly after her.

This time she didn’t bother with the neighbour, walking past towards her German suitors, but nevertheless our Crazy Lady neighbour was out there brandishing a pitchfork and flaming brand, with the now-tired threat of a call to the council. Difference? This time she met Dee.

“Calm down, she wasn’t even in your yard,” I imagine Dee said, but it’s hard to be reasonable with unreasonable people. “Good, call the council!” Dee returned with Lucy, then went back for a chat that was reportedly even more frustrating than the first. “She’s not a mongrel,” Dee explained to me later. “That’s just factually incorrect.” She did however manage to get a copy of the bill and a receipt for the money I’d paid.

The end result is we’re finishing the fence today and hoping our neighbour — a renter, “townies, eh?” — was so distraught by the situation that she moves out and we never see her again.

After a torrential downpour last night, it looks to have cleared up nicely for Isaac’s birthday in the park.

We’re running late, of course – after the work Christmas dinner on Friday night and an Audrey Tatou movie on Samedi, I was wiped out this morning. Lucky for me Dee is so capable – she not only managed our babies (one small, one large and furry) effortlessly, she brought me breakfast in bed AND finished our De Blob 2 game on the Wii! A guy couldn’t ask for more…

We arrive just in time to sing “happy birthday” and watch Isaac cut the cake; he immediately resumes his tireless play, from bubbler to spinny-roundy thing, haring around the park with nary a backwards glance at nap-time. Good to see he’s enjoying himself!

Take turns holding other peoples’ babies for a while, then time to head back home. I’m still so tired that I may well have an afternoon nap; more likely I’ll do something mostly brainless, like play a game or do some Euler programming.

Thank you all my lovelies for the birthday wishes, I feel much loved! :). I had a brilliant day, slept through the night with Jules, fab present from Glenn accompanied by mud cake for breakky, shopping then lunch at chaddy, then back home to find flowers on my door step (thanks big sis) topped off with pizza and my fav wii game DaBlob2. Dexo

We checked out the Emerald féte in the morning: a church féte, with typical stalls, but a lovely collection of Triumphs out the front (and even a BSA) from the Hillriders motocycle club. Damn, I want a bike again: something classic, or at least classy, that we can throw carefully down the mountain roads. I don’t need to go fast. :-)

After a compulsory sausage-inna-bun from Cut-me-own-froat Dibbler and one last, longing look at the bikes we headed to Knox. All our Christmas shopping is done now, except some stuff we’re going to make, so this was really just a pleasant drive with some commitment-frei window shopping at one end. I found some sunglasses that looked okay, but I’m really not going to spend $350 on Raybans until they can project high-definition, immersive augmented-reality directly into my eyeballs.

We headed home the long way, through the touristy Sassafras and Olinda. A half-hearted look for stocking-fillers for Jules at Geppetto’s Workshop saw Dee dropping and breaking about half their stock, so we hurried out and were home in time to have a play with Lucy in the backyard.

Now I’m about to tuck into some roast vegetables; a late dinner. All in all, an enjoyably unexciting day!

In the last rapidly-accelerating twelve months we moved into our own house, bought the biggest, sookiest dog known to humankind and had a son — although “had” is past-tense and he’s undeniably more of a handful here on the outside! I flick back through the pages here and it’s like taking a trip down memory lane, only it’s via Google Street-View.

But it is the next 12 that I’m looking forward to, however: renovating, working hard to diversify, going camping and watching little Jules grow and grow. He’s already amazing, of course, but just listening to him make ever more complex noises (i.e. proto-speech) is humbling, scary, brilliant — and wait until he starts walking! (Sometimes we speak to each other and say, “I can’t wait until…” but we really CAN wait — even realising he’s outgrowing some of his clothes is a shock.)

Rather than any “new year’s resolutions”, I’m setting myself three impossible tasks (and several unlikely ones). The way I’m soft-wired, you tell me something is impossible and I just want to get in there and try it; so this way I’m hacking myself. Turns out it seems to work even when you consciously KNOW (but don’t dwell on the fact that) it’s a hack attempt!

My three impossible things are:

3. Get hyperfit

I’m losing weight at the moment, which in itself is pretty amazing for this time of the year, thanks to the combination of various Internet forums, Tim Ferris and myfitnesspal.com. Today I weighed in at 89.8kg — the first time I’ve been below 90kg for years, and possibly finally breaking through the “barrier” that’s had me drifting between 91kg and 94kg on every other “healthy eating/diet change” I’ve tried before. Better than that, my body-fat percentage (according to our WeightWatchers scales: inaccurate, but consistent) is a little above 29% — when previously it’s read 30+.

But I want to do more than just shake this office-worker beer-belly off, so next year I intend to introduce more exercise (hiking, cycling, body-weight exercises) and get that percentage as low as it can go. Hyperfit: that level of fitness that professional (or at least semipro) athletes achieve in the course of training for their sport, like wiry marathon runners or muscle-clad MMA fighters. Yeah, it’s an ongoing thing — use it or lose it — but getting down to less than 10% body-fat (and building a little muscle) should put me around 75kg, which is respectable for my height and build.

2. Publish Android

This is something I’ve been intending to do since before we left London (!!). It’s very hard to find the time, after a long day in front of a computer, to sit down in front of a computer. Key here is Dee’s backing — this is the way to get a little money in, eventually, so if that means we have to have a design session rather than watching How Clean Is Your Kitchen then so be it.

We’ve got so many ideas for apps — ironically, one in stalled-progress is for making new year’s resolutions — and my professional experience/history should make me an ideal candidate for “garage-startup mobile-app development house”, so this the most important activities for this impossible thing are scheduling and prioritising against other activities. Time to be a “productive procrastinator”!

1. Speak French

Another impossible thing — impossible to find the time to actually practise, and practise is what makes possible (if not perfect). We have so many livres et CDs et materiel français it is just ridiculous that we DON’T already speak French, but hey, like anyone we take the easy way and nothing is forcing me to learn … except myself. So I’m planning how to structure and schedule my sessions, gathering Internet links and books, and really intend to attain a basic level of comprehension — to watch a film without subtitles.

So they’re my three impossible things, and now I’ve told the world about them I guess I better actually make some progress. There’s always a danger in putting up something like this: the pressure can backfire, especially on me and my peculiar rebellious mindset, and there can be a tendency (again, for me anyway) to mentally tick-off a task, and therefore forget about it — it’s someone elses’ responsibility — once I’ve told someone about it. This is, I think, why so many good ideas talked about in bars and over coffee never go any further…

I’m telling myself that this note is for me, that nobody else really reads this so I can’t expect someone to learn French (or go for a run) for me — and that nobody cares if I fail, so why try failing? But if you are out there, and I haven’t made at least some progress by this time 2012, by all means call me out on it.

So we ranted and raved to each other, finally deciding to “send a stern letter” via Freedom’s website. Crafted something beautifully demanding, then followed it up with a phase-two assault email when our first only elicited a form-response — and it worked! This morning I received a timid, optimistically hopeful phone-call from Freedom telling us our new dining table will be delivered Thursday-week, for free.

Old-man-yelling-at-the-telly WIN!

We’ve been bouncing back and forth over how best to use the space we have: what rooms to keep, which walls to punch through and where oh where to put a proper bathroom. We’ve got two rooms downstairs, and our giant room upstairs, but neither of us was particularly happy with being too far from Jules – so we’d basically resigned ourselves to living downstairs for a while, in the “guest room” with the tiny, tiny ensuite.

Then tonight we thought – what if we walled in a bit of the verandah at the back? Three stud walls, insulation and flooring and we’ve got ourselves a blank canvas for an awesome little nursery upstairs! We get to stay in our room (and build the ensuite), we can leave the current bathroom mostly alone and we immediately solve half the problem of what to do about the back verandah. Better yet, we could almost have it done before he grows out of his hammock…

At this point everything started coming together. The dark bathroom gets a new window, our laundry becomes a European-style laundry in a cupboard. Downstairs, the front room becomes a study area (floor-to-ceiling bookshelves), opening up the large lounge with a couple of sets of French doors and an extra wide verandah; the guest room gets a makeover, stealing a little space from the study for a better ensuite or built-in robes. No potentially load-bearing walls to knock down, and no sacrificing a bedroom. Upstairs, our balcony ensuite gets a double shower rather than a bath, a walk-in robe and a proper dressing-table. Luxury!

Best of all, none of the work will be “all that hard”. Stud walls? Easy. Plumbing? Not too much for the “expert” to do, so not too much for us to spend. Now we’re both a little buzzed, spinning with ideas and itching to get started, but tomorrow Dee’s promised to finish the painting in my lab – now I’m working out there, it will be nice to hit IKEA and finish it off.

Been a busy couple of months for us, as it turns out. First and very much foremost, we had a baby! Jules Franklin Mason weighed in at 3,686g on the 29th July, 51cm tall and full on beans. (The beans were later removed and we were allowed to take him home.) Almost three months later and it is an ongoing journey of discovery and sleepless nights, as anyone who’s had kids or insomnia can tell you!

Just wanted to check in quickly, joy.

On the weekend she fell at the bottom of the stairs, and while I didn’t see it the noise was an almighty thump and she seemed a bit shocked afterwards. I gave her a hug and she ran up the stairs, but stumbled again at the top and almost fell over. It was heartbreaking! I sat her down on her bed and ran my hands over her to see if she’d actually broken anything.

Since that time she was having trouble walking, her back paw "knuckling" over and sliding on the wooden floors. When she didn’t seem to be improving, we took her to the local vet, who suggested a spine or brain injury (!!) and referred us to a Dr. Peter Laverty, who was kind enough to slip us in between his other patients.

Overnight observation showed she wasn’t improving (very quickly, anyway), so we signed the release for a myelogram. This x-ray was not without its risks, but would locate the problem and tell us whether she needed surgical intervention.

Another nervous night (her timing sucks — with Dee about to go into labour any second, we really need our rest) and morning and we get the results: it is not a compression or swelling, so it is very likely a random "spinal stroke" (fibrocartilaginous embolism) that will fully heal itself over the next 6-weeks — it could’ve been much worse! Dr. Laverty suggested that it was more likely that the fall was due to the stroke, not the other way ’round. Lucy will still not be allowed downstairs for a long time yet.