Three things have caught my eye since the last post. First up, I watched some of "Cool as Ice" the 1991 film flop starring Vanilla Ice. That persona and those clothes almost defy description. I had not remembered that "Word to your mother" originated with this guy. Thanks to Wiki, I now also know that Robert Van Winkle is doing the reality TV rounds. It is quite sad that the prime of his life will be tarnished by the memory of his sudden rise to fame, and subsequent free fall. According to Wiki, in the early 90s his peeps put out a biography of him full of lies to make him seem more credible. Talk about adding fuel to the fire of public opinion. I think I will now drop the white hip hop thang - my efforts at humour pale in comparison to Van Winkle. Although, seen another way, perhaps his story has more pathos than humour.

Number two eye catcher was a review of Darkmans, a book by Nicola Barker. The ghost of John Scogin, a 15th Century jester in the court of King Edward IV, inhabits characters in the book. From what I can gather, his is a nasty, yet intellectual kind of humour. Barker said that he changed the history of comedy. It is hard to imagine that in a world without mass communication there could be a prevailing type of humour. But perhaps what we know of humour back then is confined to the court.

In a world of print publishing, TV, and internet, the fashion of humour seems to change at the blink of an eye (although it will always be true that Adam Sandler will never be funny) which brings me to my third point. A 16 year old boy, Corey Worthington, from Melbourne, Australia has earned notoriety by hosting a party that got out of control while his parents were on holiday. His star is ascendant now that he has showed himself to be quite the lovable idiot, but with a selfish "me generation" twist. I am predicting a move back to this lovable idiot kind of humour (think Wayne's World with lots of text, big sunglasses and family dysfunction). This trend should last at least a couple of weeks.

Most of us fancy ourselves as comedians at times and the bulk of us are funnier to ourselves than we will ever be to anyone else. I am definitely in that category. My mother is too, but in a nastier way. I recall my mother's sense of humour revolved around her trying to shock people and getting a kick out of their reaction, or making fun of Indians or people from the Phillipines. If she were a nine year old boy she would be frying ants with a magnifying glass and slanting her eyes at Asian people.

One genuinely funny moment came years back when I dropped a Christmas tree off to her. My husband (who was my boyfriend then), had barely met her, and was waiting in the car while I took the tree inside. In the lounge skulked the biggest drop-kick loser you could imagine as a boyfriend for your mother. She had known this joker for a while but at that moment the penny dropped that they were in a 'relationship'. The inverted commas allow for the probability that 'relationship' actually meant plenty of boozing together and a quick poke before passing out (should an erection have miraculously been possible). I returned to the car, and wound the window down to ask her if she was sleeping with him. A small woman, she fired up (big red hair and Irish blood blazing) and hooted in a voice meant for passers-by, "So what? I can FUCK SANTA if I want to!" punctuating 'fuck' with a thrust of the hips. My husband, whose mother reminds my sister of Mrs Bucket from "Keeping up Appearances", was in tears of laughter. I don't think he knew that mothers could be that way.

My mother's boyfriend is still on the scene, still her drinking buddy and still cannot string together a coherent sentence. Presumably the acohol preserved rather than killed him. You may be interested to know that my mother has had red dreadlocks for about 9 years now - her big anti-establishment statement - is missing teeth and is falling apart physically the way that alcoholics do. When LOTR was in pre-production, she was approached for a photo by one of the production team. We will never know what came of it, but when the first movie came out, I suspected she was inspiration for the Orcs. I am thinking very hard now about whether I should leave that sentence in as it harks back to my mother's nasty kind of humour. Can't resist. It stays.

I crack myself up in the privacy of my own home by pretending to be gangsta and bad. I don't mean to take the piss out of hip hop culture. I simply find ironic humour in a white middle class suburban house bitch try hard trash talking to her sister and baby-daddy. My inspiration is my 14 year old brother, who a few years back tried very hard to be gangsta. As a very small, very skinny and very white 11 year old, he aspired to membership of the Bloods and wanted to become an assassin (although I am not too sure that being an assassin is particularly gangsta). He spent hours practising spelling out bloods with his fingers, and wore pink shoelaces (I am not too sure that this is gangsta either, but I suspect that even at the age of 11 he had a sense of irony). His street talk was gold. It was a guide for my phone etiquette. If my husband or sister called I would answer with a Randy Jackson/Iced T word riff -"Yo, yo, yo, dawg, go with the flo, word up to you and your peeps". It helps that I have no idea how to really talk hip hop. It back-fired recently when I answered the phone with only a cursory glance at the caller display, thinking it was my husband:

"Yo, yo, yo, word up mother fucker G."

"Er, hello?"

"Please let this be my sister"

"Er, no."

It was an acquaintance whose son has a play date on occasion with my son. She is also a PhD in some kind of mental health discipline. Fortunately, having grown up with a mother like mine, it takes a lot more than this to embarrass me.

Detailed accounts of other people's home renovations are much like updates on a newborn baby's development. Fascinating to those relating the story, and snore inducing to those on the receiving end. This is true no matter how eloquent the story teller. Hilarious accounts of birds nesting in guttering and threatening to occupy the house, are not actually hilarious. In fact, home renovation threatens to turn the wittiest columnist into a crashing bore.

With that in mind, I should warn that this post is about renovating our home. Once this is out of my system, I will endeavour to only post something on the topic if it is pertinent to world peace talks or solutions to the cryptic.

We moved into our 1920s bungalow a few years ago, champing at the bit to complete a home renovation that the previous owners had begun. But we ended up doing nothing - due to a new baby, then another baby, mixed in with a dollop of idleness. But doing nothing is starting to get painful. Our kitchen needs to be scrapped. It has accumulated years of grime and is some home handy man disaster from god knows when - several different decades I suspect. The oven is full of carbonised food leftovers that didn't budge when they had their final eviction notice served by a crack oven cleaning professional last year. The fridge covers holes in the floor that are the right size for rats, big, grey, twitching and hungry. The pantry shelves camber towards the floor, so food must be placed as deep into the cupboard as possible, lest we get taken out by a falling can.

It got too much even for these lazy bones. I contacted an architecture practice. So far, after one meeting with two people, we have gone from plans to replace and relocate the kitchen, to plans to knock out the large extension and garaging; extend the house back; create a new room; move the laundry; replace a bedroom with part of a new garage; and create some kind of outdoors dining oasis. Not forgetting, of course, the new kitchen. Oh fuck.

I am particularly enthused about the potential to go carbon neutral. We can allow for solar panels, but won't install them until a cheaper product that is made more efficiently is available here. Our architects feed back to the grid from their own home - that would be brilliant. Grey water - rainwater collection for laundry and toilets - is also on the 'nice to have' list.

An exellent book on the topic is Sustainable Home, written by a green architect from Sydney, Michael Mobbs. In the late nineties he converted his Victorian terrace house in Chippendale into an eco-idyll. He not only feeds back to the grid and collects rainwater, but also treats sewage on site. This sounds disgusting, but read the book and you will be turned on to the idea. I am a little curious about doing the same here, but the architects tell us that the Auckland City Council is not interested - yet. Mobbs says that testing has proved the treated waste water to be potable. I am sure this is true, but I doubt I would be offering it as an aperitif at my house - "sparkling shit water, anyone?".

It is astounding to think Mobbs manages all this in a dwelling that is not stand-alone. From what I can tell on his website, all is going well over a decade on.

Now I have dreams swimming through my head of a vegie patch and greenhouse, fertilised by our worm farm and a bokashi. The rats could feast like kings and not even have to come into the house.

The hippie home renovation spiel has been brought up and I am feeling much better now, thank you very much.

Sometimes I feel like the woman who knew too much about parenting. This is not to say that I know how to parent better than the next person, I have just read a lot of stuff, too much stuff, about toilet training, building self esteem, discipline, good nutrition and so forth. I do think it is a good move to seek parenting advice, but beware - it will open you up to a lifetime of guilt. Right now I am eating a walnut and ginger biscuit and I am feeling guilty. Guilty because I breastfeed and in eating those nuts I possibly expose my son to the risk of developing a tree nut allergy (now here is something I recently learned - peanuts are not tree nuts, they are legumes). I'm not sure that the link is proven, but all the same, who wants to risk giving their child potentially fatal tree nut allergy?

There is a balancing act we all do - the trade off, the momentary lapse where we can't be arsed being super-mum. Today's lapse is this biscuit (and ones that will follow). Yesterday's lapse was giving the three year old a gentle shove (after he had pushed his little brother over for the 3045th time in his short life) to teach the toddler that being pushed may not hurt, but it hurts feelings. This is against all parenting advice out there. Your kids need to trust you and see you as above petty things like that. But, I thought, feelings are such an abstract concept for a kid to understand. So, without anger, I gave him a calculated push, with one hand behind him to catch him. It didn't seem like much - but the wounded look on that delicate face broke my heart - he was so hurt. I apologised, hugged him, and said "See, pushing hurts feelings". Now I realise, he didn't need that lesson at three. He needs it when he can understand the concept of feelings better, and I won't need to push him to teach him that by then. Right now all he needs to know is that he isn't allowed to push.

See? A lifetime of guilt awaits.

One of hundreds of things that I am trying to be conscious of (remembering that I had a poor role model in parenting) is my reaction to creepy crawlies. They are called that for a good reason - they crawl around like bloody creepy things. Iggy and I have a long standing insect agreement. I will deal with the Wetas. He deals with everything else. I thought this was fair. Weta are the ugliest critters you could imagine, but they also don't come indoors a lot, so there are less to deal with. But Iggy drew the short straw. I think the last time I dealt with a Weta in the house was 1998. Since then there have been hundreds of other little creatures come our way, including cockroaches the size of small rodents, rodents the size of small cats, and a large, brown and hairy huntsman spider in our Sydney years.

Again, I digress. Since the three year old came on the scene, I have been the spider's friend and the bugs buddy - so determined I have been not to give him a complex about insects. But then out of the blue yesterday he had a big freak out about a daddy long legs spider. He was convinced that it was on him (I suspect he had a bit of cobweb on him) and wouldn't put his legs on the ground. Bless his little Bob the Builder acrylic socks - he really is a chip off the old block.

Clinton or Obama? Given I live in NZ and am an NZ citizen does it really matter what I think? Probably not, but it is hard to not have an opinion.

In my last year at university I wrote a (disappointingly bad) dissertation on candidate selection pratices of parties of left in NZ after electoral reform and the effect on women's representation. One mildly amusing discovery was that Jeanette Fitzsimons, co-deputy leader of the Alliance party at the time, referred to the committee that determined the party list as the "knitting committee." This was a reference to the challenges of weaving together the various interests of the party (the Alliance party was an amalgamation of a number of political parties, all with specific interests), while allowing for representation of women and ethnic minorities (Maori and Polynesian). The Alliance was a minority party so the composition of the top ten places on the list mattered a lot and working all those interests into ten spots had to be challenging for the decision makers (why the party did not implode earlier I do not know).

But I digress. In the course of research I became increasingly convinced that we need more women in leadership. And if there are more female leaders, this should in turn widen the pool of quality female candidates for decision making roles. We need inspiration for our aspirations.

When Jenny Shipley became NZ's PM, Helen Clark was leader of the opposition, and Theresa Gattung was head of Telecom. I would hear people bang on about how women were running the country, as if there was a new injustice. I heard how women were "taking over", how it was reverse sexism. This was a ludricrous notion. Parliament and decision making roles in the public and private sector were dominated by men. It just so happened that three high profile positions were held by women. But I hear this talk less lately. In the early days of her being PM, I heard Clark accused of a harsh appearance and of being selfish for not having any children (incidentally I have never understood why not having a child is a selfish act. Isn't the passing on of your DNA one of life's great vanity projects? And each child we have is going to put more pressure on the Earth's limited resources. Surely, therefore, procreation is the selfish act). You didn't hear such criticisms directed at male politicians. Perhaps I am too out of touch, now I am out of the workforce, but I seem to hear less of this criticism of Clark nowadays. I wonder then, are we growing up as a nation and getting used to the idea of a strong women in positions of power. And why might that be? Having women in high profile roles for a decent period of time must have helped us along. Clark has provided strong and effective leadership for over eight years, and few could question her competence and credentials.

I am hopeful about what this means for young girls and boys who have grown up during her term. I hope that they will see that aiming for great heights is something special, but not specifically extraordinary for a woman (as opposed to a man) to do. I hope that they look back on the days when people were concerned that women were running the country, and have a good old belly laugh.

So back to the original question, Clinton or Obama? From a "fair" representation perspective how could you value one over the other? I was surprised to hear that my husband (let's call him Iggy) was barracking for Barack, meanwhile I was hoping Hilary would prevail in Iowa. Iggy's argument was that there had never been a "black" president before (I always found the word black a bit odd - American "blacks" are not black - but then again I suppose "whites" are not white either, with the notable exception of Marilyn Manson.) I pointed out, on the other hand, how there had never been a female president before, "and women make up over half the population, so ha ha, I win". I don't pretend to know much about American politics, so my observations didn't get much deeper than that, although I did point out that she had been there, done that as first lady, whereas Obama is the new kid on the block relatively speaking.

Regardless, either would be a step up from George W, who would have made a lovely teddy bear face model (think frowning, quizzical Georgie), but isn't my hot favourite as US leaders go.

Sometimes, like now, I am in awe of how Civilisation is a tiny eency weency blip on the timeline of the planet. And look what has happened during that blip. Empires have been built and destroyed. Cities have sprung up on a vast scale. Cars, computers, telecommunications, aviation happened. Penicillin was discovered. The atom was discovered and then split. Billy Ray Cyrus had a hit with "Achy Breaky Heart". All manner of mind boggling things have happened. Man has created a big, heaving, carbon belching monster that is destroying, at an alarming rate, what has taken billions of years to evolve. Terrifying and awe inspiring all at once.