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I just saw this survey, it's not too bad. Although I don't how my morality can be “liberal”, I guess they just mean “more in line with those who call themselves liberals than those who call themselves conservatives”. It doesn't help that in Australia the Liberal party is about as conservative as you can get without being a crazed right-wing loony.

Check out my Morality! 75% liberal, 25% conservative

Moral Attitudes Results
By “moral” we mean those aspects of thought and behavior that relate to commonly accepted notions of right and wrong, and to selfish and unselfish actions. One need not be religious to be “moral,” although religions do tend to espouse moral codes of behavior. We have broken down your results into two sub-categories: political/economic morals and social morals.

Politically Conservative		Politically Liberal
Socially Conservative		Socially Liberal
Overall Conservative		Overall Liberal

Based on your answers to the previous questions, your overall score on a conservative/liberal dimension of moral attitudes–compared with the general population–puts your percentile at 75, with the 99th percentile indicating the most liberal possible rating. Another way of explaining this is to say that out of 100 randomly-selected people, you will most likely be more liberal than 75 of them.

• You tend to hold progressive/liberal values, but are more traditional on some aspects.
• When it comes to social morals, you feel that society's current laws need to be more liberal and flexibile across the board.
• You believe that government is too conservative and would prefer it to change several of its political and practices.

 Personality Survey Results

Closed-Minded		Open to New Experiences
Disorganized		Conscientious
Introverted		Extraverted
Disagreeable		Agreeable
Calm / Relaxed		Nervous / High-Strung

There has been much research on how people describe others, and five major dimensions of human personality have been found. They are often referred to as the OCEAN model of personality, because of the acronym from the names of the five dimensions. Your specific personality indicates that the following attributes will most likely describe you well:

• You enjoy having novel experiences and seeing things in new ways.
• You probably have a messy desk!
• You are relatively social and enjoy the company of others.
• You find it easy to criticize others.
• You are generally relaxed.

More on the continuing drama that is my life in 2004 - today on the way to work my car was hit by another vehicle in a busy intersection. It was a pretty minor accident really, the other driver tried to turn right in front of me from the left hand lane while we were travelling through a roundabout. Neither of us stopped in time and now I have dents and scratches all down the left hand side of our car where it was hit by the other vehicle coming into my lane.

I'm hoping that the insurance claim will be straight-forward. The other driver turned right from a straight-or-left-turn only lane, and she apologised and admitted it was her fault. But a women reversed into our car once while Lou was driving, admitted fault and then later changed her mind. A couple of fairly aggressive phone calls from her husband and several months of back-and-forth between our insurance companies later, and they finally caved in when we got a date for a court appearance.

I felt pretty sorry for the other driver, really. I reckon she can't have been more than 17 years old, and she was obviously a bit upset and shaken by it all. When we pulled over in the emergency lane she got out of the car, apologised, admitted it was her fault, told me she'd only recently got her license and that she hasn't really driven through town before. Obviously nobody has ever taught her what to do if she's involved in an accident - fly like the wind!! only joking..

Anyway, I've spoken to my insurance company, written up a statement, drawn diagrams, taken photos and we're getting a quote to fix it tomorrow. Lets hope it all goes smoothly.

Ten to fifteen percent of all clinically recognised pregnancies end in miscarriage. I know this because I've done the reading, and asked our gynaecologist so many questions that he printed out a copy of this report for me to read, in order to reassure myself that we were doing everything possible to understand and solve the problem.

Ten to fifteen percent is a lot of miscarriages - it's more than one in ten pregnancies. The actual incidence is thought to be higher, because that statistic only counts the miscarriages that doctors know about. Some women miscarry so early that they don't even realise, while others just never bother going to see a doctor. But in the end what it all boils down to is that you almost certainly know someone who has miscarried, or have even done so yourself.

We've spoken to family, friends and others who know what it feels like to have a miscarriage. They all told us that it's a pain which never really goes away, and that nobody else really understands what it's like. But most people who miscarry go on to have children - it's not something which dominates their life, and not something they generally choose as a topic of conversation.

We've now had multiple consecutive failed pregnancies, the last two within six months of each other. We've had every available test performed, and all that anybody can tell us is that we don't fit into any category of known causes for miscarriage. We're able to conceive and we're both still fairly young, so we're told that the prognosis is good.

We want children. We want it more now than either of us probably realised when we met. We want to have children with each other, we want to recombine and spread our own genes, we want to do our best to add to the population of the world people who can love, laugh, play, think for themselves and try to make the world a better place.

But now we have to at least entertain the possibility that it's something that will never happen.

We're a very long way from giving up, even if it's still hurting too much to think about exactly what we'll do next. But it's in my nature to explore all possible paths to their logical conclusions, and the thought we may never get to have the family we so desperately want is just terrible.

It terrifies me to even consider it - what will it do to Louise? To me? To us? We've coped so far, and each time we've seemed to cope a little better, but then again each time it's like a little piece of us dies. We cope now because we can still hope for a future in which this is just a painful memory on the path to our family. How will we cope if that hope dies?

I don't know if it's true for everybody else, but I often seen the world differently after a new experience. When we've bought a new car I suddenly notice all of the other identical cars on the road, and all of the variants (same model but different colour, same colour but the 3-door model).

Right now I see every child, every parent with a baby, every pregnant woman. They stand out from the rest of the world as though they've been underlined and highlighted, a constant reminder of what I've lost. I'm so happy for every parent I see smiling, or just being a parent to their children. I'm furious every time I see someone scream at their kids in a supermarket, or smoke a cigarette while pushing a stroller.

It's a bigger problem in some ways for Louise than it is for me, because the unfairness of it all is like an added insult. It's slightly easier for me in that I have no expectation that the world will be fair to me or anybody else - in fact past performance seems a pretty clear indicator that fairness is the last thing any of us can expect.

This probably makes us a bit difficult to deal with at the moment. I'm so pleased for all of our friends and family who have children, but sitting next to one of my best mates as he bounces his baby boy on his knees while they both laugh at each other is pretty hard. I can't think when else I've been so happy for somebody else and yet sad for myself at the same time.

I usually hide my sadness pretty well, in fact too well sometimes. Happiness and anger I have no trouble showing, but sadness is something I try to keep to myself. I know it's helped Louise to see me upset, to know that she's not the only one going through this, but it's not something I let my friends see on purpose.

Louise can't manage to hold it all in though, even though she tries. Sometimes it just spills over, and lately it seems to be happening more often. People don't know what to say, or sometimes even know there's nothing they can say but don't know how else to help. I don't know what to tell them if they ask - usually "thanks, but there's really nothing you can do". I don't know how to help myself, I just do everything I can to be there for her. I know that, as bad as I feel, she must feel ten times worse. To have the added indignity of the physical process of miscarriage on top of the emotional stress, it's something I can't imagine enduring. It's nasty stuff, not something that just happens one morning and then it's over.

Here's an image permanently burned into my brain which I wish I could forget - to have seen the sac, the products of conception, the blood and placental tissue. To understand miscarriage as a real and physical thing, not a terrible but abstract idea. We've been reassured by doctors that there was not, as yet, anything that could have been called a baby - but this time not only did I get to see a heartbeat, I saw exactly where that baby would have come from, the home it should have had for the next seven and a half months.

I looked away, sickened - me, who has no problem seeing blood, cuts or watching surgical procedures. If one of my arms wasn't stuffed there's a pretty decent chance I'd have studied to be a surgeon, but this was a little bit too real and too personal. Louise apologised and I quickly told her not to be sorry. I'm glad I saw it, that for a brief moment I experienced what she had to go through for almost a week.

That's why we're difficult to be around at the moment. It's not something you can discuss around the table with friends, over a couple of beers and nibbles. It's not something I can ever effectively communicate to another person, it's just something that we'll have to deal with somehow before getting on with our lives.

For now though I'll just take it a day at a time. I have plenty to keep me busy at the moment, to distract myself from thinking about it a little bit longer until I can face the question of "what next?".

Ok, good news out of the way first - I received the official offer for the job I was after.. I accepted it and have resigned from my current position. I finish up there on Friday the 20th, I'm speaking at a conference on Monday the 23rd, and I officially start at the new job on the 24th. I have a pretty hectic month ahead of me.

Now, time for the bad news. I mentioned in my last entry that Lou was pregnant - that hasn't worked out.

I've been in a bit of emotional turmoil over it all, and so has Lou, but we seem to be coping better than last time. Somehow that makes it worse, which is a bit of a vicous cycle to get caught up in. We talk about it of course - the primary strength of our relationship is our ability to communicate with each other - but we also spend a fair bit of time distracting ourselves from it all. Lou said to me one night in bed that she felt terrible about coping so well, yet relieved about it, but terrible that she felt relieved, et cetera, ad infinitum. When she says "coping" she really means that she's not a total wreck - I tried to console her by saying that continuing to function relatively normally doesn't mean she feels no emotion about it.

I'm more of a sustained-release emotions kinda guy myself. Most of the time this latest setback (not to mention its position within a series) is a constant low-grade ache, which only occasionally bubbles up to the surface. I'll deal with it over time, but in the meantime I have to make sure that Lou can deal with it too.

Wow, there's so much that I need to get written down somewhere, but I don't have the time now. It's so much that I really don't know where or how to start, which is why I've only just written it now.

But it'll have to wait.