The heat has hit
After one or two false alarms, I can finally say that the heat has well and truly arrived in Milan. 30 degrees+ during the day and not that much less at night. Net result: PC seems to be overheating, yours truly is overheating and no-one seems to be getting much sleep.
I bought a desk top fan the other day, but not just for me. It was for my laptop - which is my main PC and has all my work on it. The poor pile of electronics seemed to be going on a go-slow after only a short period of use. Messing around with graphics stuff has become painful. Surfing the web was not so much surfing as crawling. At the moment it seems to be working fine, so maybe the adjustments to the virtual memory settings have made a difference, or the fan is keeping the thing a little cooler. Regardless of either, I've splashed out on 512mb of RAM for my 'puter, in the hope that having a total of 768mb of memory will make a difference. Here's hoping.
To keep myself cool I'm downing copious quantities of liquid - mainly water. If I don't I start to get a headache and feel awful. I sweat buckets too - I come from a sweaty family, by the way. My other half, though, does not sweat - until the heat hits 40°+. Being Italian, she is well and truly acclimatised. On the other hand, I'm not Italian and even after nearly 10 years, I'm not really that used to the sultry heat that Milan presents you with for the best part of five months a year. I even destroyed a mobile phone by sweating into it, and I have to carry my current mobile in a little case attached to my waist, otherwise the poor thing starts to drown in the sweat which its proximity to my skin causes when it is in my pocket. Yuck!
We did have air conditioning in our last place, but going from 24°c to 35°c seemed to lead to lots of summer colds and stuff. I've been thinking of how I could chill my pillow - in the past I've been known to sleep with icepacks. The heat gets to me, it really does. But I love it. Masochistic, I know. But hey, nobody's perfect!
Worrying times for parents
I read this article on the web today. Makes you wonder in just which direction the world is going. If you read the item you will see that it is about a group of kids, 11 and 12 year olds, who tried to hang, or so it would seem, a five year old. What I want to know is just what caused the kids to even try a thing like this. It’s mad and it makes you worry about your own little one.
This shocking event took place in the UK, not in Italy. However, there has been another disturbing story here. A young mother, married and all that, claimed that she had been tied up by burglars and that as a result her baby son had drowned in the bath. I had my doubts when I first heard this and then the truth came out. The mother had drowned her own baby son and then tried to make it look as though someone else had been responsible. Frightening, although being a parent, I can just about understand how someone could end up actually killing their own child. The arrival of a baby rocks your world, especially if you weren’t expecting it. Then, if things are not going well in a relationship, or there are money worries, and or sleepless nights, it can become a real nightmare situation which could drive and in this case seems to have driven someone to the limits of their endurance and beyond. It was an act of pure madness and by all accounts the mother in this case has woken up to what she has done and will have to live with this for the rest of her life. Things must have been going really badly for her to have actually reached such a state of desperation. But I find it difficult to accept that the blame lies entirely with her, poor woman. She will now pass the rest of her life thinking about what her poor little one could have done. Poor little chap. It makes you sad when you hear about things like this, it really does.
Bringing up kids is not too easy at the best of times, but there is painfully little help or guidance available. Maybe we should be taught about this at school in some form or another. I do know of someone who is bringing up her kid literally ‘by the book’. You know, one of these manuals which sets down lots of little rules for you to follow - only you are not too sure just how qualified the person who wrote the book is and, more to the point, whether this person has kids of their own and has used the method on them. It’s a bit like the divorced marriage guidance councilors or the Roman Catholic church with its virtually all male priesthood dictating how men and women should behave. The person I know will not let you say ‘no’ to her child (this is bad according to the book…), which seems daft to me. We use the word ‘no’ regularly with our little one, while trying to explain why he should not do something. Although explaining something to a two year old is not that easy and, in general, you are ignored anyway. I don’t feel as though the word ‘no’ is damaging him in any way - he’s a happy little chappy and full of life and energy. Seems pretty well balanced for his age - not that I know much about two year old kids really. (Don’t know a thing to be honest.)
Isn’t it about time we took the subject of bringing up children more seriously. I mean, they are our future, the world’s future. Do I know what I am doing? Not really and being in a culture which has a different attitude to my own complicates matters even further. I suppose I am a reactive parent, not really pro-active - which I don’t think is that good. Hell, we’ve turned running businesses into a fine art come science. Why the blazes can’t we do the same with regard to bringing up kids. They are important. (Climbs down off soap box)
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Photos from Flickr
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