Of mice and AI

I just spotted something small, brown and furry emerging from under one of the kitchen cabinets.  Now, I've been here before.  I have form in this area, but not for some time now have I had the fun of dealing with unwanted household visitors.  As I sit here typing my feet are on high alert (who knows when I may need to stand on a chair whilst I assess the situation at the top of my voice?), with a weather eye on the gap between the dishwasher and the cupboard, that it used as an escape route.

I'm kidding myself that it was temporary incursion made through the kitchen door left open into the garden all morning, and also hoping that my initial impression from the fleeting glimpse I caught of the creature - that it was a shrew, rather than a mouse - was correct.  I'm not sure why, but a shrew in the house seems far less concerning to me than a mouse, which is ridiculous, really, because both are rodents and both are unwelcome; it's just a matter of semantics, really.

Whilst I wait for the fugitive to show itself, I'm taking my mind off it with some displacement activity; namely that of today's rant.

As an aside here, I do find this whole getting older thing makes me far more sensitive to - and crosser about - things that in the past I would yes, have noticed, but probably shrugged off as just part of life's rich tapestry.  Hormones, eh?

In any case, the subject of today's mini rant is Alexa, Amazon's cloud-based home management system.

Tell me please: why is Alexa a woman?  Or more specifically, since I'm sure there are options to customise the system and have an 'Alex' rather than an 'Alexa', why is the one featured on all the advertising a woman?

Because I don't know about you but I am sick to the back teeth of being the go-to person in this house for just about any query regarding home administration, especially when the person asking the question has usually not even bothered to raise their eyes from whichever screen they're watching to try and locate the information themselves.

As a feminist (a label I'm proud of by the way; more of that in another rant in the not too distant future), I'm trying to raise my sons to make no assumptions that it will be the woman of the house who will sort home-based admin problems out for them.  Yet on every side they are confronted with images that tell them no, your mother's wrong; no matter how much she may try to encourage you to adopt a non-sexist approach as you deal with life, it IS a woman who is going to run things for you.  And here, on the tv and radio is Alexa, an early version of AI - complete with female voice -  to underline that fact.

I can't be the only woman to be annoyed by this, surely?

Escapism, pure and simple...

The summer holidays are here so normal service on this blog has been suspended (even more than usual) for the time being.  To keep things ticking over, however, I'm using a fb exchange between my sis and I from this morning.  I think it's entertaining...

From my sis to me: 

Tory name = first name of a grandparent + the name of the first Street you lived on hyphenated with your 1st headteacher's surname.

Reginald Elvaston-Woodhouse. Sorry Potty Mummy, I bagged it first.

From me to my sis: 

Well, I'll have to be your unmarried sister, Joan Elvaston-Woodhouse. Pillar of the local WI, unpaid house-keeper for Reginald, and still pining for a young accounts clerk, Alfred, who declared his love before going to Tenby on a works trip, falling for a brassy barmaid, and never returning. 

Alfred and Primrose run a sea-side cafe now and he often thinks wistfully of Joan and her bramble jelly as he wipes condensation from the salt-stained windows. 

Joan, meanwhile, is unaware that the local vicar, wounded in some unnamed war and bearing a slight limp as a consequence, dreams of her at night. Reginald knows, mind you, but keeps it to himself, unwilling to lose his devoted sister to another form of affection. And... Breathe....

From my sis to me:

Oh my God. I want to know more. 

Does Joan ever find out about the vicar's secret love? 

Will Alfred leave Primrose to peel the potatoes for the chips and take the bus back to Joan's village for the day, sitting next to the phone box on the village green, hoping for a sight of Joan whilst eating his corn beef and pickled sandwiches? 

And will Reginald take his attention away from the golf course just for one minute, to appreciate Joan's sacrifice?

From me to my sis: 

Don't think too harshly of Reginald. He is holding a torch for the redoubtable widow Verity Ssykes-Winton, a strong-willed lady with a bust like the prow of a ship.

Verity rules society in Upper Moultings with a rod of iron and, whilst she enjoys Reginald's attentions, has no intent - now that she's outlived her aged and querulous former husband Colonel StJohn Ssykes-Winton - of ever submitting to the marital yoke again. So Reginald is distracted, and a little envious of the puppy-dog devotion that his sister inspires in Vicar Edmund Oak-Wooton as she moves around the church arranging flowers and embroidering samplers for the pews...

That's it - for now.  Stay tuned for more inanity from Little Moultings.  (Oh, who am I kidding?  The next post on here is unlikely to happen until the next term starts...)

Staging my own intervention; 'If it is to be...

... it is up to me.'

Cliched, huh?  That's certainly what I thought 2 years ago when this was trotted out by someone at the Boys' school in a speech made to children and parents at the start of term.  And yet, I heard it again yesterday - from the same person - and it struck a chord.

Expats everywhere will know peers who refuse to engage with their local environment.  They hide away from the reality of where they are living, simply existing from one holiday to the next, and not venturing out to see what lies beyond their temporary front door.

I get that.  I understand that.  We all feel like that sometimes.  And I have to admit, I'm struggling at the moment.  Struggling to regain my equilibrium in a hard-to-live-in city, in a country that I don't know I'll still be living in one year from now, 1500 miles from my family and friends.  

We just returned from a fantastic break with a summer spent taking it slowly, away from the battle of the daily Moscow grind.  Sure, I was still food shopping, cooking and washing, sorting socks, packing and unpacking and repacking every week or so, travelling through airports, train stations and car hire outlets,  fitting in 6 months' worth of dental and doctors appointments, stocking up on any school uniforms, children's shoes and underwear we are likely to need before Christmas, and then working out how the hell to cram it all into our suitcases and stay within the weight limit for the airlines, but ultimately we were on holiday, and somehow that made it all OK.

Now, though, we're back in Moscow and even though the thermometer hit 27degC today, I know that in around 8 short weeks we'll have freewheeled down and be bumping along the bottom of the scale for a short while before we nose-dive below 0degC around mid-November and then don't come up above it again until the middle of April next year.

Add to that the fact that the start of the school year is earlier here than it is back home - we're in the first week of term already - and despite the fact that I'm majorly in denial about the shortness of the summer (wearing every short sleeved dress I own in turn until it's too damn cold not to), I'm already experiencing GroundHog Day type symptoms.

However.

I may have less than one year left in Russia.  That in itself is a scary thought (what - and where - next?), but I refuse to let this year pass in blur of worry and wishing I was somewhere else.  Why live somewhere like this, surrounded by the wonderful people I do, if you don't push yourself out there and experience it all properly?  

So I'm staging my own intervention.  I've signed myself up for a months' 4 hours a day, 5 days a week Russian course (the straw that broke the camel's back on this one was not being able to understand a telephone operator at the company we buy our drinking water from - not my finest moment after living here nearly 4 years), so that whatever else happens in the next 10 months or so, I may at least be able to make myself understood.

I am going to enjoy this year.  I am.  But like the man said; if it is to be...

Gone fishing? I should be so lucky...

It's the holiday season.  Well, when I say 'holiday' what I actually mean is the Expat Summer Shuffle which, rather than time lying on a beach with a pina-colada to-hand as you wade through the latest paperback block-buster, is in fact solo-parenting time spent moving from one long-suffering family member or friend to the next, packing, unpacking, repacking, buying extra suitcases to contain the supplies of school uniform and clothes for the kids that you've bought along the way in the UK sales, and of course taking any opportunity you can to squeeze in the odd load of laundry when possible.

It's great to catch up with our nearest and dearest, but this lifestyle is not conducive to writing long posts - or, it seems, looking back on the last week or so on The Potty Diaries, any posts - so please bear with me for the moment whilst the Potski familiski makes their summer progress through Northern Europe.

On the plus side, I have come up with a killer concept for my next novel.  Never mind that I have yet to finish my first, or indeed that the 60K words I have already written require some fairly extensive editing; at least I know what I'm going to be doing next.

You know.  In my spare time...

So accidentally cool...

One of my sons is nearly half way through a week of such an IMMENSELY cool sport-related activity that even I - the queen of no sporting ability - get excited about it when I think about it.

Imagine your child getting the chance to spend a week being coached in a sport he likes, but at which he will never be a world beater, by luminaries who's names send grown men into awed revery.  Like, for example, being shown how to ride a bike by Chris Hoy.  Or how to score a goal by David Beckham.  Or how hit a tennis ball by Jimmy Connor.  You get the picture.

Well, we got the opportunity for Boy #? to do something along those lines, for a week.  He jumped at it, so we made it happen.  He's having a great time, hanging out and playing a sport he likes, being coached in how to improve his performance, and being outdoors all day, every day, in top-class facilities.

There's just one thing.

He has no idea how amazing this experience is.

On the one hand this freaks me out a little.  It's like training at Anfield and treating it like the local rec, or knocking a few balls about at Wimbledon and acting as if it's your back garden.  It's as if you're treating Lawrence Dallaglio like your dad showing you how to score a try, or back-chatting Freddie Flintoff - showing you how to bowl a cricket ball - like you would a visiting uncle.  It's just.  Plain.  Wrong.

But on the other, I'm quite glad my son has no idea how cool this opportunity is.  He just gets to hang out with the other kids in his class, enjoying the experience, with no thought of being intimidated by who the coach is or the location he's standing in.  Mainly because - if I'm honest - as an expat with limited exposure to sports events on tv,  he has no idea of who the coach is, or the historical significance of the location he's standing in.  This situation would be impossible to achieve if we lived in the UK given the exposure afforded to this sport, but due to the fact that whilst we like it we cherry pick the games we watch, and then add to that the fact that where we live most of those games aren't screened at times we would be interested in, his opportunities to soak up background knowledge about this sport are thin on the ground.  The result is a child who is simply there this week to learn and have fun, rather than to impress his heroes.

Husband, who was here for the first day of this activity, is delighted by how good a time Boy #? is having, and more than a little envious of the opportunity (as is every other man we've mentioned it to).  He told me that he would never even have considered doing this at our son's age.  He would have been too scared; his exact words were 'I wouldn't have dared...'

But there's time enough for hero-worship in our son's future.  For now, here he is:  Daring.  Making us proud, doing the things we never got the opportunity to do, taking them in his stride, just getting on with it.  Learning from it, enjoying it, and not wasting time worrying what anyone else thinks of his choices or performance.

And actually, now I think about it, that in itself may just be the coolest part of the whole experience...

End of term madness, meets BritMums Live!, meets Good Enough Mothering...

I am all for giving children the opportunity to make their voices heard within the school environment.  One of the worst things I remember about being a child was the feeling that your voice didn't really count for anything; adults got to make all the decisions, big and small, so the fact that the Boys' school has a Student Council seems like a Good Thing to me.  No, really, it does.  Just as long as my sons realise that they live in a benevolently authoritative establishment at home.

That means, by the way, that I will listen to their points of view and accommodate them where possible but - when all is said and done - what I / Husband says goes.  Especially on the big issues.  Like, rice or pasta for dinner.  Or whether that crust is going to be eaten up or not (we can discuss 'not' - but then there won't be dessert afterwards...)

Anyway.  The Student Council.  It had decreed that today was Celebrity Day.  (We won't get into a discussion of whether celebrity is something to be applauded here, I think.  I mean, obviously it's not, not really, but when everyone else is participating it seems to be more than a little curmudgeonly to lecture your children on why you are not going to help them pull together a costume when all their friends are dressing up as famous football players or pop princesses).

But let's put Celebrity Day in context.  We are in the last week of term here (do I hear a sharp intake of breath from UK based readers?).  So, you know, I have a question. Whose bright* idea was it to schedule it for this week? (*Add expletives as you see fit).  Because yes, come next Monday my two little darlings will be home all day, every day, until the end of August.

*sighs deeply*

*pulls self together*

Yippee.

So, bearing that in mind, much as I love my sons and am looking forward to spending un-timetabled weeks with them in the very near future, I have to admit that there are just one or two teensy little things I would like to get sorted before that happens.

• Like, finish the copy-editing job I was just sent.  
• Like, finish my novel - a ridiculous dream which is close enough to touch, but not quite - or, in the absence of that, re-read it and come up with an elevator pitch on it's theme.  You know; 'Oh, my novel?  Well, it's sort of Tolkien meets Chekhov meets Maggie O'Farrell...' (It's not, by the way.  Totally different, in fact.  But you get what I'm talking about).  
• Like, gird my loins (as in, work out what the hell to wear) for BritMums Live! this weekend, prepare myself for the workshop and the keynote reading I'll be doing at it, remember to pack my glasses for the opticians appointment I'm squeezing in during my 60 hour whirlwind visit to London, write a shopping list for the same (sleep?  Who needs sleep?), and also batten down the hatches here so that Husband has sufficient supplies (aka pizza and crisps) during my absence.

It's not surprising then that Celebrity Day slipped my mind until Boys #1 and #2 reminded me of it just before their bedtime yesterday evening.  Cue mild panic followed by frantic thinking and creative problem solving.

But, we triumphed.  Well - sort of.  Boy #1 strode into school complete with long brown shorts, white shirt, blue sweater and comma-quiff (courtesy of my Aveda wax) as TinTin, and Boy #2 negotiated the corridors in a dark blue t-shirt tucked into slightly-too short but suitably snug tracksuit bottoms, and wearing his brother's black ski helmet bearing the legend 'Hamilton' written in felt-tip pen on a sticky label across the front of it.

I did spend a few moments last night considering the possibility of covering Boy #2 all over with sponsorship labels so he could look a little closer to the real thing but once I googled a few images and realised that a) we didn't have a yellow flame-retardent jumpsuit to stick them on and b) I would be up all night printing them, it would be much simpler to tell him he was wearing Lewis Hamilton's training kit instead.  (They keep the many-labelled racing kit for race occasions only, didn't you know?)

At the end of term, there was a limit, I decided.  In this instance, Good Enough mothering would have to be good enough...

(Unpaid) Movie Review: Megamind

Our summer break started this week. We are on Day 2 of 10 weeks off.  Ten. Weeks.  (Insert horrified gasp here if you're not part of the US or expat schooling system).

Don't judge me, but I think we might be watching the odd movie in our house over the Duration.

Rather than just waste that experience, I thought I would take the opportunity to post a couple of unpaid brief reviews on here.  Just in case, you know, there might be other parents who are interested and looking for movies to show their kids over the summer break...

So, this week's post is for the animated move Megamind, which the boys and I downloaded and watched on the ipad yesterday evening.

Age of kids I watched the movie with: 8 and 6 years old

Plot:  Megamind (voiced by Will Ferrel), a self-styled evil genius, has spent his life battling his nemesis, the goody-two-shoes 'Metro Man' (Brad Pitt).  When he inadvertently manages to destroy his foe, he finds that his life without him has no meaning and decides to create a hero to take Metro Man's place.  Unsurprisingly things don't work out as planned, and the situation is complicated by the fact that Megamind has fallen in love with sassy reporter Roxy (Tina Fey) who believes he is a nerdy librarian...

Movie suitability:  Have to admit that whilst watching it I did wonder if the plotline might be a little sophisticated for the Boys, and lacking in the requisite action.  I mean, there are some super-duper action sequences, but they're quite short, as opposed to quite long sections where the story focuses on clever twists on life as an evil genius, and the developing relationship between Megamind and Roxy.  I needn't have worried, of course - the smart people at Dreamworks know how to keep kids engaged.  The Boys loved it, and of course were far more interested in Megamind's side-kick (Minion, a fish in a robot suit) than they were in any lessons on being yourself and not judging a book by it's cover...

Value for money: the download cost was £9.99.  Bearing in mind that the boys will definitely watch it again, probably in a week or so (but only because we have an embargo on watching the same movie or tv show more than once in 7 days), and the relative price of taking them out to a movie (plus of course the added hassle of doing so here where I would need to find an English showing, pay a fortune for popcorn and drinks, and battle the traffic before and afterwards), I would say that yes, this move provides good value for money.

If you would like to join in with this, please feel free to link to your own movie reviews in the comment box; I'll drop the link onto the bottom of this post if you do...

Packing it in...

Moscow doesn't seem to like me too much at the moment.  Not only did it put in an extremely poor performance when friends visited last weekend, throwing torrential rain at them, releasing super-strength mosquitoes on their children and - to add insult to injury - closing the doors to the Kremlin on not one but two attempts made to visit it, but it paid no attention when I banged my head and gave myself concussion a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday did it's damnedest to take the top off a couple of my fingers when I was trying to close a door in hurricane-strength wind.

(And if you see any typos in this post, try using a keyboard without the second and third fingers of your right hand before you judge me too harshly, please).

So naturally, given Moscow's hissy fit and the fact that the Boys' school term ends in less than 48 hours, my thoughts have turned to summer holidays.  More especially, the packing that goes with them.

Being an expat presents a special set of challenges when packing to go away for the summer, especially when you don't have just one place to get to and then relax in for a few weeks.  In an attempt to see as much of our families and as many of our friends as possible, our 6 week summer break will cover no less than 4 different countries and 6 different destinations - some of them twice.  Sounds great, and it will be, but dealing with both the UK and southern Europe from within the same suitcase, whilst leaving space for those essential purchases I need to make back home to bring back to Russia is a something of a logistical nightmare.

But it's not the first, and probably won't be the last time I need to do this, so I've picked up some tricks along the way, not the least of which is that once you've decided what to take clothes-wise, take a good look and pull out one third of it and put it straight back in the cupboard or wardrobe; that seems to be a fairly consistent average for the amount of clothes that I bring back unworn from most holidays I go on.

And then secondly, if you have a partner like mine who insists on packing everything else himself to minimise space, do ensure that he also repeats the process before you return from your trip - dirty laundry and all.  It's all about sharing the burden, after all - and you did do the hard work of selecting the clothes in the first place...

For more tips on successful holiday packing, expat or not, short or long-haul, check out Toni Hargis' recent Expat Focus piece on the matter here.  (You might even recognise the names of a couple of bloggers who contributed advice...)

The Gallery Wk 84: My Awesome Photo

This post is for Week 84 of Tara's Gallery. Click here to see all the other awesome photos...

The prompt for this week's Gallery is 'My Awesome Photo'. Before I started to write this post, I decided to go over to Tara's blog and check out some of the other entries. Big mistake. One might almost say 'awesome' mistake. There are some (no, am not going to use the 'a' word again - 4 times in the first two paragraphs would be too much, even for me) fantastic, incredible photos on there.

I can't compete, clearly. I mean, I could compete, but only if I was prepared to show you photos of my family, which is not possible, however much I want it to be. (If I'm honest, my natural competitiveness might have won out if unchecked, and I have would picked one of many 'awesome' photos of my sons, but since Husband reads this blog occasionally and I have faithfully promised him I would never cross that line, no dice.)

So then I thought, which photo to choose? There are a number of contenders, most of which have appeared on this blog before, but I decided to go with one that hasn't. It's not deep and meaningful, with a sense of the brooding menace that one often finds here - like this one - or visually interesting - like this one. It's simply an image that I took whilst on holiday in Croatia this summer, which I think works. I hope you like it, too.

Boy #2's holiday...

Boy #2 has an imagined trip to go on at school today. He was asked to think about where he would like to go on holiday, pack a bag, and bring it in to talk about at circle time. So today, he arrived in the sub-zero temperatures with his blue Trunkie (he was very insistent that he be able to take the Trunkie) packed with a number of small toys (all, of course, forms of transport), a Mr Sloooooowwww Mr Man book, a pair of sunglasses, his swim shorts, a pair of armbands and his towelling cover up.

Clothes will not, it seems, be required.

Oh, and as to where he's going?

The South of France, obviously. ('No clothes, mama. It's very dry in France. Very dry...')

That's my boy...

Rites of Passage

I took the Boys to Southbourne Beach near Bournemouth today. This was an important Rite of Passage; this part of Dorset is where my mum's family is from, where she grew up, and where I spent not only some very happy holidays but also two formative summers during my sixth form years - on this very beach, in fact - after my parents moved down there for a while.

Whilst we were dodging waves and building trenches this afternoon, the sand was invaded by a 50-strong party of teens, probably from the very same school that I spent those two summers at. Seeing them race into the waves, wrinkle-free, skinny-hipped, and far more beautiful than they will ever realise (or at least, until they come across a photo of their 17-year old self in 25 years time), it took me back to some of my own rites of passage, like leaving school on a hot and sunny afternoon and heading down to the beach for a spot of illicit sunbathing when I should probably have been doing my homework. Spending hours making a cup of tea last in the cliff-top cafe, putting the world to rights with my earnest girlfriends, and wondering whether the guy playing drums in the school band actually fancied me or just happened to be glancing in my direction when he was having trouble with his contact lenses. Finding out that he did actually fancy me, and getting into trouble with my dad (waiting by the garden gate for my return after a night out- oh the embarrassment!) for being an hour late for curfew as a result of this discovery...

Luckily for me however, my sons were there to pull me back to reality before I found myself wandering amongst these teens muttering dire warnings about the transience of youth and making the most of it whilst you're young and firm (like I would have listened at their age if confronted by a 40+ mother of two looking unkempt and unfashionable on the beach in glamorous Bournemouth), since Boy #1 wanted to inform me of two discoveries he had made all by himself on this sunny afternoon.

1. There is almost nothing to compare with the satisfaction of peeling sunburned skin off your own feet...*

2. ...except for, that is, answering a call of nature whilst sitting down in the sea.

So it was Rites of Passage all round today, then.