Vulcan Trucks

What must have been a publicity photo of Vulcan trucks in front of Government House Perth (Western Australia) circa 1920.     The trucks were imported from Britain and the bodies made by Motor Body Builders Fremantle.

When I was young in the late 1940s and possibly in the early 1950s, there were still solid-tyred trucks like these working in the Port of Fremantle.  Solids on the two trucks left and right in the photo.

click to enlarge

                                       
When next I am in Perth City, I must see if those trees are still there.

Boxing Day

Boxing Day in this household is nice and quiet.  Rest day for me.

Father Xmas brought a nice lot of presents for everyone who gathered at Brian and Lilli’s house in Mandurah.  Brother Graham didn’t fall for the bottle of lousy homebrew beer wrapped up in a Moet box I gave him.  He himself gave a present to Lilli in a MacBook Air box.  He did something similar last Xmas, so she also wasn’t fooled.

Daughter Helen and husband James gave me a three-piece flavorStone cooking set.  I followed the instructions for the preconditioning of the three utensils and gave the fry pan a workout with a nice piece of filet steak topped with cherry tomatoes for lunch.   It functioned exactly as advertised.   Great, thanks  H & J.

My niece Katherine and husband Rick were back here in Western Australia from the U.S. for Xmas.   Katherine is partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers and Rick is a dermatologist.  They recently bought a multi-story house in the middle of San Francisco and are going to rent somewhere for a year whilst an architect supervises the remodelling of the building.   

Katherine gave Rick a very smart professional hand-held variable magnification and LED light inspection tool.   I had jokingly mentioned earlier in the day that everyone should line up for a five-minute consultation and after opening his present he decided to check out a small lesion I have on my scalp.  The verdict is that it is OK.

   

Katherine and Rick have invited people to visit them in their new house after the renos are completed.  I think I will do it.

Christmas Day 2013

My best wishes for the season and that 2014 will be a healthy, happy, safe and prosperous year for all my friends and readers.

I am the ‘skipper’ and doing the driving when my Brother Graham, daughter Helen and husband James travel south to Mandurah to see if Santa has any pressies for us at Joan’s sister’s son, Brian’s house.    (I love apostrophes!)   Apostrophes for the pedantic.

Our son Martin visited yesterday and I gave him a haircut and he thought he would be able to join us in Mandurah today, but his AS is still causing him lots of grief and he is not able to attend.  

The Lock family has a track record of dodgy Xmas/birthday  presents.  I am giving brother Graham a bottle of poorly made homebrew beer dressed up in a Moet box.    He will also get a real Xmas present from me.  Don’t know what he may spring on me.

Sharks and flies both hazardous at Christmas

Some savoury and not so savoury stuff.    It is the fly season here in Western Australia.  Nice hot weather and the flies breed like...well; like flies!

I set up a couple of my homemade flytraps with the same bait in the same position and strangely, one trap is very successful and the other has not attracted a single fly.    Can it be that the flies don’t like blue plastic bottle lids?  Both traps certainly have equal stinkiness.

My cocktail tomatoes are going great guns and I can harvest about 50 tomatoes each day.  I have made a few sauces and daughter Helen came this morning to collect a lot to make a soup.  When the bushes were young the tomatoes suffered from insect strikes.  I sprayed for about a week, then stopped and I no longer need to worry about insects.  I guess there are a few more weeks of harvest yet.

The Western Australian Government has decided to catch and kill sharks cruising our beaches where swimmer and surfers frequent.  There have been a number of  fatal attacks and some non-fatal attacks over the last few years and the state government has been pressured into doing something about them.  Opponents to any ‘cull’ of Great Whites argue that more people are killed in road accidents than by sharks, which is quite true.  

There are, at a guess, approximately up to a million drivers in W.A. out of a total population of 2.118 million people.  I could be quite wrong guessing that around half the population drives, but any true number would be far above the 10 or so sharks spotted around the coast at any one time.  The pros, cons and stats are here.

I guess both flies and sharks are up for a bit of Christmas fare, too.

The Land of the Unexpected

Papua New Guinea is sometimes called ’The Land of the Unexpected’.  In the 36 years since we returned to Australia after leaving PNG, I have followed PNG’s progress since  Independence from Australia in 1975.     There have been some ‘unexpected’ happenings there over the years.  Recently a number of horrific murders of mostly elderly women accused of sorcery.  

Here is a recent article from the nation’s main newspaper.  Hard for me to understand  how an educated man can believe such stuff.  He obviously has a brain, but methinks he is sitting on it.

Another strange and hard to fathom act is being perpetrated by the speaker of the National Parliament House.  He has ordered contractors to tear down and destroy traditional carvings  which adorned Parliament House.   

A POLE symbolising national unity will adorn the Grand Hall in Parliament to replace the totem pole that has created so much public debate over its displacement.

Speaker of the national parliament Theo Zurenuoc said the national unity pole would comprise four layers representing the Word of God, the Constitution, the people and the Covenant.

The totem pole has three heads representing the god of witchcraft on the left, the god of immorality on the right and the god of idolatry in the middle,” he said.

“While the carvings are harmless and lifeless wood, they symbolically represent ancestral gods and spirits of idolatry, immorality and witchcraft.”

The missionaries did a good job converting him.

Ankylosing Spondilitis

Over the last week I have been trying to get a Mac computer running.  Ken, who owns the machine uses it to run video and music.  He has spent most of his life as a muso playing guitar.  His Mac is the last of the MirrorDoor series.  Nice machines, but a bit rare these days.  Ken has a late model Mac 27” to record and tweek voiceovers that he does for ad agencies.   He has an impressive sound studio at his house.   I took a couple of shots with my phone which were poor and have made a resolution to take a real camera when lighting conditions are not great.  

   

When trying to get his older Mac running again, we determined that the power supply was U/S and I thought that the chance of finding an identical PS was pretty remote.  A friend told me that there was a similar Mac on a roadside chuckout so I collected it and it was identical.  The owner of the salvaged Mac had been either too lazy or lacked the knowledge to remove the four Hard Drives from the machine and so attacked it with what must have been a sledge hammer.  The four drives were damaged beyond use, but the power supply looked undamaged, so we installed the one from the roadside and he now has his music machine working again.  

This morning I could not get my son to answer his phone and I did a little panic and drove down to  his (my) unit.  He is in poor shape with continual pain from Ankylosing Spondilitis and has spent a couple of days sleeping.  Not good!  He also has fluid retention in his feet, so I drove to Kwinana shopping centre to see if I could get a non-script diuretic.  The only available non-script stuff was an alternative off the counter product which I didn’t go for.  Tomorrow I will collect him and take him to his GP to get the real stuff.   The Kwinana Shopping Centre is a new building, very large,  serving the town of Kwinana.  The de rigueur is tatoos on arms and legs.   Sorry; not everyone there has a tat!  We, Joan and I, taught in Kwinana in the 1960s and every time I have occasion to shop there (very rare) I expect to see some ex-students and forget that they would now be in their early 60s.

Chef accidentelle

Last night I cooked a pickled beef silverside   I did it on a BBQ outside.  I calculated the cook time to be two hours and made up the usual blend of water, vinegar, pepper seeds and brown sugar.  Once it was at the boil, I set the timer, reduced the flame to a simmer and sat down with a glass of wine and watched TV.    I recall waking up in the chair at 10pm and staggering to bed.  I had slept through the timer alarm.

Around 4am I woke with a start and remembered the meat and dashed outside to find the beef cooked to perfection and the gas blown out by wind.  This morning I am eating sliced pickled beef on toast....perfect!    I will hide the remainders somewhere in the fridge as my son is visiting today and he loves silverside.

Yesterday I had three pleasant young university students come to collect a Mac computer each.  There was a bit of paper/scissors when the selection of computers and larger screens were lined up, but they were all most grateful.  That makes my project worthwhile.  These Macs were G5 towers given to me by my contact at an Australia-wide printing works.  Nice machines, liquid cooled with solid aluminium cases.  Almost a bit sad to see them go! 

Caveat Emptor

Over the past couple of days I have attended two Xmas ‘get-togethers’.   Can’t say that they were wonderful or even necessary and I guess I am becoming a grumpy old man.   I meet with four other friends weekly for coffee, snacks and conversation and that is good and enough for me.

An ex-student of mine, Sean, lives in NSW.  He rang a couple of days ago to tell me that he is soon to turn 50 and a group...family and some friends, are going to Phuket to celebrate the event.  I can’t remember turning 50!    He asked me to attend and I think I will.  Thanks for thinking of me Sean.

Yesterday I drove to a nearby suburb to buy an advertised camera tripod.  It was inexpensive...$30 and I asked if everything worked.  I was told that it was all OK. The young couple seemed pleasant and I later found that the tripod head was shattered and useless.  Fortunately I was able to made some rough repairs and it will do the job I had in mind.   I emailed the couple saying that they were selling under the umbrella of caveat emptor (buyer beware)  and whilst $30 to me is nothing, I felt sorry that $30. was so important to them.

visiting chef

Our daughter Helen cooked for me last night.  She brought over all the ingredients for a wonderful meal and all I had to do was the clean up and enjoy it with her.

Lamb cutlets with roasted cherry tomatoes in a red wine vinegar glaze and a potato, zucchini, green bean and fetta salad with roasted pine nuts, lemon, mint and olive oil dressing.     Accompanied by a local (Houghtons) bubbly.

Living alone doesn't inspire me to go to great lengths to present a nice meal and I guess most single people are in the same boat.

Outstanding!    Thanks Hel. you can come over and cook for me any time you like.

Artistic postcards

My friend Joy’s daughter is very artistic.  Only recently have I seen some of her paintings and lino prints.  The ones I have seen are mostly artistic postcards home after an event. A short text and the artwork.  I like them!

                                    Click the photos to enlarge them.

                      Hi mum, got home from Linda's funeral and painted this.  

To me, it's about the winds of fate, but also about how for the one involved, stuff scattered, shared or gone; but ended and those close; devastated. But to all down the hill, life as normal.

Got to have a cup of tea with the other sister today and apparently when Linda was in and out of consciousness she kept saying ‘its so beautiful but it's windy’ Interesting! 

A little lino print I did last weekend. My sweet daughter with the orange hair asked what the Milky Way looks like .

I was totally horrified.  She is eleven and didn't, like me, remember being a kid in the seventies and lying on front lawn, loving looking at the stars .

Couple of weeks later we had a holiday in York and both spent the night staring at the sky.... also a big tree with a swing. Lovely night.

PNGAssociation

Daughter Helen is recovering from the migraine attack.  She has a supply of a nasal spray named Imigran, which seems to give relief.  

Yesterday I joined about 40 other oldies for a reunion of Papua New Guinea expatriates who all belong to the PNGAssociation, an Australia wide organisation aimed at keeping people in contact so that they can get an opportunity to tell their stories to people who will be interested.  Many people are not too interested in old PNG stories.

The venue was a hotel reception room and we shared the room with another reunion of the class of 1962 of Kent St High School.  I was amazed to see my cousin Ted at the Kent St gathering in the same room.   The noise from around 80 people recounting past times was deafening.  

At 74 I thought I might be the oldest there, but there were plenty older than me.

I will suggest the next ‘get-together’ be at someone’s house so that it is easier to converse and move around.

Migraine

Yesterday was not one of my better days.   Daughter Helen had rung in sick at work with a minor migraine.  Later in the day she was woken with extreme stabbing pains in her head.  She rang me and I drove to her place and determined that an ambulance trip to the nearest hospital was necessary.  James her husband was out with one of their dogs at a vet.

I cannot recall seeing someone in such pain.  She could not think straight and was alternating between screaming and swearing.  I tried a cold compress without any relief as we waited for the ambulance.     James arrived home just as the ambulance turned up.  We got Helen out to the ambulance and it seemed ages as the ambos asked a series of questions which I felt was to determine whether this was serious enough to warrant and emergency trip to hospital.  I do know from sitting in the reception area of the Emergency Dept., that had I driven her to hospital she may well still be waiting for assessment and treatment.

After a CT scan of her head, two doses of morphine, a nasal administered pain killer and intravenous something, the pain receded somewhat.  Then came the nausea and vomiting which lost the last two painkiller tablets.   I could see improvement and so left Helen and James and came home.  She was discharged at around 9pm and given a script for some heavyweight painkillers which they filled on the way home.   Today is her birthday and tomorrow is mine.  We were to go out for a meal tonight, but I am not sure that would be wise.

                                                         Helen

A Busy Bee

I own a second story unit in a block of 18 in Orelia, south of Fremantle.  It is quite a nice 2 bedroom unit with a large deck.  Unfortunately Orelia has some major problems with youths invading such blocks of units by kicking in steel fences and jumping over walls.  Cars are damaged and anything of value not locked down is stolen.  Our son Martin is living in the unit.

There are 18 units in the block and some of the owners refuse to pay the Strata fees.  Whilst legal action has been taken on them, it is a long drawn-out problem and responsible owners have been hit with extra Strata fees to pay water bills etc.

The Strata management asked owners to attend a ‘Busy Bee’ this last Sunday with the idea of  cleaning up gardens, pool and gazebo areas.  Three owners turned up and we worked solidly for three+ hours.  Busy Bee is an Australian term for a group work session without payment.  Like me, the other two owners either lived in their unit or had family residing there.    

Mean spirited act on the part of the other 15 owners.

                                                    Not as nice as it looks

Techno tragic

I recently bought a secondhand 17” MacBook Pro for $150.  Love it...fast; great speakers, unmarked condition.    I have an iPad, but clumsy Kev has trouble doing one hand typing on a digital keyboard.  I have other laptops and desktop computers which I should give away or sell, but I am afraid that I am a techno-hoarder.  I still have an operational Beta VCR and 30+ movies (tapes).

The Australian Prime Minister has taken a hammering from the Indonesian President after it was disclosed that Australia has been spying on Indonesia and even monitoring President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s personal phone calls, including conversations between the Pres. and his wife.   PM Tony Abbott has not really apologised and the pressure is on to either give an apology and assurances that spying will stop, or relations between Aus and Indonesia will get very frosty. Already the Pres has cancelled all military cooperation with Australia and canned the deals made about boat people heading to Australia through Indonesia.

U.S. President Barack Obama was recently caught holding the ball about U.S. spying on Germany et al. and he immediately apologised and that seems to have calmed things down.  I think everyone knows that almost all nations are doing a bit of eavesdropping on friends and enemies.  China has been doing a bit more than listening in...it is claimed that Chinese agencies have been breaking into U.S. military networks.

Unless our PM apologises and promises to look into what is going on, the Indonesian public might well vote in a radical President next election.  Goodbye Bali!

The Bachelor

I declare that I have not watched ‘The Bachelor’ on TV.   What I see online and in the newspapers is enough.  This fellow is to choose his lifetime partner in a reality TV farce.  Imaging the sniggers at parties when the happy couple arrive.  

I can see the sense in online dating for desperate, single people and those not in the 5% of the beautiful.  Widows, widowers, divorcees, ungainly, unhandsome people need a place to hook up, but to win a partner on a nationwide, very public TV show....nah!

      Wait.... 'widower, ungainly, unhandsome person'....sounds like me!

                                    I guess a followup show could be The Divorcee.

                                                           Pick one mate.

                                            Sorry there's only one winner.

Tomato fails

I dabble at growing vegetables.  My tomatoes are healthy, but insects have attacked most  of the fruit making them mostly inedible.    They look OK as they hang there, but underneath the tricky little bugs have ruined them.  I spray all the new fruit with a gentle insecticide Pyrethrum.  The label advises that there should be a one-day withholding period before picking the fruit.  I notice that a second ingredient is Piperonyl Butoxide which is nasty sounding stuff which was the main ingredient of fly sprays in the 1950s/60s.

It is hardly worth growing tomatoes, when at this time of year here, they sell for $5. per box. 

There is no way that ‘organic’ and regular market garden tomatoes don’t get sprayed to keep the bugs off.  They, of course, use organic insecticides and managed insect control....Oh Yea?

Newmont Boddington Gold Mine

Yesterday daughter Helen and I drove to the Newmont Gold mine at Boddington.  We, and about 500 other people, were guests of the company which was opening the minesite to family, friends and partners of workers at the site.  The mine is 130 kilometres from Perth in Western Australia.  Boddington is an open pit mine,

Everyone was outfitted with safety gear and we boarded buses for a guided tour of the complete site.    Blasting was suspended for the day, but the mine was otherwise working.    There are two main pits, three crushing plants and a processing plant where the flotation method extracts gold and copper from the final finely crushed ore.  It was a great day.  I cannot remember all the figures of production, so I suggest you watch this YouTube presentation.

The campsite has much to occupy off duty workers which on average total around 1200.  Sports, gymnasium, a wet canteen and a very nice dry canteen (mess) with plenty of nice food. A couple of stats that I did remember were that the canteen did 300 pies per day and 1000 chickens a week.   Watermelon was talked of in tonnage.

We were invited because James, Helen’s husband, works there on a two week rotation (one week on; one off) The tour ended with a BBQ and salads and drinks. Good day!

Unfortunately there was a plague of bush flies.  They don’t seem as smart as city flies and were easy to slap down.

                                               Click photos to enlarge them

                                                         One of two pits

                                                             Dump truck

                                          Helen in front of Dump Truck wheel

                                                       Water truck

          The initial crushing plant which reduces the rock to football size

                                     Trucks tipping ore into initial crusher

                                                Massive cable shovel

                                           2.5 kilometre conveyor belt

'Tight Arse Traveller'

I have had a sudden rush of people turning up to collect free computers from my place and yesterday had a phone call from a chap who asked if I could come to his house to repair his PC.  I explained to him that I was not a PC expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would have a look at it for him.  He got my name from a librarian at his Public Library.  He was given my name and phone details and told that I repair and distribute computers.  I cannot imagine how the librarian had my details. 

When I went to his house we cranked up the PC and it made a noise which indicated that the RAM (memory card) was not working.  I brought it home and when I opened it replaced the RAM with one from my collection....bingo it now works.  The rear of the box was facing a window which he leaves open to the weather and it has rusted some of the exterior bare steel panels and I believe affected the RAM slot inside the box.  I took it back this morning and he was delighted that he didn’t have to call a real repair man.

                                               My RAM collection

He is 71 years of age...almost three years younger than me and could talk underwater. He is a self described ‘tight arse traveller’ having made many world trips on the cheap.  He flies at night so he doesn’t need a hotel bed; takes his own bowl and breakfast cereal and seeks out other travellers to share a room on the cheap.  On a recent trip he slipped into Burma for a look  and got out without being caught without documents.  Friends maintain that if he were caught and jailed, he would be in first class accommodation compared to his regular doss houses.

Good talking (listening) with him!

A not so wonderful day

Today has been a mixed blessing.   I joined my brother Graham for a lunch at a nearby tavern.   The food didn’t have the taste  I was used to; sort of like I experienced with my dear wife when she was going.  I have lost the ability to cook creatively (if I ever had it).

I came home and continued cleaning out residual memories from cupboards.  I found a package of sympathy cards from Joan’s  funeral.  I will have to find addresses for the senders to send them the URL for our family  blog to tell them how I/we are going. 

That was  very upsetting.

I have lots of people who support me in times like this, many of them ex-students of mine.  A young lady at the bottle shop I frequent is a most pleasant gal.  I enjoy her bright, young,  vibrant personality and I wish I could drain off some of it to me.

A room for visitors

Our son Martin is finally in to my unit at Orelia.  He has found that getting to work by bus is relatively easy, but costs him around $60 per week.   I had to remind him the fuel and associated expenses of running a car would be far more than $60 per week.

I had a full-on clean up of what was Martin’s side of my house and it is now ready for visitors.....if I had any... sniff sniff.  Sister Shirley can come stay with me next time she travels up from Esperance to hit the big smoke.

I recently lost my car in a large shopping centre car park.  Easy enough when most cars are silver and similar size.  I then thought that I would design an App for iPhone and name it ‘find my car’.    I did a search for iPhone Apps and there are dozens already available.  Too late Locky!