Joan Lock

It is four years ago today that I lost my dear wife Joan.  We were together for 46 years, and I miss her every day.    We will share a bottle of nice Champagne tonight, as a celebration of our time together.  Daughter Helen will join me for a meal and no doubt, some tears.

                                       Joan in Bloom

Big Brother

As I look at ‘Sitemeter’, a program  showing where the location of readers of my blog are from, I see a major trend of readers searching for The Book Thief.   The hits for The Book Thief come from a wide range of countries.  Interesting!

Big Brother IS watching me.  I received this in an email from Woolworths' supermarket chain.  

I have a Woolworths reward card and so Woolworths have my details such as email address.   The items shown were purchased by me some weeks ago.  Do government agencies have this ability?

11th commandment

Yesterday I saw a small truck which had gone AO*.  I managed a snap with my iPhone as I passed it and noticed that it had a heavy looking small crane on its tray which possibly made it unstable trying to go around a corner.  Didn’t see an ambulance, so hopefully  no serious injuries.

Click to enlarge

I recently read about a famous neuroscientist, Vernon Mountcastle, who said that he will obey the 11th commandment....’thou shall not whimper as the darkness falls’.  He has not had to test his resolve yet.  I hope to obey the 11th commandment when my time comes.

*arse over

St John's Ambulance Service

Yesterday I had a visit from a nice ex-student of mine who has been an ambo for a number of years.  She had just come off duty and dropped in on her way home to have a sleep before recommencing duty at 5pm.   I asked her how she was enjoying her job.  

She finds it interesting, BUT sometimes dangerous and disheartening with the drunkenness and sometime violence of alcohol and drugs. Suicide and self-harm are not uncommon causes of callouts.

Paramedics are not in the upper levels of renumeration in dollars, however they are well regarded by most of the community.  She told me that weekends are the times when clients are at their most difficult. 

There is a Western Australian site on line where people can post photos of drivers who are poor parkers.  

An example I photographed a few days ago:  Click to enlarge.

I won't embarrass him/her by posting the photo.

Click here to visit the site on Facebook. It isn't too thrilling!

Australians to be executed

I use eBay for most of my computer bits; batteries, RAM, printer supplies etc.  When a product is supplied from within Australia there is usually no postage charged.  Even from China, no postage is charged, however if I order something from Britain or the U.S. a ridiculously high postage rate is slapped on even a very small article.  Can’t understand that and they get none of my business.

Example is a single DVD of a Mac operating system as shown here.....

click to enlarge

Two Australian men are soon to be executed in Indonesia for drug smuggling.  They have already served ten years and clemency has been denied by President Joko Widodo.  It is believed that the pair are making last minute pleas for clemency but the pres is standing firm.   Over the years other Australians have been executed in South-East Asian countries and the risks are well know.  In this case the Australia Federal police discovered the plot and told Indonesian authorities.  The Indonesia customs officials were waiting at Denpassar airport and nabbed nine people attempting to smuggle heroin out of Indonesia to Australia.  The two about to be executed were the ringleaders.  The other seven are still behind bars in Kerobokan prison which isn’t a Bali holiday hotel. 

I wonder who authorised the disclosure by Australian Federal Police.  Had they all been apprehended in Australia on arrival from Bali they would have faced jail for some years and not be in danger of execution.

I am confused as to what I should think about this death penalty. What these two young men wanted to do could have affected hundreds of families in Australia if the  drugs had been successfully imported into Australia.  I have close experience of the use of such drugs on a family.

Leg cramp medication

As a follow-up to my leg cramps story, my daughter Helen gave me some medication which seems to be working.    A couple of pics of the container, one showing the ingredients; so many that it looks as though they are trying to cover all the bases.  Something in there has got to work.

                                click pics to enlarge
I have just filled my car with petrol at 95.1 cents a litre, which included a 5c shoppers discount.  Hope it stays around that price for a long time.

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.

Stamp Tax rort

This morning I transferred ownership of my new car to me.  It isn’t a new car, but is only six months old and has done a mere 7,000 kilometres.     The transfer fee was a bit of a shock...$812.70. 

   

The state government is double dipping on the Stamp Tax.  On the purchase price of the car there is a Federal Tax (Goods and Services Tax), but when the state Stamp Tax is calculated, the GST is added to the price of the car and so everyone transferring a vehicle pays Stamp Tax on the GST.  How do they get away with that?

When I bought the car, the dealer gave me a fuel discount card....4c off every litre.   Trouble is that it is only redeemable at BP service stations.  In this state BP is the sole fuel refinery and it sells fuel to a number of different brand name servos who all sell fuel at far less than BP service stations.  Useless!

Reading, a thing of the past?

The main newspaper in Western Australia is not published on Good Friday or Christmas Day.  My late wife Joan was a voracious reader of books, magazines and the newspapers.  On the days preceding Good Friday and Christmas Day she would divide the newspaper so that she had something to read on those two days.  

When we worked in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s there was no television, mobile phones or computers and so we either partied or read for entertainment.  I confess I haven’t read anything much except technical manuals and on line information since our PNG days.  Our house has hundreds of Joan’s books in almost every room.  Books are getting hard to sell these days and I am unsure what I am (or my kids are) going to do with them.  Example is the huge collection of cook books Joan bought over the years.   I get frustrated trying to find a recipe in the books, but with just a few keystrokes can pull dozens of recipes for anything I feel like preparing.

Something to ponder....

New car

I picked up my new car today.  It is a Kia Optima, built by a cousin-company to my last car, a Hyundai.

Nice car with lots of goodies such as reversing camera and sensors as well as forward sensors which will help me get closer to the wall in shopping centre carparks.  

A couple of days ago I bought my son a small car at the other end of the scale for $1700.  He hasn’t had a car for five years and is enjoying his freedom from public transport.  I am hoping it will also allow him to get work off bus routes.

Is this going to be my last car?

The Festive Season

This ‘Festive Season’ isn’t so festive this year.  We have agreed to a no-presents Christmas Day.   Not sure if that will work.  I have a number of Christmas cards to which I haven’t reciprocated.

In the next few days I will write a synopsis of the better times of the last year and email it to friends.  I hope that my friends will not be too upset about not receiving commercial cards.

Government schools in Western Australia closed on Friday.  The students finished the day before.  At daughter Helen’s school it would seem that some students didn’t feel their school year was worthwhile and set the place on fire.  The damage should be repaired by the start of the school year in 2015.

Every year during school holidays, bush fires, vandalism etc increases.  Is it because school kids are bored during holidays?   I don’t really need an answer to that one.

Sydney hostages

There is a hostage situation in a Sydney cafe under way at the moment.  It seems that at least one Islamist has taken staff and customers hostage and forced some of the hostages to hold up the now infamous black flag at the cafe windows.

There are hundreds of state and federal police personnel surrounding the cafe and nearby buildings have been evacuated.  Roads have been blocked and a nearby rail station has been closed.  At this stage no communications between the Islamist(s) and negotiators have been disclosed.

Personally I believe this one will be a protracted situation as the cafe has plenty of food, drinks and toilets. If I were one of the hostages I would be worried that once world-wide media coverage has been achieved the ‘terrorist’ may well blow himself and the hostages up.

Whatever the outcome, he/they have done no good for integrated Muslim Australians.

PS: Tuesday morning.  It's over; three dead including the hostage taker.  Now comes some debate about how the two hostages died.

Online shopping

Over the last couple of months I have been buying items from an online store named Kogan.  They sell good, inexpensive products and are very efficient in their deliveries which are mostly free.   One item I ordered didn’t arrive on time and after three weeks I started emailing their help desk enquiring as to what had happened.  

They eventually sent me a notification with a photo of a signature at the time of delivery.  The signature was by someone name Michael.  They suggested that I ask the neighbours if there was a Michael in their houses.  I replied that I know my neighbours and nobody by that name lives nearby.

At this stage there was a bit of a stalemate.  I waited to see what was going to happen next, then a couple of days ago the young daughter of my neighbours rang my doorbell and presented me with the missing package.

The neighbours were having renovations by some builders and their garage was filled up with boxes and furniture etc.  Their mail box doesn’t have a number on it and my mail box is on the border between both houses.  

                            My house is on the right

The delivery man went to the wrong side of the mailbox and one of the builders signed for the package and put it on the floor amongst all the other stuff.  three weeks later the daughter noticed my name on the carton and delivered it to me.

I emailed the company explaining the details and we are friends again.