Saturday, June 3, 2023

Trying To Get Regular again.

 The web site you seek

Cannot be located but

Countless more exist.

I am finally trying to get my life back to normal.  Since we came out of lockdown I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time visiting doctors, dentists and the like but so far I only have a long visit to my GP in the almost foreseeable future.

The knitting group carried on regardless but masked and a much-reduced lunch group reconvened this last week. I am not sure if there will be another one; we were down to three but nice to see old friends again.

My main problem at the moment is my earthworm farm.  D2 promised to regularly remove the worm castings but she seems to have disappeared.  I stopped feeding them as the farm was full and I threatened to put them in biodegradeable bags and dump them in a red-topped bin . . . but find that I cannot kill them so I am back to feeding them for the time being.  As it is winter here they will not cook if dumped so we will have to consider our options.  I will give it a bit more time before I bag them up and dump them.

My cats are going gray and I have put them onto a soft diet as I was getting fed up with cleaning up the up-chuck every morning.  It took them a few days but they seem to be enjoying the change.  One problem is that a lot of the supermarket cat food is tuna and Poppy, when she was only a kitten developed a tumour which analysis found was caused by too much tuna which would have been what her breeder fed her kittens on; I have never fed tuna to my cats.

The Limerick:

Mark Twain was a mop-heaqded male
Whose narratives sparkled like ale;
And this Prince of the Grin
Who once fathered Huck Finn
Can still hold the world by the tale!



Friday, March 17, 2023

NO LONGER GETTING BETTER

 Website has been moved

We'd tell you where, but then we'd

Have to delete you.

Yesterday I discovered that my IT provider has been taken over by a bigger one which leaves us here in Australia with very little choice and I had some trouble setting this page up.  Even now it is trying to out-think me about what I want for the page and is constantly correcting my grammar.  I am not happy, but no-one asked me . . . it just happened so I am going to have to get used to it or get off the internet . . . not an option.

So far, with a bit of tweaking it is doing as it is told but I am not holding my breath and it is going to be something of a learning process until it all becomes automatic again.  In the meantime I am correcting the computer's corrections.  Ah!  I have the option of ignoring the computer's suggestions; maybe we can work together after all.

THE  LIMERICK

"Tis my custom," said dear Lady Norris,
"To beg lifts from the drivers of lorries.
When they get out to piss
I see things that I miss
At the wheel of my two-seater Morris."




















Monday, March 13, 2023

THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME


No keyboard present

Hit F1 to continue 

Zen engineering?

Autumns is here and life is finally starting to settle down and I no longer wake up feeling frightened.  It is now eight months since my bank account was hacked and  I am managing much better than I did last July.  In the mean while the bank which I considered to be "easy" has changed things and has become difficult.  I use it for small transactions and suddenly it has altered its format and I had a great deal of hassle paying a small account.  When I finally managed to do the transaction I was asked to rate its new format.  I gave it four out of ten because the transaction eventually went through.  One of my daughters said that she awarded them two out of ten. That is one of our 'big' banks so people are going to have to deal with the changes.

Just when I thought that I was getting clear of medical appointments with only a tooth with "no roots" left to deal with, my doctor has suggested two shingles vaccinations and of course, the inevitable annual 'flu vaccination.  "sigh".

My little cats are both going grey; they are 13 years old.  Both are mostly eating soft food but that is more about me being fed up with cleaning up furballs first thing every morning.  They are both on pain medication now and Parsifal has gone all kittenish and bats his pingpong ball around the bath because it always rolls back to the middle  where the plughole is.

A couple of our erstwhile lunch group are trying to re-convene it but I suspect that there will only be three of us attending.  However, the knitting group is getting back to its pre-covid numbers which is really good and we took our masks off last week for the first time for years.  With winter on the horizon I suspect that they will be on again in a couple of months.

I have got back to spinning as I reaslised that I have a large amount of unspun fleece and quite a lot of spun yarn.  At one stage I had ambitions to spin enough fibre to knit a dress.  I don't think that I have the figure for a dress now but will spin it up and maybe knit two sweaters instead.

The Limerick:-

If it's magement men you pursue
Don't hunt every beast in the zoo -
Just look for the signs
That say: "Tigers and Lions."
It isn't how many . . . it's WHO.



Monday, March 6, 2023

Life is Slowly Getting back to Normal

 Everything is gone.

Your life's work has been destroyed.

Squeeze trigger? (yes/no)


Squeeze trigger?  Life has not been easy on and off in the last few months.  My kids say that I have PTSD and I need to see a psychotherapist.  It seems to be getting better so I will wait a while and talk to my doctor.

It started when my bank account was hacked but it really didn't affect me until I tried to get into B-pay and found that it all looked different.  Just a note to say that my bank was "down" that day and I needed to get one of the staff to put the payment through. Not a problem as the bank is just across the road but the staff member sort of growled at me while he did the transaction.  To do him justice he may have been having to do it all day but the time before last when I had a look the site was very messy.  Today it looks much more normal so maybe the bank has sorted thngs out or I am seeing it through different eyes.

Parsifal had to have a loose tooth removed a couple of weeks ago. It was a bottom canine and seemed to be dangling by a thread.  The vets do not like my cats any more than they like her and I had to laugh when a nurse came into the room dressed in long padded gloves and a full length padded apron.  I keep their claws clipped but it was probably a sensible move on her part.  Anyway, he has been much happier and is on a mostly soft diet and pain relief for his joints.

We are gradually opening up again after the Covid but there are still people wearing masks and we all wear them to the knitting group still.

The Limericks will probably be duplicates for the most part as they are either duplicated in multiple books or are definitely not suitable for a family page . . . or are among myfavourite and worthy of duplication.

Pygmalion said,"I'm afraid
I've fallen in love with my trade.
I'm much too elated
With what I've created
And, chiefly, this woman I've made.

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Today I took Covid Koala out of the window - but I am not holding my breath

 The code was willing!

It considered your request,

But the chips were weak.

That is about right, too.  Over the last year my computer has changed considerably and I am once again feeling my way through the abyss.

The computer was hacked last July and the effect on me was not good.  I found myself in a real lather whenever I needed to do any financial transactions and although everything went as I wished I found the two-step verification a pain and I had to buy a new, fancy mobile phone to enable it.  Now that I have mastered it I have found that I am mostly not asked to do it.  Luckily I do not use Medibank or Optus so it could have been worse.

The reason I am back to writing this Blog is the information that a friend still comes in and reads it sometimes.  And I guess that it is a record of what I am doing; nothing much at the moment . . .

A lot of time has been spent catching up on medical stuff but yesterday my ophthalmologist decided that the right retina which he has bee obsessing about for years is stable and he will check on it in two years which is a huge weight off my mind as I always thought that it was not necessary . . . but he is a retina guru so I suppose that we must pander to obsessions.

Like the post which I wrote about a year ago  -  it is still hot; 39 degrees today.  My cats are going grey and are limping a bit but there is a new arthritis injection for cats which I shall investigate although I think that it is a bit early to go down that road but I have put my Vet on notice about it.  It is a once-per-month deal and obviously once I start down that road there will be no gpoing back.  I'll stick to the oral anti-inflamatory medication for the time being.

I think that I have exhausted the funny but respectable Limericks so I will be repeating myself as the writing of Limericks seems to be  lost art but here goes:

There was a young lady of Ryde,
Whose locks were considerably dyed.
The hue of her hair 
Made everyone stare;
"She's piebald, she'll die bald" they cried,


Tuesday, January 4, 2022

I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas

 For a new PC,

Centre of my universe,

I abandon all.

This Christmas was HOT and things do not look to be improving greatly over the next week.  Here are our temperatures over the Christmas week:

Christmas Day  -  42.8 degrees
Boxing Day  -  43.5 degrees
27-12-21  -  41.0 degrees
28-12-21  -  40.7 degrees
29-12-21  -  38.0 degrees

. . . and it is about to start heating up again.

However we were lucky  -  my air conditioning is very efficient.  A fairly large swath of Perth had no electricity at all for about four days; no cooling: no refrigerator: no hot water: no lighting: no fans . . . it must have been a nightmare for those poor people.

The family all came around here for lunch and afterwards we played a very funny, very rude game with black and white cards.  I do not know the name but anyone who has played it probably knows what I am on about.

We are back in lock-down of a sort:  we have to put on masks to even walk out of our Apartment doors, use the tracking App and keep our masks on in company so the three of us who attended the knitting group today all wore masks for the duration and compared the pros and cons of the ones we were wearing.

I have been triple vaccinated so I have done all I can and will get a fourth one if given the opportunity.  D1 has a cold but two rapid antigen tests have come back negative so hopefully they are accurate as she lives in New South Wales where things are not good.

The Limerick:-

The Limerick is callous and crude,
Its morals distressingly lewd.
It's not worth the reading
By persons of breeding;
It's designed for the vulgar and rude.

Saturday, December 25, 2021

Covid Koala is back on the windowsill

Chaos reigns within.

Reflect, repent, and reboot

Order will return.

(24-12-21) As of seven pm last night there is a Statewide mask mandate due to a French backpacker who flew into the State, just before the border clamped shut, and proceeded to visit cafes, nightclubs and other crowded venues.  He had tested negative to Covid before he flew in from Queensland and unknowingly infected five people.  Fortunately he used the SafeWA App so his contacts are being trace and tested.

The Mask Mandate will continue until 28 December and will then be reviewed.

*  *  *

I took a break after the last paragraph and it is now Boxing Day.  We are in the middle of a heatwave; yesterday the temperature was 42 degrees and today is predicted to be 44 degrees.  I have very efficient air conditioning so it was good that the family all came to me for Christmas day.  After lunch we played a game which GB2 brought: very funny and not limited by such things as the number of players or political correctness.  I called a halt at 5.30 when Parsifal emerged to tell me that he was hungry and that it was past his dinnertime.

D1 and I had arranged for her to Skype me when she arrived home from her Christmas party (she is three hours ahead of us here in Perth) but I kept getting "slow connection.  Try again later" when she called me, so I tried again but no luck and this morning tried D1's mobile number and eventually reached her on the landline.  Obviously since the whole of Australia seems to be in lockdown now all the lines were busy.  It was a pity that the whole family were unable to get together but . . . maybe next year.

I have a wet towel over the poor worms as they are out on the balcony.  It could be worse; my balcony faces South but the air is stifling and no change in sight as far as I have heard and no sea breeze either.  Hopefully all the arsonists are sleeping off their 
Christmas dinners as the sky is clear of smoke.

The limerick:-

I knew a young lady named Clair
Who possessed a magnificent pair.
Or that's what I thought
'Till I saw one caught
On her brooch and began losing air.