Last Xmas he took it apart…

Nov 032008

Last Xmas the daughter and son-in-law (plus kids) were here for a few weeks… not long enough really but that’s another story, but one of Mark’s best features (apart from really being good for the daughter) is how hard he works. Even on holiday it was hard to keep him still!

Something he did that was exceptionally useful was to repair the Strimmer, or Whipper-Snipper depending on which part of the world you live. Somehow the ‘pull cord’ snapped and he fixed it. The repair was pretty good. In fact it lasted the entire year… until a week or so ago when it finally failed again.

Because he’d done it last year I figured *I’d* have a go – I mean how hard could it be??

Off came the cover, and I discovered that unlike last year, what had happened was that the thing that turns the motor over had slipped off the thing holding the pull-cord (stop me if I’m being too technical ok?? ).

It looked incredibly easy to fix. All you need to do is lift up the pull-cord thing and reconnect it – yes? Dead simple. So I fixed it…

Well of course, I soon learned it would be dead simple to fix for anyone who wasn’t born with ten thumbs… and a jinx. For those of us not so well blessed what happens is that as you lift it up the spring inside, which you hadn’t noticed, suddenly goes ‘p-twang’, uncoils and goes shooting out of the gubbins in much the same way as a real-world version of a cartoon engine exploding!! There were bits everywhere.

Currently it’s in the repair shop.

While it’s away the grass has taken wild advantage of the situation and the lawns are already beginning to resemble backdrops to Tarzan movies… I’m expecting Johhny Wiesmuller’s ghost to come swinging out any day now.

I don’t think I’ll try to repair anything mechanical again. I’ll leave it to the wife… while I supervise.

Something’s bugging me!

Home and Hearth No Responses »

Oct 302008

Out in the garden last summer the air was green with these little bugs. They are around a centimetre long at their largest and seemed to be congregating from choice over the orange tree.

Little green bugs.

Clearly odd little sap sucking leaf hoppers of some sort but my dilemma is what to do with them? If I leave them they might ruin the trees, slowly weakening and killing it. They might ruin the fruit as well but since we only use a handful of the dozens of lemons the tree produces that isn’t an issue.

If I kill them off by spraying I might well kill off loads of the other little micro-wildlife we have creeping around the garden. I *do* spray cockroach killer around the doorways which must knock over things I’d rather keep but we have to balance some losses against the gain of keeping the yuckiest of beasties out of the house.

Still, we don’t spray in the garden or use pesticides other than scattering the occasional hundredweight of snail killer around – not that it makes much difference. We seem to be “Snail Central for the southern hemisphere. Despite decaying corpses and shells crunching under foot for weeks after a mass slaughter… next time it rains… out they come again in their thousands!!! C’est la guerre – at least they feeds the lizards.

Anyway, back to the subject. Has anyone got some suggestions?? Leave them?? Kill them?? Are they really a problem… or just food in the chain??

We seem to be back!

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Oct 292008

After an extended absense during which a large portion of the house was cleared of accumulated junk… as per pervious messages… I think it’s safe to come back.

Loads has happened in the world that’s worthy of comment but I don’t think I’ll be covering much of it, there’s been enough said as it is.

All I’ll say is thanks for the patience and let’s get on with it.

Spring into cleaning!

General Ramblings, Home and Hearth 2 Responses »

Oct 122008

A couple of months ago I decided it was about time I took our house ‘in hand’. I’ve done next to no real maintenance in years and my growing collection of the bloody useless has slowly mounted up until I couldn’t see the floor for the mess! Since it’s Spring over here I figured this was an ideal time to get on with it and so we did.

As in most houses, the larger part of the clutter is caused by things we haven’t used in years. These are things that would cost a lot to replace if we ever needed them, the emphais being on the *if*. Also of course they are things you can’t give away – even to friends! Eventually tho enough was enough and as the wife had taken a week off work we decided to attack the place. Ok *I* did… the wife just wanted a holiday.

So far, just out of our *bedroom* we’ve thrown away three bin bags full of rubbish mostly old clothes and shoes… but also a wide assortment of magazines, some of which have never been read but are so old the content has been superseded!

Also out of the bedroom went a lot of the computer gear that I’ve had stored in there since last Xmas when the ‘computer room’ was turned into a bedroom for the ‘guests’ (cough spit… ).

You may think so ok big deal… but amongst the detritus of 20 years of hoarding computing equipment were 12 working desktop computers, two laptops, and 4 half built computer carcases. All in the bedroom. As you can tell the wife is a very patient lady… either that or couldn’t care whether the house is clean an clear or not. I think I’ll opt for patient or I might become one!

Some of the stuff we shipped out (back to the ‘computer room) will be used in the long promised but not yet arrived ‘Great Grand Mega-Mammoth Garage Sale’ which we’ve promised ourselves for some months… but a lot was just dumped into the garbage bins – now filled to overflowing with four days before it’s emptied! In the UK we’d be imprisoned for having so much in it!!

Anyway, out went (or into the ‘Garage Sale’ pile) my collection of ‘legacy’ 5¼” floppy drives, 3½” floppy drives, video cards, CD drives, video/sound/LAN/etc cards, motherboards, 1Mb (and lower!) RAM strips at least three dozen power cables, printer cables, loads of LAN cabling, switches, 2 x 20 port routers, a dozen or so external modems and the like. Even my last Apple computer went out along with its printer, screen. k/b and mouse. Tho I’ve not even booted it since we moved in here and that’s 10 years!

The result of all this sorting is that at last we can see the carpet again!! Whilst this is a plus in some ways, we now realise it needs replacing so it’s a bit of a mixed blessing.

Naturally, with the sort of clutter we’ve accumulated, it’s not *all* gone. For example, I still have several tea chests filled with 5¼” and 3½” disks filled with programs and utilities that are now entirely useless… but I’ve had some of them 25 years and they represent a lot of history so they have been ‘hidden’ away. Also secreted is one of the laptops that runs Win 98, also an older desktop that runs Windows 3.1, and an even older ’286′… complete with green screen monitor’. Well… you never know when this stuff might come in handy do you?? Cheesy

This lot has been piled into the cupboard that holds my Drizabone… the one I wore around *London* in the ‘summer’ before we migrated… and that I can no longer fit into, and a huge pile of photos that I’ve promised myself to one day annotate and stick in albums… or at least scan into the computer… or something.

Will someone remind me in ten years that I promised myself I’d do it ‘soon’??

And so, I’m now having a 5 minute break before getting back to finish off tidying around the floors before I tackle the one remaining pile… my computer workbench. It’s also in the bedroom and is piled high with stuff I’ve not yet managed to bring myself to discard.

Next week…. the garage itself… maybe!!

Don’t mention the air-conditioning!

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Oct 092008

As you may recall I’ve been wittering on periodically about the breakdown of all our aircon machinery in both car and house.

You might also recall that I took the car to the service station to be sorted out and was told the system simply needed re-gassing to ‘fix’ it, and also had arranged for a tech to come and repair the house system.

Well two days after the car was repaired… the a/c is no longer working. Clearly they re-gassed the system, but… also clearly… nobody bothered to fix the problem that caused the gas to leak!! I can’t take it to be repaired until at least Tuesday because the wife is home on holiday and we’d actually like to be able to go places instead of spending the day sitting in a repair shop!! First Grrr….. !!!

Which brings us to the house system.

The a/c tech turned up, spent considerable time (maybe two hours) doing wonderful things like regassing the system and fixing leaks… only to *then* decide the compressor needed replacing, isolating the system and charging us $250 for the privilege. We expect to be charged anything between $2,000 and $5,000 for a compressor or entirely new cooling unit. That was two days ago and so far we’ve not heard anything more! Maybe they are just too busy to bother. Second Grrr…. !!!!

I fail to understand why nobody working on the car thought it necessary to establish there was no leak before announcing the ‘repair’ complete, and why the a/c tech couldn’t simply go and get a new compressor and install it there and then!

Basically it seems nobody feels it necessary to actually do a job *properly*! Except me of cours… if there’s one thing I *can* and do *do* properly it’s whinge! And having landed myself in do do again I’m away to get on with life.

The perils of daylight saving.

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Oct 062008

Daylight saving started here yesterday… and ended in the UK (or is it the other way around?) anyway the clocks went forward by one hour. Went forwards everywhere… except that is, at our house.

Normally I’m up coughing with the sparrows resetting all the timepieces around the house to the correct time which as you will know from previous posts takes ages because the number of clocks runs well into double figures! This time, for reasons I can’t explain I didn’t do it. Obviously this led to certain interesting side effects.

For example, yesterday morning my youngest daughter was due to go to Jamboree for the day. We knew the trip was laid on but in our usual chaotic manner had neglected to sort out where the pickup point was and what time. We knew the ‘day’ was due to start in Warragamba at 10:00 a.m. and it took about an hour to get there… so we figured if we started at our own Guide Hut at 8:30 that should give us time to wait to see if anyone else turned up and allow us time to zoom over the an alternate one if not.

As it happened, we left a little earlier than planned… and arrived at our hut (by our clocks) at 8:10 a.m…. just as they were all piling into the cars to leave! That was when we discovered the clocks had gone forward and it was actually 9:10 a.m. Had we put the clocks forward it’s quite possible we’d have missed them entirely! Oops.

So off she went anyway and had a great day meeting up with her older sister and enjoying herself immensely.

Of course being a ‘day trip’, we were to be there at 5:00 p.m. to collect her and bring her home. Were we there? Well since I ask the question you can safely assume we weren’t.

We’d gone home and made yet another start on clearing up the mess ready for the ‘Great Car Boot Sale’ I’ve been meaning to have since last Xmas and again forgot entirely about correcting the time on any of the dozens of clocks littering the house.

At 4:30 p.m. I went downstairs and for some reason decided to have a look at my phone… which showed a message had arrived. Assuming it was from my eldest daughter I was in no real hurry to look, so sat down and did other things on the computer first. When I *did* look… I discovered it was from the youngest saying the people who’d brought her home from the Jamboree were wondering where we were. The message was timed at 5:20 p.m. and it took a few minutes more of dissonance before daylight dawned and we ran for the door!

Chaos ensued.

Off we raced to the Guide Hut… we arrived… and they’d left presumably to bring her down to our house. We raced home… accompanied by a flashing panel light and incessant beeping letting us know we were almost out of petrol.

We get home and discover in our absence the daughter had finally decided to call the home phone number and left two messages telling us she was at a friends house and could we collect her from there please.

In true farce style we tried to get there as quickly as possible before the petrol ran out.

I’ll pass over the lunacy of driving up a road that had been ‘cut off’ and diverted by roadworks… and (after finally collecting her with some embarrassment) the idiocy of a U-Turn on the road to get back to a petrol station a kilometre or so away when there was a suitable one a hundred metres or so away over the brow of a hill, but forgotten about until it was too late to turn back… and carry the story on a little.

We topped up the car and to round off the afternoon asked the daughter if she’d like a McDonald’s for dinner while we had a salad… of course she said yes so off she trotted to buy one.

Five minutes later the wife remembered she’d promised her a BBQ so ran in to get her before her order was processed and we drove off home for the first BBQ of the year… despite the cold and the rain we had all day!

Gosh I was **so** pleased to be out there doing the cooking. I’d suggested waiting until *today* to have the BBQ so that we could share it with the eldest daughter who will be arriving home from Jamboree sometime today but of course I was ignored as usual. Charming!! In fact they both said… no worries… you can do another one tomorrow!! Hah!!

Oh yes. I mentioned the eldest daughter was returning home from Jamboree. Guess what??

We have no idea at all either when she’ll be coming home… or where she’ll be arriving! Here we go again.

(by the way – despite updating a few of our timepieces there are *lots* still waiting their turn!!!)

More on the weather.

Home and Hearth No Responses »

Oct 032008

I mentioned a few days ago that both the air conditioning in the house, and in the car had failed. I took the car in to be repaired this morning and left the house at 7:30 a.m. I looked at the temperature gauge and it told me it was already 27ºC. By the time I started the trek home. at 12:30 it was 37ºC… which is quite warm!!

No doubt we’ll have a storm soon to take the edge off the heat but I’m hoping this isn’t a sign of things to came. A summer with temperatures consistently in excess of 40ºC can be hard to deal with. I might end up spending a *lot* of time in the local library where the cooling systems can cope, because even at its best ours finds it hard to keep the house at a reasonable temperature under those extremes!!

But at least the car is fixed.

The house system should be fixed on Tuesday, and the pool heater might be done next week as well. Summer is icumen in.

Girl Guides – Jamboree 2008

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Sep 282008

Jamboree 2008 is in Tara, near Warragamba Dam and lasts from 27th September to 6th October. They ran from 1966 as ‘musters’ but the name was changed in 2001 to bring NSW into line with the other Guiding groups.

They’re held every two years unless there’s an international Jamboree happening and the kids love them! It’s a lot of work for the leaders and I’d like to put on record just how much us parents appreciate what they do for our kids, mostly entirely free of charge to us but often at high cost the them!!

This year the eldest daughter is supposed to be leading the singing of the National Anthem *and* the ‘World Song’ but the unfortunate sort of clash over dates that happen from time to time sees her having to take her black belt exam for Tae-Kwon-Do at the same time as she should be arriving at camp!! Erk!

We’re hoping we can encourage the examiners to test her early to allow us time to belt off (hah!!) to Tara and get her there on time. These things happen.

Still, either way we can look forwards to nine days of peace… and she can look forward to nine days of intense, if exhausting, fun and games.

Life changing experiences

Home and Hearth, Reminiscence, Terrorism 4 Responses »

Sep 122008

Most of the media commemorations of the 9/11 attack on New York were written and published yesterday… ours memory is slightly different so waits until today to write.

It was seven years ago this morning that I switched on the television. The wife was on a business trip and I never sleep well when she’s away so was up early. The sight that greeted me was a plane flying directly into the second of the two towers. I stood there for an hour hardly moving as events unfolded and more news came in of places ‘disappearing’, and the White House being attacked. Then the towers collapsed and like everyone else I was totally lost for words or any way of expressing what I was feeling.

For me the issue was more personal that many watching the dram because the business trip the wife had taken was to New York for the first time and I had no idea where she was in the city… and had no phone number to try to contact her on.

Neither of us were unaware of terrorism of course. Having lived in London and having survived a few near misses from IRA bombs over the years, we weren’t totally naiive about the possibility of being killed… but this was different, maybe because we were so far apart.

For obvious reasons it took a long time for her to call and reassure me all was well and she was in fact a long way from the centre. Nevertheless it was enough for me that she *might* have been sightseeing and *might* have got caught up in it all. Besides, there was no way of us knowing that she wasn’t caught up in some all out attack on the USA!!

She tried to leave immediately but again, with all flights cancelled it wasn’t an easy process. Eventaully she got a flight thru Japan and got to Oz safe and sound.

Thing is, despite her being in no danger whatsoever, we were both very traumatised by it all. Her company (IBM) did absolutely nothing to help her get over it and we’ve just had to cope. However, even now, all these years later, is something to do with 9/11 comes on the TV… she gets up and leaves the room.

Can’t say I blame her. When I look at footage of the buildings collapse or reports of new evidence and similr, *I* still get cold shivers up and down my spine thinking what could have been.

So this is my memory of 9/11 albeit a day after everyone elses.

‘Twas Fathers Day yesterday!

Home and Hearth 1 Response »

Sep 082008

Yes, yet another Hallmark Day has come and gone and I’m here to tell the tale! The kids outdid themselves… in some ways. In others, well same old same old. The eldest daughter bought me a clock… much as she did last year! Perhaps she thinks I have some sort of fetish? It’s a nice one of course as you can see, and it’s standing on my desk near last years… and the five others that are surrounding me.

Fathers Day 2008: Clockwork cloc

This one is really different in that it’s a real *clockwork* clock! Those gears actually tick away, so as the time turns they do! I like it

The youngest in a surreal frame of mind, bought me a giant fly. No idea what was going through *her* head either but she said she thought I’d like it and I do… I love it!! I like weird

Fathers Day 2008: Giant Fly

As you can see from it’s position on the outside table it’s really chunky. It can’t stay there unfortunately, it would probably tarnish really quickly. Hey… you can just about make out an image of yours truly in the reflection as I took the picture!

Talking of pictures, you might be interested to learn that they were taken with a Fuji FinePix S5800 which the wife told me I could buy myself for Fathers Day. There was no point her going out to get one for me – she knows from experience I’d just whinge about her getting the wrong one or something. Though new, the camera is actually an ‘obsolete’ model that I found at a reduced price. I’m not complaining of course, it will serve me well enough until we can afford a *really* good one! Ha!! Besides, as we all know as you walk out of the door with the brightest shiniest new model… they are unloading newer even shinier ones through the back door so you can’t win. This model last Xmas was twice the price I paid so I think I’ve done well.

The image quality is perfect for my limited ability with a camera and capable of producing more than adequate results. This for example is an image of a small rose I took on the way home after my morning ‘constitutional’ around 8:30 a.m.

Morning Rose

We spent the day doing very little, which is how I like it. We went for a walk to take the wife’s dry cleaning in, and out to buy the eldest daughter some acrylic paint for a project she’s working on, and in the evening played Monopoly – I won! A quiet day yes, and probably boring to some. But I was happy enough. I like being home with the family. So all in all Fathers Day was good for me.

Right now though, I’m setting off, camera over the shoulder, to see what I can find worth capturing on ‘film’ – if anything. Yes there’s a lot happening out in the suburbs but people get *so* suspicious of you taking photographs of them or their property!

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