20190213 – Wednesday – My cousin

20190213 – Wednesday – My cousin

This morning when I awoke, after once again, having enjoyed a good night’s sleep, out of my subconscious mind came the the realisation that I had a cousin in Launceston, Tasmania.

I searched Facebook and Messenger for his contact details and soon was ringing him and arranging for a catchup.

My cousin, Graham D left Adelaide for Tassie many years ago, and so I have only seen him very infrequently since then.

It will be good to catch up with him.

Selena had already left for work, and I was feeling lazy. 

 After breakfast I began listening to, and noting from the book Selena had suggested I read.

 

20190214 – Thursday – Computers!

I have a cousin here in Tasmania, and I rang him and arranged to go to dinner at his place on Friday.

He is Graham D  and his wife is sister of Ian F in Adelaide.

I knew that I would need to be familiar with the the data in my iPhone or iPad on our family genealogy because I knew they were both interested in comparing notes.

But, when I tried to access “My Brain” on my computer, I found that the company had just released “Brain 10” so to my dismay, I found that I could not open the program on either my iPhone or iPad. 

Every new version of this program has always given me grief and each time I have had to go to Tim C’s place and get him to help me through the transition from my current version to the latest version.

Well, I struggled and struggled with it and messaged support and received a Query number and messaged back and forth to them, but with little success.

So that means no information to share with my cousin until Tim can help me back in Adelaide

 I knew that Graham had read my “story” of our family history, but unfortunately when I wrote “Runaway from Santipore,” I wrote it as a sort of “true/fiction, and though my data had all been researched and I DO have the original source material, in my computer at home, but I didn’t have it with me, and I knew that Graham wanted verification for my story.

And what’s worse, I had written the story a long time ago, and since then, my short-term memory has diminished and does not retain the data it used to, and that is why I write everything down these days.

So I would not be able to verify any of my data on this trip.

And now, added to that, I was unable to open my “Fay’s Brain” program and so didn’t even have access to the genealogy’s contained therein.

Such is life.

20190215 – Friday – My cousin

This morning after Selena went off to work, I made myself some breakfast and went outside in the courtyard to eat it and soak up the sun.

The weather has been heating up again and so the sun had quite a bite in it and I believe that is partly due to the hole in the Ozone layer which lies just overhead, or so I am told.

I can’t believe how much vegetables we have gone through since we have been here.

We have eaten all of the vegetables that were in the refrigerator when we first arrived in Tassie, and then the  big bag of organic vegetables that the owners gave us, and finally Selena had done a big shop the day after we first arrived and we have eaten all of that as well. 

At 11 am today, Friday, my cousin Graham D arrived to pick me up and then drove me to the Post Office so he could pick up his mail. 

Then we drove towards his home which is at Riverside, which is 21 minutes west of Launceston.

We drove up a long private road to his house and pulled up beside the side door of their house and walked to the front door and inside.

We discussed our combined genealogies and to my surprise I found enough of it was in my memory so I was able to answer some of Graham’s questions. 

For desert we had fresh blueberries from off of their own bushes, and with custard and they were simply divine.

Then it was home again along country roads and back to Launceston and then to 19 Robertson St.

When Selena came home, we were both pretty tired so we decided to have a late dinner and both went and lay down for a late afternoon nap.

Selina had suggested I read the book she was reading so we could discuss it, and she loaned the book to me for that purpose. 

But then I found that the reason I had not done much book reading (as opposed to reading on my iPad and iPhone) for some years, is because when I had a stroke in 2008 I pretty well stopped reading books at all.

The reason for this is because I can no longer read in the way I used to read.

Early on in my life I had taken speed reading courses and so I read very fast and was used to reading by “fixation” and could read downwards in a page and take in a large amount of material in a short time.

After my stroke I lost eyesight in both eyes and the effect of that is that I can see everything from left to right but on my right side there is a bar of blindness just on the periphery of my vision.

I can see everything up to that bar, then the bar where there is no sight and then beyond that bar at the far right I can see again.

But that doesn’t bother me and affects me very little, almost not at all.

What does bother me is that I can no longer read as I used to read.

I now have to read from left to right all along the line that I am reading.

So if I am reading sub-titles I only ever get to read to about just past the middle of the subtitle before the sub-title is gone and I have not absorbed the information.

So reading is no longer pleasant and easy.

So since 2008 I have substituted reading with listening.

If I have large amounts of data to read, I can copy it into WordDream and listen to it being read, and so Audible would have been a good option if it had been any good right from the beginning.

But the books on audible were originally older books mostly read by volunteers.

Since then Google has bought Audible but you can only buy books if you are a member (at $16/m).

I knew I would never get the book read if I had to read the hard copy, so I made the decision to join Audible and buy the book.

And it made all the difference.

I read/listened to the first 7 chapters in no time, and since to make my $16/m worth while, I will have to read a lot of books, so now that my Netflix is out the window, I will replace it hopefully with good, valuable books and use the wasted time on Netflix to advantage when I want to just veg out and relax.

Anyway, we shall see how I like it and if I USE it.

With computers the work is never over, there is ALWAYS something that I struggle with.

20190216 – Saturday – On the road

 20190217 – Sunday – Ken Niejalke

Sunday morning Selena and I drove to Launceston ecclesia hall.

I was expecting to know almost no-one, but I found a knew quite a lot of people at the meeting so both Selena and I found plenty of people to talk to.

The exhortation was I given by a new young brother Cameron. ? Not sure of his name.

The hall is a lovely bright hall with sky lights in the central part of the hall which made the whole hall light and bright.

We sat at the rear of the hall in the last row because there were so many people in the hall. 

I think there is something over 100 members at the meeting in Launceston.

It was good for me to see Ken and Pauline Niejalke there and the Scoliers.

Ken’s mother used to be very good friends with my mother and somewhere in my files I have a photo of Ken as a baby, which Topsy sent to my mother when Ken was born.

And then I met him and became good friends with him at a couple of youth conferences.

I saw Graham D’s son  ?? who was clearly a Dangerfield because he in 6’2” tall with reddish hair.

And John was there too.

There were a number of other people that I knew but haven’t managed to attach names to all of them.

After the meeting and general conversation with a lot of people, Selena and I left the hall and drove to Westbury and managed a meeting being held there.

After the meeting Brian B came up and said hello.  We had met each other for the latest time at Hyde Park earlier in the year.

I didn’t know too many other the other people there, but Selena did.

The speaking brother whose name was George ?? Not sure of his last name, came up and spoke to me and he had read and taken screen shots of some of the studies I have transcribed and asked for more.

So I sent him Jim D’s studies in an email on the spot, but will send him further studies hopefully today.

Then Selena and I went for another drive, trying to get as much exploring done as is possible while we are here.

At Westbury I photographed a beautiful church and then we went to Meander on the river Meander and to the Apex Train Park at Deloraine along Racecourse Road, I think it is.  

We passed a mountain that had an amazing dark cloud covering the top of the mountain.

We passeda lake and a beautiful horse in a paddock at Westbury.

At Carrick we saw a beautiful old building that had been burnt by fire. It was called Archer’s Follow, and on the signboard it had all the details of the fire.

On the way home we saw something that “tickled Selena’s fancy.” 

It was a truck that had a caravan built on top of it so it looked like a caravan without a car to pull it. 

And last of all we passed the coffee shop which is the drab place I first walked to which is the only place near where we are living to go for a cup of coffee, the Bizy Bee.

And then around the corner to home.