Leg Cramp home cures

I have been suffering with night time leg cramps.  If I get up and do ballet-stands on my toes, they eventually ease off. I decide to look for a medical solution, but there doesn’t seem to be any serious research done on the cure for cramps, so I will try the most recommended medical treatment...magnesium. Daughter Helen has some flavoured magnesium powder, so I will give that a try and report back.

Dr Google points to a page of home cures for leg cramps.  Check these out:

'I know this will sound really strange but my son really has bad leg cramps. He will wake up just about every night screaming about his legs. I read putting a bar of soap under the sheets by the feet will relive the pain. Tried and it worked!! Artical said to try either dove or ivory. I tried Ivory'.

'Take the hand of the opposite side of the cramped leg, and simultaneously pull and pinch the ear lobe on the same side of the cramped leg. Pinch the ear lobe firmly, but extreme pain isn't necessary. Also, pulling to pull the ear off isn't necessary, either. Maintain the pull/pinch steadily until cramps subside. It usually takes one to three minutes for the cramps to subside'.

'Pinch your bottom lip as hard as you can for 10-15 seconds. It will eliminate the leg pain'.

and finally...'It might seem strange but a black domino between your big toe works immediately. My mum insisted we always had one in our house. Tried white domino but it does work as well. Don't know how it works but it does'.

I'm off to buy a domino set.

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Willetton SHS upgrade

I have been retired from teaching for some 16 years.  I was fortunate that the subjects I taught were mostly electives where students opted to take them and were more likely to work well with good results.....Woodwork, Metalwork, Graphic Arts and Photography.  I have a lot of ex-students I count as friends.  

In the Western Australian education system I taught at seven schools, some of which could be called, just OK.  Most of my service in W.A. schools was at Willetton Senior High School.  Willetton SHS was a wonderful place..it still is.  It is the largest Government school producing outstanding results.  This year’s enrolments are around 2,000.

Yesterday I drove there to photograph work on a $80M upgrade of the school.  Phase 1 is almost completed at $32M.  When the whole upgrade is completed the 22 demountable classrooms will be taken away and it will once again look like a school rather than dongas at a mining site.  I look forward to the commissioning of the new school in 2016 (If I’m still around).

Demountables.

Old and new

Almost ready for occupation

Szechwan Dan Dan Noodles

Daughter Helen visited last night bringing dinner for both of us.  A large pot of Szechwan Dan Dan Noodles.   Delicious!     She also brought over Ruby and Rosie her two staffies (my grandkids).   The recipe Helen used for Szechwan Dan dan is here.

When Helen and James announce they are ‘going to grandads’ the staffies go berserk, and when they arrive at my place I have to ready the rear door and  stand aside as they bolt through the house to get outside.   After the meal, the dogs always chill out with a sleep on a lounge. 

Some months ago I played with a mouse windup toy.  They loved it and I had to rescue ‘mousey’  and put it up high on a shelf and out of sight.  Every visit, after tearing up the back lawn, they come inside and stand and stare at the place they

remember seeing ‘mousey’ last.  Amazing!  See Mousey in action.

Our son Martin has a good eye for good stuff at ‘Guttermart’; the throwouts at curbside.  A couple of days ago he dropped off a footstool for me.  It is probably not something I would salvage, but it does work well and it is in good unmarked condition.  Thanks Martin.

Home brew Ginger Beer

I have just bottled a brew of alcoholic ginger beer.  I have been brewing beer for many years on and off and have had just a couple of what could be called successful, quality beers.  Stout and ginger beer seem to be easier and more successful.  So, I will have to wait a couple of weeks for carbonation to give the GB some bubbles and hope that it isn’t 30 bottles of dish water.  

My computer project, like me, has run into a problem of old age.   Most of the Macs people give have the older Power PC processor which Adobe has decided it will no longer give PPC support to its video player, Flash.    That wouldn’t worry me, but almost all the folks I give a computer to want to look at videos on Youtube and Facebook.  After trawling the net for an alternative player, it would seem that there is no alternative.  A guy in Texas has produced a workaround which goes something like this......Remove Adobe Flash player from computer with an uninstall program.  Inside the Finder>library>Internet plugins, remove Flash Player plugin.  Replace it with Tex’s Flash Player Plugin> install Tex’s renamed Flash player and it all works.....for now at least.  

A Hackintosh

Yesterday I gave up on the restoration of an Apple G5 tower computer.  There are a few unfathomables which I don’t  have the patience to spend lots of time and money on. 

I advertised it in a local online sellers mart, 'Gumtree' for free to people wishing to make up a ‘Hackintosh’.  A Hackintosh is a nice Apple case with a Windows-based  computer inside.  

I made up the advertisement and and placed it online and within 5 minutes had three calls for it and took the advert down.  The first callers drove down here from north of the river to collect it.  A nice young couple who are both engineers.  It was a pleasant meeting with a couple of interesting people.  

Felt good about that one.   

                      Nice Apple design. Solid aluminium.

Changing times

2015: things are rapidly changing.   This beautiful cork extractor was in use up until 10 years ago, but now has been made redundant to all wine bottles except those destined for the tables of royalty or tycoons.    The screwtop has taken over and our cork extractor is  now a museum piece.

An Australia-wide online market named ‘Gumtree’ which is probably a ‘Craig’s List’ ripoff,  has a new category named..... Unwanted Christmas Gifts.

This is an entry on that list.

                      Click photos to enlarge

Raw Milk

Ah, the internet.   Before the internet there were not a lot of methods of getting your nutty ideas out there.   Cancer cures, anti-vaccination, pasteurised-free milk and green coconut water.  Word of mouth is gone; too slow.  Just a few keystrokes and one can become an international font of information on any nutty topic.

In Australia, every state outlaws the sale of unpasteurised milk, however it is easily bought for people to bathe in (or drink).   Websites have postings from both sides of the argument with many people saying they drank milk straight from their own cow.  I recall milk deliveries in the 1940s and early 50s being delivered by a man, usually driving a horse and cart, in bulk to households scooping it out of milk churns with a dipper and pouring it into a ‘billy can’ left on the front steps.  All sorts of pathogens had a chance to get into that milk and often sicknesses from them were not reported in  the newspapers.  If the milkman was a bit short of his milk he was able to top up the churn with a bit of tap water.  There were inspectors who supposedly made random checks of the specific gravity of milk in the churn, but I never heard of anyone being charged for a top-up.

Anti-pasteurisationers claim that the shop milk is tasteless and pasteurisation destroys ‘all the goodness’ in raw milk.  I like it.

Sitemeter

At the bottom of this blog is a link to Sitemeter which gives lots of information about visitors to the blog and the countries they live in/visiting at that time.   Sitemeter has not been working on my site for about a month and I found it very frustrating that I could not assess whether I had visitors  or what they were reading.    I made several requests to their support centre, but never received a reply.  Googling Sitemeter showed that there were bloggers all over the world having the same problems.  I figured that Sitemeter had gone out of business.....and then it suddenly returned.      Sitemeter is well worth a look and you can click on the icon and select an option to see where the traffic is coming from, the operating system of the computer etc etc.

Go take a look.