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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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| 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. |
Prompt: My favourite Valentine My favourite Valentine was one I received when I was fifteen. At school I was far from being the popular girl. I never felt I belonged. I think the reason being that I missed so much school. I was needed at home. We ran a delicatessen and when I say ‘we’, that meant my seventeen-year-old brother, me and my mother. My father and other brother worked at a factory during the week. So that was the scenario. Across the road from us lived an eighteen-year-old boy who was smitten with me. Me! A girl who had never had a boyfriend. Anyway this boy joined the navy and whilst he was away, sailing in some foreign waters, he sent me this lavish Valentines card. Satin cover, about a foot long, covered in hearts, cupids and roses. He’d written beautiful words and poetry using pink ink! I think we’d only exchanged one kiss before he left. So of course I took it to school. For one day I knew what it felt to be envied. No, I didn’t end up with this guy, I didn’t even like him, but he did me the biggest favour ever.  |
| We're one month into 2025, what are your thoughts on the year thus far? 2025 seems to be exactly the same as 2024. The ramifications of the election of a new President of the USA are yet to unfold. Although I live in Australia, I feel President Trump’s decisions have the potential to have widespread effects. We are experiencing extreme weather conditions here. Floods, record temperatures and terrible fires have caused havoc and loss. I wish I could be more optimistic for 2025 but I can’t. Here in my country, far right radical groups are targeting the Jewish communities. Anti semitism is on the increase which is very unsettling and I’m not confident of a better future. Personally the year so far has been a very mixed bag. The bright spark has been travelling a very long distance to visit family. I didn’t think I would be well enough to make the four flights and five hour drive, but I did it! So happy I did and was able to bond with my little grandson. Writing took a definite back seat for weeks. Everything here comes to a halt in the Summer. All classes, whether it be choir or my writing group, close for eight weeks, so it seems as if I’ve been marking time. Even WdC has failed to inspire but I’m hoping I get my mojo back and can start writing again in February. |
| Use these words in your entry: February, love, hope, and joy. February is the hottest month here in Western Australia. It’s also the month the children return to school for the start of the new school year. I always feel so sorry for them. After seven weeks of freedom, no homework, or studying, only to have to spend weeks of temperatures in the high thirties, sitting in the classroom. I suppose they’ll all hope for a good year with great teachers. My school years were dreadful. I started school the day I turned four and left on my fifteenth birthday. The year was 1948. Teachers back in those days were to be feared and they certainly were. There was little joy. We all sat in rows, up to forty in a class, so different to how schools are today. However there was discipline. No one dared say anything out of line to the teachers for fear of reprisals. But my great grandchildren love school and are great learners which is wonderful. My eldest great granddaughter is in her final years at high school and wants to be a scientist, this certainly isn’t something which was available to me in those far off school years. |
Prompt: Imagine lacking something that everyone else has, something that proves you belong to the world. Something so vital....let's see what comes to mind... What immediately comes to my mind are other people. Imagine being a Tom Hanks character, castaway on an island. There’s no one else. No one to talk to! Having had that thought about words and conversation, it makes me wonder if one would even have the ability if there was no one else to speak to? But just imagine if you weren’t just a castaway but there were actually no other people existing in the world besides you. You wouldn’t want to live, there’d be no point to life. I suppose that’s an extreme answer to the question. Second choice.: Clothes! Imagine being the only person in the world not to have anything to wear. Now that’s sure to make a person feel as if they’re not a part of society. Although one never knows, it could set a trend! |
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