Thankful Thursday

It's getting late.  I'd almost forgotten that it is Thursday.  When one is retired one day is very much like any other.  So what have I got to be thankful for today?  Lots obviously.

I don't usually go with these answering questions things on blogs but Jenny did a very interesting post (all her posts are interesting actually) a few days ago and invited her readers to answer some questions (you'll find out why if you read her post - those of you who haven't already done so).  I thought that I'd share the questions and my answers:

1. If there is one candy left in the box, do  you have to eat it, or can you leave it sitting there all alone for the next few weeks?

A. I'd probably eat it if I was in the mood simply so that I could dispose of the box and have one less thing cluttering the fridge or cupboard.

2. What do you want to remember most of all, if you survive to be very old?

A1. I'm getting to the stage when I'd be very happy to remember anything when I get very old.

A2. I'm really not sure that I want to get very old although my parents both lived full and happy lives into their 90s. They both had excellent memories at the time of their deaths.  I've never had an even half decent memory.

3. Would you enjoy being a very rich and famous celebrity? ( after all you don't HAVE to be like the unedifying Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson and pay someone £1,600 a week to clean your silver and gold collection....)

A. Rich perhaps. Famous definitely not.

4. Which of the photos in this post is your favourite and why do you like it?

A. Learning to ski.  I have no idea why but it touched my heart and my eyes.

5. What piece of music do you personally find most emotionally moving?

A. That is an impossible question to answer.   I listen to music most of the time and what I listen to depends upon the mood I'm in although it's mostly what is referred to as classical.  I can be moved almost to tears by a piece of piano music or by some of Gounod's Mass to St Cecelia: the list is endless.  On the other hand Laura Branigan and Bonnie Tyler also sing songs with great emotion.

6. How do you deal with anxiety, depression and bad times?

A. Once you've been told that you are going to die and that it's likely to be sooner rather than later anxiety, depression and bad times just don't exist any more.  If I wake up in the morning then it's a good day.  It really doesn't matter what shit is delivered it's likely to be small stuff and there's no point in sweating the small stuff.

7. What do you love doing that bores everyone else stiff?

A. Hopefully not blogging.  I've learned not to mention croquet to The Family.

8. Did you ever encounter an inanimate object that seemed to have a will of its own?

A.  Not apart from my croquet mallet.

9. What is your very favourite hotel or restaurant? (This blog does have "travel" in the title, after all)

A.  I've thought long and hard about this and I just can't answer it.  There are just too many I really enjoy or have enjoyed for various reasons: some very expensive and some very simple.  I feel very at home though having coffee or a simple lunch at The Woodlands Centre on Lewis.

10.  Do you think prisoners who have committed particularly vile crimes should be segregated in jail for their own safety?

A. Perhaps many of them should possibly be segregated for the safety of others.  I suspect, though, that you were thinking of vile crimes perpetrated against children and so on.  That's a more difficult question to answer.

11. What do you wish you had known when you were 18? (if you are under 18, ignore this question

A. When I was 16 I was a teenager so I knew everything.  By the time I was 18 I realised that there were things I didn't know. Now at nearly 70 I can't remember what they were.

The funny thing is that looking back I'd answer some of the questions differently even though only a few days have passed since I wrote those answers.

If you feel like answering any of the questions I'd be interested to know your answers.  

So what made me think of this for Thankful Thursday?  Question 6.  I woke up this morning.  It's been a very good day.  For that I'm thankful.

Happiness is

getting a punnet of cherries at a roadside stall, putting them on the passenger seat and then eating cherries whilst driving with the hood down on a beautiful day on country roads (and disposing of the stones by shooting them out of the car with a u-shaped tongue - but I wouldn't tell you that).

I can never see or eat a cherry without thinking about the series of posts that Katherine wrote here which started with a punnet of cherries and ended with a painting .

It was another of Katherine's posts a few days ago which pointed me in the direction of a recipe here on Cro Magnon Man's blog.  It was for bread which looked rather tasty and easy to make.  This evening I decided that I was going to have a dinner of fresh bread and cheese and tomato and lovely things like that.  I make most of my own bread in Eagleton but I use a breadmaker.  I got this one decidedly wrong.  Firstly I made it a bit too moist and secondly I discovered that my oven's 200℃ and a real 200℃ are quite far apart.  The bread tasted good but was decidedly overdone.

Ford Zephyr and Zodiac Mark IV

Was this one of the worst cars that Ford ever produced?

This is one of the first of the Mark IV Ford Zodiacs that I can recall having seen for decades.  About 102,000 of the Zephyr and 49,000 of the Zodiac and Executive were made.  The three-litre model (which I don't think was available in the UK) was quickly adopted by Ford New Zealand which had originally launched the Mk IV Zephyr assembled locally from knock down kits with the 2.5-litre V6.  They had received complaints it was underpowered for a country where towing boats and caravans was common. Ford New Zealand also introduced optional floor shift and bucket seats as an alternative to the standard column shift and bench front seat and a large number of Zephyrs were built in this form, with other modifications, for New Zealand's traffic police.

I'm not short of stories about Ford Zephyrs and Zodiacs but you'll be glad to know that I shall spare you most of them although I did reverse a Mk III into a lamp post in Keswick one day in broad daylight.

When I married in 1970 I did so from a friend's house which was much nearer to the church on the Wirral than my parent's house in Liverpool.  My friend - a larger than life character both physically and mentally (he became a judge) - had a new Ford Execitive Mk IV.  It was not particularly reliable but was very impressive.  To Dvorak's 4th Symphony on the sound system, we eventually managed to get to the church in reasonable time.  Later, at the time of the birth of our first son I had influenza and collapsed at the hospital.  I vaguely remember the same friend carrying me like a child (I was 5'10" and 133 lb (60 kilos) at the time), putting me on the back seat of the Ford, taking me home and putting me to bed.

Impressive?

Well I think it is.  This photo is taken from my deck with my Canon SX50 HS with the lens at 4.3 mm (35mm equivalent 24 mm):

This picture is taken of the sticker in the rear window of the car at 215 mm (35mm equivalent 1200 mm) in indifferent light.

This picture was taken a few days previously in good light.  The Pheasant was to the right of the furthest away Highland Bull in the first picture where there is a large clump of vegetation by the fence.  Again it is taken at 215 mm (35mm equivalent 1200 mm).

 All these photos were taken with the camera hand held with no support at all.

I accept that the quality of the photos is not magazine or professional quality but then this camera cost less than some professional lens filters or a reasonable carbon fibre tripod.

I think modern technology has achieved wonders in this field.

It's Sunday

I recall some while ago that there was a general consensus among some fellow bloggers that weekend posts were less read than weekday ones.   On that basis I shall do my Oxford Comma post today.  Frances wrote a post entitled The Essential Colon recently.  Frances likes colons and semi-colons.  So do I.  Flippantly I commented "Let's eat Grandma. Let's eat, Grandma. Punctuation can save lives. I love colons and semi-colons. I use the Oxford [I actually said 'Cambridge comma' silly billy that I am], though, so perhaps, to some, I'm not a purist."  Actually my brother CJ (aka Scriptor Senex wrote a piece on the Oxford Comma entitled, with his usual pithy directness 'The Oxford Comma' in August last year.

To be honest I don't have any strong views on the Oxford Comma (and as I get older on fewer and fewer other things either).  However, whilst I may not use it when there is no particular need for it I do use it when I feel that there is.

The Oxford Comma' is an optional comma before the word 'and' at the end of a list: I like coffee, chocolate, and budgerigars.  Actually I'm not that fond of budgerigars but I thought it might make you sit up and take a bit more notice.  I probably wouldn't use a comma between 'chocolate' and 'and' in that sentence.

However if I were to write I like coffee and chocolate, bread and butter, and cheese and wine.  Then I would always use a comma between between the penultimate pairing and the 'and' before the last pairing.  That is an Oxford Comma.

Does anyone really care?  I would hazard a guess that if you were to ask all the children under 15 that you know very few, if any, of them would have the slightest idea how to use a colon or a semi-colon and that 99.99(rec)% of the English speaking population wouldn't know what an Oxford Comma is.

I have to face things though: I even split infinitives and end sentences with prepositions sometimes these days.  I don't put commas in addresses on envelopes.  And I sometimes start sentences with prepositions.  All is lost.  Woe is me. 

Songbirds a Plenty

Here in New Zealand I've noticed - and I'm not alone - that there are a lot more songbirds around this year than usual: a very lot more!  

My Dad always said that one should never hate anything and I used to pass that advice on to my partner's young daughter.  One day when she said that she hated something (probably Marmite) and I gave her 'a look' she immediately said "Oh very well Graham, I don't like it a very lot".  Since then 'a very lot'  has become part of family usage.  I digressed.

There are a lot more song birds and they are building nests in the bushes round The Cottage as if it was about to go out of fashion.  Perhaps it is.  Perhaps they know something I don't know.

This is the first nest from the olive tree just outside The Cottage deck/verandah

and this is it's occupant

I can't say that he/she is the prettiest little baby I've seen.  In fact 'fearsome' is more how I'd describe the visage. 

Modern Technology

I'm a self-confessed technophile.  I love technology: most of the time.  Sometimes, of course, technology and I have a falling out.  We almost always kiss and make up though.  Which is what happened last week.  Ever since I arrived back in New Zealand my iPhone had refused to connect to the internet via the mobile 3G network.  I have had to use a wifi connection.  I only noticed the problem when I went to Dannevirke and had to use the mobile network because most places I've been before then have had wifi.  Various phone calls and visits to NZ Telecom produced no results nor did a trawl of the internet.  Then one day when I had an hour or so 'spare' I decided to take the bull by the horns and sort the problem.  I suddenly remembered that I had a 'special' number for NZ Telecom that I'd been given once before when I had a difficult problem.  It was in my contacts under NZ Telecom and labelled "Complex Problems".  I rang the number.  Immediate reply: no waiting in queues nor long multi-option menus to go through.  I explained the problem and was given an instant solution.  A young lady made an old man very happy.  I'm so easily pleased these days.

On a completely different matter why is it that drug companies supply tablets in packaging that is so difficult to open?  One of my tablets comes in a comparatively easy to open blister pack (as opening blister packs goes that is).  The latest packaging I have been supplied with it in is almost impossible to open without scissors or a razor-sharp hard set of finger-nails.  W H Y ?!?!

Returning to computers and phones and so on I admit to enjoying exploring new aspects of the operating systems of my Apple Macbook and finding and using new apps for my computer and my phone.  Having grown up with computers since I bought my first  Amstrad PC1512 in 1985 which was the first Amstrad introduced I'm fairly au fait with their operation despite their increasing complexity.  It's quite a thought that the first Sputnik that went into space (and many subsequent to that) had less computing power than the average non-smart phone has today.  The Amstrad had no memory to speak of and the programme software was loaded from one floppy disk and the programme data was stored on another.  Ah those were the days.  Long gone thank heaven. 

For those who are interested in smart phones but who find the technology daunting New Zealand Telecom does a wonderful set of short videos on it's catchy website Techinasec.  It's worth a look.

Thankful Thursday

My partial absence from Blogland has meant that I've not even posted a Thankful Thursday post for several weeks.  Today I shall remedy that.  In fact today has been a most enjoyable day so far.  It's been a day of utter mundanity (okay there's no such word: I knew that before the spillchucker threw a wobbly).  I woke and looked out.  It wasn't raining.  Odd.  The forecast had been for torrential rain.  I'd already decided that I was going to have a non-croquet day and, as my Christmas lunch with a friend had been cancelled because of a doctor's appointment - not mine, I decided to go and see if I could get my Christmas cards and a load of other things I needed in town.  Firstly, though, I did some more catching up in Blogland.  I'm almost up to date.

I viewed the sky and trundled into town with the lid on The Handbag. After lots of walking, shopping, coffeeing and crosswording and a trip to Tarradale for things I couldn't get in Napier (and another coffee) I arrived home nearly five hours later by which time the rain had well set in.  

Oh, I nearly forgot to tell you that I also visited the library.  I love soup and today was an ideal day to think about it.  A friend in the UK knows a teacher of drawing with the right side of the brain so I thought I'd try and learn a bit about that too.  I couldn't resist a book on modern manners.  That should be worth a blog post or three. 

One interesting thing I did find out today is that everywhere I had coffee and the New World supermarket in Greenmeadows all had free wifi.  Now there's a real bonus I hadn't been aware of before.

This evening I'm getting ready to make some soda bread mentioned in Katherine's The Last Visible Dog and spicy roasted chickpeas done by Monica in Beyond The Lone Islands before I pop up to The House for a catch-up.

All in all it's been a very satisfactory day and one which makes me very thankful for the life I am able to lead and the health that allows me to make the most of it.

Why Am I Here?

No.  This is not a question relating to esoteric wondering about our existence on this planet.  It is simply about why I am here in New Zealand.  It is a question asked by several people arising out of my recent posts.

Catriona aged 4 (2005)

In 2005 (a very difficult time in my life) long-time friends Wendy and Martin who had moved to New Zealand some years previously had repeatedly invited me to visit.  On the spur of the moment one day I accepted the invitation and went on what I expected to be the holiday of my lifetime staying with The Family and touring New Zealand for 6 weeks.  [At that time my cancer was rearing it's head again].

In New Zealand when a child reaches his or her fifth birthday he (or she) graduates from Pre-School and starts attending Junior School on the day after the birthday. When I first visited The Family, Catriona was just four.  I promised to return for the ‘graduation’ on her fifth birthday. I’m not quite sure why but I decided on the spur of the moment when I was booking the plane that I would stay for six months: the whole of the UK's winter.  In September 2006 I set out for what was to be one of the most wonderful and life-changing things that I have ever done.  I have never regretted a single moment.

Now Catriona is a young lady and a weekly boarder at one of New Zealand's premier girls schools and loving every minute of it.  Not yet having any grandchildren it has been a wonderful privilege to watch the children in my adopted family grow from year to year and, in particular, to watch Catriona, to whom I made the original promise which brought me back here, blossom.

Of course it's not all about one person or even about The Family although without them I would not have come in the first place nor returned year after year.  I have made many dear and important friends here in New Zealand and also have the sport which has dominated my life more than any other sport since I gave up fencing and being a fencing coach.  In fact, truth be told, they are the only two sports that I have ever really enjoyed.

[The two recent photos of Catriona are taken from her Facebook page.]

I'm Back! So is Jamie.

Not that I've been physically absent from my home; just from Blogland (apart from the occasional visit).  All this living the 'real' life can be very frustrating.  I keep wondering what my Blogland friends are up to and what I am missing.  Of course croquet is to blame.  There was a national tournament taking place at the two local clubs (the one I play at and Te Mata in Havelock North - and, no, there isn't a Havelock South or East or West for that matter although there is an unadorned Havelock down in South Island).  I also had a croquet friend staying which took care of the evenings.  By the time we'd gone over the day's play, eaten and so on it was time for bed and a 6am start for another 9 hours on the lawns (and, in my case over an hours travelling time too).  All in all it was 7 full days and yesterday was housework and catching up.  Today was child taxiing and more housework.  

Well that's me up to date.  Wasn't that exciting?  How did I play?  Don't ask!

On Sunday, though life was quite exciting.  I was on the lawn playing my last (and exciting) game before 8am because at midday I had to collect Jamie (The Family's number one son) who was, unbeknown to them returning from his gap year in Europe and working and learning Chinese in China.  In fact for the two days prior to leaving China Jamie had only had Chinese speaking friends and colleagues to talk to.  The return was to be a surprise for The Family.  Which is exactly what it turned out to be.  For Jamie the sudden return to a relatively unpopulated, quiet, organised sort country which spoke English was quite an experience too.

Air New Zealand's ATR 72-212A on the Auckland Napier flight touches down in Napier

First foot on Napier soil

Recognition

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