Life gets tee-jus (2)

My shoes untied but I don't care
I ain't a-figurin' on goin' nowhere
For I'd have to wash and comb my hair
And that's just wasted effort

(Recorded by Walter Brennan)

For a quiet life in lockdown the last week has been surprisingly busy.  On Monday evening I realised that one of Poppy's last teeth  -  a bottom canine - was hanging quite literally by a thread and the tooth was sitting outside her top lip but sometimes pointing up and sometimes down so I decided to take her to the vet the next morning and and have it removed.  Knowing how they both react to the vet I decided to give her a sedative.  As she resisted having her mouth opened I knocked the tooth and it fell out.  It was HUGE.  She was ecstatic that she was rid of  it and galloped around like a kitten.

Then the day before yesterday Parsifal started vomiting all over the apartment; mostly bile (fur balls) and it stains so I spent a lot of the morning cleaning up and by evening I realised that he was not using the litter tray so yesterday morning I phoned the vet, dosed him with a sedative and took him in two hours later.  He was not sedated enough and ripped his clipped claws down my hand; blood everywhere.  The vet and I  decided that he needed more sedation so I brought him home for another pill.   Then yesterday afternoon, using a very devious manoeuvre she anaesthetised him and did a thorough physical examination  including X-ray, heart, lungs and abdominal palpation before pronouncing him constipated but healthy.

He was still asleep when we got home and Poppy was convinced that he had been out on the town without her and growled and spat at him whenever she saw him.  Only now, 24 hours later, will she let him  even approach anywhere near her.  Now I have realised that Poppy is also constipated so they were both given a laxative with their evening meal.  And they are both curled up together finally to sleep.

The Limerick:-

To the nun said the priest drinking gin,

"Drinking gin is a terrible sin!

My condition is chronic

But I do need the tonic,

And something to put tonic in!"

Life Gets Tee-jus. (1)

 The sun comes up and the sun goes down

The hands on the clock keep a-goin' 'round

I just get up and it's time to lay down

Life gets tee-jus, don't it?

 (Walter Brennan recorded it but I do not know i he wrote it) 

My feelings exactly and now the Blog format has changed again and I am trying to find my way around the new one;  I don't need any more changes in my on-line life just right now.  The thought of paying bills still sends me into a cold sweat and now my printer has died.

I bought another one but when I started to read the installation instructions I got that cold sweaty feeling again so I have called on SIL and GB1 for help.  As SIL said, I could certainly do it on my own (probably he is right but . . .) -  and the document which I need to print arrived in some unknown format and I can't copy and paste it so I have sent it to another email address for safe keeping.  At least I can still email . . .

I ordered some carpet runners  -  12 metres of them  -  so that the cats' paws do not get damaged as they get older.  They arrived this morning and Poppy thinks that they are fine but Parsifal is avoiding them and jumps over them if he needs to cross over.  They are not very beautiful, being basically brown but so is the apartment so they look the part.

We are still in lock-down although the only Covid-19 cases here have been returned travelers and our border is still firmly closed so there are not many of those and they all have to go into quarantine.  We are all keeping social distancing but no-one is wearing masks.  I have mine ready for if they are needed.  There is talk of opening the border before Christmas so maybe we will have a first wave here and I will get to wear my masks eventually.

The Limerick:-

God's plan made a hopeful beginning

But man spoiled his chances by sinning.

We trust that the story

Will end in God's glory,

But at present the other side's winning.

 

Person Woman Man Camera TV

 Anyone who follows USA politics will recognise the title to this piece; it was supposedly a part of Mr Trump's Montreal Cognitive assessment.  When I was working in a psychiatric facility people were asked to punctuate the phrase "no ifs ands or buts" which, in my opinion is a trick question because the "and" stands in place for a comma and therefore a capital at the beginning and a full stop at the end would be sufficient but I think that the I was asked to read and recall the words when I did the test so maybe a couple of Oxford commas would suffice.

However, we are on the subject of cognition and last Saturday D2 and SIL came here with jump leads and trickle charger to try to get D2's silver classic Porsche up and running.

For years I have been babysitting a varying number of D2's classic cars, two Porsches and a classic VeeDub. A few weeks go the order went out that the secure parking to the Apartments was scheduled for cleaning and all cars needed to be removed for the duration.  As the silver Porsche which I was minding had a flat battery D2 brought the battery from the red Porsche which did not fit the slot but she connected it anyway and as the battery was in the boot (which is at the front) there was plenty of room for it.  All went to plan, the car was relocated for 24 hours and then back into my parking slot.

However, trouble struck when she came to return the batteries to their rightful cars; the bonnet had jammed the battery was flat and she was not able to do the exchange.  She consulted SIL who had two suggestions:  (1) recharge the battery through the cigarette lighter or (2) attempt to jump-start the car since the motor was in the back and therefore accessible.  I should add here that access to the residents' parking is via tight corners and a steep, narrow tight curve with no room for a flat-back truck and towing is illegal.

Shortly after these desperate attempts were to be tried they came back up to my apartment and told me that all had been fixed the batteries had been changed over and the car was operating just fine.

In trying to open the bonnet, D2 had been pulling the wrong lever.

The Limerick:-

I have posted this before but it is very clever.  This Limerick was posted in the Classified Ads of a London paper and it was a while before the public penny dropped:-

An Anglican curate in want of a second-hand portable font would exchange for the same a portrait (in frame) of the bishop-elect of Vermont.

A little Less light Now.

 I have fixed the blinking light on my fixed-line phone.  Once again I had to search the internet, ask pointed questions and then choose the simplest solution which worked and now I have the proper steady light which blinks only when the phone rings.  Not that it has rung very often and mostly it is people trying to persuade me that there is something wrong with my internet connection.  Since there were a couple of unanswered calls registered and which my phone identified by their number I was able to trace the calls to China, which figures, from the accent of the "technician".

For some reason all the cold calling spammers are convinced that Telstra rules the phone lines and that Telstra is going to disconnect my landline within 24 hours.  They do not seem to have realised that Telstra is not wireless and that if the telco disconnects my cables they would be cutting off the internet which they would be providing.

And my new mobile phone ran out of charge and would not re-boot once charged.  The only thing which the "how to" manual actually gives information about is how to turn it on again if it becomes unresponsive and that worked as well so I am learning all manner of new skills.  It has all been something of a wild ride and all I now have to document is how to delete the unanswered calls on my landline phone.  I have already done it twice but it is all a bit hit and miss so I need to write it down to fix it firmly in my mind.

Hopefully my final hurdle will be next week when I have to turn off my "computer" (for that read modem) for three consecutive nights while technicians check the connections of the shops below.  I used to turn off my last modem with gay abandon whenever a thunderstorm was in the offing but after the last few weeks I do not trust the new one to behave itself when I turn it  on again. That is an indication of how bruised I feel since the NBN was installed but I can always call Techie to fix it again.

The Limerick:-

Of a wounded war hero I sing

Coming home from the war in the spring:

Oh, he may have been lame

But he came just the same,

A discharge is a wonderful thing!

We Shall Overcome

. . . and this is not just floundering around trying to find out how to write a new Blog Post in the new format (which I have already forgotten but I think that it is a link which appears when I click on 'Posting as pinkozcat' .  It seems that every new 'improvement' on the internet involves searching and extra clicks.

What I am referring to now is my ongoing battle with my i-Pad which has steadfastly refused to recognise my fingerprint ID when I have needed to download a new app;  I even resorted to taking myself into the city at one time to the apple Shop to download something which I deemed essential.

Today I tried, in vain, to download the Chrome App and eventually went into google and asked some pointed questions.  The reply I received was easy, worked and should have been included in with such information as using one of my cats' paws or a spare nipple should I feel like stripping off whenever I needed a new app.

Here is what I did, following the newest instructions:-

Launch 'Settings' App
Navigate to 'Touch ID and Pass-code section 
Turn off toggle for 'I-tunes and App Store'
Re-boot the device (i.e. turn off at the switch at the side and count to 20)
Turn i-Pad on again
IT  WORKED

So simple and yet it seems to be one of Apple's deepest, darkest secrets never to be divulged to frustrated i-Pad users.

The red light is still flashing on my land-line phones but I can phone out, receive calls and the answerphone works so I am not too fussed.  I gather that I have to contact my NBN provider to get it switched off but I am putting that off until I recover from multiple repeats of "My voice is my password".

And the Limerick:-

Whenever a nun's feeling wild
She keeps herself quite undefiled
By thinking of Jesus, 
Contagious diseases
And the bother of having a child.

A little light at the end of the tunnel

Techie came yesterday and networked all my computer stuff and, hopefully, things will now work as they should.  I woke up at 4.30am yesterday morning in a muck sweat because I was going to pay an account but throughout the whole debacle Macquarie Bank has allowed my payments to go through with a minimum of fuss even when things were in a shocking muddle -  and Kobo has relented and is allowing me to load books onto my e-reader again.  It has taken about four weeks to get everything sorted so fingers crossed.

I am sort of getting to almost like my new mobile phone and today I bought it an overcoat and screen protector.  This shift is probably due to the fact that Techie suggested that the blinking lights in my fixed-line phones was because their batteries are about to fail. I have ordered more, noting that their warranty is just three years and it is just three years since I bought the last lot.  Hopefully they will keep the fixed-line phones working for a while as I have had enough of electronics to last me for now.

My birthday dinner had to be cancelled because I had a bad reaction to some new medication so it is going to be this Sunday instead.  In order to network my system I had to identify myself to my internet provider and that included voice recognition and stating my full name, address and birth date.  When I got to my Street name I received an incredulous sound on the other end of the phone and had to spell it.  It is unusual and apparently Italian and no-one quite knows how to pronounce it.  At the end of the transaction the operative on the other end of the line wished me a Happy Birthday.  :)

And speaking of addresses, last Friday I received an express package with the most garbled address on it and delivered to me because the only correct part was my full name and the street address although the number was a Chinese restaurant and when I opened it the sender believed that I had requested some special Optus cabling.  I checked that the Optus outlet downstairs was the Unit requesting the cabling and delivered the whole package to them.  I haven't heard anything further and my attempt to phone the sender produced no results.

The Limerick:-

There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time;
When asked, "Why the third?"
He replied, "One's absurd!
And bigamy, sir, is a crime."

O frabjous day!

After two weeks hanging off the telephone to my Bank I think that things are finally sorted.  Some light crept in on the problem when I found that I was two people and I was locked out when I gave the wrong answers to a security question because the question was set by Person 1 and I had morphed into Person 2.

We have now killed off Person 1 and my test money transfer went through without any problems.  So I need not have bought my so-new mobile phone for which its 'book of works' is still pending.  No doubt there will be a time when I will not regret having spent all that money although SIL says that it should be a tax deduction because I need it for my banking.

I would like to say at this juncture that the 'help people' at MacQuarie Bank have been, throughout, friendly and helpful and although we seem to have come full circle I will be endlessly grateful for their help and patience.

I realised a couple of days ago that my drivers' license was due to expire next week so I made a trip to the Department of Transport by the first free train, figuring that so early on a Monday morning in such horrible weather there would not be a crowd.  There were some people ahead of me and a queue was forming by the time I had organised a replacement so that is another tick off my list.  There are a couple of things pending on my to-do list but nothing urgent and nothing as difficult as my on-line banking problems.

D2 has moved her car out of my secure parking place because the secure parking areas are going to be cleaned tomorrow.  I was too tired yesterday to help her with getting a new battery installed and cleaning the greasy drip trays.  Her cars are all incontinent so the drip trays are essential.

I am still in semi-lockdown and everyone is very good about not getting too close and there are bottles of hand sanitiser at the entrances to all the shops and all the shopping trolleys and baskets are sanitised before being handed to me.  Western Australia still has a closed border and D1 will probably not be able to come to stay at Christmas time which is sad.  Maybe next year.  Anyone coming into the State must quarantine for 14 days.

The Limerick:-

This is an old one but so good that it bears repetition . . .

I sat next to the duchess at tea,
It was just as I feared would be.
Her rumblings abdominal
were simply phenomenal,
And everyone thought it was me.