Cleaning Day

 Hi there

Last week, I was cleaning the bathroom which included the toilet.  I grabbed the toilet brush by its plastic stick handle, and fiercely plunged it down into the water.

Perhaps I brushed too fiercely.  With a - snap! - the bristle head of the brush broke off completely from the stick and got jammed in the tight bend of the toilet.

I prodded that hedgehog's bristles with the stick of the brush, trying to move it.

Nothing happened.  That thing was sooooo stuck.

I figured my salad tongs would be too lightweight to pull out the bristle head.  I couldn't think of anything else.

I jittered around the house for about fifteen minutes, coming up with a dozen ways to get that brush head out from the toilet, none of them practical.  It was late at night, just past my mates' 9 pm deadline for receiving wailing phone calls.  What to do, what to do....?  There was only one answer.

I ... would have to go in.  With my hand.

Sigh.

Finally I decided on swathing my hand in a plastic bread bag.  I discovered a rubber band in my 'anything' drawer and secured the bag tightly at my elbow.

Then .... ugh, yuck...

Down into the toilet water, I plunged my hand.   Well, at least I knew the toilet was clean.  I had used enough Dettol on it thirty minutes before to kill surely any germs in the vicinity.  Hopefully.

I tugged...  And tugged.  And tugged at that bristle hedgehog.  And tugged a lot more times.

Finally .... the bristle brush-head popped out from the bend.  I breathed out slowly, evenly, happily; everything was well in the world again.

 I bought a new brush the following day.  I stood in Bed Bath and Beyond for ages pretending to bend and pull the heads of all their toilet brushes.  I settled on one with a wooden stick instead of a plastic one.

Let's hope the toilet brush never again breaks on me, ever....

**

However, I did discover, via You Tube, that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people who have had the same problem. There are whole stories on how to get that jammed bristle head out from the toilet.  Some people use a plunger, some pull the entire toilet out from the wall, some call a plumber.  Guess I was lucky.

Another New Plymouth Holiday

 Hi there

I'm just back from 6 days' holiday in New Plymouth.  I so love walking the Coastal Walkway.  It's completely concrete, and part of it is directly opposite the city.  On the walk, one comes across bicycles, skaters, walkers, dawdlers, scooters, mobile scooters, joggers, families, mothers with prams. Last week, I even came across an oldie on a walker.  She was on the track for about half-an-hour.

I stayed at the Devon Hotel, in the city, with the most fantastic nightly buffet that the locals adore. And I can swear by the fish and chips from Room Service (plus... no tipping).   And across the road is a zig-zag path that leads you - in about 5 minutes - past a river to the Coastal Walkway.  

There is a croquet green at the bottom of the zig-zag.  I stopped to sort out my sunhat and my sunblock.

An older guy passed me.  He nodded toward the croquet green.  "  Go on, " he indicated, with a wink.  "Give croquet a go?"

"I'm too young for croquet," I said.  ...  Fibber ...

I've done the Walkway lots of times, used to walk from the Ngamotu Beach end (family beach, calm water) which is down at the Port end -  to the modern bridge end.  Couple of hours walking it all one-way, maybe.

stock photo:  Mt Taranaki can be seen through the bridge

But last week, I decided to split up my walk into two sections, to make it more leisurely.  In whichever direction I walked I had to remind myself that I had to walk the same distance back again.  But there are points along the Walkway to park a car, cross over or walk up to a bus stop, or make a detour to the city.

Another place I love to stay in is a small serviced cabin at the Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park.  The cabin has en suite, and kitchen facilities.  The cabin car parks  (and some motor home parks) are on the edge of the cliff, looking across to the magnificent view of the sea, and the holiday park is right next to the Coastal Walkway.  What I like about these cabins, is that I can tie my own elasticated clothesline between the two poles on the cabin deck and dry my wet bathing suit!

above:  Me, on the Coastal Walkway. In front of a surf rescue club. Surf water.

above:   This used to be the entrance to the aquatic centre, a place where I learnt to swim when I was ten.  There's a more impressive entrance around the corner nowadays.  The Coastal Walkway goes around the aquatic centre.

above:  thin me!  There is a silvery-metallic-type sculpture on the Coastal Walkway, near to the city.   If I go around the back of the sculpture and look at my reflection, I appear extremely thin.  Wow, wonderful.  Hey, my hair even looks thin; it was very windy and I got a sort of mohawk.

above:  Along the Coastal Walkway.  Behind the tree, you can spot a glimpse of a yellow-ish building.  This is the Clarendon Flats, St Aubyn Street, where I lived for a couple of years as a child.  If you look in front of the posh new building on the right, you can see a white fence.  I used to stop my bicycle against the fence and just sit there on my bike, gazing for ages at the sea.   I was so fascinated by it.

The above photos taken last week. If you look further back in this blog, at other New Plymouth holidays, you'll see more photos taken from the Coastal Walkway (of the actual sea views!)

Summer here today!!!

Hi there

Well, it's the 1st of December.  The official first day of summer - December, January, February.  Hey, hey, you people in the Northern Hemisphere, are you jealous?  But what goes around, comes around: we'll be jealous of you in June, July, August when it's our winter.

Today is warm.  And sunny.  And not much wind.  But... I'm a bit sun-burnt from the beach yesterday, so I didn't sun-bathe today.  I really can't understand it all because I never get sunburnt.  I always tan.  But I've had several bouts of sunburn since October.  I'm even reducing my hours sunbathing, but that hasn't helped.

For weeks now I have been plastering myself in after-sun gel, moisturiser, and aloe vera.  And pre-swim, there's sun-block, all different brands.

I can only put it down to the sun getting more frequently through that nasty ozone layer.  The sun has found the one hole in the ozone layer that everyone is talking about and, apparently, its right above both Aotearoa and Aussie.

stock picture

We kiwis get tired of being at the bottom of world maps or sometimes not even making it to a map because Australia dwarfs us and we're quite tiny, anyway.   Some years ago, an enterprising kiwi business person printed an upside down map of the world, which put New Zealand at the top.   It was even printed on tea-towels for tourist shops.

The Great (?) Vegas Hotel Soap Scam

 Hi there

Just after I arrived in Las Vegas last August I went into my bathroom at the Rio Hotel to wash my hands.  

Hey, where was the soap - ?  The bar of soap that should be on the bathroom counter?  

The only soap was in the container in the shower - the container that was in a frame that was fixed onto the wall  - and it was liquid soap.  To wash my hands, I would have to stand in the shower cabinet. Or wiggle the liquid soap bottle out from its casing every time I wanted to use it.  And then put it back again, ripe and ready for the hundred showers a day I would undoubtedly have to take during the projected 47c temperatures in the Vegas heat.

I rang housekeeping.  "Could I have a bar of soap please."  I told them I wouldn't even have minded a bottle of liquid soap.  As long as it was portable.

"Of course, Ma'am. We'll deliver it to you instantly.  The soap should have been put in your room in the first place."

About an hour later, there was a knock on the door.  A housemaid stood there, clutching two tiny sweetly-packaged bars of soap.

"Thank you," I said.  I handed her a tip.

It wasn't until I got home that I read a hotel review -

It was a scam.  To get those tips.  

And wait, there's more ...   After the Rio, I moved over to the Flamingo Hotel, to be more central.  Can you guess what happened to me there?  I bet you can...   

The same thing that happened at the Rio was happening at the Flamingo!  There was no packet soap or bottle of liquid soap on the bathroom counter.  Or anywhere in that bathroom.  Only the liquid soap fixed on the shower wall.

And so, I tipped another housemaid...

above:  And just to show you that it can rain in Las Vegas.  Very heavily.  Especially in August,  I got a text from management telling me not to leave the building because of severe flooding.  It was all clear by following day.

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 18

 Hi there

Supervising Typist, First Floor, Education Head Office, Government Buildings, Wellington, 1977

When a newcomer joined the govt, Probation Report time came round after a year.  After 2 years, the typist was off probation and ready for her yearly Personal Report, as were all workers in the govt.

 Mrs Rowley, the top-graded supervising typist of all Head Office pools, asked various bosses who sent their work into our rooms what they thought of the service.  She and Miss McNeil, the (supremo) Supervising-Typist-in-Charge worked on the reports together.  A report was all about what a boss thought of a minion's-sorry-employee's initiative, judgement, accuracy, supervision, etc.  There was also a box for Mrs Rowley to give a rating out of 10.

I got a 9!!  I was so excited.  I'd never had a 9.  No typist ever in the history of Education typing had ever got a 10 (please wait with bated breath for Episode 19 where there will be a blow-up over this rating!!)

At the bottom of the form were the words "Your Job Aspirations?"  I had always put "Higher Graded Position".

So, enclosed in that full glow of being a 9, I worked even harder to cement my supervising typist position.  I became a work-horse of the highest degree.  I typed my fingers almost to the bone, I raced through a job with accuracy and speed...  Oh, and as a side note, here's a trick question that was asked at interviews,  "What is more important: accuracy or speed?"  Most interviewees proudly said "Accuracy" and it was then pointed out that accuracy and speed together were important.  Oops. 

I hated working on Saturdays to get the pool's work-pile down, especially when the hand-writing of the officers  couldn't be read and there was no-one around to ask.  I often volunteered to work solo (whatever happened to teamwork?) because I knew that I was both accurate and speedy. and could work non-stop without the disturbance of pool chatter and stopping for cups of tea, and ringing up boyfriends on the one phone that the pool had.  Most letters and jobs to be typed were clipped to a huge file containing everything to do with the subject in question and, yes, sometimes, it was fun to read back through the files.  When the bosses arrived at work on Mondays, one couldn't see the work desk for all the typing.

An officer who sort of cruised through his job had the 'girls' in the pool coming up with theories and ideas about him.  He was in Administration, just across the corridor and, unlike us with our window vista of the wooden Annex at the back of Govt Bldgs he was under the big outside clock with a great view of the Cenotaph, Lambton Quay and Parliament Buildings.  This older guy was sort of the Admin run-around.  He drove Head Office's one car.  If an officer wanted to go to the airport or around town, he would ring Admin, book in a time and this guy would take him to his destination.  I remember once seeing Mr Pinder, a director, racing down the hallways, yelling back to his secretary to ring the airport and tell them he was on his way.  He rarely remembered to tell his secretary that he was leaving the building.  The only way she could figure it out, was if his hat was no longer hanging from the hat-stand.

One day, our junior Helen came tearing breathlessly into the pool, "Guess what?"

"Your boyfriend has a secret girlfriend?" Maureen asked dryly.

"Of course not!  It's that guy in Admin.  He opened the bottom drawer of his desk.  And there was a bottle of...whisky!"

No???  What gossip...

Mind you, it wasn't that much of a surprise because he often smelt of beer.

While all the usual shennanigans were going on in the typist areas, I was studying Pitmanscript.  I had realised over the years that I would never be able to advance higher if I didn't have a shorthand qualification.  For some silly reason the higher supervising typist positions were for shorthand-typists.  Silly, because supervising typists never went to take shorthand, leaving it to a pool minion instead.  It was better that they stayed in the pool to supervise.  And type.

Shorthand-typists were thin on the ground.  Schools were finding it hard to get teachers of the subject and women attending business colleges, like Gilby's, didn't want to learn regular shorthand.  It took too long and was too finnicky with it's accuracy.  In exams, pupils were marked wrong if they so much as slipped up on the slightest little penciled line.

So, in obvious panic because no-one was learning Pitman shorthand anymore, Pitman came up with Pitmanscript.  It was half-english.

I did a Pitmanscript course over six Saturdays at a local college.  At the end I triumphed with a 60 wpm certificate from the school.  However, that 60 wpm equated to words the equivalent of 'the cat sat on the mat'.  In real-life, if trying to take more complicated dictation from a boss, it would be like I was writing about 20 wpm.  I wouldn't keep up.  Pitmanscript could never be as fast as regular Pitmans Shorthand.

So I studied further.  I brought my "Pitmanscript 500 most common words in the english language" to work and practised going over them again and again every morning and afternoon tea-time until I could all but Pitmanscript the words in my sleep. As I passed shop awnings on the bus ride home, I mentally  pitmanscripted the names of shops.  When the teenage music programme "Ready to Roll" came on Saturday evening tv, I frantically Pitmanscrpted the words to songs.

 I practised an hour every night in front of my text books and my cassette recorder (sorry I wiped you off the tape, Elvis).  I read out loud the long texts from my advanced exercise book - eyes focussed on my watch, to get the words evenly spaced to the minute  - then played the texts back as I furiously tried to keep up. Once I finished the book, I started again, at a higher speed.  

I sat the Trades Certification Board Shorthand-Typing Exam, 80 Words Per Minute.   The piece the teacher read out from had the word "Monarchy" in the title.  I couldn't figure out how to Pitmanscript that word. I hesitated too long. After that, all was lost.  I scrawled everything else, missing out on so many sentences.  

I failed the exam.  I had sat it at a regular college, alongside fifth form girls.   My fault that I failed, nothing really to do with the reader (though instead of reading the whole thing at the same speed as she was supposed to do, she tended to read phrases rather fast.  Maybe because the kids in the class were used to the shortened phrases of regular Pitmans Shorthand, so she was helping them out.  No-no-no, I'm not bitter...)

above:  the department gave the above notebook to all sitters of School Certificate Shorthand.  We had loads in the department....

Noone at the office knew I'd sat the exam, thank goodness, what with me being a supervising typist and all.   I vowed to sit again the following year.  I figured that my writing size was too big.  I wasn't getting that many words on a line, thus losing time.  And with it being Pitmanscript, I was allowed to make up anything I wanted to in order to speed everything up, unlike Pitmans Shorthand where every stroke had to be perfect or there would be a fail.  So ...I came up with a few symbols to get me faster through a piece.  I have never written anything so small in my life as I did in my practise pieces.  The exam piece had taken about six shorthand-notebook pages.  With my new teeny writing and word abbreviations I was down to one and a quarter  pages.  Roll on exam try no 2... And, maybe, a higher graded position

Every Thursday, the Public Service Official Circular (PSOC)  came around the rooms.  Everybody looked at it to see what graded jobs were going over the whole of the govt, including for typists. We all knew everybody's salary because the PSOC included it.

 I flipped through the pages.  Then flipped back again -

What -?

There was a position for a Supervising Typist at Customs Head Office, just down the road from where I was working.

It was a supervising typist job.  Not a supervising shorthand-typist job.  And it was one grade up from my present position.  The gods couldn't have been kinder.  Angels were singing.  Not one alarm bell rang in my head.

Little did I know.....

LAX International Terminal

 Hi there

Stock photo. Los Angeles International Terminal

Just a word for the wise, or the maybe-not-so-wise when they're leaving the United States for a visit to New Zealand -

What to wear at your departing airport when it's an American summer, especially in August....?

Don't wear summer clothes.  

When I was sitting in the Air New Zealand departure area at the Los Angeles International Terminal, I glanced at the people around me.  It was so easy to spot the smug Southern Hemisphere know-it-alls, myself included.  We'd  exchanged our California summerwear for puffer jackets, fleecy trousers, clod-hopper trainers, our pockets a-bulge with mittens, woolly beanies, and cough drops.

Many Northern Hemisphere people appeared to have come straight from someone's backyard pool party:  floaty  chiffon-y dresses, light cardigans, Jandals ('flip-flops' or 'thongs' if you're from some other parts of the world),  shorts, Hawaii shirts....

No-no-no. No.

I can understand that many first-time long-distance travellers don't know how chilly it gets on a plane that might take 14 hours to reach its destination, but to not check up on the weather season at plane's end is totally wrong.

June, July, August are New Zealand winter months.  It's topsy-turvey to the Northern Hemisphere. In many areas, we have snow and winning Olympic snow-board athletes.  Even in places that don't get snow, we're still winter-cold, especially in Wellington with its gale-force winds and seemingly forever-rain.  And, more advice, be careful travelling the West Coast of the South Island in winter.

I guess it's all because we are close to the South Pole...

 Hi there

I was going through New Zealand airport security a year or so back.  I'm always excited - and nervous -  to be starting off on a holiday; it probably showed.  Still, I beamed at the guy operating the x-ray booth, the one that we have to stand in so as they can see if we're carrying anything illegal under or over our clothes.  The hard-worked security people deserve my beaming at them because they have to put up with a lot from passengers.

He beamed right on back, and waved me over to his monitor.  Oh, no, I thought, what am I wearing that's betraying me?  My rings?  Ear-rings?  The sequins on my sweater?  

"Hey, come and see how happy you look".  The guy pointed to the screen. 

Um... I peered c!osely at the screen.

It was just the outline of a figure.  No detail at all.

"Gotcha!"  He grinned.

This guy made my day.  I tripped merrily away, in such a good mood to start my holiday