Posts by Julie Fairey
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Good luck Russell and team!
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And I totally agree with Jacqui about the lying. I'm not in a coffee group yet, but I have a relation who had a baby three weeks after me and she alleges that her bubs was smiling, rolling over, and talking at 7 weeks. I haven't seen this wonder baby since it was a couple of weeks old, so maybe they have injected it with kryptonite or something in the interim?
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Thanks David, after a weekend that seemed to involve constantly feeding our 12 week old (5 feeds between 10.45pm last night and 8.30am this morning) I feel much better after reading this!
Apparently that constipation stuff isn't that uncommon - I've heard of a baby that only goes once every 10-14 days, and when it does it is a veritable Vesuvius of Poo. The only option for that family is to wait for the eruption and then shower down their child.
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I think I may have specifically picked digging up Ancient Rome as an occupational intention because I subconsciously knew it was wildly unlikely to come true. When I found out how stultifyingly dull I find archaeology it went from "wildly" to "utterly".
When I was little I wanted to be an All Black. Or a spy. Briefly I remember hating Helen Clark because she was going to get to be first woman Prime Minister, not me (I was 8 I think). I stopped really having occupational intentions from age 9 (after the World Cup when I think I finally twigged that a girl couldn't be an All Black), until I had to pretend to have them towards the end of secondary school. You have to have something to say to people who ask you what you are going to do when you leave school.
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Well I joined Brownies because my best friend at the time was in it, and she was in it because her older sister was. I went on to become a Girl Guide just through inertia mainly.
But when I was newly 9 my parents saw an ad for a kind-of "sea scouts for girls" which was starting up in our area for a young age group, called Young Mariners. My family was quite into the sailing, so we went along to that cold church hall in Northcote, and over 20 years later my Dad still helps them out on a regular basis. When I was about 13 I had to make a choice between guides and mariners and it was a total no brainer. I stayed actively involved until I was elected to the AUSA exec, which met the same night that Mariners was on, and still keep in touch with many of the young women (now not so young!) that I met then. We had a casual reunion last year and it was amazing how many people turned up and what an impact Mariners had had on their lives - parents as well as girls. It's quite a small organisation - only about 8 units in the upper North Island, and none anywhere else. There are four in Auckland - Awataha (my unit, based in Milford now), Akarana (Orakei Basin), Ohui-A-Rangi (Pigeon Mountain) and Pakuranga. I reckon Whangaparaoa would be a great place for a new unit and if I ever get the time I'm hoping to help set it up there.
The other group I joined that had a big impact on me was the Education Action Group at UOA. On the first day of semester in my second year of uni this guy I'd had a crush on for several years insisted I go along to a meeting, so I did and within a month I was running the phone tree with two other people who I am still good friends with. From there I became immersed in the quagmire of AUSA politics, and I have ended up far from my original occupational intentions (digging up Ancient Rome) as a result.
It's all good.
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I'd just like to second Deborah's thanks for the plug!
Also, while I'm here, wasting bytes, "not even a journalist's bottom" ?!! Did anyone else have flashbacks to Tom Baker on Blackadder when they heard/read that?
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Anjum has a good post on the "bureaucrats" issue.
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I would really like to see some research that actually breaks down the work that the extra "bureaucrats" are doing. For example in the Ministry of Education a lot of the increase can be accounted for by the fact that the Government has brought Special Education back into the core public service, as opposed to having them as external contractors. If you asked most NZers if they thought the work done by those in GSE should be done by people directly employed by the Ministry of Education most would say yes, I believe. I suspect there would be quite a few similar examples in other areas too.
But at heart Key's criticism does rather reflect the difference in approaches - National seems to believe that it is not the role of government to do the long term policy research and development necessary to uncover the causes of bad stuff and come up with solutions. Without those "bureaucrats" and their silly research we can only respond to problems with solutions based on talk-back ideas, which I tend to think is not the best way to be making policy and trying to improve things.
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That's very sad about Finn :-(
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So, um, Torchwood? Whatever happened to the first series, which IIRC TVNZ snapped up to stop Prime from getting it, but it hasn't surfaced :-(
Also, anyone got any goss on when we'll be getting the Kylie Minogue Dr Who Xmas special here?
Yes, yes, I am stuck in the techno-ghetto of lacking a computer that can download anything big enough to be interesting.