Bugger!

My chilli sauce was going quite nicely last night as we settled down to a bottle of bubbly and TV. The plan was to simmer it for a while to reduce and thicken the sauce. Well, I guess you know what happened then....it 'caught' and burnt on the saucepan. Today I went and bought more chillies and this time pumpkin for thickening and colour. This lot turned out very well indeed...proud of myself! I now have to design some labels for the bottles.

Martin our son, is on the job trail again and I looked in the Quokka (a local free-ad paper), for a cheap car. There was one advertised quite close to us here and I went to look at it. The asking price is $800, but it is two days off running out of registration and the owner says that it has a problem with the auto transmission. I drove it and it functioned well. It has done only 88,000 kilometres and was owned by her grandmother. I am tempted to buy it, but if a gearbox repair is necessary later, the cost would be around $2,000. We have had lots of bad luck (or bad judgement) with our son's cars.

Chilli sauce

Long time friends of ours have just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. On the eve of their anniversary they received a phone call from their daughter who works and lives in Karratha. She asked them what they were doing on the day to which they replied that they would go out to lunch somewhere in their town, Mandurah. No they weren't: she had booked them on a plane for an overnight in Karratha for dinner with her. There is lots of money to be made working in a north-west mining town!

When we were in Los Angeles we visited the Farmers Market. One of the stalls there was solely devoted to various types of chilli sauce. There must have been hundreds of varieties all made by the stall holders. We bought a small bottle and it is very nice...and hot! So today, Kev has been brewing up his own chilli sauce and it is shaping up very nicely. Large hot chilli, tomato puree, some apples, some potato, vinegar and a little salt and sugar. Ready to bottle tomorrow. The name of my sauce: 'Ring of fire'.

I have been delaying visiting a friend who has mesothelioma. I have not seen much of him in the last 49 years when we both did an apprenticeship at the State Engineering Works. After he finished his trade he went to sea as a ship's engineer and that is the most likely reason that he contracted that disease. Ships in those days used lots of asbestos lagging on pipes and the crew was constantly renewing lagging. I am not good at sitting with people who are about to die. It is not so bad when they are quite old and have had a long and good life. Colin is about 69 years old. What can I say to him?

ex students

I had three contacts with ex-students today...amazing! Two were through the internet. Facebook has certainly taken off and I have had four 'youngies' requesting that I become their facebook friends. At 67 I think I am a little old for all that....however? The first contact was through the SchoolFriends network by a girl (now woman) I taught at Cecil Andrews' Senior High School in 1989. The second one was through FaceBook and I taught her at Willetton SHS in the 90s (?). Then this evening I had a phone call from an early 80s student from Rockingham SHS. He, Sean, did a commerce degree and is about to finish a B.Ed and enter teaching. Sean and his wife Denise have sold their house in western Sydney and are having a caravan built to their specs to travel around Aus for a couple of years getting work where they can. Sean and the family are visiting W.A. and us over Xmas.

Our daughter Helen had me take pics of her Pre-Primary class and print them to a size for making Fathers Day key-rings. She has a lovely bunch of kids and they love their Ms Lock.

Joan entered a piece in the Melville Art Awards and although she didn't win a prize, it was bought for $550. I reckon she should start making more of the same and flog 'em off. I have been told by an artist friend that real artists don't do that.

Good news

Today I drove Joan to Sir Charles Gardiner Hospital for a follow-up investigation after her recall following a mammogram. It was to be an all-day affair to determine if the dense area which showed up on the mammogram was anything serious. By 11.30am she rang me and it was all over. It was good news...nothing abnormal there.

We have just delivered our Hyundai Sonata to the dealer for a warranty repair. The seatbelt warning signal is malfunctioning and the warning buzzer continues to sound even when the driver is belted up. Warranty repairs are always a worry for me....are they going to tell me that 'that wasn't covered under section 43/4 of the warranty agreement'. We'll find out later today.

I googled Sonata seatbelt warning and found a forum where someone in the U.S. was asking how to turn off the seatbelt warning. He got a nasty reply suggesting he was an idiot and a moron and should be wearing his belt. In Western Australia it is illegal to not wear your seat belt fastened and upon reading the message again it seems that the person posting the question was indeed trying to disable the warning so that he could drive without a seatbelt. Having been in a major car crash and being thrown through the windscreen (before seat belts were even fitted to cars) I know we would have done far less damage to ourselves had we been wearing belts.

One of our kitchen cabinets looks darkly at me when I have a few glasses of wine. I can't image what it would look like if I were using mind-altering substances.

The good and not so good

Today we drove to Sawyers Valley in the hills above Perth. A fellow up there had emailed me offering a late model iMac for $50???? I have been donated stuff from him in the past. When we arrived at his place in a bush setting, I asked why did he not advertise the computer and get at least seven times what he was asking. His simple answer was that he hates selling things and didn't want people coming up from the city making a noise in his area and haggling over price.

He is a retired psychologist who migrated to W.A. from the U.S. in 1967. I will write him a nice letter of thanks with some money to buy himself a bottle of decent wine. Still can't believe that he 'gave' it to me for $50!

Joan had a mammogram on Tuesday and everything looked OK. Yesterday she received a phone call informing her that there was a dense area which needed further investigation. Not good! She is to go to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital on Tuesday for what looks like being a a day's investigation. She has been informed that they will make a definite diagnosis before she leaves the hospital. I will drop her off in the morning and collect her when all is done. We both hope it is not a serious problem and the nurse who rang stressed that it was not a 'lump'.

a week in Bali

Friends are off to Bali tomorrow for a week. They go about three times a year and love the place. There are other places to visit for around the same money and I wonder why they don't do at least one trip to, say, Singapore. I guess they have been going for so long and so often that the familiarity of the place and the people are important. I just talked to Haddon and he is quite sick with a heavy cold. Great start to their hols.

I collected 12 donated computers from a store room and have reconfigured seven of them with educational software and some games. As soon as I hear that the Fawcett Foundation will help with space in their shipping container, I will change the Australian power plugs to Indonesian plugs and start collecting boxes and shredded paper for packing.

The murder of Mrs Corryn Rayney and discovery of her body buried in a deep grave in Perth's Kings Park is still unsolved. Police discovered her grave by the most fortuitous set of circumstances. Her car was driven to Kings Park and up a track where the body was offloaded and buried. Fortunately, for the police, the murderer ran over a bollard in the track and damaged the gearbox causing an oil leak. When the car was found in a nearby suburb they noticed the oil trail and tracked it back to the grave. Unlucky killer! There are the usual armchair detectives pointing to her husband, her sister and probably the archbishop of Perth.
I reckon the whole thing will be solved within a week.

New project

A couple of days ago I was starting to feel lost in retirement and then all of a suddy, there is a posting on the Mac Users' Group for free computers. I decided to take them...about 12 plus a couple of laser printers. I will pick them up this evening and start cleaning them up and configuring them for Bali. It is long enough now to get over the bad time that Indonesian Customs gave us both entering and exiting Bali.

The difficulty with such an undertaking is getting the stuff to Bali for free. Garuda Airways will help with one or two computers at a time, but then we have the same problems with Customs when going through Denpasar airport. In reality the only way to do it is to talk the John Fawcett Foundation into giving me some space in one of their sea containers which regularly go to Bali. The Foundation has also had lots of problems with Customs and now ships directly to Surabaya where the Customs Department is more 'transparent'. It seems that they have a sort of computer system there whilst in Bali they do everything on paper. Once unloaded in Surabaya the container is trucked to Denpasar, Bali.

The John Fawcett Foundation has the use of a shipping container owned and paid for by Ross's Salvage, a company which buys Balinese manufactured furniture and ships it back to Western Australia. Good for the Foundation as they get to fill it with medical supplies on the upward journey.

Aches and Pains

We both have them today.

Kevin's are because he spread half a trailer load of compost (kindly donated by Dave next door) and also did some other work for a friend in South Fremantle which involved a lot of squatting and bending.

Mine are due to two things as well. Firstly a water aerobics class that was full on - and I have only been to one other since we got back from the US, so I am out of practice. Second was a mammogram. I got the letter yesterday that I was due for the checkup that happens every two years, rang to make an appointment and got in today. This is something that is better to get over and done with, rather than think about it.

The procedure was as horrible as usual. Though the radiographer did the best she could, there is no way to make it easy. I have a bruise just below my right shoulder where the edge of the frame dug in. However, if it leads to early detection of cancer or better still, provides reassurance that there is no problem, it is worth it. And we Australian women of a certain age are so lucky that the checkup is free.

Retirement

Lots of people have asked me about retirement...'what do you do?' I have never understood their concern as I have always been busy with various projects. In the last couple of days, however I find myself walking around the house trying to decide whether to watch TV, a DVD or go and buy something. Retirement has hit me and I must find a new project.

Today a lady I have worked with emailed me to let me know that a business contact has a large number of PCs to donate to a good cause. That company has a policy of removing the Hard Drive from the computer so that any data cannot be retrieved. A good friend teaches IT at a Senior College and I have passed the offer on to him.

I guess many people who use a computer do not know that even deleted data can be retrieved using simple software. That's why you see the cops collecting computers from suspects' houses. On Mac computers (and probably PCs) there is an option to empty the trash securely, so that the next lot of data overwrites the secure trashing. I would think that there is still a chance that bits and pieces of data are still left around the traps. Smart villains would almost certainly have a spare hard drive for any naughty stuff.

The 21st party on Saturday night at our neighbors' place went off without noise or beer cans on the lawn. We were rewarded (for what I do not know) with some birthday cake and a bottle of bubbly. I guess it is because we allowed guests to park in our driveway. I did mention that Ross, the 21 year old did visit all the neighbors in the street to advise them there was to be a party and there was only one couple who objected. They are the Cul-de-sac's Neighborhood Watch because they know something about every resident and are always looking out for undesirables. We don't mind them being watchdogs.

A 21st party

Our neighbors, Judy and Dave, have three kids. I have mentioned them before. They are excruciatingly nice! We are fortunate to have neighbors like them. One of them, the middle one, is having a 21st party tonight. He has warned the cul-de-sac that there is to be a gathering and we have suggested that the kids use our driveway for parking, leaving their own lawn for others.

Today our automatic garage door broke one of the cables. We have manually forced the door up and hope that our open garage doesn't attract villains. I will get new cables on Monday and fit them. Cul-de-sacs are fairly nice places to have a house. No passing hoons making black tyre-marks on the roadway . . . they are however, a problem for party parking.

I think tonight might be one where we drink a fair bit and sleep through the party noise. I reckon I can do that.

House hunt still on

Our daughter Helen's offer to buy was not accepted and she has decided to wait and see if the owners come back to her. I don't think they will as it is a very nice house in a newish suburb with what look like nice neighbors. I think they will stick with their initial sale price for a few weeks at least

She is agonising over shifting from Victoria Park which is a very trendy suburb with lots of pubs, restaurants and a 'village' feel to it to St Pauls estate which has the 'settle down' feel to it. There may be a bit of the 'settled' fear showing. She is going to look at more houses over the weekend. The current stock market and house finance scare may also have influenced her.

A couple of days ago I was offered a contract to write a course for the School of Isolated Education..Distance Ed. It sounds interesting, but I have been retired for 9 years and don't think I want to re-learn stuff that I have long forgotten. I will look at it when I get the details.

In a couple of weeks we; Helen, Martin, brother Graham and I are going to the Steely Dan concert at the Sandalford Vineyard. As usual, the main attraction comes on late in the evening.
I am getting a bit old for this stuff, but being a serious fan of the band I cannot miss the show. It is to be an outdoor concert and it is one that will go ahead regardless of the weather. Hope it doesn't rain.

Haddon and Margaret

Today I returned a borrowed exercise bike (unused) to Haddon and Margaret. We had a cup of tea and lots of discussion about worldly matters and when I was about to leave I was given some seeds and seedlings of various plants. There were some seeds from a very nice red flowering Canna, a Cape Gooseberry plant and some seedlings from some sort of 'spider' plant. As you can see I am not an exotic plant gardener. They have a great back yard...very Baliesque with a Bali style retreat. They are into plants, but I am into edible plants...silver beet (Swiss chard) is my fav. and of course, tomatoes.

I also love Cape Gooseberries (Phisallis peruvian) and have had much success growing them in the past. They are a weed and thrive on neglect. It would seem that cultivation is the last thing that they need. The other common name for them is Chinese Lantern Fruit because the fruit is encased in a lantern-type shell. They are almost bitter to the taste and make wonderful tarts covered with ice cream and cream. That taste makes them safe from nasty insects. There is a trade-off there! I have always thought that they were named Cape Gooseberries because they came from South Africa like lots of our plants, but no. Google (Aus) tells me that the lantern shell around the fruit is a 'cape'. Is Google ever wrong?

When we lived and worked in Papua New Guinea I took Cape Gooseberry seeds back and planted them. They grew, but the fruit never ripened. One thing I did take back that was a success was silver beet seeds and the students were able to grow enough silver beet to offset their school fees. It seems that people did not know that Australian vegetables like silver beet would grow in the tropics. My boarding school students made good money selling their produce to Australians starved for familiar vegetables.

short one today

This evening I shared a few beers with brother Graham. His house is about ten kilometers from our place and Joan had said that she would drive up and collect me in the intoxicated state before meal time. And that she did! We watched a few TV programmes...almost all of them of American origins....why do they clap their own achievements? That is something that is not Australian. Traditionally, in Australia, winners wait for others to applaud; not clap their own achievements.

As I said; a short and intoxicated post!

Tuesday and a confession

Our daughter Helen has overnight thought long and hard about buying a house and this evening she has made the decision...buy!! One of the worrying things for her is her employment tenure. If she doesn't get tenure at her current school she may not be able to meet her mortgage repayments of $350.00 a week. She is confident that she will be teaching next year and even if things went badly she has two qualifications to fall back on . . . Education and Business. Even without tenure there are plenty of relief jobs in teaching and those jobs don't require lesson preparation. The teacher being relieved is obliged to provide adequate lesson planning.

We are about to have Aussie tucker for dinner tonight...steak, carrots, silver beet and spuds. As preparations commenced it was found that we had no potatoes. Kev volunteered to nip over to IGA in Coolbellup to buy some. Here comes the confession part; I went to the store in Ugg Boots! I don't normally venture outdoors in Uggies. It is, however, OK to shop in Ugg Boots in Coolbellup... popular footware over there! Sorry Had and Marg.

A few more US trip pics

Helen's house hunt

Our daughter Helen teaches at Banksia Park PS in Leeming. She loves it there and is hoping to retain her position there next year. The Western Australian Education Department has suddenly become Mr Nice Guy about postings because of a teacher shortage. If she works two full years at a school, then she will be granted permanent status and remain at that school. The Principal has told her that they want her there next year and it looks like she will get tenure.

On Sunday we looked at a house for sale quite close to our place. Helen is ready to move from her two bedroom unit in East Victoria Park into a house and today she went to look at the house we had seen over the weekend. She is sold on it. Just 7 years old in a nice area with nothing to do, she will probably make an offer tomorrow. She owns her unit and should be able to sell it for around $290,000. This house is on the market for $469,000, but the agent tells us that $465,000 will probably get it. Then of course the state government wants its slice of the action with stamp taxes probably in the $19,000 range. We will most likely help with that part of the purchase, if it goes through. Houses in this state are sold at a premium with timber/weatherboard places selling for more than this double brick 3X2. Hope she makes the leap.

A prediction

I have a friend (his blog has a link on this page) named Paul, who is an avid...possibly one-eyed, Fremantle Dockers supporter. Today the Dockers had a big win in the AFL and surprisingly there was no nasty play.

My prediction is that Paul will write of the Dockers' win in glowing terms: and so he should, they had a great win. I am happy about their win also. I am also happy about the Eagles winning as well this weekend. You see, I am a parochial Western Australian and I want both teams to win. When they play each other (in a 'Derby') I don't barrack for either side...I'm a winner whatever happens.

Check out Paul's blog tomorrow from this page.

US trip photo sampler

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PC problem

Yesterday I collected a Windows PC from my son. He had borrowed it from a friend and on returning it it would not get up and go. 'Fix it', he was told, so Dad decided to have a look inside.

I know the inside of Macs well and PCs are basically the same, so I opened the case and had a fiddle with connections etc to no avail. The computer would start and the hard drive would run, but no screen. I decided to cart it over to a PC/Mac Guru's house to see what he thought. As soon as he set it up it ran fine. Damn! On restart it didn't want to show a screen. Eventually he went to Goggle and found the codes for the start-up beeps that were sounding....there it was; three beeps indicated that the RAM was either faulty or needed re-seating in its slots. Fixed!

Also yesterday, brother Graham and I did a little bit of house hunting for our daughter. She wants to upgrade from her two-bedroom unit to a house. The bank has set a limit on the amount she can borrow and we were looking at places around the $420,000+ price. Not much at that price in a reasonable suburb. We did see a house in the suburb of Parkwood, but the opening time was later in the day so didn't get to look inside. Parkwood is not considered to be a great suburb and this house is opposite a park and the last dwelling in the street adjacent to bushland.....ideal for villains to jump the fence at night. Parkland can also gather drinkers and youths on weekends. The older I get, the less democracy I wish to afford youth.

We might go back today and take another look.

Elephants

I am a bit elephant's trunk at the moment...it is, after all, Friday.

The email I sent to the manufacturers of the carving machine replied advising me that they do not ship to, or support their machine in Australia. There is a woodworkers' expo at the Showgrounds over the weekend and I will go and see if someone has imported one of the CompuCarver machines and has it on show. The entry fee is a bit steep at $17 for oldies...guess it is worth it?

Today I drove to Banksia Park Primary School to swap cars with my daughter to try and solve a problem with her car. Her car was 'missing' under load and I guessed it might be spark plug leads. I don't have a good multimeter and so I drove her car out to cousin Ted's place in Willetton where we tested the spark plug leads and found that one lead was dead. I bought a new set of leads and all is well. She (our daughter) is off to Wedge Island for the weekend with a newly acquired boyfriend. She rang just before she was due to be picked up for her weekend and left details of the new beau. There was a little apprehension about spending a weekend with someone she didn't really know too well. Smart gal!

I will talk with our son tomorrow and see if he is ready to start looking for a job. Yesterday I went and looked at a car for sale in Willetton. It is a 1987 Corona with a lot of kilometers on the clock but not in bad condition. They want $900 dollars ONO which means $750 I reckon. Our son has an appalling track record of car maintenance. Almost all of the cars we have bought him have cost us double the purchase price in repairs and maintenance because he neglects his vehicles.

CompuCarve

Each time we visit the U.S. we usually see something that Kev thinks would be a 'goer' here. It sounds like we visit every year; in fact we have been there only three times. This trip I didn't see any new-fangled machines or schemes that would go well here. However just today I received a newsletter from Sears (I don't know how I subscribed to the Sears newsletter?) featuring a wonderful computer-controlled wood carving machine at a price of US$1800. See it here.

This machine could be just the thing for our son to start a home business producing detailed carved plaques and nameplates for houses and farms etc. From the promotional video and the many postings of internet forums for the machine, it seems to be a great little machine.

I have emailed the firm asking if they market their machine in Aus or even ship to Australia. Two thousand bucks is not a lot to spend to get our son into something that he, with my assistance, could run. There again, I have had lots of schemes that I have not followed through on.

Photography

We have now downloaded all the photos we took, though I think there may be some on the CDs that Kevin made at Jennifer's which haven't been loaded on to our computer. The question now is what to do with them all.

Kevin spent some time today with Photoshop and the photos that he took at the Barn Bash the night before the wedding. The lighting was really bad, but he has managed to adjust most of them so that the people are not only recognisable but also look good. He is planning to make some CDs of this and also the wedding to send to the bridal couple and their parents.

But what to do with all the others? We might put them on Flikr. Or, since I wrote a pen and paper diary every night, I may set up another blog and chronicle the whole US adventure with heaps of photos.

By the end of the trip my three year old digital camera was starting to play up. It no longer turned itself off, and I was getting rather too many pics of pavements and blank walls. I had been frustrated often as well with the length of time it took to process each photo. We timed it at 10 seconds this morning - no wonder I lost lots of photo opportunities.

We got a Hardly Normal (Harvey Norman) catalogue in the junk mail over the weekend which advertised some cheap digital cameras, so we went today to look at them. Ten minutes later we had bought a little Nikon CoolPix half the weight of the Canon with a much bigger viewing screen, 6 megapixels, digital and optical zoom and a host of features that will take me months to get really familiar with, all for less than $200. And the processing time is less than 2 seconds!

It went with us today to a gathering to celebrate the 71st birthday of a friend. We haven't yet downloaded the pictures to be able to comment on quality, but watch this space.

Home sweet home

It doesn't matter how good the trip was ... there is no place like home.

We were met at the Perth International Airport by my brother Graham and driven home. Had a few drinks with him and slept in our own bed with an electric blanket smoothing out the cool weather. The last two days have been like summer, but whilst we were away there has been heavy rainfall and more is promised this week. That should do some good for the water supply dams.

Yesterday I had a phone call from an African chap I had helped out by giving him an iMac and a multi-purpose printer/scanner/copier. I at first thought that something had gone wrong with either the computer or the printer, but he merely rang to thank me again for setting him up with a computer. Nice! He along with his wife and child have been in W.A. for about a year. The child, a girl, attends school and the parents are both employed as carers for disabled children at Rocky Bay Village.

Joan says: I have finished the washing - the ironing is still waiting - and have adjusted to being home again. I do like our own bed and bathroom, and especially the plumbing. Every motel we stayed in while we were away seemed to have a different system for toilet flushing and showers. It's just as well Kevin is mechanically minded. I always made him take the first shower!

Singapore Airport 5.20am

We have just had a 16 hour flight to Singapore from LAX. There was hardly a bump and Joan read and slept for most of it. I didn't manage any sleep as I had a bad pain in my right leg. Even though we are here for another four hours and the flight to Perth is five hours, we feel that we are just about home.

Yesterday we left the motel at Pasadena and made a less stressful trip into LA proper. That last motel was by far the best we had used and was only $15 a day more than the cheapest one. Most of the motels were poorly maintained with plumbing or electrical problems. The Indians (of the sub continent variety) seem to have captured the cheap motel business.

The day before, we had a passing look at a couple of LA attractions as we drove past them on the bus tour and decided to spend a few hours before heading to the airport taking a close look at them. The first was the Petersen Motor Museum and this is a wonderfully presented museum. Best we have seen! Next was on to the Tar Pit. This museum and actual dig was amazing! Right in the centre of LA is this ongoing excavation of thousands of fossils of animals, birds and insects trapped in the tar floating on the water, some over 40,000 years ago. There are complete skeletons of Mammoths, wild horses, Sabre Tooth Cats (they are cats not tigers) dogs, wolves, birds and insects. There was a continuing dig which the public could watch. A paleontologist's dream: to work in the city!

We returned the hire car and caught a free shuttle to the airport. LAX is chaotic. Nuff said. At the Singapore counter we were told that we were separated, Joan did a bit of grumbling and they found us two seats in the 'emergency' seating area. They are the ones near the emergency exits and we got a lesson on how to open the door in any emergency. As it happened I didn't get the opportunity.

Downtown/Intown LA

Yesterday we ventured into LA to do the 'Grand Tour'. The tour took all day and started off with a very nerve wracking high speed drive in 3 - 4 lane traffic at 60-70 MPH since we had to be at the pickup point at Grauman's Chinese Theatre at 9am. Our Sat Nav device is pretty good but under these curcumstances travelling in a mass of metal it only warns us what to do at .8 of a mile. So a suggesting of 'keep right' when in a left lane causes panic and sweaty hands. Fortunately LA drivers are used to cars changing lanes at high speed...I'm not! The voice on the satnav caused the only amusement on that trip by pronouncing left as 'bleft'.

Once parked in a huge multi-level parking area we joined the tour. Apply later for details.

The tour took us to the highlights of LA. We didn't intend to take the second tour of the Celebs' houses, but somehow we paid for it so went along for the ride. That tour finished at 6pm and that put us back in peak hour traffic again. The navsat chucked a hissy fit and wouldn't talk to us.....probably because it heard me laughing at the mis-pronunciation of left. So we headed off in the direction that Joan thought was right and after about 20 minutes it started to talk to us again. And we were on the right road.

Today we book out of the motel and head back into LA to look at a couple of things we thought needed extra time at. One is the 'Tar Pit', a large pit of tar in the middle of LA. Since the 1940s archeologists have found many prehistoric animals including mammoths. Then we drop off the car and get on the plane to Singapore at 9.15pm. We should be landing in Perth about 3pm Friday, having lost one day.