The food police are at it again

and telling me that fruit juice is as bad for you as soft drinks - because of the sugar content.
Now I have always been a good little cat and bought the "unsweetened" variety of orange juice for the Senior Cat's breakfast. There is a particularly nice, indeed outstandingly good, brand of orange juice available in this state. I buy that. We do not drink a lot of it. The Senior Cat has a glass about the size of a sherry glass for breakfast. If I have some I water it down a bit. I always have done. We thought we were being well behaved, restrained and sensible about this,
But it seems that we are not and that we should not be drinking fruit juice - because of the sugar content. Uh? Fruit has sugar in it. Fruit is supposed to be good for you. I know you shouldn't be consuming large quantities of juice, that a large glass of juice is likely to be several large oranges worth of juice. It is like many other things isn't it? A little of it is actually a good thing?
No, the food police want to label it the way they label soft drinks. It seems they are not taking into account the fact that there are differing sorts of sugars. The real problem with the sugar in soft drinks is that they are made with added sugar, not naturally occurring sugar. Are the food police going to tell us to stop eating fruit too? Of course they won't.
What they need to do is educate people. It would be better to put a picture of sixty oranges on the container and say, "It took this many oranges to make this much juice. A serve is equal to six oranges." (I am making the numbers up of course.) That would be much more likely to make people think. They could cease to make sweetened orange juice. We don't need that. Simply telling us "this is not good for you" won't work.
 

Increasing the cost of an arts degree

and making it one of the most expensive to do is a mistake.
I know, "arts degrees are useless" - or are they?
The Senior Cat has an arts degree. Under the system here he had to do three arts subjects and one science subject. His degree is therefore in English, History and Latin with one year of Geology. He chose Geology not because he had any interest in the subject - he had none whatsoever - but because he had a good friend who was majoring in Geology and who helped him through it. He passed Geology but had much higher marks for everything else. Now he would have been encouraged to go on to a higher degree but back then he was doing his degree two subjects and then one subject at a time while teaching full time. It was not easy. He wasn't the only teacher to be doing this. It was very typical just after the war. 
He used his degree - to teach English and History (and help me with Latin). He went on to research the teaching of reading and the psychology of learning. He could do this because his previous studies had taught him to do that sort of research. It is not the same as research in the "hard" sciences.
But Arts degrees are about more than that. They are about our cultural heritage - something we are more than ever in danger of losing. They are about understanding the past, about understanding people, places and ideas. The idea that this is no longer important is disturbing.
If I need to help a student who is struggling with an essay I often ask them which subjects they studied in their final year at school. All too often the answer is something like, "I did the suicidal five" - by which they mean Mathematics I and II, Physics, Chemistry and a "soft science" like Biology. They did not do English, History or a language - the very subjects that would have cultivated their imagination and critical skills - subjects which would have given them the skills to write a well constructed essay.These students have study skills for the sciences. They do not have other essential skills.
It is no good studying physics or astronomy, nursing or teaching if you lack imagination and cannot communicate. I know children who prefer non-fiction to fiction. That's fine - as long as someone is getting them to think about what they are reading, asking them if they can design that "better mousetrap". There isn't much time for that sort of thing in the last year of school so it often has to be done earlier than that. Then we need to be careful to still cultivate imagination and critical skills. Science stagnates if it is not leavened by imagination.

Solar power is supposed to be

the ideal renewable source of energy in this state. Oh yes, we have some wind turbines as well but solar panels can be fitted to many roof tops. It is fitted to about thirty-five percent of roof tops in fact. All this is supposed to be a good thing.
This morning's paper now tells us that the power generated by all those solar panels might need to be switched off sometimes - because it contributes to an instability in the power supply. That instability can cause a power failure.
There might be people reading this who will remember that we had a major black-out in this state in 2016. It was some days before power was fully restored. It cost the state millions of dollars. Since then the "big battery" has been supplied but that does not solve the problem either. 
I thought back to our time in "the bush" - remote areas of our state. My parents lived in a galvanised iron house on the top of a hill when I was born. It was the only available accommodation in the small rural town. They were waiting for the then "Housing Trust" to finish the accommodation for government workers down in the township itself.  There was a windmill which supplied a sort of intermittent  power.  It made a lot of noise. Perhaps that is why I now like quiet.
Down in the township there was 240v power. We went from there to the city and then back to the rural areas of the state. We had no power at all at one stage. My mother cooked on a wood burning Metters stove and we had kerosene/paraffin lamps for lighting. Eventually they supplied a  32v power system that the Senior Cat had to set running to keep the batteries charged. It was not reliable the lights would suddenly go dim even when we did our best to conserve the power so that my parents could prepare lessons at the kitchen table. We made the most of the daylight hours.
My mother used heavy irons she heated on the stove and a treadle sewing machine. The Senior Cat chopped wood every morning - wood we children had collected in the surrounding bush along with a load of "mallee roots" dropped off by one of the farmers.
We moved around, sometimes having 240v power and sometimes 32v power. One school ran on a massive diesel engine.  If that failed there were 600 plus students and the staff without power.
We coped with all of this.  There was no internet then. If there had been and we had been relying on it and the other power dependent things we now take for granted life would have been a great deal more difficult. 
If our power supply is not stable because of renewable energy sources then I wonder how people will cope now? 
And there is one thing that many city dwellers who do not know what it is like to be without power at night have never had the pleasure of seeing properly - the stars at night. Perhaps we were fortunate.

Communicating with the elderly

male can be a trial at times. No, I do not mean their deafness or their confusion or their tendency to forget things in the normal way. This time it was important but not serious.
Brother Cat phoned yesterday. The Senior Cat was curled up on his sleeping mat but awake. I had someone here. I took the phone in to the Senior Cat because he wanted to know if the Senior Cat was all right. 
My visitor and I went on talking. When she left I went and brought the washing in - just as the Senior Cat was finishing the conversation. Right. Did he want a cup of tea? Good idea.
    "And you know what that was about?" he asked me of the conversation.
    "No, I just passed him over to you because W... was still here."
    "Oh, R...'s son has had the baby." R...is my SIL. This is her son by her first marriage.
    "You mean his wife has?"
    "Yes."
    "Is everything all right?" This was not a silly question. She is forty-one and it was the first child. There has been some cause for concern.
    "Yes."
    "Boy or girl?"
 There was silence and then, "I don't know."
Right.
I emailed R... and asked her for the important information. Yes, caesarean because the baby was breach/breech and there was another potential complication. All went well however and the baby boy weighed in at 3.8kg. (8lbs 6oz).  They have not yet named him.
Armed with this information I informed the Senior Cat who said,
    "I did wonder."
 A female would have asked those questions. I know, that sounds incredibly sexist but a female would have asked those questions. We might have gone on about APGAR scores (fine in this case) and Guthrie tests -  although the latter will not yet have been carried out. The male of the species, unless of the medical profession, would seem less likely to ask about these things. 
But I would have thought they might ask about the sex... or are they simply following a modern trend of some sort?
What the heck....baby is apparently fine. That really is all that matters.

Political corruption does not matter -

until you get caught.
If it was not so serious it would actually be funny that the Premier of the neighbouring state has finally acknowledged the corruption in the ranks. It has been common knowledge for a very long time.
No, I am not being partisan here. Corruption exists on all sides of politics. Corruption is part of political life. You can try to avoid it of course. There are rare politicians who do succeed. They are usually "independents" or people who never climb very far up the political ladders. The internal structure of a political party and the "factions" don't help overcome the problems of corruption. The sense of entitlement among many who have been there for years doesn't help either.
If you ignore what you have been told it does not exist. If you don't discuss what you have been told it does not exist. If you don't do anything then the problem will simply disappear.
Or will it? This time it seems a journalist accessed illegally recorded conversations and has made the issues discussed in them public.  The fall out - one Minister being sacked and two more resigning - has actually been minimal. It goes nowhere near to facing up to the issues raised.  
That does not surprise me. A former Prime Minister is complaining that celebrating his successor is "bizarre". They both belong to the same party. It is an issue designed to sidetrack people from the issue of corruption.
I have no doubt I could find equivalent examples elsewhere in other parties. Politics is not about people but about power.
It was nice therefore to get a letter yesterday, a letter from a politician. It was a personal letter, a very personal letter. There was even a little bit extra scribbled by hand on the end of the official bit. I won't tell you what it was about but I can say action has been taken over an issue of concern - and I was thanked for raising it.  It's just a pity that the politician in question is not likely to retain his seat at the next election. 
 

Falls in the elderly

can be serious, even fatal so the Senior Cat is extremely fortunate. In the small hours of this morning he somehow managed to "slide" out of bed and end up on the floor. He ended up on the wrong side of the bed as well - the area with much less space. 
I heard him calling to me. He did not do this until he had finally realised (yet again) that he cannot get up by himself.
I cannot get him up either. He only weighs about 58kg - if that - but he is awkward and unable to help himself.
Although he claimed to be all right I know that, if something like this happens, then someone with more medical knowledge than me needs to see him. Middle Cat? No. I could not see her and her husband, both of whom would have been over here in an instant, being able to get him up.
I pressed the emergency button. It was 1:37am when two cheerful ambulance men arrived and we all went off to the Emergency Department. The Senior Cat was feeling very cross - with himself. 
At 6:00am I thought I had given Middle Cat enough sleep time and phoned her to let her know where we were. By then the Senior Cat had been given the requisite ECG, had blood taken, and x-rays of his back and chest had been taken.  He had told the nurse he couldn't recite the months of the year backwards but he knew the year and what day of the week it was. We all shrugged off the months test and he, lucky cat, dozed off. 
I had grabbed his medications, my phone, my purse and - some knitting. I needed something to keep me awake. Without it I was in danger of being restrained as "confused" or some such thing. 
I answered questions. The Senior Cat answered some questions - just occasionally. He snoozed. I knitted.
He is "okay" - a little shaken at how easily it happened but definitely not injured. He is now having a good cat-nap. I have had no sleep. I am trying to stay awake for a little longer because I sent some work off a moment ago. I just hope it makes sense - and that when they get back to me I can snooze too. 
But through it all I thought of how fortunate we are to have a hospital system which works and whose Emergency Department was not full of suspected Covid19 cases.

There has been a reported increase in "elder abuse"

as well as "domestic violence".  I have put quotation marks around both those things because, for me, these things are criminal acts. 
I hope, even when I sometimes want to scream at the Senior Cat for doing something stupid - like trying to pick up something from the floor when he is not sitting down,  I will never be guilty of abusing him or hurting him or stealing from him or failing to provide something he needs to keep him warm and comfortable and safe. 
   "You live at home with your father?" people ask me suspiciously.
I say, "Yes" and leave it at that. Perhaps though I should say, "As the unmarried child I moved back in to care for both my parents so they could stay in their own home. "  It was a decision two of my siblings and I made. It was the right decision even though we would have preferred it was not necessary.
My mother died almost twenty years ago but she was not well and quite incapable by then of caring for herself and the Senior Cat. The Senior Cat, much as I love him, has absolutely no idea about  cooking or many other household tasks. He is of the generation when boys simply did not do these things. On the other hand  he was once outstandingly good about all the outdoor things and the wood chopping and water pumping and the maintenance. He has taken his turn, more than taken his turn. In "retirement" he did such things not just for us but for neighbours, church members, friends and a women's shelter. It would be utterly wrong if he did not now get the help he needs especially when he once gave it so freely.
But perhaps the problem elsewhere is that some people have moved back home for other reasons. They want to try and save money, a marriage has broken down, they are escaping a situation of domestic violence, or no longer have a job. All those things, and more, would make for a different sort of relationship. I can imagine abuse occurring.
There are other sorts of elder abuse too. There are demands on parents to do school runs and care for the grandchildren in school holidays...."if you don't do it then you don't love us and you won't be able to see them" is elder abuse. There are financial demands "because we are going to get it eventually".  
I have sometimes been told, "I suppose your father pays you."
No, he doesn't. He doesn't pay any of my expenses either. I pay my own health insurance and medical bills. I buy my own clothes and I pay a fair share of the household expenses. He would do all this, indeed keeps telling me this, but it would be all too easy to let that happen...and then the next thing... and the next thing. I am there to look after him because he is my father not because I am a paid carer.  
And I am not doing it for "nothing". I do get something from it. I get something which money really cannot buy. I get his love.
I wonder if those involved in elder abuse really have that?