This afternoon, alerted by a friend and as reported in this article, I sent the submission below to the Queensland Government’s inquiry into Andrew Fraser‘s Civil Unions bill.

While I would greatly prefer that there be Marriage Equality for all, in this nation Marriage is part of the Federal Government’s bailiwick and I’m not confident that either federal party will start listening to all their constituents on this matter.

To whom it may concern

Submission to the Inquiry regarding the Civil Unions Bill

I am writing to express my support for Mr Fraser's Civil Unions bill.

I have very dear gay and lesbian friends who have been in committed relationships for many years. Under current law if one member of the partnership is hospitalised, the other is prevented from being recognised as the next of kin.

This is offensive and discriminatory because in many cases the natural family members who current law elevates over the partner are unable to accept that their relative is in a committed relationship, and who then ignore the expressed wishes of the relative (as known by the partner) in favour of their own opinion.

The situation is similar when it comes to superannuation, where gay and lesbian partners must jump through significant extra hoops to be recognised as a legitimate spouse or dependent. In particular, women are widely acknowledged to be disadvantaged in later life through a lack of sufficient superannuation funds. A recognised civil union will obviate much jumping through hoops in order to prove the validity of the relationship. This, in turn, will help prevent financial stress; something which is acute even in non-LGBT couples when dealing with the superannuation system.

Yours faithfully,

James C. McPherson

On Friday we finally bit the bullet a bought a new set of saucepans. Our local Matchbox franchise at Mt Ommaney is taking part in the current catalogue Scanpan special – a 10 piece set for $499 (rrp $999), and it’s all shiny steel with correctly-proportioned bases and pyrex lids. Wibble!

I’ve been wanting to update our set for years, since it was J’s set when she left home, and they haven’t really kept pace with our needs since the kids came along.

I unboxed and washed everything yesterday, but it wasn’t until today that we had the cycles to rearrange cupboards to fit everything in. Of course, when we looked at what we had and where it was, ’twas a fantasticly awful mess. So, once we started it very quickly became a case of “just one more shelf, then we’ll put the pots away” … and then 2 hours later we had our cupboards organised.

It’s something we should have done when we moved in here four and a quarter years ago (to the day, would you believe), but since we were focused on IVF from the day after we moved in we’ve made do with a jumble of randomness.

It’s a homely feeling of satisfaction to get done, and a little bit jarring when I was cooking dinner tonight – I didn’t have to rummage around in the plastics cupboard to find the bits I needed. I’m sure I’ll get used to it in a day or three.

Back in July when I was on a work trip to our new Beijing campus, I managed to injure my knee. After getting home, seeing the gp, getting an xray and having intensive physiotherapy for several weeks, I eventually got a referral to a knee specialist. An MRI quickly followed which revealed an extensive tear to the medial meniscus. Surgery happened yesterday, and I’ve got a page of arthroscope pics to show for it as well as a pink leg (chlor-hexidene, which will take some effort to scrub off):

Finally, the written notes. Yes, you do see the word macerated – while in the recovery ward I was trying to get my groggy head around the surgeon’s handwriting, thinking “surely he hasn’t written ‘macerated’ – there are no teeth in my knee!”. Update: Courtesy of Team PurpleCow I’m reminded that I was thinking of ‘masticated’ rather than ‘macerated’. That’s what the drrrrgs will do to you!

I’m very happy to finally have this operation done and I’ll be happier when I’m able to walk properly again (about 10 – 14 days). Bandages come off tomorrow, and my post-op followup is on the 3rd of October.

To my astonishment, my request to churn our upstream provider to Exetelwas activated earlier this evening. I only logged the application on Friday arvo (5th August). So I have a complaint: “Damnit, you lot are TOO FAST”.

I’ve been growing more and more annoyed that I have to fire up a VirtualBox to do my RAW photo processing. I’ve got nothing against VirtualBox – it’s a fantastic application for virtualisation. I just don’t want to boot up MS Windows XP and run Adobe Lightroom to do so.

I’ve been watching developments in the Open Source photoprocessing application space for a while now, and recently (since I found a gcc 4.6.0 in pkg(5) format via http://staticdev.uk.openindiana.org:10002) I decided to give Darktable a whirl.

I had to rebuild a few of the dependencies, since the WOS versions were built with the Studio C++ compiler, and there’s no way g++ libraries will talk to Studio C++ applications. That cost me a few days (and nights), but I’ve now got a working installation of Darktable built from the git repo:

this is darktable 0.8+668~gec9a548
copyright (c) 2009-2011 johannes hanika
hanatos@gmail.com

And now, the obligatory screenshot (3200×1200):

I need to tidy up the changes I made and contribute them upstream – for darktable and its dependencies. I also want to contribute pkg(5) manifests so anybody else who wants to can build it for Solaris 11 Express as well. I think there are a few areas I can contribute to the project, and it’s definitely worth my while to do so.

I think the cord is almost cut now. What a fantastic day this is!

Today the cabinetmaker rocked up with the floor-to-ceiling cupboards (he’d had problems getting bits together, apparently those floods had an impact :>) and 3 hours later we had them all ready to start filling with our stuff:

With a bit more work this arvo Alan and I got the blinds mounted over the window frame:

and then after dinner we spent an hour or so installing and populating slotted cable duct along the wall behind the desk:

Chris has done a heap of cleaning – multiple moppings and vac-ings of the floor, cupboards and work on the windows too – but it’s still going to take a few goes before it’s safe enough for C’s 2yr-old feet to scamper across. At this point we’re unsure whether ceramic tiles or carpet would be a better covering, but aside from the minimum required for noise abatement (the ol’ u40m2 is LOUD) we’ll leave that for a few months at least.So we’re nearly done – and by Monday it should all be shipshape. I’m ecstatic at how this has all come together, and that I now have a proper home office. I just wish we’d been more organised and got it done sooner. Chris and Alan have been fantastic, I’m so glad they were able to be here.

Our builder, Dan Trevorrow of Tredmac Pty Ltd and his team (Michael, Joel, Jamie, Josh and Stewart) did a thoroughly professional job, and we’re very happy we chose them.

On Friday our builder, Dan, came back in and finished off the skirting boards and straightened out the sliding door that  leads into the house. He’s going to fit that door with a claw-style latch so we can keep C and bub#2 inside the house.... and limit the noise inside the house when I start cranking Beethoven (or Jamiroquai).

The painter came back in too, and finished off another coat after Jamie the plasterer had sanded off his work on Thursday evening:

Also on Thursday evening we picked C up from daycare and went directly our local Good Guys and purchased a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries 2.6kW split system, which we’re getting installed next week (assuming that the floor to ceiling cupboards are installed by then). The recommended installer lives barely 500m from us.

Joel the electrician is coming back tomorrow to finish off the lights, and relay our phone cable (that’s what the strand f cat5 in the corner is for) so that the socket doesn’t come out of the master bedroom and remove the need to run a cable all the way along the hallway. It’ll make quite a change from what we’ve had to do over the last 10 years!

So we’re nearly, nearly done. Can’t be done soon enough, frankly, but I’m glad we finally got things happening.

After a solid three days of work, the team have got the front window + wall finished, the wiring in place (including repositioning of the phone input so it’s not in our bedroom), and got everything ready for the plasterer to come in and prettify, with the painter and cabinetmaker to follow shortly thereafter. We went off to our local The Good Guys at Oxley (recently reopened after the floods in January) and ordered a 2.6KW Mitsubishi Heavy Industries split system. That should arrive in the next 10 days, and their recommended installer lives a few hundred metres away from us. Sweet!

Some photos of how things look right now:

When we purchased our home, we knew that the previous owners had turned a lot of the second garage space into a room that joined on to the laundry, making up a home-based hair salon:

The door at the rear lead through into the rest of the garage space, but wasted about 1.6m between the wall and the garage door. We, being more focused on getting J pregnant, and then figuring out this parent caper, didn’t do anything about it until November last year when J started ringing around to get quotes from builders. We got three builders out to inspect, but only two quotes… and chose one.

The January 2011 floods put a kink in our plans, but yesterday morning the window was delivered, then in the afternoon the timber, gyprock and linea board was delivered. This morning, bright and early, our builder Dan turned up and started work.

Here are a few photos from day 1: