Slacking a bit

parenting and slackness

Yep, back as a rigpig.

Since I was pointed to/at a job notice in September, I have had a lucrative three months. As far as strict parenting goes as a single parent goes, I have let it go, shouting and ranting only when there is a mess, and keeping to myself and my hobbies* and letting the kids free rein on the family TV.

Seems a bit rough, but the gels have their aunt around, a few days or more a week for Female Company/ Role Model. As a pool is involved at her place, I think she is like me, 'let em go for it' with their young cousin.

The second child is a little tougher to handle,  he could be out on his own this time next year, and his freedom and phone are pretty important to him at the moment. Well.. To both of us. But I am not paying for vices for him, his phone bill is too much almost to bear. Even if I could afford it, his cap is over nearly every time the bill comes round. I mean, five or six pages of text messages on the bill each month- who has time to spend on text messaging? I reckon he will have it hard enough with this last year of high school anyway and only a few bucks a week to pay the bill. However, his friends and GF manage not to sponge too much off their folks, or even save money! We did have a dinner out together the other night, nice meal, then a few games of eight-ball later. Nice night out.


Eldest child is happy enough I think. At the moment he is happy to help out with stuff around the house here while on vacation from uni, baby sitting the kid, shopping for the house, a bit of cooking and lots of [free] downloading, and doing my delivery job while I am away during the day on a rig earning some real money!

And the newest problem or addition to my menagerie is this little hand me down [below] from #2Son's friend Jonnie... About 3 months old, male, and so is onto EVERYTHING. A firm grip on the nape when an attack occurs seems to have intimidated him that I am IN CHARGE, bit the gels are letting him give them war scars.... He loves chasing the red spot from a little laser pointer- it is FUNNY. So here is the little squirt, resting from a hard days labour entertaining the troops..

Andre....

My father in law had a birthday the other week, the big 80. I think. And is over his Whopping Cough illness a bit more too. Imagine a doctor [GP] or hospital staff not recognising that- UNBELIEVABLE  any way, anti-biotics, and feeling better is how it's going.

My father is in Tassy, at a wooden boat Show with my brother and a cousin's hubby. is that not nice or waht. So far they are eating well. I think. And the weather has been nice for them too.

Other local buzz is a huge bush fire out of control for three weeks now or more- north west of us by 40km, covering a huge 75000 hectares- that is 750Km2 or 289 square miles or 185330 acres. I just wish that officials or the media would say 20 miles by 14 miles, with the active perimeter as say 200km long? And another fire out of control is greater than 10000 hectares in the Alpine region 130km NNE. What a great Country!





















*My TV, Solitaire, The Portable Vineyard watering program, work paperwork and some beers.

My Dad has a trick

Does your dad do this?

Since I was a kid, he would shock kids, like a cousin or nephew, or his grandkids. How?
By doing an....

 Alien impression...

Memorabilia from my grandad

My dad's dad- Coo  
Nickname, Keepsakes and Apple Corp  

The following is some of my recollections of my grandfather, as this is my family story site- ie clean. Maybe. Don't tell the kids they were not brought in by storks, okay?

My dad's dad was a teacher before WW2. He married a seamstress, a city girl, also from Our Big Smoke*. Adrian Francis was slight bloke, and strict. I think I was told he was really good at calling out to people in the bush when they were all out of each others sight with The Great Ozzie Bush Or Outback Call, done  at the top of your lungs:

 "COOOOO-WWEEEEEEEEE!" 

If you were lost or looking- it was recognisable everywhere-like in  "HERE I AM, CALL ME BACK YOU SORRY 50#@$@%!!". [That sounds like an advertisement, sorry.].

Little ol lady, grrrr

A rant and rage, not family value

Lonesome Breakfast Times These Days, & Stings

The weekend, and today...


Breakfast Today
The three progs* left at home these days are getting so autonomous, I could leave home  for a few weeks and nearly be comfortable with that on a rig in the North Sea...

Not really.

I can sort of sleep in while they get ready for the school day. Toast smells sometimes drift down to my room. Some talking,  mostly the TV noises. Occasional brawls do not make me rush to put out the wildfire anymore.

Then the inevitable "Bye Daddy", "See you Dad",
"Yeah, Bye! Oh. Made your lunches? fed the Cat? Done your shoes? Have a good day, see you tonight!"

Weird. I am a bit lazy sometimes, but they are all really growing up!

I am still Grumpy at breakfast, probably like my dad! Back when/then, Tarn, and my Mum too, would give "Their Man" brekky in bed to stave off the Grump from "ruining" the kid's breakfast...


I walk down the hall to get ready for the day for a Pondering Shower  or ABC news over a lonesome brekky and nice coffee.
Yeah.
Bath towels, underwear, and breakfast dishes all around the lounge. TV on.
All left in situ like a tsunami had been announced or I walked into Pompeii...

#2 Son and Heytell

#2 son is not so much a handful anymore, and some conversations are pretty good- and I though last night, pretty grown up. "We" "had" to try an "app" out on our respective iPods- 'Heytell.'

Hmmph.
Pause an old NCIS at 11:55pm and go to my pc and find and load the dang app, fine, and the iPod wanted update itself- jeze mabel!

Anyway- like coitus interruptus, the two downloads went ahead. I got the app loaded and I wondered back to see if #2 the dazzler had loaded his app.

Nah, It was in the middle of updating the song list instead...
Hmmph.

Stomped back, snatched the iPod off the umbilical, forgetting to make sure it was okay to eject it and went back to watching my show.

Finally the Frazzler got his shite together, and with much sssss's and stuff, we got it to work. Dunno how much that is gonna cost me in wasted time and money, but looks like a cool walkie talkie type thing. If a WiFi hotspot is close by that is.

To be Stung or Not
The other two progeny have really stung me this weekend. Their birthday money went on an iPod touch each with some subsidizing- I don't like one missing out- so sue me.

"Everybody else has an iPod Toch. Bwha, bwha!"
Fine where's the cash gels?
Got em, although there could have been extras for extra- like Maccas...
"There you go. Satisfied?"
Oh YEAH! They were!

Tarn would not have gone down this track I am bloody sure, but, [And Happy 39th again Tarn], I cannot help myself. A Techy Boy Thing I reckon.

And then after all set up and the facetime is finally usable:

"Everybody else is using iTunes!"

Who- What- How- Why- When?

Parents do not read the conditions, or do, don't worry or/nor care and still sign over the preciousnesses of their lives - to The Net. Or Steve Jobs and minions. (Jeze Mabel- shoulda got those Apple shares)

I did so as long as use was supervised- after all, I managed to trust #1 Son. I think.

The Sting.
Their accounts needed some real verification before accessing the app store. Really?

Big mistake.

#3b girl child went for some  free apps/songs. ["Not"!]
I was not there over her shoulder, so did not notice, AND was not told that the verification notice was in reality--- an agreement to purchase these app/songs...
Da dong...

Okay, and I agreed to what I thought was a strange way to get a freebie... Da Dong

And then  #3a girl child needed some verification code too. Still not suspicious.

As they went off to bed I recieved some emails with Apple invoices and a thankyou for using the Apps Store.


DA DONG!

WHAT?!

We had just put some credit into their accounts from Target using the rest of their birthday money from the rels at Fi-ester Weegen!

Raised my voice and berated the two rapscallions, nor Yelling but certainly crossly!
"never Never do that again! Etc etc etc..."

And then and now realised that it was all my fault anyway. Still, cheap and not cheap!

More Stings. Today

[An aside- a pay check $238. Food today $136, Sting 2- cat medicine $46]

I received a text message from The Bobby Dazzler that I could pick him up after school.
Why? No answer.
So when It gets home, It says, "we could have gone out to the grave to pay respects?"
BUGGER, yes, we could have done it that way!
Hmmph again.
Off we go to see Tarn to put a little posy in the vase thingo, share some tears, and leave.


Travelling towards home:
"I need shoes"
"Me too"
Bugger me!

So. Via the shops...

First shop, cheapos okay, but do what Tarn would have made me do anyway, and get some more quotes.

Next place.
"Yuck"
"Don't like 'em"
Get some replacement jeans on special for me...$35

Next place.
"Nah, my friend says those shoes are crap"

Back to the first one, and fork out 120 buckaroonies!

Next stop, get some shoe inserts for the injured one like the doctor says. Another $35.
By the way, from last weeks x-ray of #3b's foot, looks like there's Nothing Wrong with it...
Hmmph, knew that!

Stung too many times. Credit card, cheque book and pay check buggered again for the week.




*not sprogs! Progenies. progenics?

Close shave-ers

Another trivial pursuit of cleanliness.

In more ways than one.

After a shower pondering, I thought I should better clean up my ablution-istic accecessorizing belongings...

After all, with three kidliwinks also sharing the large bathroom, a good example may work!

I have given shaving up. "For Lent", ROFLOL.I am pretty sure that at least two people are throwing their hands up in shock and horror clutching their (female) cheeks and a "oh, it makes you look So Old, get rid of it!" So far, a client or two have been like that as well. What?  I cannot see the problem. My face! Winter is coming along. Even with Global Warming Accelerating as hard as it can, it is still going to be cooler around here for a few more months, so what the hell? The gels are being annoying- "ooh, it's so thick!"

Ruffling through my basket of stuff on the shelf, I found a few odds and sods... a twenty years plus collection of the best and worst blade shavers, IMHO.

My first shave, a twin-blade Gillette Contour is not there, but there a few others. The Mach series is not that great. They may have five blades, but they sure don't last that long for me. The vibrator handle doesn't turn me on at all, it still shaves the same as the triple blade.

The Quattro from Schick does a good job, and the replacement blades are usually cheaper and last longer than the Gillette ones. Go figure? The earlier Schick's were not great, but adequate. A change was as good as a holiday was probably the reasoning behind the defection...

The Wilkinson Sword was a souvenir from Grantham, UK, 2001. It was not that great either.

Now I am using the one from Aldi - an in store no-name brand I suppose. It works really well for a triple blade, and the only thing I reckon would be better for it would be a trimming blade like the Mach and Quattro have.

Another Ponderant was that this is a way of digitizing my memories... for me, later...

S'weird aint't it, all the shite we manage to accrue over the years, and think nothing of it?

I had a dream...

A dream knocked my usual shower ponderings off course this morning, after it came back to me, wet like.

The set up: using my hair brush. It is from Aber-bludie-deen, so it had done a few "stylings" since the early 90's... The bristle pad needs to be re-glued to the handle, again. Maybe time to give it up?

I was looking at the brush in the dream, and noticed it had another apartment under the pad, handle side.

"What the...?"

It was a another brush! For shoes!

I turned it over, took it out and tried it. It worked a treat.

"Well well!" [I think I would have said]

Then my dream self noticed a third brush! From the other end it appeared.

This one was for brushing lint off clothes! Wow!

A magical Russian dolls type brush, and for two decades I had never known about it!

Was there a fourth?

I may have woken myself up by then in the strangeness of the dream.

Weird dream. Because had been thinking of dumping it...

kids say the dangest fings, don they?

My gel#3a said something the other day, not weird, but funny and I cannot remember it.

That's so annoying.

Anyway, Son#1 is doing fine. According to the latest news, finding his feet okay in the Big Smoke.
Accomplished first assignment anyway, 25 hundred words.... First of Many! Hahaha. Do well lil one, I scraped through with the minimum, but enjoyed it all anyway. And got to see the world, and bring you up.

#2Son is getting to be a financial drag on my deficit. I was collared the other day;
"Pweesz git me sum nu skate shuz at the cool shop? 70% off?!" at the supermarket door...
Och boy, timing!

The weekend: was at the movies as I could not let gel#3b watch Rio with her friends and not let #3a miss out cos she wasn't having a sleepover with that group. Could I?

So off we went agin, n jus made it. New 3d glasses, cos mine were missing... Och! The movie was okay, but now that I read Updates@10, I would like to see Rango too.

A great start to the holidays in any case. For us, but #3b's friend's mum, T, was sposed to do a run to pick them up from the other mum Sz halfway back from the beach, but the car broke down. Not such a great start to the hols for them, bugger.


Ah- I remember what the weird thing was #3 told me.

A friend had invited her to a youth group Friday evening. Now remember, or not, that I don't go on about the cults too much at home, and encourage the kids to be careful to use their own judgments in all things,  like ask questions especially when you want to confirm an inkling of the answer.

She remarked that there appeared to be some attempts at brainwashing and encouraging people like her to join a group to introduce her into their community. And someone gave her a bible too.

She does not want to go back if it was always like that, even though it was fun and friendly. I replied that was okay, once a month or so instead to be with a friend would be alright, eh?
We'll see. I said the book was okay, and should read it. By the time I got to high school and was into SF I would reread it as a history of civilisation in all its gory and glory, a great long anthology.
[Thanks Erich Anton Paul von Däniken. ]

We are not religious, but it is a part of the world we live in. Society would like a bland well behaved and tithing population to run soothly, and faiths have developed ways for a large amount of people to get on, either tyrannically controlled or commercially co-opted into it. I myself agree with a lot of people that the 10 commandments have a lot of good ideals among the list, mainly the ones on how to get on with each other.

I try to have a well run home, we all have out things to do, and I don't like a rough table. A democratic tyranny? Some one has to be in charge, and as long as they step out clean, well mannered...

Catching Up [i]

This past couple of years, I have managed to reel a few old friends in.

Today I sent off [the usual & overly?] an exuberant
HELLO HOW ARE YOU? AND HERE IS WHAT I AM UP TO...
 to my old school friend Macca. Yet to get a response. At this time. We went thru primary and secondary schools together in a small seaside town out of the Big Smoke. When I went orf to try geology in a country CAE, he was left behind to get into a spot in an art course up in the Big Smoke instead- and only caught up three or four time in the interim. [funnily enough, same place where my ex-gf Sue went too, and my eldest #1son goes now! wow.]

That's thirteen years growing up together man! Macca and I used to make up Scalextrix tracks and buy and race cars with Tug and Trev, compared to when these days you can't get the kids off the web or Wii or ... He had one of those racer bikes that had the three speed hub. I had to wait a few more years for a flouro green 10 speeder. Macca [thru his big sister and brother] got me into Supertramp's Crime Of The Century and Bloody Well Right on nightovers in his bungalow, as loud as possible too, back in the 70's of course, and  Lou Reed's Satellite of Love and the rest of that album Transformer too. And

Another friend, SmokoKid had never heard of Transformer, in 1990! Well, maybe he was pulling my leg, cos he does own a lot of music. I imagine he has filled a few iPods too.

I did catch up with a girl Brigitta G that went thru the same school years, but that was it, a 'FBk friend'  and that's that. Heloooo?! Get back to me!

And more as well, Melissa [Lisa] WJ, Michael H & Grainne M, Robyn, Richard W, Kevin H, Luie B., Fiona Hunters' sister, Michael M, Trevor D, list goes on.

Out of the blue last year, one of my bestest ever mates in the CAE years caught up with me! From the other side of the country too, and did we ever get sloshed and catch up via the web!

And by accident I got hold of other fellow house mates too, of the Houston Street mansion-not, thru the web. The years before that, I got in contact with two others from there too. One has just the other month completed the Barcelona marathon, at my age, and in a really good time too. What else is amazing was that Mandy had made friends at work in the North Sea with another Geo I had worked with, Stew, two decades ago offshore, WOz. The mansion had a loo that leant to the right a bit and full of weeds, being an outside dunny, so if you were not in the right mind at wee time in the wee dark dark hours...

Face Book, Friends Reunited, Wikipedia and the web is an interesting experiment, indeed.

Reminded by a Cajun

I come across someone's blog a few weeks ago. She had become a single mum.

Part of her life was blogging, and had made lots of friends doing it. I read through it, made me sad. The links were good though.

One of them was a Cajun, transplanted thru wedded bliss to Australia.

She had her little stories about Oz and Dixie, some are really good. One story was about how her hubby did not have to leave the car at all in one US town, everything was like a drivethru type of thing. Donuts, banking, coffee, burgers etc.

And that reminds me of a few US stories of my own.

One was of going thru a US Mobil petrol station. The fill in. I had been sent to Fort Worth with Halliburton to do a course in MWD and directional drilling with new downhole tools back in '96. The office and workshop and practice rigs and all that stuff was on Everman Parkway, Fort Worth.

Our hotel, the Crowne Plaza Fort Worth South100 Altamesa East Blvd, Fort Worth, TX was near or south by a mile, of the hugest freeway intersection In The World [to me]. This place had a bar, but across the multilane freeway that I never got to was a real bar, with a fake drilling rig in the front carpark. Too far. Bugger... At the hotel bar one night, a fellow patron was forward as he pulled up a stool and ordered a drink- "Ha thar, Ahm Je-am Sumthang, from [City] in [State]". "Hi Jim".  I loved being there, twice! Man, they had great breakfast muffins. I was caught out once putting the brekky dishes out the door and the door swung shut behind me, wet and dressed in a towel only... The idea of phones, along the hall near the ice machine, to call the front desk was made clear; because of people like me.

The road network was fun. The second trip back there, we went on the wrong North/South route, but never mind, it was only a few mile out... Once I went to Grapevine Lake to see if there was any windsurfing gear for hire. Nah. But it was windy. That was why I went of course.

The hire car needed some gas on the way back, and the Mobil station nearby had the newish fangled thing EVER!

The bowsers had credit card facilities! Whahoo! Had to try that!

Filled the tank and replaced the filler, and waited to see what would happen.

The machine had taken my card, thank gott, and printed out my receipt and cut it automatically for me to take.

And.

The wind blew my receipt away!

No proof of purchase for the company expense report or even a souvenir to take home.


Second story is about a comment made by an engineer at the workshop. He had been out huntin' awhiles back there in the hills. After a days huntin', he was havin' few quiet beers back at a tavern. One guy was talkin' 'bout the days shootin'. This guy never saw anthin all day, but did take a "noise-shot at sum bushes ovah thar a bit..."

My sister-in-law has a hubby [Aussie] that works as a manager on a motorbike racing team during the US racing season. Travelling through the mid-West or east coast- forgotten- the team was under his orders to stop wasting time at stops along the way! At one coffee stop, he asked the young waitress for a cappacino. 15 minutes later- the guys in the truck were starting to wonder what the hell was he up to! He eventually got back in the truck. The poor waitress in a panic had had to go to the nearest store for some extras- to make a Cup Of Tuna… 

Home again, after a non sailing weegen

So after dropping Off The Boy, I stayed over at Sandy Point yesterday after a little trip to Inverloch. Stubby of VB. Bottle of red was used 50%. Two late telephone chats. Slept in til 9:30! No wind to wake me up by trying to over-turn the "new Winnebago" to remind me why I was there.

Th