Fool's Paradise – Infinity on a Shoestring Gender: Male (last time I looked); Writer; Thinker; Studier of the Human Condition (and chickens' entrails); Wonderer; Laugher; Listener; Character; Recent Optimist; Part-of-the-Solution Aspirant; Sarsaparilla, Cocoa, and ex-White Black Tea Imbiber (no sugar - plenty sweet enough); Twenty Eight Thousand and Twelfth Living Wonder of the World; Amateur Worm Farmer Extraordinaire and Professional Worm Admirer; Humus Assist and Humorist; Play Up; Yes-Hoper...
And I reckon: Reality is actually far better than the best any of us can imagine, the universe is friendly and funny, laughter is a powerful medicine as well as an efficacious antidote for self-importance, and the best is yet to come, despite any and all appearances to the contrary...
Saturday: Gerraway! It couldn’t be Sarrerday, or Sarrerdi to be more dinkum! Well whatdayaknow, it is! Having had a very late walk, dawn was not that far away. I uploaded a couple of day’s worth of this very diary, before tackling the kitchen while the house could be open in the cool of the morning, to let out the heat from the hot water of my hand and machine dish washing. I noticed about this time that my right eye, my somewhat gammy eye, was a third blood, the white of the eye that is, and I looked somewhat like I imagine the writer from the black lagoon must look like. I had this happen a year or two ago, and if I recall, it has only been these two times.
Then I retreated to the back yard to water and tend to the bamboo culms needing directing and tying, before eventually hitting the sack mid-morning. I expected to be woken by the alabaster dragon about half three to drive her and Pa pree Inkletter to the local shops and over to Girrawheen for the usual Saturday round of non-essentials, but she must have had a rare pang of concern for me and let me sleep another hour, forgoing the shopping, so that I could drive and function tonight.
It was hot, humid, and stormy over the ranges, and we got ready for visiting the Chocsons up at The Vines. We left soon after six o’clock, dashed to pick up Pa pree, then called at the local shops for some supplies for the Chocson visit, before dashing back for Missus Inkletoobusytoremembereverything to jab herself with her Byetta needle, giving her one hour before needing to eat. After this, we headed along Marshall Road east toward the hills along the beautiful rustic WhitemanPark southern boundary. The WalyungaNational Park to Ellenbrook area was dark and ominous, and lightning was flashing, and that’s where we were headed! As we turned into Millhouse Road we encountered something rare – heavy rain in bright sunshine, such was the alignment of the elements. It was still raining, much lighter, minutes later when we pulled up at the Chocsons’ place at The Vines, Babies Ink&Peggletter having already arrived, this being their first ever visit to thisChocsons’ place in this neck of the woods.
And what a treat the Babies got! In addition to seeing the kangaroos coming for bread at the fences before the rain, they had Reeve giving them not only a tour of his magic garden full of herbs, vegetables, grapes, you name it, worm farms, compost, you name it, but also half of the things growing in it, from straight produce to cuttings, root pieces, you name it, potted up and ready to go. And what a treat we all got, for Rocci had cooked up a vegetarian storm this time, and it was derishus! Babies Ink&Peggletter brought the starters, exotic dips and exotic crisps such as beetroot, and Janny brought the desserts to kill for such as stewed rhubarb and apple, and a poppy seed sponge cake with icing to die for you’d get high just thinking about. Not to mention the +paytontedwithlove+ cocoa drinks I made for Reeve and myself, managing to drop the whizzer in the process, landing it hard, yet somehow it ran like it hadn’t happened afterwards. Maybe the cocoa had preternaturally infused its powers into the whizzer?
I asked Reeve, a great word lover, whether I was the victim of a mondegreen with my ‘nounce’ of the other day, when I wrote of my being happy that Janny can have a professional with some ‘nounce’, Samantha the wonderful shrinking doctor, listen to her life stresses and strains, and he instantly put me right, informing me I meant ‘nous’. Then it all came back to me; if only it never left!; I would have saved ages googling for ‘nounce’.
We later played Absolute Balderdash, and while wussyberger Reeve watched on with Pa pree from the relative safety and sidelines of the lounge, Rocci demonstrated she was full of absolute balderdash, and cut it with the best of us. Reeve won’t be given the luxury of being a sideliner next time (if I have anything to do with it – I’ll think of something he cannot endure, such as withhold his +paytontedwithlove+ cocoa), especially given his great gift for creativity with language. We left about half eleven, in humid conditions, given the drenching the landscape had had on this hot summer’s night.
I was as tired as all get out, and would have preferred Janny to drive if her leg allowed. Anyway, with a mustered full focus we arrived home safe and sound, on a busyish Saturday night roads, just after midnight, having dropped Pa pree home first. I was so exhausted I couldn’t walk, brush my teeth, nothin’. I hit the sack with Janny before two.
Friday: I awoke at eight a.m., after but three hours sleep, unable to sleep again, so up it was, and into computer jobs, including emailing some friends who will pray for my cousin Vee. I am very glad I’ve got this spiritual resource. I also sent more information to Vee’s email address on dietary information which I dug out of the recesses of this computer from back in 2002 that Mum used.
I did much watering and micro-fertilizing on this warm humid day, front and back, and then cleaned up before Umple Dais (Daffyd) picked me up at four o’clock and drove me to Ultratune to save me hoofing it on this warm humid day. The bad news was that as every Suzuki Swift of our vintage has its automatic transmission computerized controller packing up, there are no wrecker parts available, and if and when they are, it’ll be about 600 bucks, while a new one, from Japan and up to a month away, is a thousand bucks. May the car manufacturers who price these things this way, and plan the obsolescence, live in interesting times. A little circuit board with some software wired into it. Not unlike the thousand bucks at full price (had we not been kindly given a big discount) for our Miele oven’s circuit board which packed up last year – six inches square of circuit board with some software in it. A quarter of the price of the whole oven.
Simon L., the wonderful manager, showed me how to override things manually for as long as we have to or choose to, bless his cotton socks, and will wait for our next move, be it search for second hand parts or take our chances. I then plunged into a late orgy of shopping on my own at the nearby major shopping centre, scoring a pair of cargo pants at Ed Harry’s, thicker than I want but no matter, for twenty bucks, and a couple of fittings from Tandy, one of which I searched for all over as well as online over two years ago to no avail: an audio 3.5mm stereo plug to socket elbow. The fellow at Tandy reckoned they’ve always been available, but I reckon I searched and questioned high and low without success back then, being amazed that it wasn’t available. I can use it with my iRiver T10 mp3 player, which if it has a niggly fault, it would have to be the fact that the earphone jack sticks out at a bad angle, and this elbow will alleviate this problem (which it did on my first test on my late walk). The other fitting I didn’t expect to find either: an audio adaptor 3.5mm mono socket to RCA plug, if that makes sense. (I was overjoyed when back home I got my diminutive iRiver T10 to play an mp3 through our (by comparison only) huge Sony Trinitron courtesy of this plug. Now I won’t have to frig around burning to CD or DVD any of my recordings in order to be able to check the finished result in the comfort of the lounge, so I am one happy chappy about this.
I checked the astronomical price of the original ink tanks for my Canon iPixma 4200 printer at both Kmart and BigW, and the identical tanks cost over $4 more each at Kmart, a state of affairs I find, while not universal, is the norm between the two competitors across their everyday prices for a huge range of items. So at Kmart they are five cents shy of 29 bucks each, while at BigW they are under 25 bucks each.
I next got petrol over at Shell on Alexander Drive, using of all things a Kmart voucher from a receipt I picked up in the car park – thanks Kmart for that! Petrol has jumped almost twenty cents since last week when I last got juice, strewth! Next I called out our local Dewsons’, hoping to score another few slabs of the great over one month long special on Harvey Fresh UHT milk, but ’twas all gone, and it had reverted back to $1.95 a litre from 99 cents a litre. So coffee, gingeebee (ginger beer), and sugar it was only.
Worn out, I returned to Janny, the Swift’s auto transmission having worked fine, for it is only an intermittent problem, but was shortly sent packing around to Pa pree with vittles for him and his package which arrived today (Janny felt it would be more secure delivered to our place): his plastic shakuhachi seven hole flute for 240 bucks thank you very much. He was chuffed and most surprised it had already come, and put it together and pumped out some pleasant sounds in front of me. He decided with me to take our chances for a while yet with the transmission on the Swift, given the ridiculous cost to fix the software only.
I cancelled yesterday with Bob, for today was to be his swimming day. He is funny, because most every week he’ll comment that the car sounds dicky, and this week he was right.
Back home I broke bread in front of My Beloved and The 7.30 Report, eventually crawling into bed for a 3 hour nap about nine o’clock. Missus Inkles woke me just after midnight, as I requested, and she hit the sack, her leg pain not as bad today as she had feared, but bad enough. I watched David Letterman, and must say Renée Zellweger would have been much more enjoyable had she appeared in a comfortable old track suit and been just relaxed and normal, rather than a Barbie doll on display. From the moment she walked on artificially swinging like a clown, to the way she sat, holding her right hand of her hip, it reminded me of one of the reasons why I’m glad I’m not a woman. That poor girl seemed to think she had to portray some feminine ideal, but she was unrelaxed in her effort, and it was exhausting to watch. Give me her in round the house clothes any day, and a normal state of interaction. Uugghhh! Yes she’s gorgeous, but she doesn’t need to try, she just naturally is. She should let the natural relaxed persona shine through, and stick it up the expectations’ jacksie!
I wrote some of this blog, then went for a very late walk, aided and abetted by white comforters to control headache, arriving back drenched in sweat, as we are entering dinky di Perth February sauna weather. My bamboo – that which gets the food and water – is stoked, going gangbusters, with new major culms appearing every week now. On my return I continued writing, and jotted the odd note down for my critique, The Dawkins Deduction.
Thursday: After the uploading to my Fool’s Paradise ‘In other news…’ site, a terrible thought occurred to me: is Internet Explorer displaying these new ‘In other news…’ postings properly? After all, I have only had it going for a week or so, and I hadn’t yet checked it in IE, as Firefox is the much better browser, or at least it’s my browser of choice. So I loaded the site in IE, and sure enough, many earlier posts had the HTML code leakage – – between every paragraph. SHIT! More time to waste redoing all those postings when I can get to it. Thanks Blogger editor, may you rot in hell, although hell is too good for you.
I tidied up the Swift a tad, had a shower, then scooted down to Ultratune and left the wheels there with Simon L. the manager, a very pleasant fellow who has serviced these wheels excellently for well over a decade. We go halves with Pa pree for all car repairs, and this time the automatic transmission needs servicing (bad news, see tomorrow’s entry). I later discovered that there are but two of his surname in the whole Perth White Pages, and when I questioned him the following day he said the other is his brother. Fancy that I thought, given that the surname is certainly not odd or queer, and ends in ‘ford’ as do many names, and is but 8 letters long. Wow. Names interest me a lot.
In humid conditions I walked back for the exercise, hat on, iRiver T10 and my favourite talking book massaging, nay, working out, my brain, and the walk takes me just a smidgeon over half an hour when I’m well, but I’ve got to really hoof it.
While Janny, poor old pheasant, slept on, I did my back yard summer maintenance jobs until midday news time, when she plied me with cheese, crackers, gherkins, and tomato, and met with little resistance. I was getting in the mindset to sleep, which was badly needed, when my Aunt Elsie phoned, which news from Janny that she wanted to speak to me had me concerned, for I thought perhaps all was not well with my mother.
Well, it was bad news: her eldest son, my cousin, Vee, but 45, has just had a cancer diagnosis, throat-neck, with a tumour around a tonsil, and tests yet to establish whether it has spread. I played with him in the mid sixties when I used to spend a week at a time during school holidays at Melville, up from Pinjarra. I am six years his senior, but the pairing worked very well. I suppose I must have been like a big brother in retrospect. He is married with a son, 9, and a younger daughter. My poor aunt remained composed but I could easily tell she is very stressed for her son. She knew I had some cancer dietary additive advice of Dr Johanna Budwig, that I had Mum use back from 2001 when she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer, so I said I’d send it asap.
I had the information emailed within about 15 minutes, and went to bed burdened for Vee, his wife and children, his parents, and his three brothers, who are, fortunately, all strongly supportive of helping Vee beat it. I also had begun my praying for his healing.
Without enough sleep under my belt, I surfaced after seven o’clock, to prepare for the greatest highlight of every week, the visit for din dins and games by Babies Ink&Peggletter. Before I hit the sack and before Aunt Elsie had rung, we had Simon L. phone us from Ultratune to deliver the bad news about the extent of problems with the Swift’s transmission problems: a circuit board controller which changes the gears playing up, and it would be more like 400 bucks and not be ready till late tomorrow, which explains why I slept through the late afternoon, rather than hoofing it back to pick up the serviced Swift. (It gets worse – see tomorrow’s entry.)
So the Babies picked up Pa pree for us given that we were wheel-less, and we enjoyed a delish meal of cold roast beef and all sorts of salads and praters (you would not believe how long it just took me to google how the Irish say ‘potatoes’, for I wasn’t sure just how to spell it), and later a dessert of wine boiled pears in chocolate. Missus Inklechef should be busted. We played a short card game of Big Fish Little Fish, with the Babies cleaning up the floor, before Carcassonne, a favourite for us, with more new tiles coming into the plot. Of course Baby Inkletter cleaned us up again.
As fate would have it, after watching Letterman and doing some more pooter stuff, I decided to forgo a walk, and go to be ‘early’ at half two, but then as I got into bed, Janny felt her leg cramping beginning, and what ensued was the worst she’d had in a very long time. It took me almost three hours to get her in a state to go back to bed, and while she did her points in the lounge after the severe pain had subsided enough for her to move, I decided to do the kitchen clean up which I had decided to leave till tomorrow in aid of an ‘early’ night. So about five a.m. saw sleep for me.
Wednesday: I fled from the computer into the relative relaxation of over two hours of cleaning up the war zone that was the kitchen, with two dishwasher plus loads required to make a dent in the mess. In the overcast and very humid new daylight I then watered the back garden, and tied back bamboo culms, one of my delights. My babies are growing beautifully, those that are being fed and watered that is.
A shower, then Missus Inkletter surfaced, late morning, and she wanted to hear Arcanum. Gulp! I knew that was fraught, as she is therein portrayed (truthfully of course) as somewhat of a cythral. She was prepared to sit uncomfortably in the back room to listen from the computer, for I hadn’t yet burned it in a form that our useless Panasonic DMR ES15 DVD Recorder could manage to play in the comfort of the lounge through our wonderful old Sony Trinitron. Well, we did listen to almost half, and she did raise her beautiful little eyebrows many times, but admitted it was very funny.
I got to bed about half one. I had asked Missus Inklealarmclock to wake me just before six so that I could join her and her entire remaining family, Pa and Umple Daffyd pree Inkletters, for din dins, but I waved to her my disapproval of the idea from the bowels of our boudoir in the depths of my stupor, as I was feeling like death at one degree Kelvin. I eventually surfaced about eleven o’clock, forced to by the need to tinkle, but noted that Letterman would be on momentarily, so tackled my ablutions and watched it with Janny while eating my tuck tucks. Letterman was still sparking somewhat from his break, which, come to think of it, should be a permanent state for a comedy show – the sparking that is. Sadly I had missed my favourite night of the week comedy line up on Aunty, for I had been snoring my head off, having some strange dreams again, involving electric fences, gates, a now parched garden around the home on the farm where we used to live before I married, and where my mum stayed living till but nine years ago, and other odd things.
After Letterman I turned off the box, and let Janny talk to me about the happenings of the last couple of days: well, an hour or more, no, make that an hour and a half of verbiage followed. My she talks like an old woman! – hang on, she is an old woman. I believe it does her – and anyone – good to be listened to empathetically, but boy oh boy my ears can get a workout. As I’ve said many times, as suggested even in the title to the next posting, that woman can talk the locomotive appendages off any number of mammals.
Finally chatted out, I put her to bed, and after some email checking and whatnot, I took off on my late walk, at a quarter to three this time. I am digging deep in my favourite talking book at the moment into some fascinating stuff about the nature of energy; it certainly made the walk an exercise for both body and mind. I had just copied some specifically focussed chapters on subjects of ‘extra’ particular interest to me to a separate folder in my trusty old iRiver T10, and this will make it mobs easier to access these parts.
I tackled the kitchen on my return, getting one load of dishes going. Then it was here in front of this keyboard catching up with this blog of the last three days, as well as sending an email to the Town of Bassendean Council letting them know that their Mayor, Tina Klein, might be pinching jelly beans and schnapps from the council chambers, and pointing them to where they could listen to the shocking revelations: the Arcanum story. Which story, by the way, has the sounds of our back garden bird life visitors chirping away at dawn in the background.
Next came the uploading of a couple of days of ‘In other news…’, as said bird life began chattering away again in the faint daylight now increasing. An idea occurred to me while doing this: I should be able to make a sacrificial, or test, bare bones blog for posting to, testing the display in IE and Firefox, and with its much faster loading times, I should save some time there, then when it’s right, copy the html to the final blogsite. What a smart idea! It doesn’t reduce my hatred of the Blogger editor, nor the Blogger layout manager, nor the Blogger templates, though!
Tuesday: I had to lean rather heavily on Missus InkleI’dreallyrathernot last night to commit to keeping her first of two medical appointments today, being whacked out and not feeling up to juggling the Byetta nausea contingencies and getting her Acuplus zapper dapper points done all before leaving, but this encouragement of mine had the downside of signing, sealing, and delivering my fate as the driver much earlier than I would have preferred, for Janny’s leg pain incident is still fresh in her memory, both her brain cells’ and her body cells’, making driving still fraught. So I cracked the whip after so little sleep when I got up, and we picked up Pa pree and had Janny at the appointment for half eleven.
Bearing in mind, dear readers, the wisdom of ‘crypticity’ in a public blog, Samantha the wonderful shrinking doctor has proven to be very caring for Janny, and is not charging above the bulk bill rate (thus Medicare makes it free for us), making her as rare as hen’s teeth in her particular specialty, and has now seen my missus half a dozen times or so from the middle half of last year, all upon the recommendation of her GP. Given this sacrifice compared to her colleagues, and her empathy with Janny, I did not want her to go and cancel under three hours before the appointment time, given that yesterday was a public holiday. Just not fair in my opinion, unless a serious development interferes with plans. Janny was glad after the event that I strongly encouraged her in, in fact exuded disapproval of her not, keeping the appointment.
Of course I am ripe enough around the ears to know that much of the advice my missus would receive from this profession, and reasonably so, would be stand up against unreasonable demands upon her time and attention, which is greatly stressing her. It thus devolves upon the recipient of the advice to apply it. So when the recipient does not want to do so in regard to a particular individual, this complicates matters. To her credit Samantha the wonderful shrinking doctor acknowledged all this today, so Janny tells me, and is helping her with modified strategies to gain ‘me’ and ‘X-free’ time. Nevertheless, I’m of the opinion that simply having a caring professional with some nounce (why do I use this word thinking it means ‘intelligence’; ‘capability’; etc.? I just googled it and can find nothing, nor in my hard copy dictionaries. What am I mangling from my youth that has come to be ‘nounce’ now? Let me know if you know!) (Breaking news: Reeve Chocson put me right - read all about my mondegreen in INNALOO: Residents plead with an immovable Payton L. Inkletter not to flush away his genius and get bogged down into the long drop of toilet humour. below.) - yes, having a caring professional listen to your problems every now and then is potentially a helpful if not healing experience, and so for this reason alone I encourage Janny to attend every appointment the good doctor offers.
After the appointment I drove Janny around the Anglicare Op Shop where we donated bags of clothes and such, then I dropped her at the door of the major local shopping centre where she was to find Pa pree and keep shopping for an hour till they dropped. Meanwhile, I found a lucky shady spot under a tree, and read, first, a small segment from ‘Dear Fatty’ by Dawn French, the second section of this book Baby Inkletter wanted me to read and give her my opinion on, followed by more chapters of Clive Hamilton’s ‘The Freedom Paradox’, escaping into his thoughts on metaphysics, and from the little people, a treat not to be considered lightly.
Next I scooted around and picked the recalcitrants up, and drove them to ‘This Little Piggy’s’ podiatrist in Yokine for Missus Inklepiggytriedtostayhome’s appointment. This fellow has transformed Janny’s trotters, and this was only her second visit! He so skilfully attended to her sole splits with their silicaceous sheaths and the corns and whatnot the first time late last year that her diabetic feet have responded brilliantly. I kept on reading young Clive’s book, and I must admit that while I found oodles to agree with in Part One, this ‘Philosophical Foundations’ that is Part Two, is, while a worthwhile summary of much of philosophy, exposing lack of rigour and attention to detail on his behalf, despite him appearing to – and I admit he has done – give it a damn good go; the ontological conclusions he is reaching are not what I can say I agree with. Early days though, for I’ve much more to go in his book. My own writings on ontology before the middle of last year in my draft of The Dawkins Deduction clash in fundamental places with Hamilton’s.
We called in to Ultratune (toothpaste, the oil you can really feel!) on our way back, and booked a transmission service for Thursday, as the bands are not engaging periodically, or so Pa pree explains, which if this is the case, it explains why we start with only half our power sometimes until the car warms up a lot.
Yippee! JB Hifi emailed me to say they have dispatched my Alison Krauss CD today! I hit the sack once back about half four, for a few hours, as I was barely able to function. Poor Janny was in need of sleep badly, but entertained Pa pree instead. When I surfaced I watered some outside, and took Pa pree Inkletter home before eleven. Then we watched Letterman, and he was sparking, as though the break had done him some good, on this what appeared to be the first show since the ObamaInauguration. The repartee and understandings he enjoys with Brian Williams are entertaining.
I sent my opinion on the Dear Fatty piece by email to Baby Inkletter, then I finally tackled putting the full text of the Arcanum story into the posting of Dec. 31st, using the edit function, copying from Word the 12,500 plus words. Well, of course what followed was a well worn descent down the wide path into Blogger hell. Have I said here before how much I detest the Blogger editor’s guts? Of course the spaces between paragraphs in my Word document don’t appear in the online Blogger editor – how impudent of me to expect them to – so I laboriously placed a space between every paragraph, and line of dialogue, taking ages, and published it, danced around the effing ‘Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not allowed: ’ error message that always displays now, and finally got the story up. I emailed this fact to Gladys Hobson and thanked her for her kind comments both at 4shared.com and in her personal email to me regarding the audio version of Arcanum which she had listened to while it was still warm, and embarked on a very late walk, about half two in the morning.
On my return I checked the Arcanum text posting display more closely, only to discover that HTML code had typically leaked out in Internet Explorer’s display, the good reliable old ‘’ cursed code, between paragraph breaks down at the Mighty Midland Medley’s masthead font lines. Thanks Blogger, thanks IE, love you too. Firefox displays it beautifully, but way more folk use IE, so I had to correct it. Now should you place the cursor just once into the ‘Compose’ page, as opposed to the ‘Edit Html’ page, formatting regarding spacings and even the font sizes themselves are regularly smashed to smithereens, and it’s back to the beginning again. Just by placing the frigging cursor in the page! Not doing a thing with it mind you, just positioning it anywhere in there! If it’s tens of thousands of words long, you’re in the shit, you’re in for a soul destroying redoing in the cursed online Blogger editor (may it rot in hell), whose guts I’d boil, whose guts I hate. Well, I had to redo it twice didn’t I? I finally got it done the once, then realised I hadn’t placed the caption text in at the end of the story, so the simple addition of these in Word to the display copied from web page into Word still was not good enough for the arse that is Blogger editor, was it? Oh no, throw out ALL the paragraph spacings again for having the audacity to add a few lines at the end! The same old story. Why not make the Blogger editor compatible with Word and Writer, the two ‘most’ ubiquitous word processors in the world today? At least for the basics such as spacings, font size, colour, bold, italics, and underlines? Throw in a few decent font choices and hyperlinks, and what would I have to complain about? But then I’m a petulant sod, with the audacity to want to be able to write my posts in Word where I can access many tools such as grammar, thesaurus, and spell checking, as well as do searches back through all my previous postings stored in the same document.
This whole soul destroying exercise wasted over two hours. Bear in mind it takes about four or five minutes for my main page to load for me, before I can peruse the result. I estimate that I spend almost as much time getting my writings onto Blogspot as I spend writing them, and the whole situation stinks. I tell you, some moments would be bad for me to bump into a Blogger editor programmer, for I’d rip his nuts off, or bitch slap her; (and I’m a gentle man).
Finally, done at last, so I sent an email to young Duncan of the Moon lineage, informing him that hooray!, the story, text and audio, about his Arcanum, is done.
Monday: Happy Australia Day to all my fellow Aussies, and pretenders!
Eye strained from all the CRT computer screen staring while I recorded, trimmed, and spliced the Arcanum story, deep vein thrombosis aided and abetted, I was glad to get outside and do a cowboy watering of the bamboos, and a tad of tying back, especially of the damaged (kinked) large oldhamii culm of my misadventure. I tied it in five places to a mature neighbour, kissed itbetter, apologised to it, and will hope for the best, but the wind will so bend the neighbour that I don’t know what to expect for the brittle young one.
A warm day, humid, but much better than yesterday, so this will help those hundreds of thousands of bravehearts or fools, take your pick, who sit around the foreshores of Perth city for hours in advance in the searing sunshine to secure the best vantage points for tonight’s skyshow. But then I did a tad of such for Baby Inkletter decades ago…
Pa pree Inkletter and Umple Daffyd arrived before noon to have a lunch with us, and we watched at the same time a tad of telly before I had to retire to the bedroom to get some badly needed sleep.
Which I did, and when Missus Inklealabasterdragon woke me at nine o’clock she disturbed some unusual dreams I was having, involving hills, ocean, waves of chalk and sea water, icy caverns, myself riding to these strange places on a bicycle, and much more I don’t recall. She and Pa pree were watching a free to air movie, and to the south the Skyshow thunder began for its half hour of glory, while I attended to my painfully slow ablutions and waking up procedure. No joking, the waking up can take three hours and be so tiring I feel like I need to go back to bed! The time needed for my ablutions are something of legend about these parts, but rugged beauty can’t be hurried, or can it?
I took a gamble and began the long slow upload – it took almost an hour – of the Arcanum story to my 4shared.com account, all 70+ Mb of it, having listened to less than half of the spliced version looking out for glitches which my iRiver machine regularly puts into it when recording – momentary dropouts of my voice – not to mention my own errors. If it’s got any bloopers too big, I’ll fix them up, and upload again, deleting my first upload. Janny and I hope to listen to the whole story through the TV later after I return Pa pree home, and she’ll hear it all for the first time, not even having read any of it, and I’ll get to listen for errors and glitches. Janny comes in for a bit of flack in the story, so I hope I get through it all with my manhood and marriage intact.
Most every week, sometimes every day, I find some new skin blemish appearing from my mad youth sizzling in the Australian sun all day every day without protection, not even a hat. That is one thing I would change in a flash about my physical living if I had my time over again – I’d take the sun very seriously indeed, and cover up assiduously, as I do nowadays, fifty years too late.
I took Pa pree home about half eleven, and had a meal watching a pre-recording of an episode of Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby with Janny, not being able to get our useless Panasonic DMR ES15 DVD Recorder to play the mp3 of the Arcanum story I spoke of earlier. I later converted it to a wav file, and will try again through the telly on the morrow, as an audio CD, for Janny’s sake.
I meanwhile put the combined file back onto my iRiver T10, and went for a nice long walk and listened to the whole thing, and was pleasantly surprised at how few machine caused glitches there were, and at how my own mess ups were bearable, some even adding to the effort. I found it funny, and I hope you do to.
I was surprised too by how little hoonery was going on on this late Skyshow evening of Australia Day, but the large amount of littered booze bottles, spirits and beers, did not escape my notice. There were a few more cars on the road, but not so many. And the overnight temperature was very reasonable for late January.
On my return I added links to the Arcanum audio file from the main site, and generally titivated and tweaked this and that to do with it. Just the full story text now remains to be uploaded to the Arcanum story posting. If I get this finished tomorrow night, I’ll then email Duncan Moon and let him know it’s all finished now, a mere three months or so after I asked him whether he would mind if I wrote a funny story about his beautiful Arcanum artwork.
Very very late I hit the sack, but it took me a very long time to fall asleep.
Sunday: The day did get as hot as forecast, about a hundred Fahrenheit. I surfaced in time to catch My Beloved (on which a segment about solarium dangers sent me down a bit, as I recalled my massive overexposure to the sun as a young man and boy, and the stupid use of a small solarium lamp in my late twenties for a while; reminders of my mortality sometimes hit me with force, as it did on this occasion, when most often I’m hardly affected). Next it was time to deliver vittles to Pa pree Inkletter, and I helped him with a couple of things on his pooter before returning to tackle one of the deepest darkest wild corners of our yard, the northeast one, where I cut away some of the dry grass. I discovered that the large new Bambusa oldhamii culm I tied this morning near its top had kinked half way down in today’s breeze, which I should have seen coming, so I tied it in a second place just above the kink, hoping to arrest any more fracturing, and allow it to heal and strengthen the kink. Whenever damage occurs to my bamboo I feel out of sorts, and all the more so when I am the cause; they’re all so hard won, every culm, and I know them all by name, even the leaves!
I came in after dark for tuck tuck, and then began more computing bits and pieces. It’s doing a run slow again, thanks be to Bill Gates and his demon mates at Microsoft.
Missus Inkletter and I watched a repeat of Compass about Australia Day and the flag, done by Geraldine Doogue herself, and there were some thought provoking comments by a theologian and Dick Smith that have prompted me to think some more about the matter of the flag. I returned to the pooter and began a second edit of The Mighty Midland Medley ‘Arcanum’ story, while getting emails from Baby Inkletter, who is finding it hard to sleep.
Just before I went for a late walk, about half two o’clock a.m. on this warm humid night, nib over and down a few, (son Sekim of mention a few days back) let blast with very loud (wog) music, likely Sekim and his mates, and Ahmed,their nib, came out from his sleeping household of eight or so souls to protest. The whole blast must have lasted three minutes. I intimated ignorance in the entry of the other day, and I’ll add to it inconsideration. Dozens of homes would have had their occupants woken up.
My walk had me drenched with perspiration by my return. Then back to this here pooter to do more editing. I eventually finished the second edit of Arcanum, then I bravely tackled, with a cup of tea on hand to sip for oiling my tonsils, the recording of the story, straight from the computer screen. Essentially the whole story is first take final take, but in eight blocks, for it totalled a record breaking hour and a quarter, my longest recorded ‘short’ story to date. I used the impressive mp3DirectCut and 123AVMerger software to chip off the clicks on the ends and splice the eight bits together. From starting the recording to splicing the bits together must have taken me more than four hours.
Saturday: Some of my billions of long term readers, otherwise known as my Foolpies, are expecting me to pronounce that it is Sarrerdi, so you have not been disappointed. Oh where would Missus Inklewornout and I be without Sarrerdi’s? The bulk of the week’s duties over, and time to prepare for the next week’s onslaught.
The temperature climbed a bit today, just as all the little boys and girls who lie and end up working for the Bureau of Meteorology told us. I awoke with a nice early stage migraine brewing, so I got onto the white comforters straight away, popping them as this day wore on, keeping the lid on the pain and its ‘quinseconces’. I took the little people to the local shops, for Janny’s leg cramp the other day is still making driving a fraught decision. I got another 4 cartons of UHT Harvey Fresh mullock on sposhull, which suggests the Chinese melamine contaminatedmilk scare and subsequent cancelled Asian mullock order certainly left a mountain of this locally produced mullock unsold. What with Reeve Chocson’s honey, our house is now the land of UHT and syrup.
We got back just in time to watch My Beloved, and the economic bad news keeps mounting, and the rescues required, with the latest Australian Government involvement in the commercial property sector. I headed outside to use the waning daylight for tweaking the melons with the growing bamboo shoots (tying them back, directing their growth), watering, and such, before tuck tuck at dark watching the last half of ‘The Jackal’ on free to air with Pa pree Inkletter, while consuming one of my favourites, baked beans and cheese on toast. I returned said wrinkly just after 11 o’clock, then began watering out the front, my gorgeous Sansevierias under the patio, the biggest most beautiful aspidisansevierias in the world.
I became aware out of the corner of my eye a person beside a motorbike, a few feet away from me, now near midnight! It was none other than Dale Dumpling, and I had never seen him on two powered wheels before. He had pushed it up to our patio, which is why I was caught by surprise (lucky I didn’t touch cloth, but then, at my age, you just can’t be sure anyway), and we had a chat. He had been spending the afternoon driving it at Bayswater, and the back tyre began to melt, causing him to all but push the bike home between riding carefully on the footpaths, not having lights. I discovered the cause of the melting for him – the tyre literally was rubbing on the exhaust from his weight and bumps, and he is not a heavy bloke. So much for the quality of this Chinese bike, a Christmas present to himself. This incident put a very different and innocent complexion upon the expression ‘burning rubber’, which his old man, the notorious and infamous Kip Dumpling, has been known to use. By the way, it is thrilling to see the wonderful progress Dale has made in geatly improving his life, a formerly wild lad who went to the same school as Baby Inkletter for a while, and is but a half year older. After Dale left for the final push up to the top of the street I finished my watering, and then tackled making a new header picture for the main Fool’s Paradise web site, and various buts and pooces, before heading off on a very late walk.
I pushed myself, and worked up some perspiration, all the while listening to my wonderful favourite talking book on my trusty old iRiver T10 mp3 player. When it comes time to replace it I hope the company is selling as robust and versatile equivalent model.
On my return I tweaked several of the early posts on this new (since January 2009) page, in regard to spacing inconsistencies with the text’s paragraphs, and of course had to waste much time battling the usual non-WYSIWYG and sundry arbitrary tantrums and vagaries of the infernal Bloggereditor, may it rot in hell.
For a pleasant change, I sought the refuge of the back garden with the new day’s light, and did a lot of watering, bamboo tying, and fertilizing. One of my biggest new culms of the Bambusa oldhamii was curving outwards more than I wanted it too, so I took a risk and tied it to a mature culm up high from the ladder. Back inside and I finished the first edit of The Mighty Midland Medley story about Duncan Moon’s wonderful Arcanum artwork, something I should have done months ago. Late morning Janny tempted me with a brunch of pears and cheese, and it was after 1 p.m. when I finally got to sleep.
Friday: It took me ages to get to sleep, why I can’t say, but it is frustrating that I can be falling asleep in front of TV, but wide awake in bed, yet I have to admit I spent some intervening hours catching up with Fool’s Paradise tasks online before hitting the cosy sack. MissusInklenoisyslumbercheeks did sleep in those times I didn’t, making it harder for moi to fall asleep.
Poor aforementioned old thing, woke with a cramp in her right leg, the usual problem from the pinched nerve in her back, and I had to swing into the well practiced emergency drill of heat packs and zappy dapper (Acuplus) fetching, and after a period of great pain it subsided for her, until she was able to return to get some much needed sleep.
Another mild mid-summer’s day coming up, and that’s not to be sneezed at around these Inkletterville parts. I got ready for taking Bob swimming, bless his dark grey cotton bathers, the ones that slip down to expose where the sun don’t shine to the world the least. His red ones are notorious, but all three pairs have been known to commit this social faux pas, and he’s always oblivious to the innocence he shatters when they slip on the way back up for air after his duck dives in Swan Aquatic’s walking lane.
On the way to Guildford I called into Colli & Sons and bought a pair of cupboard hinges, the only type anywhere close to resembling the pair I fitted the other day in the kitchen. I thought they were expensive, but when I asked Janny to guess what they cost later, she went way above, so I’d better catch up with the times. Bob was patient, for I didn’t get to his place till after three o’clock. Off to Swan Aquatic, where he put in a sterling performance exercise wise, duck diving and walking in the devoted lane, and fortunately I didn’t notice any of his infamous faux pas today, thank the Lord for elastic waist bands!
A young lass slipped into the pool and hurt her back and backside on the edge, poor thing, but she and her mates had long been running around, breaking one of the cardinal rules around pools. She seemed to function okay after a while, but I’ll bet she’s sporting some bruises tonight. I wondered at the lack of constraints applied by the staff, for a controlled moderate riot went on for quite a while among a coterie of young kids between the outdoor and indoor pools.
I read a few more pages of Clive Hamilton’s ‘The Freedom Paradox’, and I have been very much in general agreement, as well as enjoying his style and argument, until the beginnings now of his treatment of metaphysics; I am still enjoying it very much, but am being pushed to accept some of his early analyses of the nature of reality; his take on ontology. Methinks I’ll have to put my boxing gloves on for the rest of this section…
We finished our afternoon with a cup of tea and walk at Fish Market Reserve in Guildford, where we most always find folk fishing from the Swan-Avon, not that I see them actually catching anything.
I got a tad of petrol on the way home in Malaga, and was mighty weary when I arrived at our place. I did a quick turnaround to deliver vittles to Pa pree Inkletter, before sinking into the famous Player recliner and enjoying my tuck tuck. I fell asleep soon after, and had Janny revive me to catch the mid evening SBS news.
Late evening I fitted the two hinges I bought earlier, but they were subtly different as it turned out from the others, and I couldn’t get the door to close cleanly. It’ll probably be me, not the wrong hinges; such things are like rocket science for me. Janny is stoked nevertheless for the result is brilliant compared to how I’d let the pantry doors devolve over the years.
I tackled some online stuff, including a comment to GladysHobson’s Writing for Joy ‘Sun and Rain’ posting, then set off on a late late walk. The boys and girls in blue hesitated driving past me for a mo, but let me be. I wonder if they are the same ones who have come to know me? I smelt smoke in the air on my humid walk, and it always bothers me, for I wonder how close the fire is, and such like.
I have been composing mentally more material for my Dawkin’s critique; I can’t stop myself, and one of my problems is that I’m usually miles from the computer when I come up with the ideas, and I have to make sure somehow I remember the stuff, or jot the ideas down on the million scraps of paper that are piling up everywhere.
I also find myself wondering what it used to feel like having good eyes, legs, muscles, digestive system, strength, everything. Aging has knobs on it, apart from the wisdom accrual. Well nigh everything is hurting these days, which I suppose is funny really, and it’s one way to remember I have all these bits and pieces.
After some more online and offline computer work, as well as a hit of tea and a read of Saturday’s West, I hit the sack.
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