Phoney funny phone calls.......

 

Do you get many of these?  Do these callers irritate you?  If so, you certainly are not alone.  It seems that around five o'clock in the afternoon has been logged onto their computers as a good time to call and pester me.

 

However, instead of getting mad and upsetting yourself, have a little fun with them instead.  The following are my tips for enjoying these calls.....

 

Firstly, when they ask " Am I speaking with so and so?". I always rebound with "Who is calling?"  This seems to throw them a little bit off balance and they don't get to ask me how I am, as if they cared!!

 

So, here some of my ways of dealing with these jackals trying to consume any part of my virtual life that they can get their virtual fangs into.

 

When I am feeling bright, I go into my "Italian" mode.  I speak to them in my limited and, no doubt, broken Italian.  After they get sick of my heavily accented "Do you speak Italian?" routine and my chatting , they generally give up, and I don't get calls for a while from this centre.

 

Then, there are the calls allegedly from Microsoft. "Can I speak to the owner of the computer? There is something wrong with it". At this, my answer is that the owner is dead. This generally elicits a moment of silence and expressions of sympathy. However, one cheeky chappie had the gall to ask me who had the computer now, so I told him I had buried it. End of story. No more calls at the moment

 

The easiest one is to just ask the person to hold the line, and then put the phone down for five minute or so. This generally gives them the message.

 

So, don't be angry, get even and have a laugh on them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have I got green fingers or am I from Mars......

 

I have decided to become a mini gardener. When I look at my unused deck, I am starting to visualise turning it into a green-house. 

 

Okay, at the moment it is open on three sides but, with the clear over-roof, quite a lot of sunshine gets through.  And, somehow I do seem to have green fingers, or is this a trick of the light?

 

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the few plants I do have seem to survive for quite a while with just a bit of water and kind thoughts. So, ever on the lookout for something to expand my horizons, I am going to start with the herbs we use a lot in our household, they seem very hardy. 

 

Also, we eat a lot of salad greens, and once again, if you can protect them from the snails and other pesky critters, they make quite a good addition to the family menu. 

 

Of course, if my late husband, Vern, was still alive, he would quickly convert the marauding snails into a snail farm.  When we lived in our old house, he used to gather the snails from the garden and start the process of preparing them for the table.  Actually, they looked quite tasty when he was finished cooking them, as he was a very good cook. But I couldn't even bring myself to taste one.  So, the snails here are quite safe.

 

Enough of day dreaming.  I am now going start drawing up a plan for the mini garden, and once underway, I will post some pictures.

The age of innocence lost, and airport security……..

 

I was watching a documentary last night about airport security.  I am glad in one way that I did all of my travelling twenty years ago when jumping on a jet meant just that.  A short waltz through the luggage scanner,and,  hey presto. You could just go to the waiting area and board your flight.  Looking at the programme last night I wondered if the authorities can possibly find any more indignities to heap on the heads of the passengers.

 

And this programme about airport security triggered a memory from sixty years ago, when I was a child of about ten, and I remembered  how trusting the Americans were way back then.

 

My grandparents lived in a Brisbane suburb called Bulimba, in a house just across  the  road from the Brisbane River.  Around 1943. after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, the Americans officially joined in  World War Two.  They had a lot of their fleet based in the pacific theatre of war while they were engaged in the battle of the Coral Sea, off the North Queensland coast.

 

Brisbane was the port of refitting, rest and regrouping, and, from time to time,  I would look across the river and see that the odd battleship or gunboat had dropped anchor  and was tied up at the big wharves on the opposite  side  of the river.

 

As part of what would have been an early  version of "winning the hearts and minds of the population", the Americans would hold open days on which anyone who wanted to could go aboard any of the ships which were in port.  Long queues of people would form as everyone was anxious to see the fleet that had come to save us.  And save us they did.  The Australian government, in its infinite wisdom, had decided not to defend Queensland above "the Brisbane Line", and the rest of Queensland was going to be abandoned to the Japanese invaders.

 

Anyway, as I was staying so close to these ships, I went aboard many of them and even got to go down into a submarine one day.  What a magnificent adventure for a ten year old .

 

To this day, in those of us who are still alive and can remember, there is a deep and abiding affection for the brave Americans who won this important battle and literally saved us from a horrible fate.  Just near our house, there was an unofficial graveyard where the remains of the planes, lost in battle and salvaged for scrap, were dumped, awaiting recycling.  Their shattered remains were piled up, torn and broken,  the nose cones still brightly painted with the names the brave pilots had given to their planes. 

Pandora and all that jazz………

 

There is a saying that music is good for the soul. But I have never been a person involved much with music. 

 

However, now I am starting to see the benefits of listening to a variety of music genres (as they say on iTunes). I am finding that listening to meditation music as soon as I get up is as good as a tranquilliser. It gives my mind a calm platform to launch itself from  into the day. If I don't take this action first thing, my thoughts and memories start to take a dark turn. I wish I knew why unpleasant memories are so ready to appear and why the good ones have to be knowingly excavated. 

 

And, so to my favourite radio station on the internet, Pandora.  No, this isn't an advertisement for Pandora, but a small gesture of appreciation for all the pleasure I get from listening to this site.

 

And, to make it even more enjoyable, it's free, no ads and they only put in the odd breaks asking if you are still listening.  Of course, they would like you to upgrade for a fee, but I will just take it like it comes.

 

It is such a simple site, and you can go to iTunes and get a free app.  The selection of music is up to you.  I go for gentle meditation in the mornings while I carry out my mindless and endless, it seems, self maintenance tasks.

 

Later in the day, after I claw myself back into consciousness from my afternoon Nanna Nap, I put on a selection of rock and roll, with the Rolling Stones, and others, of course.  I just love Mick Jagger, he’s nearly as old as me! I cant imagine him having a Nanna Nap.   And Boogie Woogie, can you remember that, too?   I am so old that I can recall doing the Jitter Bug (ever heard of that?), it’s a dance craze from the olden days, circa mid 20^th century.    

 

So that's my pick of the day. Good on you, Pandora.  Go!!!

 

 

The smile on the face of a sparrow…….

 

You don’t believe me, do you?  I’ll bet you have never looked closely enough at these pesky little birds to notice their peculiar quirks. Neither had I until, recently,  I generously bought them a bird bath. 

 

You would think they would have been highly delighted at this gift from me, but no.  They regarded it with disdain. They flew over it, around it, and under it, but would they get their feet wet?  Hell no. They preferred having a dust bath in a little patch of dirt.   I dutifully changed the water, and watched hopefully from my bedroom window, but nary a bird could be seen drinking or wallowing in the bird bath. Ingrates, I thought. 

 

At one point, I considered giving up my philanthropic gesture to nature, and decided to  reclaim it and turn  it into a very nice planter .  However, that day, miracle of miracles, a lone sparrow flew down and landed on the edge of the bath.  As I looked, he dipped his beak into the water and took a long drink.   When I looked again, there suddenly appeared a lot of sparrows, the first bird was a trail blazer.

 

Now, just because you cant see a sparrow’s  teeth, that doesn’t mean he is  not smiling. I feel I am a great success with my bird bath, and now there are different types of birds coming in, too.

 

The moral of this story is for you to remember to provide water for our bird and animal friends, particularly if you live in a heat stricken part of Australia

Blog moving on  to weekly posts……

 

It has been suggested to me that I should only do the posts one day  a week, and so the next post will be on the same day (Sunday NZ time) each week.   But of, course, if there is anything particularly interesting, I will post that too.

 

What do you think?

 

 

You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too many computers…..

 

I don’t think Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, would have approved of this version of her favourite saying.  But, as I am never going to become too thin or too rich, I will have to make do with the last one, and I’ll say it again –you can never have too many computers.

 

I don’t know when I came into this state of mind regarding techno-tat, but as newer and newer gadgets come pouring out onto the market place, “must have” has become firmly installed in our language.

 

Not just kids, either.  I hoped that, after many years spent in the School of Hard  Knocks, I would have some immunity to this all-out advertising drive to hook our brains  up to our computers.  But, lo and behold, who is that standing in the store gazing lovingly at the latest cell phone, the thinnest tablet and counting her money?  Yup, its me.    Well, at least I have the good manners to do the number crunching at home.

 

From being a “no computer oldie”. I now find that I have surrounded myself with a desktop, an iPad and an Ipod.  Now, I am seriously contemplating the purchase  of one of the latest cell  phones.  I already have a perfectly good old cell phone, an earlier Nokia , which in fact is smaller than the new phones and works perfectly well.  However, you never know.  My fame as a blogger might spread and I will start to get text messages, maybe from aliens from outer space!!

 

And while I am talking about texting, did you know that what you think of as this new-fangled, newly discovered, pursuit is in fact a swept-up version of  the cables sent over one hundred years ago. I think this was an Edison invention. Clever man.    In the olden days, telegrams ( have you even heard of these?) and  news stories etc were transmitted by teleprinter, a machine which used a paper tape which  fed through the receiving machines.  Have you seen the “ticker tape” parades in America, well this is the kind of tape being used long ago. It punched holes through the paper tape, looking much like Braille, and of course, some smart alecks among us could even sight read these messages. Not me, however.  The tapes could then be fed back through another machine which decoded the messages into print.  .  In order to save time and money, the abbreviations of words were widely used.

 

So there!!! I am so old,  I can remember working with these machines!!! 

 

 

 

   

Cooking  in the morning…

 

Many years ago, in 1976, Vern and I and the children went to Italy for six months.  We lived in Rimini with my late sister-in-law, Rina.   We had a marvellous time, and I first saw the principle of cooking in the morning.

 

The women of the house, even my old mother-in-law, would get on their bikes and cycle into the city central food market, where they would purchase the food for the family for the day.  They didn’t have extensive refrigerators, and food wasn’t bought en masse, so to speak.  It was a long time before they even had the delights of a supermarket.

 

When they got home, their baskets laden with fresh fruit and vegetables and whatever else we were going to eat that day, they would immediately set about the food preparation.  Never mind that it was only eight in the morning.  Of course, the main meal of the day in Italy was lunch, but the very fact that the women of the family started to work  quickly, was in order to carry out their most important function of the day, which was providing food for their family.

 

From observing them so closely, not that my cooking ever progressed to their standards, I could see clearly the advantages of preparing your meals while you are fresh, and not having to face a horde of hungry people at mealtimes.

 

And so I developed my own version of “Cooking In The Morning”, which I used for years when I was a working mother. And even now, though I am only cooking for one, I still follow this method.  As an older person, you may not think that this is important.  However, I don’t find it any fun to reach lunch time in a totally unmotivated state of mind, stare hungrily and hopefully into the fridge and try to rustle up some food.    Even if you just assemble all of the ingredients for a simple meal in full view on the kitchen table, and place the saucepan on the stove, (but don’t turn it on!!) you can then make an important decision at lunch time. You can either start cooking, or put away all of the stuff on the bench.  I find this to be a great motivator.  In my mind, cooking can also encompass making a sandwich or heating up some soup.  It doesn’t have to be an extravaganza.  For working mums and those with a young baby, this can be sanity saving. Dinner time rolls around and it is usually the time when most mothers are in a state of total exhaustion. The kids are screaming and so on, but you have it all there in front of you, you don’t have to make decisions. Just start cooking the food you have prepared in the morning. I even used to wash the salad greens and put them in a plastic bag, mix a separate bowl of dressing, and then, hey presto, at meal time I would pour the dressing into the plastic bag and give it a good shake!  Instant dressed salad. I would peel the vegetables and put them in the fridge in a bowl of water.   I even used to go to the extent, in my morning preparations, to find all of the crockery and glasses etc, and stack them on the table under a cloth, to stop undesirables like flies. Set the table before you start cooking, as there is nothing like a table set ready to go that confuses the hungry or quells the rebellious.  They automatically think that if the table is set, dinner is on the way.   The more you can do in the morning, the better off you will be at dinner time.

 

Believe me, this really works

Is that my treasure they are throwing out?….

 

Last Saturday, I awoke to the sound of the shed door clanging.  What is going on, I asked myself. When I had plucked up enough energy to actually look out of my door, I saw my son-in-law and my daughter pulling out an endless array of “treasure”, stuff that nobody really wanted but was too good to throw away. 

 

Then the kids joined in, with cries of delight over long forgotten books and toys.   There is something very therapeutic about having a shed cleaning day, even if you don’t actually throw anything away.

 

But I digress.  After a while I joined in the throng, and lo and behold, found some of my things I had thoughtfully mothballed for a rainy day.  An old chair, a dehumidifier that I was never going to use again, kitchen gadgets that had outlived their usefulness.

 

Being old allows me to remember the hard times, when you never threw anything away.    Refrigerators lasted thirty years at least, your stove likewise.  I even still have my original Panasonic microwave, now nearly 40 years old, and it works far better than the revamped models which last around five years, if you are lucky.

 

Having moved three times since I turned seventy, I had thrown away quite a lot of stuff so my treasure hoard wasn’t much. In fact, I couldn’t find anything that warranted being allocated to the “keep heap”.  However, none-the-less, the “keep heap” was continuing to turn from a heap into a mountain, as the family foraged.

As I write, a few things have been given away, some dumped, and a little saved thriftily to be sent to the auction or wherever. 

 

In the end, the shed was cleared out so another pile of stuff could be laid to rest there.

 

The moral of this blog is that when you are oldish, you need less not more. Unclutter your living space,  leaving only the things that you like or use, and if you do buy something new, make sure you throw out something.     

 

 

 

 

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones…..

 

 

"And I try, and I try, and I try,  and I try,” wails Mick.  And I don’t think he means sleep, either. However, that is what this blog is about, to sleep or not to sleep that is the vexing question.

 

Not being able to sleep is one of the Seven Curses of Old Age.  What are the other six Curses? Wait and see.  But not being able to sleep is a major one.   Finally, after years of never being able to sleep long enough, kids, work, you name it, you find that now, in your old age, you can stay in bed for at least eight hours every night, and no decent sleep happens, or, if it does, it is, at best, broken. 

 

Well, you can always take sleeping pills I suppose. This is the easy way out , but  I don’t, as I find myself becoming  addicted very quickly and have  to increase the dose.   Instead, what I do is listen to an audio book or tune into the BBC World Service (there is an app for this radio  station) .

 

How much sleep is enough?  Is it four hours, five hours, six hours?  Who knows? Finally, if  nothing lulls me back to the Land of Nod,  I surrender and go and make a cuppa.  I prop myself up on my pillows, tune into the BBC, and eventually nod off. 

 

The best way to treat your inability to sleep, is not to worry about it.

 

   

 

 

 

Why Time Management is important when you’re old……..

 

 Sometimes people ask me what I do all day.  They don’t see me in action so, in their mind’s eye, I am just sitting around doing nothing.

 

Well, for me anyway, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  When I was in business, years ago, I had to be self motivated, as I worked alone most of the time.  And now that I am in my eighties , you might wonder when ‘older’ becomes ‘very old’.  I certainly do.

 

And what does Time Management mean to some of us oldies?   You have a reason to get out of bed every morning, after you have loosely planned the first six hours or so of your day .After a lifetime of having to be somewhere on time  or do something every day,  having  no time structure is what really does you in when you retire.  You are floating around at a loose end with the prospect looming of having nothing to do all day.

 

 I have found that allocating my time into what I call Automatic Pilot Time Structure is a good way to get myself going in the morning.  If my mind is a bit cloudy some  days , I just slip into the self maintenance routine, which gets me out of bed, dressed and ready to go.

 

 I used to begrudge the self maintenance time, I was used to getting stuck into
what-ever work I was doing, but now I realise that self-maintenance is a very important part of an older person’s life.  After all, you wouldn’t expect your vintage car to run if you didn’t look after it lovingly, wash and polish it, and tune the engine.  So I allow the hours from six to nine each morning  to be consumed by small tasks, like feeding the animals, having breakfast, etc and I count each one of these small tasks as a useful activity. I also regard the time I spend walking around the house as my exercise programme. After all, I don’t really have the physical energy to undertake any strenuous activity like going for a walk.  That’s my excuse, anyway.

 

The hours from nine to twelve are my “mental workout time”.  I work on the computer, send some emails, do some writing, listen to my audible Italian lessons, have numerous cups of tea and make a few phone calls.  Then its lunch time, and nap time.  After I wake up, I am not much good for anything except my jigsaw puzzle, but hey, I have to keep my brain maintained, too.

 

Not an exciting life, I must admit.  Still, as the BeeGees’ famous song says,

  I’m Stayin’ Alive.

 

 

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The Malware Mafia and Associates, Phisher and Scammer.  Its a jungle out there……

 

 

Every day it seems like there’s a new announcement of a hacker attack on some prominent web site or another.  It’s certainly enough to make you feel nervous, and so you should.  I think this sort of stuff is one of the scariest aspects of the Web community, but, if you want to broaden your horizons, you have to travel.

 

There are some simple things you can do to help protect yourself from the onslaught.  Never open e-mails from an unknown source, never open emails purporting to be from someone you know and inviting you to click on a link. These can be the scammers disguising themselves as people they have stolen the identity from. Never open or respond to emails saying they are from your bank, the banks never send you emails, but the phishers certainly do. Delete immediately, and then delete from the “delete” file, too.  Black listing these emails also seems to work into the future.  There are lots more tips from various sources, and I hope someone will post some.  We need all the help we can get!! 

 

And just who are these body snatchers of the 21^st Century?  What do they want your identity for?  They could be anyone, from a government sticky-beaking into your private computing, a foreign country sponsored techno-terror group, or just the ordinary run-of-the mill thieves. 

 

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my” cried Dorothy (from the movie The Wizard of Oz).  And how right she was..  As she walked along the Yellow Brick Road to Oz, there certainly were lions and tigers and bears in the forest, but this a walk in the park compared with  the hackers, phishers and scammers waiting for you  along today’s virtual Yellow Brick Road.  I wish there were just lions, tigers and bears out there, hiding and watching, and not the Malware Mafia waiting to get their claws into you.

 

I get most of my up-to-date techno-info from the BBC programme “Click”.  Just go to the BBC News.   

 

 

  

 

 

 

In the slow lane on the Internet Highway……

 But, you have to start somewhere, and I started to use the computer way back when I was only seventy years old.  My brother dragged me kicking and screaming into the modern world of new technology. He gave me a computer so I could practice, but it   took me years to come to grips with computing and, until recently, I only used the most basic Word programme and did emails. My filing was, and still is, chaotic.  I crashed my computer three times, losing all of the data that I had managed to acquire. 

 However, in the last couple of years, it has become a lot clearer to me, and now that I am over eighty, I am capable and confident enough to set out on my journey into the Land of the Internet.  I belong to an organisation called Age Concern, and in their recent newsletter there was an article on how few of us oldies are computer savvy, maybe as low as 5%.

 I know that it is nerve wracking to come face to face with a tablet or desktop, and I certainly wouldn’t have developed as far as I have if I didn’t have my personal brain trainer.  He comes in once a month and we go through all of the problems I am having. I just make notes on what the problem is and then he resolves it for me.  This gives me the confidence to continue with the learning process.  If you have a young relative who is computer literate, get him or her to come in and give you a few lessons and act as your mentor.  Get a book from the library on the basics, I have used the Dummies books, and read through it and bookmark the sections that you need help with.  If you find it is helping you, buy yourself a copy.  I use mine as reference text books.  Buy a notebook and make handwritten notes on how you solved this or that problem. 

 I think that having the ability to tune into the virtual world is like having a third arm.  I don’t have to visit the bank, the library, or the supermarket.  I can go virtual shopping in all of the big stores, and have the goods delivered to my door, without having to step outside.  This gives me my independence.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the beginning there was the typewriter….

 

I wonder how many people today have ever used a typewriter.  In fact, if you are young and living in a developed country, you may never have even seen a real one outside of a museum.  And perhaps you are thinking to yourself  that I  should  be in a museum, too.  Now that’s a bit unkind !! 

 My experience is first hand.   After all, when I started typing I was about 16 years old, so that makes my knowledge of this antiquated machine some sixty years old. 

 However, in the olden days, there weren’t many career opportunities for girls. You left school, became an office worker of some type, worked in a factory or shop, or got married early and became a stay-at home-housewife. 

 But, in learning to type, I discovered I had a hidden talent, and that was the  ability to type like the wind.  I don’t know how I acquired this skill but, as I got faster and faster,  I got a job in the ABC Radio Newsroom, as a news typist,  and eventually became one of the fastest typists in the fleet, so to speak.   We all used old Olivetti manual typewriters, no electric typewriters in the early days of this part of my career.  You can imagine how fast I was when I could type 120 words a minute.  A lot of the stories were taken directly over the phone or in face-to-face dictation with reporters, straight onto the typewriter and, from there, straight to air .

 In case you are wondering what this has to do with you, I feel there is a need to

de-mystify the typing skills of yesterday.  As I sit pecking away at the i-Pad, with my arthritic fingers, the legacy of bashing the manual typewriter for years, I have found that the use of the stylus( looks like a pen but with a rubber tip)   has revolutionised the art of typing on a virtual keyboard.  You only have to hold it in your hand like a pen and tap away. This removes the need for your fingers to touch the screen at all. 

 You do need to learn to type on this keyboard at  a reasonable speed.  At first, I was convinced that this was a step too far in my virtual life.  However, I devised some exercises to help me memorise the keyboard.  Every day, I sit down face to face with the iPad, and start work.  First of all, I look at the positioning of the keys.  Then I do the basic typing exercises, QWERT  and so on, and then type up the alphabet  a few times.  This has helped me to position  the keys in my mind as a map, and really has nothing to do with touch typing.  And of course, as I also work on my desktop, I  try to do the regular exercises on my keyboard, in an endeavour to keep what typing skills I still have.     

 

I know I am never going to be able to type at 120 words a minute again, but who cares?  My mind doesn’t work that fast any more, either.    

 

 

Hello World!

Hello world.  This is my very first post on this blog site, or any blog site for that matter.

Who am I? What do I look like?   My logo is a portrait of me through the eyes of my seven year old grandson.  I have been told that it is a very good likeness!! Firstly, I am an eighty something year old woman and  I live in the beautiful city of Auckland, New Zealand.

 I have had an adventurous life, travelled a lot, worked hard all my life, and now I am entering into uncharted territory as I am journeying onwards.  The destination is certain, but the trip towards it doesn't have to be.

What I am hoping to achieve with this blog is some new friends and acquaintances, get some new ideas, hoping to hear about  your interesting life experiences.

Here's my thought for the day

Instead of slapping yourself in the face, pat yourself on the back