Shortest Day Mid-Winter Swim 2022

 Hi there

What an exciting morning.  Forty-one swimmers turned up to Hataitai Beach today to commemorate this year's shortest day.  Unlike last year's swim where it poured with rain and there were howling biting cold winds, today was beautiful.  Blue sky, warm(ish) water, 15c air temp.  I also went for a swim last week on the official shortest day (21 June) when the air temp was a cold 8c and the water temp was 11c!

Today, 26 June 2022

photos by ... Tom

Getting health jabs

 Hi there

I often wonder about what would have happened if I hadn't taken certain medical jabs, ones that I'd forgotten I'd even taken in the first place.

When I was in a remote little cowboy town in Nevada, I got bitten by a feral burro (donkey) who wanted my lunch and had backed me up against the saloon wall (hint to my four readers: never ever accept the packed lunch provided by a tour company when you're anywhere near a burro, especially in a replica western town where burros are allowed to wander anywhere).

Back home, my GP assured me that the tetanus jab I'd had eight years before, and didn't even remember getting, still had two years to run. I was safe from feral burros.  Whew...

The same thing when I rang him five years previously after having injured my finger on a rusty saw whilst pruning a fig tree.  I'd forgotten then, too, that I'd had that tetanus jab.

 I read now that travellers who had the smallpox jab in the 1960's may be a teeny bit resistant to monkeypox.   That's me!

I'm ruminating over what other helpful jabs I've had in my long life that I've completely forgotten about?

Mid-winter swim, Hataitai Beach, June 2022

Hi there

Mid-winter swim, Hataitai Beach

Sunday 26 June 2022

11 30 am

Swim, plunge, paddle, wade, or spectate...

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 11

Hi there

It was 1969.  I was Senior Typist (Display) at the Curriculum Development Unit of the Department of Education in Hobson Street, Thorndon,Wellington, Yippee, at last, I had my foot on the first rung of the typing graded position ladder.    

At the CDU, I typed all the yearly booklets, pamphlets, reports, exams that were needed for the secondary schools' syllabus.  

And I got a spanking new Selectric golfball typewriter, the only one in the department.  Scored!

above: not quite the model I worked on but this machine is showing a good view of the 'golfball'.

above: similar to the machine I had.

Please imagine a small metal ball with every alphabet letter and number that's on a general typing keyboard crammed around this ball.  The ball is clipped onto a fork in the basket of the typewriter.  And - bingo! - when a typist types, the ball rotates up into the air, fights its way through the inky ribbon, and miraculously finds the right letter/number to put on the page.

I could prise out this general golfball, and in its place slot in different  golfballs containing umlats, italics, symbols, or macrons.  There were other golfballs too, full of mathematical figures, foreign languages, fractions, and  scientific equations.  Frequently I used a golfball for just the one key strike.

The Maori language, full of macrons, was difficult to type on a golfball machine because every time I came to a letter that required a macron above it, I would have to change golfballs.  

And I wonder if anybody realises how many upside down question marks there are in a Spanish-language exam paper?  

My record for the highest amount of golfball changes in one line was seventeen.  I got blisters on my index finger.

The Curriculum Development Unit was in two separate buildings, a one minute walk away from each other.  At morning and afternoon tea time, the officers from the other building trekked over to my building, no 32.  Obviously it was to partake of Mrs Fraser's piping hot and freshly made scones, cakes, biscuits, and savouries.  I don't know how she fitted in time to type.  Um.   Well ...   She didn't much.

above: 1969.  In my memory this building was numbered 28 Hobson Street (corner of Hobson Crescent)

above: the building as it is now.  It seems to have a different street number from no. 28, the building I knew.  Actually, the only thing I truly recognise is the entrance arch.  At present, it's an apartment block. 

above: side view, 32 Hobson Street where I worked for the CDU.  (yes, yes I know I've shown you this building a couple of times before but, sigh, needs must...).  Photo taken from 'the other end' of Hobson Crescent.

above: modern day view. It's a house and nowadays is numbered 33 Hobson Street. ??

I would shoot between the two buildings quite a bit to ask a question about my typing (translation: when I couldn't read the writing).  I adored the old-fashioned architecture and layout that was inside no. 28 (?), with its beautiful wood-look, and all the nooks and crannys of the work spaces.  We had the entire building.

The directors at the Curriculum Development Unit weren't a bad crowd, except for the one who kept his hand on my mini-skirted thigh as I drove him to the railway station one evening.  

I never reported it ...  

I was too scared to rock the boat.

*** One of my four readers has told me that after  the CDU  building was the Curriculum Development Unit, it became a hostel.  And she stayed there!  Wow, great information...

What will our descendents not like about us?

 Hi there

I often wonder what our great great great great and onward grand-children will think of things that have given us pleasure but by the year 3000 be thought of as ... repulsive.

Coffee, as a for instance.  You know how we have been trained to look down our noses at cigarette smokers?  I figure children of the next millennium will be horrified by our generation's love for caffeine. 

And bread.  When I was young, I read a short story set in the future.  The plotline was about paying a mighty price on the black market for a sandwich, and dealing with shady characters in dark alley negotiations just to buy one.  I think the only alternative was pills or paste. 

My two favourite foods are sandwiches and low calorie caffeinated  Coke. I have tried dozens of times to quit both.  My usually three-week Coke withdrawal anger put fear into my dentist when I visited him during week 2.  He made me promise never to come to him again during withdrawal.

I would never attempt to quit Coke and cheese sandwiches at the same time.  My snarling anger at everybody in my vicinity from the postie, to the guy at the dairy, to my closest friends would be a sight not to behold.  You wouldn't like me when I'm angry....