Sunday, July 28, 2019

What do you call...

No this isn't the lead in to a joke but a serious question. What do you call those little bits of paper that float around on my desk with important bits of information? True confession here: I hate filing and so recently when I stared clearing paper on my desk it was easy to throw away the stuff that was no longer relevant. Not so easy to  know what to do with the cute poems, cartoons and nice messages from family.
Then there were the scraps of paper. Important things like the name of a guy who is good at fixing grout according to friend, the hairdresser who might work miracles with my hair, the name of the new people I met - and their cat (It's really important to remember the name of people's cats), the note to check for the payment from that sort of dodgy lot who offered the refund. And so it goes.
Yes, I know the young and trendy write that stuff on their phone and I have been know to do that, but technology can let us down in a spectacular manner - see an upcoming blog about that and a previous one and another one a while back and...

So I now have a little pile of scraps of paper held together with a paper clip. Seriously, surely there is a name for them.

Suggestion:  Conforgetti - little pieces of paper about not forgetting.
All other suggestions will be considered.

Monday, July 22, 2019

How are you and all that jazz...


Louis Armstrong's song Wonderful World has the lines
Image result for winnie the pooh   I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
   They're really saying I love you
Really?
It's just a greeting, isn't it. How do you do? or How are you? or How ya goin'?
They say it at the supermarket as they cruise past with no intention of waiting for the obligatory
 'Fine thanks.'
 I have a friend who always says, 'I'm terrific.' Really ? Is he the supreme optimist?
Winnie the Pooh has a line that goes something like, 'When people ask me I always say Very well thank you and how are you today?*
That's the expectation isn't it?
But what if the answer is really, 'Shit', A friend tells me he used that answer and the person who asked how he felt was astounded.
Sure I have been known to use how are you as a greeting and then later into the conversation say, 'Well how ARE you?'
So do we need to take time to really let people tell us how they are? And if so to be ready to listen. I didn't make tit to morning tea after church this week because someone began to tell a freind her story and I was there too. Long after the other woman left I was still hearing the story and sharing a little  of my own.
So now I do know some of how that person is, and I do care about it and what she is facing, and I do want to pray for her and keep in within my thoughts. She laughed and smiled and is determined to be positive, but maybe some days are shit and she needs to knwo that she can tell us how she feels.
So maybe Louis is right that to asking how you are is a way of saying I love you.

*Here is the correct version!

 ' If people ask me,
    I always tell them:
  "Quite well, thank you, I'm very glad to say."
   If people ask me,
   I always answer,
  "Quite well, thank you, how are you today?"
   I always answer,
   I always tell them,
   If they ask me
   Politely...
  BUT SOMETIMES
  I wish
      That they wouldn't.'

AA Milne

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

All gone...

Last week I decided to delete a photo of a list I'd taken for future reference and in the twinkling of an eye deleted all the photos on my phone camera. Oops! How? I asked myself that many times. Didn't it warn me with that 'did you really mean to' sort of question? Was it just too weary as it was about to run out of battery? Were the gremlins inside my phone being spiteful?
So what to do? Well, it turns out I still had the downloaded stuff and the favourites like my son and his fifteen (at last count) motorbikes, the family Christmas photo, my grandroo Roody and so on. I had saved some to Google photos and was able to retrieve some back to my phone for bragging purposes - this is my granddaughter in the wondrous dress she created last year for the young fashion designer awards, this is the colouring in I did, the focaccia bread I made, the rose in the front yard. You know how it goes.
Then I mined messages - in and out - for important photos shared. It seems most of them were not that important.
Now a week later, it's fine. I'm not sure what else I've lost but I'm okay.
It got me thinking. I have about a handful of photos of my Mum (born in 1919). There is a cute toddler, one of her with her hair all the way down her back before it was cut in her late teens, a wedding photo and a few with us as babies. (Less of me since I'm the third child.)  In her day cameras were rare and photos were often taken by professionals or in a  studio. It seems common for there to have been a photographer in the street as I have a few pictures of family members walking arm in arm along a city footpath.
So what will happen to the zillions of photos we snap every day? How many will survive? The technology with be obsolete. Will we print them all and will they last? Who will sort through them all when our time is up?What will remain
One of my friends is on an overseas trip. It's fun to see her photos on Facebook. Tourists seem to take so many photos since most of us have a reasonable quality camera in our hand as part of our phones. I remember seeing a tourist take photos of about twelve historic plaques. Would he read them when he got home. Surely he wouldn't expect someone else to look at them That would be even worse than my dear Dad's boring slide evenings (one of our family friends curled up and went to sleep as soon as the lights went off.)
Now I have discovered it's so easy to take a photos of a notice or a recipe in a book and I even know one person who takes a photo of the page number where she is up to in a book, Those things will be deleted at some stage perhaps, but what happens to all the photos? Maybe memories .....

Monday, July 1, 2019

Have a good weekend.

' Have a good weekend,' they say. Well thanks, but...

I didn't do that well when the first baby came along. It seemed Ike a 24/7 job when I had been used to sirens marking the lessons and breaks during the day and, despite a hefty load of marking and lesson prep, there were weekends that came right after Friday.
I found it so hard that I contemplated writing a book called  No weekends to warn others of how they might feel when it just went on night and day -  the feeds and nappy changes and burping and crying. (Often it was me crying not just the baby.) Fortunately others have written the book and people are more aware of post natal depression or simply not coping in those early weeks.

Now I read The Advertiser on line where the morning blog tells me we'll cope together with Monday. What's wrong with Monday? And then tells me we're half way through the week on Wednesday and on Friday we're nearly there. What? I'm retired. I don't work Monday - Friday 9-5 as this assumes. Neither do a lot of the rest of the population, I suspect ,what with shift work etc. So one day follows another. I recall my parents in law saying that they only thing that distinguished one day from another was the fact that Thursday was bin day. Right!

I find myself again in the world of no weekends and long weekends are nothing to look forward to.
So when people wish me a good weekend I try to smile benignly. And yes, Thursday is bin day.