It's me again

I'm back! The whining bitchy old bag of agro has been wrestled back into her little corner of my soul and now the more or less sweet Helen, more or less bereft of mucus and more or less tanked up on sleep, has returned to the control centre.

'Hello!' as Anna would almost say and that is the news of the day, that I think her first word might soon be 'hello'. She's certainly saying something pretty similar now, a sort of Eh-Oh! and there's a definite inflection on the end to indicate an exclamation mark. It's pretty exciting. I have been musing on a (ridiculous) made-up hypothesis that a first word might be indicative of a future career, in which case I thought 'hello!' might be paving the way to interesting and challenging work within the Immigration Department. But then I realised that there would have to be a complete change of government for that to ring true, because to be eligible for employment in the Howard Government's Immigration Department, Anna's first words would have to be 'Let Me Judge You Before I Decide On A Welcome (Or Not).' From what I can tell, John Howard uses the 'Three W' test to decide who gets to live in this huge, population not terribly big, supposedly multicultural nation of ours: White, Wealthy, Westerners. If you don't fit the bill, bugger off and go elsewhere… no, we don't care where, we don't even care if there is no other where, just don't stop here. Maybe … and here I am floating off into a lovely fantasy … maybe by the time Anna is old enough to vote and start forging a career, we will have a Green party in power and the policies relating to other human beings might become humane again.

My first word, apparently, was 'Bird', and so this might explain why I myself have no career to speak of – I am flighty and easily distracted by bright shiny things, and put all my energies into flimsy nest building and larking about in the sunshine.