Last Sunday turned out to be a lovely family day at our home. It was beautiful to be surrounded by children, grand-children, and great grand-children for a few hours in the afternoon.  Some almond-cake was left from Gaby’s birthday. There was also freshly baked cheese-cake. Peter had baked this cake!

Our daughter Monika took a few pictures with her phone. On most pictures you can see either Lucas or Alex, Monika’s two little grandsons.
As promised, Monika let us have these pictures. So I am going to publish here some of them:

The older I get the more I seem to reflect on times past. I often felt very much out of place as a young person. Also I tended to be “zurückhaltend”, that is I was usually more the listener and observer and did not show a great deal of affection and emotion. On the other hand, I also remember times when…

It came as a mild shock to realise that I have now had this blog for ten years. What a lot of water under the bridge! There I was in September 2011, plodding along comfortably in what the French call“le train-train quotidien”with no expectations of any major changes in my life, when I decided to upload my bits ‘n’ bobs of versification and musings on events plus the odd painting. Pussyfooting about the pond of my life, as I saw it at the time. And then – whoosh! I was swept right into the water and had to learn to swim.

I repeat for the nth time how glad I am that I have never known what lay ahead of me! But this blog has been more valuable to me in the past decade than I could ever have imagined at that time. It has provided an outlet…

Back in in 1956 we thought we were escaping the aftermath of wars and conflict and bade farewell to Europe still smoldering and smarting from two world wars. Soon after arriving we did sense that the main influence in Australia was that of America. It’s sprawling architecture and above all the commercialization of almost everything possible and saleable. My dad could not get over the abundance of ugly signage portrayed on almost everything capable of supporting signs. Suburban shops lining the strips often next to railway lines or main roads were groaning with signs and everything was sign-written in the most garish colors as ‘special’. At one stage a locally produced car The Holden was named Special.

After a while we got used to it together with the endless advertisements hailing the benefits of all sorts of headache powders. Indeed looking at old photographs one has no trouble seeing buses…

This is early morning. It is still very cold outside. I have the heater on, so the room is getting nice warm now. I have a cup of tea beside me. I already planned what I would be cooking today. I am going to take the two beef patties out of the freezer. I’ll steam the patties with lots of onions. I am going to have some sauerkraut with some of the meat as well as some other vegies. For a drink I can have pineapple juice or maybe some beer?

Very soon I am going to cook some porridge for breakfast. Today is Thursday. That means this morning I am going to prepare the bins to be taken to the kerbside. I could not help myself: I looked up the following!

http://wollongongwaste.com.au/fogo-Collection-Services

• 
  Collection Services
• My Bookings
• Disposal Facility
• Recycling & Education
• eLibrary
• Contact

FOGO Collection Service

From November 2020…

Joseph Silverstein

The College Fix

ANALYSIS: If the goal is to prevent infection, the 95 percent vaccination rate on Cornell’s campus has not accomplished that.

Cornell University has aggressively pushed its students to get vaccinated, announcing a vaccine mandate for the 2021-22 academic year in April and frequently denying religious and medical exemptions.As a result, 95 percent of the campus population, both students and faculty, is vaccinated.

Despite this, Cornell University has more than five times the amount of confirmed positive cases during its first week of this academic year than it did during its first week of the 2020-21 academic year, according to the Cornell COVID dashboard.

By the numbers, during the first week of school that ran from Aug. 27 to Sept. 2 of this academic year, Cornell reported 322 positive COVID-19 cases.

In comparison, during the first week of school last year, which ran from Sept. 3…