“Is author Nikki Logan gay?”

It seems I’m not the only one to enjoy checking out the phrases that people use to get to my site, this search query just in from a writer friend who found this amongst his own google search terms.

Sadly (if they were hopeful, or if they were going to buy my books if I was) the answer is no. Or, happily, I guess, if they were looking for evidence that I’m straight.

This is what comes of publicly referring to your other half as ‘other half’ or ‘partner’ instead of husband. It’s tempting to just go with ‘husband’ because it’s easier to not have to explain yourself. But the thing is he’s not my husband. These fingers…they are bare. And ‘partner’ is perfectly valid and perfectly understood in much of the world.

The good news is, now that I’ve posted this, should anyone have such a question then Google should deposit them here, at this post and not on someone else’s website.

And so if you’re that person… Hi, let me introduce myself. I’m Nikki Logan, lover of men, animals and a damned fine read.

Both my grandfathers served during the war and, thankfully for my existence, both came home. Here’s a poem I wrote for Anzac Day and Rememberence Day…and for them. RIP Bill & Norm.

War made men of boys and heroes of men
and heroes of fathers who came home again
but children have children and Glory gets old
old soldiers die before their stories are told …

Too late we blow bugles
Lest We Forget
that Glory’s forgotten by those it protects

Just a sample of the learning ahead of me...

So… Some friends of mine realised when they reached for their 4yo’s book on planes, trains and automobilesto answer a question about how much fuel a 747 could hold in its wings that maybe their world had become a little too closed in. They promptly enrolled in Philosophy 101 to broaden their horizons a wee bit.

In the middle of a dinner party that I was really enjoying I realised that I felt like I had nothing to talk about except my day job and my writing. And I got the sneaking suspicion that I was half-way to being a social bore.

OMG!

I’ve never exactly been a party-girl but the idea of being the one people smile tightly at while thinking of ways of excusing themselves… Horrors.  Now since then I’ve spoken to a few people who all assured me–genuinely as far as I could tell–that it isn’t at all true but by then the damage was done. I’d bored myself!  So I set about doing something to change that.

I signed up with a company called ‘Great Courses’ who provide thousands of hours of learning on audiobook, CD or DVD. One hundred hours of comparative religion. Classic mythology. A Brief History of the World. The story of Medival England. Big History: the big bang thorough to today.  All in 30-minute increments just perfect for driving to work, or walking the block, or while having breakfast. All with accompanying course notes. All presented by leading experts. And all 80% off. Yay.

I’m only twelve lectures into ‘Big History’ but I’ve learned:

• the basic principles behind universe formation,
• how matter was formed, how stars are born and how they die,
• how hot they have to be to convert hydrogen into helium and how much hotter to then convert helium into oxygen and so on to make the building blocks of our solar system,
• what the four elements are that determine complexity,
• how planets are made and the forces that shape them,
• what E=MC2 actually means
• why scientists look for evidence of earth-like planets (not becuase they can’t conceive of worlds different to ours, but because the earth is the earth for very good reasons and life truly does seem to form only on planets with certain traits, so finding more solar systems that could support earth-like planets is a good way of possibly finding other life ‘out there’)
• how our planet was formed
• how continental drift and techtonic plate movement was first revealed…

I can’t imagine what is still to come when we’ve squeezed the entire of creation (and billions of years) into just a quarter of the content.

So… the trick now will be to take that knowledge and absorb it and hold it close to me internally so that–in striving not to be a social bore–I don’t accidentally turn into a social know-it-all, way too excited by my own new learnings. And I’ll have to be patient, too. Can’t tell you how many times a week I see ‘The Story of Medieval England’ staring out at me expectantly from my iPod menu and know I have to finish the entire history of life, the universe and everything first.

The phrase ‘patience Grasshopper‘ has never been more apt.

xx

Valentines Day at my house is a sparse sort of event. I just don’t buy into the idea that you should do something lovely for each other one day a year. I say do it every day of the year or don’t do it at all. However, that said, I have made a supreme effort this Valentines Day eve to do something nice for my other half and myself.

I made a pie.

Big news, I know. But to put this in context I am *so* not a cook. People ask me what we eat if I don’t cook and I tell them ‘I prepare food, I just don’t *cook*’. As in cook-cook. Master chef kind of cook.

I have a slow cooker which is one of the best inventions ever, and I throw things in that and food comes out the other side, but that’s about the extent of my culinary exploits. I just don’t get that whole cooking for the fun of it thing.

But it’s Valentines eve so I thought I should make an effort. So today I made a Guinness Pie. I walked to the store for the beef *cue amazement* and I threw it and some onions and a can of Guinness ale into the slow cooker and then ignored it for the next 6 hours. And just now I threw the result into little bowls and chucked some pastry over the top and into the oven.

Guiness Pie. Not very romantic to most, but when you’re the anti-cook, it’s quite something. I hope to god that it tastes as good as it smells. I’ll know in about 12 minutes.

Wish me luck!

2012… the ‘future’.

I’m still waiting for the jet-pack I was promised by implication that we’d all be wearing in ‘the future’ back when I was 9 years old. But here we are–just days away from the future–and no jet-pack. No hover-craft. No waterless-showers or roast dinners that you make by putting a capsule in some kind of re-hydration machine.

Back in the early 70′s, 2012 seemed like an utterly impossible date. Even movies only stretched their imaginations to 2001 (A Space Odyssey). So if we had space travel and computers-gone-rogue in 2001, surely the world (or at least civilisation as we know it) would be well over by 2012.

The Mayans thought so; except they didn’t really—all the palava over the end-of-the-world is greatly overrated. At best the Mayan calendar  forecast a shift in consciousness around this time. The end of the world as we know it, not just the end of the world. Apocalypse in the true sense of the word (‘lifting the veil’ ‘revelation’), not an apocalyptic event.

We’ve already had the Rapture-fail this year when one-out-of-six people suddenly didn’t de-materialise and leave piles of clothes where they stood and their friends blinking in confusion. I don’t think I’m up for another cosmic disappointment so soon.

And so…as we approach the dawn of 2012…I wanted to look for evidence of the future here in our present. It may not look like fiction would  have us believe but there certainly are signs that the future did come as promised.

I may not have a single, Jetsons-esque robot maid to do my bidding but I have machines to do most of my more onerous chores. As I sit in my office and write, a machine washes my clothes and another would offer to dry them for me if I didn’t live in the world’s most natural-dry conducive city, a machine washes my dishes, a machine slow-cooks my dinner, a machine does my vacuuming without me. Another machine cools me (or warms me depending on my needs), while another helps me to write much faster than I ever could by hand.

I don’t have re-constitutable dinner capsules but I have a machine that can cook in a fraction of the natural time and another one that can  freeze-dry and vaccum seal meals for my later re-hydration.

We don’t move through our cities Bladerunner style in levitating hovercraft but someone does, in a lab somewhere, and scientists have  managed to replicate genuine levitation and get a gold sphere to rise on its own. Surely hover-craft can’t be far away.

We may not have amphibious vehicles as the movies portrayed them, but we have snorkel-bearing off-raod vehicles and—surely—they’re just as good and just as useless?

We may not be able to beam ourselves around the place at will but entertainment beams to us—streaming movies, games, online entertainment. You’re reading this now because I was able to create something and, effectively, teleport it somewhere else so you could read it. In fact, scientists have been able to genuinely transfer information from atom to atom—and over vast distances like 1m—without any wires  or connections whatsoever. Actual teleportation.

We have the internet—god help us all—and it’s every bit as dangerous and amazing as author Orson Scott Card conceived back in the  seventies when his characters used the Ansible to communicate on a wirelessly/time-immediate network between planets. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a tangible living entity just like Card’s Jane. At all.

So, while none of it looks like I imagined the future would back when I was nine, I guess we have facsimiles of what we were promised in  fictional form. Maybe we’re not doing so badly at all for only a few decades.

It stands to reason that if we only have a facscimile of the techonology of the future then we should only have a facsimilie of the doom of the future. This time next year we may only experience a warm fuzzy feeling in lieu of global shifting and mass extinctions. I’m certainly ready for some new enlightenment on the part of the masses. I think we’ve banged sticks and shouted at each other long enough.

Though a small part of me will be a bit disappointed come December equinox–I was looking forward to watching the apocalypse from 400m in the air on my jet-pack.