The End is Nigh,

It is all so quickly over. It seemed like yesterday watching mum soaking the split peas over the (single) granite sink back in the forties. Yet, thinking of the timespan between dinosaur and IPad, a couple of mere Nano- seconds later in our universe’s evolution, it is almost over. Well, give another ten years, or more, or less.

I was hardly over my Vitrectomy getting used to endless eye drops when I reached a new stage in my own evolution. I fell over. This is a new stage I seem to have arrived at.

One of the things in growing more mature is that sleep will become more evasive. I used the word ‘more mature’ for others and not in my case. I have reversed in most of my tepid evolutionary efforts and am surprised I can still walk the talk.

We have an unwritten conjugal…

By Seemorerocks

The catastrophe from Cyclone Gabrielle in Hawkes Bay and the Bay of Plenty seems to be beyond anything one could imagine. For one, The devastation has all but destroyed from what we hear 50% or more of Hawkes Bay’s horticulture. They are not telling us any of that in the media. You can expect food shortages that may last years

GISBORNE & HAWKES BAY CRIPPLED

We are getting reports MSM are ignoring the worst stories.

There are 5,600 registered as missing.

From https://t.me/CounterspinMediaNZ/65

“Dead animals are building up and rotting & Napier residents have been without power, hot water, internet & phone signal since Mon night/Tues morning.”

“A lot of people have lost their houses, everything.”

“We were totally cut off from Napier in Hastings with many people being turned away from the only crossing available even though they were essential.”

“Looting, shooting, stabbing, killing, stealing, and hostage…

Christmas 2014 in Dapto Shopping Centre

NBN means ‘National Broadband Network’. We are the lucky ones, it has come to Dapto already!

This is at the top story of Dapto Shopping Centre. This time I did not take any pictures downstairs.

On the second Sunday of Advent we visited Monika and Mark. They had been in the process of celebrating three birthdays: Monika’s, Mark’s and the 21st birthday of Mark’s daughter Tiana. There was some cake left from the previous night of celebrations:

When we were at Monika’s place another thunderstorm came up with heavy rain. This was about the fifth thunderstorm in a row. The clouds built up during the day and then it started to rain. A bit like in the tropics. The doctor had prescribed antibiotics for Peter’s infection. On the third Sunday of Advent was the first time when he did not have to visit the…

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/three-women-struck-by-lightning-in-bowral-during-saturdays-storms-20170218-gug1xd.html

It was the end of the 1950’s. I was seventeen, in the Upper Sixth of the Grammar School. A gangly, spotty lad, and something of a lone wolf. Not much use on the football field and even less on the cricket pitch. Books were my escape, birdwatching my hobby.

Ours was a mixed school, but I was invisible to the girls and so I decided to let them be invisible to me. There were occasional exchanges of course, but on the whole nobody would have noticed if I hadn’t been there. Sometimes, that came in useful and I’d skip a particularly boring class so I could hide in the library, which was quiet and peaceful and I could lose myself in other worlds.

It was on such a day, when I was trying to think of something sagacious to write in my essay, that I became aware of a girl…

What should we older folks do when we get close to our use-by date?

One of the bloggers I have been following for a very long time is Aunty Uta, who moved from Germany to Australia with her husband and young family in the late 1950’s (I think – correct me if I’m wrong, dear Uta!). See https://auntyuta.com.

Now that her children are grown and she is a widow in her late eighties with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she’s wondering about preparing to manage in the final years of her life. Should she hand over her house to her daughter and granddaughter, and restrict herself to just one room? A quandary that has set me thinking too.

My mother was running her own household, doing all her own shopping, cooking and cleaning, running upstairs and downstairs, managing her finances and everything else in daily life, until the age of 95. I…