fred_mouse

• Genghiscon (local small, low price point, gaming heavy con) on Friday and Saturday. Misunderstood the Friday starting time as noon (which was when rego was supposed to open), Eldest and I turned up and were generally helpful with whatever the on the ground committee could identify as needing doing.
• craft - took a crochet project without the crochet hook on Friday (oops), managed to not take that project with me yesterday; did take yarn and a box of crochet hooks so as to make Eldest a carrier for their (glass) water bottle. First draft was with 6mm hook, this was too large; dropped to a 3.5mm (would have been a 4mm if I had had one). Did an 8 point circle base (3 rows; 8 doubles, then 16, 24), open netting for the sides and then sturdy handle of solid singles (7 stitch rows). Size was decided on by measuring against the bottle. Yarn is a quite stiff probably-cotton in a very slow rainbow fade, so the base is blue, fading to purple at the top of the sides; the handle then fades through pink, orange, yellow to a tiny bit of green where I attached it on the second side.
• sleep - I thought I was getting the hang of things, and then last night I was in bed roughly 11:30, and then just could not sleep. Got up, stretched, tried again. Picked up the ipad, read for a bit, played games. Realised I wasn't comfortable, took paracetamol, tried again, finally worked.
• Ran into D at Genghiscon. Will see them again today, because G, whose memorial I'm going to, was D's younger brother (youngest? or possibly only brother). We haven't seen each other in roughly 35 years. It is the second time in less than a year that I've identified myself as C's daughter, which is still an uncomfortable phrase, but eh. Equally weird for them, because apparently they'd been looking at photos that included me on Friday (presumable G's? G was definitely a reasonably dedicated photographer 30 years ago). We got to talking about neurodiversity and family; yes, I absolutely believe that their father (my fiddle teacher) was autistic. (D and I, like many people with that weird time blindness, dropped straight back into being great friends, but the issue of how does one catch up on decades of history does make it hard to just chat about stuff.)

Dear con-running friends,

What event management software are you using, and do you recommend it? SwanCon have been using Grenadine, and it has not been meeting our needs, and we are looking for alternatives.

regards, Fred

1. Get self from home in Perth to hotel in Adelaide, via Qantas. This required
2. Finish packing (including two pairs of trousers, one cardie, and two long-sleeved black t-shirts which were still wet, courtesy of having forgotten to do the second load of wash yesterday until just before bed time, and then hanging them out this morning when I got out of bed)
3. Catching a bus from the airport to the right road, although the wrong end of it
4. Walking a bit over a km (I’ll check that on a map later – that is about what it felt like)
5. Finding an open IGA, albeit a very small one, that stocked my chosen brand of soy milk, and purchasing 1L, to last me the week
6. Working out that the way that I operate on my own in a hotel room with no-one else’s urgent needs to attend to is very different from other situations, and that it does make sense to unpack clothes into the wardrobe (although there are no drawers for underthings. There are very shallow drawers that look like shoe drawers, and I’m not putting my underthings in there. Also, not enough coat hangers for a working week of shirts for me, let alone a second person).
7. Wandering downstairs to the gymnasium, and spending ~20 minutes on the treadmill (five of it at a pretend jog – not walking, because I didn’t have both feet on the ground at once, but not fast enough to do more than that), followed by some stretches, which may have sorted out the cramp in my right thigh – not sure how I’m going to replicate that at home, because taking half an hour to walk is going to be difficult, let alone at a measured pace at a given incline! Having said that, I did increase the pace as I went, but the important bit is that I’m forced to use the same stride length on both feet, because the rhythm of the walking is important, and the treadmill doesn’t care that I want to move one leg faster than the other.
8. Writing this up. Which involved getting motivated, and sorting out the computer and other things. And I have P’s manuscript open, and a folder of Hugo nominated works open, and a book that lilyoceanesque lent me that I want to read this week, and a half read ebook of Sense and Sensibility, all of which are distracting me. I’m giving myself this evening off – it being Sunday. As of tomorrow, I want myself to give a couple of hours to the various work things that I want to have done at the end of the week, given that I have a fabulous opportunity of silence to just focus, with no demands on my time post 5pm other than making sure that I eat. Which, given that I probably only ate 1/5 of the prepackaged bhindi masala and flavoured rice, may be a very simple proposition – I may in fact not require external sources of food, given that I have breakfast sorted and lunch will be supplied by the conference venue.

• focus on improving nutrition for NICU infants (everything from the talk is on the provided cd)
  
• The late preterm (32-36 weeks) birth rate is increasing faster than others.
  
• There is now a 50% survival rate for babies born with weight ~ 500g.
  
• neurological damage is increasingly proportional to weight gain ( I don't remember exactly what this means - I suspect the details are in the presentations somewhere)
  
• protein is the factor limiting growth in preterm infants, *not* calories
  
• human milk is not meant to be sterile, but a large number of US paediatricians are not aware of this.
  
• preterm infants are the most common users of donor milk. Other users take larger quantities, but there are more premmies using it (note: this is from US. Don't know what the situation with donor milk here is).
  
• Pooled donor milk is still not as good a food for premmies as mother's own milk, because the donors tend to be mothers of healthy, term infants aged 3-7 months.
  
• gastric emptying - different with fortified milk (I need to look at the Lucas study, see what they did with their stats)
  
• there are advantages to babies just having contact with their mother's milk, even if they can't exist on it - exposure causes the body to produce lactose. Skin to skin contact helps too - antibodies developed by the mother can transfer this way.
  
• problems: for pre-tem babies, their needs from the milk don't change as fast as the milk changes.
  
• breast fed babies are more likely to eat a range of foods when complementary foods are introduced.
  

• 6 month - 2 years are the ages when much of growth problems occur. This is presumed to be related to complementary feeding. However, there are problems with saying anything about this, as the research available only looks at infants 6-9 months.
  
• There are new growth standard curves based on breastfed babies, which should be used when judging infant growth.
  
• appropriate breastfeeding could prevent 13% of preventable childhood deaths. Appropriate complementary feeding could prevent a further 6%. (approx 2 million deaths per year for children up to 5 years old)
  
• Obesity is part of malnutrition - just the other end of the spectrum from starvation/stunting.
  
• There is a Global Data Bank with the targets, and every four years the WHO is supposed to report on this for all countries. There are some countries that not only have notable % of children that are undernourished/stunted but also a notable % that are obese.
  
• Globally the rate of exclusive breastfeeding at 6 months is 34.8% (no data for Asia/Oceania, as China has not been reporting on this)
  
• HIV is one of the reasons that the breastfeeding rates are still about the same as they were 15 years ago.
  
• No Australian data on exclusive breastfeeding - apparently not being collected nationally.