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 |   The simplicity of my day to day. |
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This is where I write my thoughts, feelings and my daily trials, tribulations and happy things
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| What are your feelings on daylight savings? Do you think it still has a purpose or is it time to end it? Oh goodness this subject come up every few years or so. Here in the West of Australia we don’t have daylight savings any more after many trials. Oh, the for and against arguments get quite heated. Faded curtains, confused cows and other off the chart ideas all have had an airing. The Eastern states still have to contend with it each year, leaving a three hour time differential between one side of the country and the other. I have always hated it. I’m always so pleased to see the sun go down as early as possible in the summer here. After days in the high thirty to forty degrees we need a few hours of darkness before bedtime. I’m not aware of the time differences in the US and which states have daylight saving thrust upon them, or what the general consensus might be. Perhaps someone could enlighten me. Maybe some people think it’s great but it’s not for me. |
| Prompt:Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to success is to try just one more time.” Thomas Edison Do you give up easily? why do you think some people quit at the beginning of a mission or project? And/or What is Edison trying to tell us? I don’t really think of myself as a quitter but I certainly know my limitations. I’ve been a person who has always enjoyed a reasonable level of fitness despite my issues with skeletal problems. My spine has been a trial ever since being young. I think though it has been having a bad back which spurred me on to try to overcome it. Recently I attempted to get back to an exercise class and after three goes I had to admit I couldn’t do it, it was too much for my many ailments. So I gave up! Much to my disappointment. As I write this I’m waiting to see yet another specialist to see if a magic cure can be found so I don’t end up incapacitated for the rest of my life. So I don’t give up easily but sometimes the universe has a different plan, doesn’t it? |
| Use these words in your entry: play, madness, time, mind, pray, slice, dice, and March. I love the sound of the word March. It reminds me of armies, striding out, their big boots crunching on gravel. March is the first day of Autumn here in Australia. That doesn’t mean that summer will suddenly turn off the heat, but the days are shorter. The plants somehow know the season has changed and begin to breathe a sigh of relief. March reminds me of Mad Hatters and madness. Madness reminds me of a time when mental illness was referred to as madness. We have a lot of ‘madness’ in our family. I often pray for a miracle but I think instead I should pray for understanding but it’s a big ask. One needs to always be aware of sudden changes in mood and to remain calm whilst being berated. Sometimes I take on different roles. Usually I’m just mum, but at other times I play the wise counsellor or just a friend but which ever the way you might choose slice and dice it, the problem never goes away. |
| Use these words in your entry today: sunshine, bananas, coconuts, monkey, tropical, treasure chests, and time travel. My favourite pastime when I was a child, was reading. There were always lots of books in the house. I can remember many of my most-loved titles but there were many books which belonged to my brothers. I’d pick them up and skim through the thousands of words and would decide these stories weren’t for me; Biggles with his scarf and flying goggles in his open cockpit aircraft did nothing for me. But there was one book which I found thrilling and not a little scary. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. On the cover was a treasure chest, palm trees loaded with coconuts and a monkey carrying a bunch of bananas. Of course I knew by the title this was an adventure taking place on a tropical island. To a little girl in a house in freezing cold England the thought of sunshine and warmth made me wish I could time travel to Treasure Island, back to the days of pirates, treasure and excitement. Long John Silver scared me and The Black Spot actually kept me awake at night. I ought to read it again one day.  |
| Prompt: Describe what home looks like for your Blog entry today. Home is an interesting concept. Do we mean home in as much our country is home? Or do I, as I sometimes do, mean the place where I was born rather than where I’m living now. I know, when I’m feeling really sad or needy, I remember my childhood home in the UK and my mother, so long departed. I surprise myself once when I was distraught about a terrible event, I cried for my mother and heard my saying, ‘I want to go home,’ I hadn’t lived in England or with my birth family for decades and yet deep within my soul it was there, with them, that I wanted so desperately to be. My home here in Australia at the moment is our fourth house since being here. We arrived in 1972. Each home has been different and suited the different needs of the family. Now it’s just my husband and myself. It’s a small recycled brick home we built especially for our retirement. It suits us very well. It is set way back off the road and passing traffic. It’s thirty kilometres from the city. Our eldest daughter lives twenty minutes away in her showroom quality new house. Her home is pristine, modern and gleaming. Our house is a bit shabby now, but as my husband says it fits us like an old shoe. |
| Prompt: What do you like doing the most, these days? What do you not like? Does it make sense to hand off some of those things that you don’t like as much, if you have someone to hand them off to? These days I like to be home. I used to love walking each morning with my dog but my arthritis has put a stop to that. Even my dog who is twelve now is content to stay at home. I like to stay local and go for coffee with friends. These meetings usually end up being two to three hours long. My husband asks me what we talked about for so long and I really have no idea! Recently I have found the joy in writing again. I sort of lost it for a few months and decided I’d written everything there was to write about. I don’t like clothes shopping any more. It’s not that I don’t love something new to wear but aI find the crowds and the atmosphere of the big shopping malls to overwhelming. Now I like to shop on line. It’s always exciting when a parcel arrives. It feels like Christmas. I don’t like cooking either any more. I used to love feeding a large family but now it’s just the two of us, I don’t get the same joy from it. My husband is not a food lover, so he’s not much trouble to feed, although he always says ‘that was nice,’ even when it’s a scratch meal. I like seeing my family come to visit, especially my eldest daughter and her husband. They spoil their old mum and dad. |
| https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-study-finds-relying-on-ai-kills-your-critical-thin... "Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that the more humans lean on AI tools to complete their tasks, the less critical thinking they do, making it more difficult to call upon the skills when they are needed." I've included the article as well if you want to read more. How concerned are you that more and more of our younger peers have become dependent on AI? Do you use AI yourself? I’m very concerned about AI in general. I know it’s been around in many forms for years, think spell check. And I’m aware it’s going to be wonderful for helping scientists find cures etc, but we’re all starting to depend on it more each year as it becomes bigger and better. The trouble is we’re beginning to believe everything it churns out is true and accurate, we’ve become less likely to question. Of course the children and young students are going to use it, it’s inevitable. The teachers are going to have to find ways of using AI as a teaching aid. Allow the students to access AI and then ask them questions, discuss the information together until there is an understanding of what they’ve downloaded from AI sites. There’s no running away, it’s gone too far already. |
| Prompt: "Difficult and meaningful will always bring more satisfaction than easy and meaningless." Maxime Legacé Do you agree with this quote? How about the combination of easy and meaningful? It has always seemed to me to be true that if something I’ve achieved was difficult to do, then I appreciated it more than if it had been easy. I think if it’s been a struggle and I’ve had to put in a lot of effort, when I’ve reflected on the challenges I overcame then I have been proud of myself. Most of those difficulties have been to do with renovations to our home at the same time as caring for three small children. In those days I never seemed to sleep. The nights were always broken by one child or another. We were living without a washing machine and I was washing cloth diapers in the bathtub. The house was being renovated by ourselves so every spare time was spent in what seemed to be a building site. This was a very difficult period, we had very little money and no family. We knew no one in our new country, but we eventually fixed up the old house and we all survived. It is something I feel proud of and it gives me satisfaction when I think about that time. I learned so much about myself. I taught myself to brick pave, paint and decorate a whole house and care for two babies and a three year old at the same time. Would it have been easy and meaningless if I’d had a nanny to care for my children and a team of professionals to renovate the house? |
1969 – The last issue of the “Saturday Evening Post” was published. It was revived in 1971 as a quarterly publication and eventually six times a year. What was your favorite publication as a child/teen. Newspaper comics, perhaps, or a magazine, etc? Does it still exist? What was the draw for you? When I was a very small child in the UK, it was wartime. Money was scarce and there was certainly none to spare for comics. But after the war perhaps around 1950 my brothers and I were allowed to have comics each week. These would be delivered to our house with the newspaper. There were two which I remember so well, The Dandy and The Beano. I can remember all the characters in the comics, two I especially remember; Desperate Dan and Dennis the menace. Sometimes there’d be a free gift included to be fought over. At Christmas time these comic books were published as an annual, a hardback book which would get read over and over, many times during the year. I don’t think they are being published any more, and probably wouldn’t appeal to today’s generation of children, they’d be too tame. |
On a recent trip to see family, we celebrated by going for dinner at a very expensive seafood restaurant in Cairns. We ate outside under a galaxy of stars and I felt the luckiest person in the universe. The evening was still really warm after an extremely hot day. The air was almost thick with moisture as the humidity had been as high as ninety percent that day and the temperature over thirty four degrees centigrade. I hoped the seafood had been not left out at anytime as food poisoning was something I certainly didn’t want to experience. My son assured me the restaurant was one of the best in Australia and I was told ‘don’t panic, Mum.’ We enjoyed the meal and the service and best of all I enjoyed the ultimate pleasure of being with all three of my adult children. |
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