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feelin good

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Mar. 24th, 2009 | 09:06 am

well it's been a mighty slump but i think i'm over the main of it.  the last few weeks i have had what i consider normal-for-me energy and have managed some "normal" janettee days.  yay!  can't say what the exact thing was, perhaps my thyroid medication has kicked in, or my allergy reactions have gone away, or the DLPA (and here) that i am taking, along with other supplements, and a raft of other strategies.  i have taken to going to bed at 8.30pm most nights and getting up at 6am for yoga or training most mornings.  sure it means i'm even more of a nanna than normal, but hey if this nanna can manage to go to training or the climbing gym or climbing 6 days a week then that's quite ok with me.

i'm excited about climbing again.  me pete and james c did ruby of india on saturday.  it was a terrific day, perfect weather, coolish in the morning but steamy once we started the steep 1 hour hike in.  on the 200m climb it was windy and really cold.  i had my rain jacket on to keep the wind out but still was really quite cold on the belay ledges.  i led some of the easier pitches, 1 and 6, and had a lovely time on the belays.  we started climbing at about 9am and i think we topped out at about 4.30pm, after 6 pitches.  we had a quick detour to the summit and got back to the car just as it was getting too dark to walk without head torches.    it was a long day and we all were weary but a great time had been had.   pete took lots of snaps, i'll upload some when i get to access them.

when we got back to our tent at frog buttress we found a creature had pissed all over the front bit of the tent, all over my tarp, james' boulder mat and our tootbrushes.  the tarp was skanky so i threw it out with the toothbrushes on the way home; unfortunately the boulder mat was totally bombed by urine too, but it will have to be washed as well as possible.

i woke up early on sunday but we had a slowish start.  it got stinky hot by the end of the 2 pitch warm up.  we tried a few more things but without a lot of enthusiasm or success.  still managed to leave fairly late because of chatting and stuck gear. 

got home to find out that yes, queensland can vote for a female premier.  i was worried that it wouldn't.  and a woman from the labour left to boot, hooray!   my housemate kate was running the labour campaign for indooroopilly so heard about some of the election nasty stuff, seems to bring out the not-so-nice in some people.  anyway, ronan lee, who defected to the greens effectively split the progressive vote in the electorate and the national/ liberals won the seat.

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Comments {4}

Sam Clifford

(no subject)

from: [info]ronaldraygun
date: Mar. 24th, 2009 06:59 am (UTC)
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I don't see how an incumbent member can split the vote. Unless, of course, you're just referring to the Greens' presence splitting the vote. Queensland's electoral system really, really sucks. More than 50% of voters in Indooroopilly voted against the LNP but because not all ALP voters put the Greens in a high enough position on the ballot, the LNP won it.

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Sam Clifford

(no subject)

from: [info]ronaldraygun
date: Mar. 24th, 2009 07:04 am (UTC)
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This isn't meant to be snarky. At least, I'm snarking on the electoral system, but not at you.

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Carmen

Qld election...

from: [info]zinegeek
date: Mar. 26th, 2009 12:55 pm (UTC)
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Actually I think you've got that a bit wrong. You said 'because not all ALP voters put the Greens in a high enough position on the ballot, the LNP won it' but the ALP got more votes than the Greens so it was the Greens' votes that were redistributed so obviously it was the Greens voters not putting the ALP high enough on their ballots that let the LNP in. Maybe some of those Greens voters don't actually prefer Labor to the LNP. But I don’t know. You’d have to survey them to find out.

I don't think Qld's electoral system really, really sucks. I actually think that preferential voting is a really good thing. Unfortunately having optional preferential rather than compulsory preferential (which we have in federal elections) means that people often don't preference all the way down the ballot paper. Preferential voting is so much better than first past the post where you can get elected on 20% of the vote (and less) as long as you get more votes than anyone else.

I do think proportional representation is better than one MP per electorate but while we don’t have that, preferential voting is better than not having preferential voting.

And it is exciting to have the first elected female Premier! And a third of the cabinet are women too (so sad that only a third is exciting).

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Sam Clifford

Re: Qld election...

from: [info]ronaldraygun
date: Mar. 26th, 2009 11:10 pm (UTC)
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It's complicated by the presence of DS4SEQ. Their second preferences are deciding who's coming second and third and thus facing up to Scott Emerson. I think the main problem here is that the ALP and Greens voters didn't all allocate a second preference to the other. Emerson only got 44% of the primary vote; the combined ALP-Green vote was higher than 50%. Under CPV, it would be very likely that either Sarah Warner or Ronan Lee would've won.

Splitting the vote is an issue in our electoral system, therefore our system really sucks. A party with 8% of the vote gets 0% of the seats? Our system really, really sucks. Sure, it's not as bad as first past the post, but we still have single member electorates, no proportional representation mechanism and no upper house. The Bligh government can do whatever they want for three years with very little in the way of parliamentary review (which is how both Bjelke-Petersen and Beattie managed to run the state into the ground); this shows how truly woeful our electoral system is.

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