Teacher goes back to school

I have completed a small project for our daughter Helen at her school.  Helen teaches Pre-Primary and loves it.  A recent acquisition in the pre-primary area was a small one room ‘house’.  Her pupils enjoy practising house and Helen thought I could erect a clothes hanging line.  I bought some steel tubing and timber and clothes line.   The school has some quick setting concrete so our son Martin and I set a post in the ground and strung the clothes line and attached it to the wooden building.  Looks good.

Helen and her teacher’s aide, Lyndy, have an excellent working relationship and much of the improvements in the pre-primary area of the school are because of their efforts.

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The good old times??

Yesterday I was reflecting on my 76 years  and some of the technological advances I can recall occurring  during my lifetime.

Ball point pens

gears on bicycles

computers

mobile phones

digital cameras

credit cards 

bubblewrap

aerosol paint 

GPS..................etc etc

Of course there are many thousands more.  Make your own list.

Within our Friday gatherings of friends, I often hear the comment that it was a better time back then.  Hmn??     One backwards step in innovation, was the plastic toothpaste tube. The original toothpaste tube was made of a lead/tin alloy which allowed you to fold up the tube as the contents were used.  It worked.  The plastic tube makes it very difficult to get the last three or so tooth cleanings without giving in and getting over the 1950s hangup of getting every last bit of paste out of the tube.  

The tin/lead tubes are still used for things like oil paints.

Get over it Kev!!

Oldies meet weekly

I am part of a small group of friends who go back many years.   There are seven of us left including two widows and me, a widower.   We meet weekly on a Friday for several hours of laughs. stories and reminiscences, mixed with good food, wine and genuine friendship.

Yesterday we were talking about dancing and it reminded me of my first experience at learning to dance.  It happened when I was about 12 years of age and visiting my grandparents’ farm 130 miles from our house near Fremantle, Western Australia.    I was taken to a dance in a hall near a small railway siding where I watched, mainly women, dancing the progressive Barn Dance.  Most of the men were outside the hall standing around a beer keg proceeding to get ’sozzled’ as it was called back then.  One very large woman grabbed me and joined the dance circle.  My face was held tight between her large breasts; my feet not even reaching the floor and I was spun around causing me to hold on tight; so tight that I pricked my palm on an open safety pin holding some part of her dress together.

I must have whimpered, because she let me go and I bolted for the relative safety of the mob around the Keg outside.  It took me some years before I did learn to dance.

From the rear, Carole and Dennis, 

Joy, Margaret, Wendy and me and in front sitting, Wendy’s husband Ralph.

Click on the photo to enlarge.....Pic taken using the Meryl Streep filter to smooth out facial lines.

Night

I have just finished reading a book by Elie Wiesel titled ‘Night’.  There are just 120 pages in this horror story of Elie and his family transported to Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp.  It is a personal witness statement of the horrors of the Holocaust.  It won the Nobel Peace Prize and should be a text for all high school students.

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Broad Beans

My front garden not only hosts roses, but seasonal vegetables such as the present planting of Broad Beans.  It is probably about three weeks before I can harvest the beans.

I love broad beans and there are going to be lots to eat all at once.  Have to give lots away to family and friends.

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