The Phone Rings...

I received one of those disturbing phone calls this afternoon. You know the sort that start with an unexpected question.

ring ring

Marcus Holt, hello

Dad, where's the key thingy for the drill? (It was The Heir, who returned home yesterday from a couple of months of relly-bashing around the eastern states).

aaarr, what are you doing? (Caught off guard, thinking quickly!)

Drilling holes. (Slightly sarcastic tone, as in, what do you think I'm doing?)

What for? (Getting nervous but trying not to be critical)

I'm putting shelves in my wardrobe (Of course, why didn't I think of that?)

Oh

So do you know where the key is?

No, but I'll be home soon, we can look for it then. (When in doubt, stall)

Quickly pack up and race home before eldest son finds key and gets trigger happy.

Arrive home to discover he has bought timber and shelving already and has a plan. The plan is actually not unreasonable. I blame his Uncle Rex. Clearly over the last couple of weeks he's encouraged The Heir to play with power tools, shoot guns, drive trucks and engage in other manly pursuits. Now The Heir thinks he can do anything! Just enough knowledge to be dangerous!

However, as I said, the plan is not unreasonable so relaxing slightly I commence looking for the lost item which I explain to him is called a chuck key.

Ten minutes of fruitless searching later I pick up the drill and point out the chuck key attached by a rubber thingy!

Why didn't you look here?

Why didn't you? (Hmmm, I'm on dangerous ground here. When in doubt, bluff)

I thought you would have already looked in the most obvious place.

Quickly changing the subject I point out that he requires a masonry bit, not the timber bit he is about to load, although, I suggest to him we drill the timber supports first so that we can more easily position them when drilling into the brickwork.

Ready to go..... the drill won't start. Try a different cord. No good, A third cord, still no go. Looks like my ancient drill, an orange black and decker given to me by my stepfather about twenty years ago has finally bitten the dust. The battery on the cordless drill is flat, and it's not really up to the task anyway.

You can get a pretty cheap drill at Bunnings I suggest, and they're open till 7. (He's keen, he's already bought the materials, may as well encourage him and strike while the iron is hot)

I've already been there twice today. (Ah, the mysterious magnetic attraction of the giant hardware store has begun to weave it's magic upon my eldest son. There's hope for him yet.)

We find a suitable drill with an impressive range of features and an even more impressive price tag and deciding to go halves we head for the checkout.

Suitably armed we begin drilling holes. It has to be said that there is a great deal of fun to be had with power tools. Drilling and cutting and doing blokey stuff with power tools, yeah!

We employ a tape measure, a spirit level, a carpenter's pencil-you know the flat ones-rawl plugs, a hammer and a phillips head screw driver and over the next 45 minutes successfully install three shelves in The Heir's wardrobe. We work well as a team. We share the drilling duties although I let him do most of the screwing in of screws. About half way through the task he casually comments:

It's a bit bigger job than I thought.

But, a job well done, as the pictures attest.

Thanks Dad. No worries mate.

To further cement the father-son bond feel of the evening we go out to the movies later.

Happy Birthday to The Heir

21 years ago today I became a father.

21 years ago on May 29 1987, The Heir was born, our first child, our eldest son.

I remember it clearly, every detail.

Watching his birth was amazing, my first experience of witnessing the miracle of a life beginning.

(We video-taped the birth but The Heir has never watched it!)

I was over-whelmed with emotion and a sense of responsibility, that I had played a part in creating this new life, this wonderful little boy, and my life would never be the same again as a result.

He has grown up and become a man, surviving our over-enthusiastic and at times heavy-handed parenting. The pitfalls of being the first-born! There are plenty of things I'd do differently if I had a second chance. Not that we were terrible parents, but we were pretty serious and earnest, and The Heir had to blaze a trail through our mistakes and shortcomings.

He'd be the first to agree that Sport Boy has a much easier time of it by comparison as we have become more relaxed and less stressed about raising our children.

It has been a pretty quiet day as far as celebrations go, just the family for dinner tonight and coffee at Eagle Bay with his mum and sister at lunchtime. We'll organise something a little more auspicious soon although it does have echoes of my own 21st birthday which was spent in the Spanish town of San Sebastian, riding around on the back of a motorbike with an English guy I'd become friends with. No big party, no embarrassing stories, no drunken revelry or rites of passage, just me and a mate and a motorbike.

We are very proud of The Heir and are glad to have him living back at home with us at present. He spent the best part of the last 4 years living away, in Perth, Tasmania and England which has helped him to grow up, mature and become quite independant. He is a great son and a terrific young man and we love him very much.

Happy Birthday Son.

He's Back

The Heir has returned, looking surprisingly slim and not too scruffy. Favourite Daughter and I were there to meet and greet him off the plane, a lazy 20 hour flight from Heathrow with a 2 hour stop in Singapore. He seems happy and healthy and not too jet-lagged.
Hopefully there won't be a huge period of readjustment for him. He did the decent thing by not corrupting his Aussie accent while he was away.

We called in to Carine to drop off some picture files for the camp then I had a late lunch at HJ's before the kids dropped me off at Sally and Warren's. They are staying at the Robinsons tonight and we'll catch up again tomorrow.

Carolyn and the boys are coming up to Mandurah in the morning for the Beach Mission training day, I'll get a ride down with the Van Wollies.

Happy Birthday to The Heir, and to Birchy

It's birthday season at Holt Press. May 29 is my son Zach, aka The Heir's, and one of my best mates, Birchy, aka The Full Quiver's, birthday.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to speak to either of them to wish them well, for different reasons. I left it too late to ring Birchy, it was around tea time and with 5 kids to manage through the feeding/bathing/putting to bed routine it's no surprise that they weren't answering the phone.
I left a message but as he is a fairly regular reader of my blog, let me say it publicly, Happy Birthday Birchy, you're a great mate.
The Heir has been living in England for about the last 18 months so seeing him was not an option and my attempts to ring him failed for various reasons. Seems he has a friend visiting from Australia so has moved out for a couple of days so they can spend time together. On the plus side I did get to speak to Barabara who along with her family have been "pseudo parents" and have looked after our son for us. I tried his mobile but got a message saying the phone wasn't in service. I believe it is but suspect that the whole international dialling thing was a little too much for it's circuitry to handle. I tried to get him on Skype but no joy there either.

So, son, not for lack of trying, this is your official Happy Birthday Call-Out.

He has expressed a few misgivings about turning 20 and the expectations that come with such an age. I know exactly how he feels because I had the same thoughts and feelings when I turned 20, and 30, and 40 and ... There's something about 20 that signifies a change, the end of the teens, the end of justifying your irresponsible behaviour on the basis that you're a teenager and don't know any better/haven't matured yet/lack self control/are invincible, omniscient and never wrong! I'll never forget the day The Heir was born, it was the most amazing and miraculous experience of my life. Almost instantly I felt a "weight" settle on me, of responsibility. Here was a helpless little baby totally dependent on us for everything, for survival and life. It was the start of a new chapter of my life that continues to be written to this day. He is 20 and living on the other side of the world but there is still a strong sense of care and concern and hope for him; that his life will be happy and healthy and holy. I used to hold him by his legs and hang him upside down as we walked around and he seemed to love it, never crying or complaining. We went to Victoria for 9 months when he was 1 and had just started walking. We took the Indian Pacific train and not long after we left Perth he lurched and fell in the aisle banging his head on one of the seats and getting a big lump over his eye. The rest of the three day journey was somewhat tense as I tried to prevent him falling over or getting hurt again. That's the thing about being a parent, no matter how much we love them or how hard we try we can't prevent our kids from ever getting hurt. And it's not just when they're toddlers, it continues on, quite probably for the rest of their lives, or ours, whichever comes first.
We spent 6 months at Kilmany Park in Sale studying youthwork with Fusion and now, 20 years on, The Heir has done the same course, now taught at Poatina in Tasmania, and is part of Fusion, who themselves have grown up and spread out across the world.

The Heir, as our first-born, suffered at the hands of our over zealous parenting and copped more smacks than the other three kids put together. He deserved some of them but certainly not as many as he got.

When we lived in Beckenham he slept in a cradle and if he woke up crying would usually go back to sleep if we just rocked the cradle for a little while. The Heir was a devoted big brother to his little sister Sophie, aka Favourite Daughter.

This got me thinking and I set about rigging up a system with string and metal screw-in eyelets strategically positioned along the walls between his bedroom and ours that would enable me to rock his cradle from the comfort of my own bed! It sort of worked! But not really! A couple of good yanks on the string would send enough energy down the string to cause the cradle to jerk unevenly but no smooth rocking motion could be achieved! I'm sure that there were too many angles to negotiate and too much friction to overcome for it to succeed, but I'm equally sure that with some more refinement and a finer engineering brain than mine, the system would have been perfected. Maybe even patented! Who knows, I could have been sitting on a fortune by now if I'd just persevered with my remote control string operated baby rocking system!

Happy Birthday Zac, I love you.
We have been blessed with beautiful children and a friend, Stephen, took many waonderful pictures of them when they were little. Many of these I enlarged and framed and they still grace our walls.


The Heir and Favourite Daughter were very close and played together beautifully when they were little. We've got hours of video of them running around in the backyard, sometimes clothed, sometimes not!
Sadly they went through a less than amicable period in their early to mid teens when FD no longer thought TH was cool and gave him a lot of grief but happily they have gotten past that and get along really well again now. They are talking about travelling together overseas next year.

I was going to bed but then...

I was just going to blog for a minute before bed but discovered The Heir on Skype asking questions and needing me to fax him things.
I've found what he needs and will send them tomorrow.
A mate posted a message about Skype that will definitely interest any of you who are Skype users. Here it is:

[9:41:47 AM] Phil Sparrow says: Dear all. Just to let you know: Skype can detect that you have unused bandwidth on your computer, and, being a P2P program, start using your computer as a 'Super-node'. This just happened to us. Hundred's of MB of data started being routed through our account, rapidly exceeding our quotas. The solution is to go to Skype/ Tools/ Option/ Connection, and uncheck the 'use port 80 and 443'. Skype is still a great program, but super-noding is a great hassle. Google 'Skype bandwidth use' if you want more info.

Sneaky little rats!!

Went to Bunbury with Sophie this afternoon, she drove, so I could check out FoodBank, a food distribution service which we're going to utilise for The Big Brekky this year. We hung around Bunbury, shopping etc until 9 when we went to the movies to see Blood Diamond. It was very violent and pretty heavy but also an excellent film on a serious subject.

Started the day at the physio whose diagnosis of the continued swelling and pain in my ankle (injured in September) is due to a hairline fracture, and that I need to get my foot put back in a cast for two weeks!! That's a nuisance but hopefully if he's right it will mean it will properly heal and I'll regain mobility without pain, and be able to resume playing sport.
So I'm off to see the Dr in the morning and I'll be back on crutches for two weeks!!

Blogging for cheats

Not much time to blog tonight, I'm trying to get to bed early cause I've been too tired from pushing it too much lately. This is a transcript of part of the conversation I'm currently having with The Heir on MSN. He's signing himself "Procrastinating" I'm using Jordan's log on with the reference to the Nintendo 64. Hopefully you can follow it.

Carolyn and I went to see The Pursuit of Happyness tonight, good movie, Will Smith does an excellent job, as does the little boy who plays his son, who just happens to be his son.

anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
dad wants to talk to you
Procrastinating says:
k
anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
Hi mate
Procrastinating says:
hey
anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
Why are you kissing that man?
Procrastinating says:
haha thats cpn justice, it was a justice league ceremony requirement
Procrastinating says:

anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
I told God I would be in bed by 11 tonight and it's 11 now so this is just a quick hi
Procrastinating says:
you told god?
Procrastinating says:
how come
Procrastinating says:
?
anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
You shouldn't have joined that Justice League
anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
I was praying and was VERY tired because as usual I've been staying up too late so I need to get some more sleep, thus, 11 it the aim
anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
What are you doing with the church? Be good to be earning some money, haven't spoken to Centrelink yet, will try tomorrow
Procrastinating says:
kool
anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
What are you doing with the church?
Procrastinating says:
umm, doing drop in nite friday, going to birmingham with their youth this weekend, that kind of thing
anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
Better practice your accent
anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
Have you seen Harriet on my blog?
anyone who didnt have a N64 when they were a kid or at any stage in their life is uncool says:
She's from Northampton which is on the way to Birmingham. I bought a pink tie there once.

And so it goes on, the sort of international chit chat made possible by the wonders of the world wide web. The Heir has just signed off cause he's on radio in Oxford soon, whatever that means? He used to do a radio show in Poatina, I guess Fusion must have something happening in the UK.
But it's 11.15 and I NEED to go to bed.

Sports Update (This is where you stop reading Phil! Bye)

Indinapolis won the Superbowl.

On a depressing note, Tottenham lost 4-0 to Manchester Utd!