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.

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,

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.

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.

I'm Triple Vaccinated . . .

 Errors have occurred.

We won't tell you where or why -

Lazy programmers!

I have been ruminating for a couple of weeks about the timing of the booster vaccination which is recommended for five months after the second dose of the Covid  vaccination.  Initially the recommended wait time was six  months and I had an appointment for that with my GP's Medical Centre but with the advent of the Omicrom variant the recommended time has been reduced to five months which was, for me, yesterday.

I had coffee with D2 this afternoon at a stand-up coffee shop next to my pharmacy and I asked her, in view of the fact that there is no Covid-19 here in Western Australia, if I should get my booster after five months.  Her recommendation was to get it at five months, which was yesterday, so after she left to get her hair cut I popped into the pharmacy to find out my options.

I was told that they had been busy with vaccinations all day but that everyone had now gone and that there was one dose left which I could have if I wanted it. So I was vaccinated then and there and feel much better having made the decision to get it done early.

The State is going to open up on February 5 so it will be back to masks, social distancing, masks on empty trains and buses, Covid Koala back on the window sill and the hassle of contact tracing which is almost the only use I have for my Smart Phone (its other use is for banking) which is why I now, against all my instincts,  walk around The Centre with my phone in my hand  -  something which I vowed I'd never do.  

Parsifal managed to get himself shut in my saucepan drawer this afternoon  -  don't ask me how  -  and only alerted me when he started rattling the saucepans. 

The Limerick:-

Said a girl, "This may sound idiotic

But I find sex in cars most exotic.

I've always adored

Making love in a Ford

For I'm really quite auto-erotic!"

Four Months Without a Post

 Rather than a beep

Or a rude error message:

These words: "File Not Found".

We are back to computer haiku, an echo of a long distant past in lieu of the Life Gets Tejus verses.  Life is still tejus as Western Australia is still in almost total lockdown due to the Corona Virus.  We have had almost no cases here and those were mostly returning travelers who had to spend time in quarantine.  However, the lockdown is due to end in a month or so but with rules and masks and unvaccinated people will not be able to work.

I have finally mastered my banking under the new rules imposed by my new modem and limits on the amount I can pay from the account without having to use the Smartphone which I had to buy to get the authenticator in order to be able to do online banking (if you follow that) and for the most part it is now just as it was in the olden days.

I have also found out how to answer my Smart Phone; it is a swipe from the bottom left to the top right and the phone is also useful as I have my vaccination record available to show if asked when we come out of lockdown.  To download that I had to tackle the MyGov site which, hitherto, I had tried to stay well away from;  but needs must and I can now access all the injections I have had over the last ten years or so.

I am going to revert to limericks which I have used before as the anthologies have the best ones and the modern ones are rather crass

The Limerick:-

There was a young man of Cape Horn

Who wished that he'd never been born;

And he wouldn't have been

If his father had seen

That the end of the rubber was torn.

Computers are getting very frustrating

Technology is getting more and more frustrating and I am starting to get angry as it all seems to be geared to mobile phones and I have just spent a frustrating few minutes trying to get this font for the draft up to a size which I can read.  It is not perfect but not minute and in the final posting I can, hopefully get it up to size.

Yesterday I decided to renew my virus scanner as T/M has been reminding me for weeks that it was due in the middle of next week.  However, it needed my password and when I looked up my list I realised that I had encountered problems before because I had listed the password as B******* and although I could have probably made an educated guess I had not recorded the number at the end so I decided to get a new one.  No problem except that T/M refused to recognise it.  Tried again T/M sent me an email after thinking about it for about ten minutes and it went through so now I am death to viruses for a couple more years.

Today I needed to update a spread sheet as I always do at the beginning of the financial year but found that it had transferred itself from Microsoft to Excel (I know, but the computer thinks that they are different systems) so I painstakingly re-entered all the formulae only to discover that when I saved it that it had reverted to its original format.  I have saved the new template but am not holding my breath that next year it will not have decided to use some other format to confuse me.

However, I managed to marry my medicare number and my MyGov account and was able to download my vaccination records onto my new Smart Phone along with a certificate to show that I am fully vaccinated against Covid-19 even though Western Australia is just about the only place in the world where we are pretty well free from the infection except for returned travellers in quarantine.

The Limerick:-

A restless young lass from Leigh Creek

Went to Yemen and married a sheikh.

She said in a letter,

'My lifestyle is better,

And it's only my turn once a week."