Remembering Bagheera

Bagheera
31.10.2000 - 29.07.2014

Like all cats, he was exceptional...

He was a black panther -- hence the name, Bagheera.

King of his particular jungle...

Lord of his domain...

Above: stalking green parrots on the big lawn. He never caught one, but when he was 12 years old he caught an enormous rat, and pridefully laid it out as a trophy. He was a fighting cat -- the stories of his battles would fill pages. He loved to curl up in a printer-paper box ... or in the beanbag, especially at Christmas, when he'd wrestle with the tinsel monster. And win.Below: He was a blackberry kitten -- born at Halloween, at the Millennium. His kittenhood was just a little too early for digital photography, so we have only a couple of snapshots. This one, below, makes him look exactly as he was when he was five or six months. In fact, he was five-ish.

Goodness, what big eyes you have...

Mellow, in the jungle...

The tinsel monster! Christmas, 2004

Paper box. Best cat bed ever.

Below: helping (!) to make Sushi ... rolling on the pavers ... stretching with all claws unsheathed, by the glass door to the upstairs deck ... "helping" to unpack boxes...

 

Streeeetch ... yaaaawn ... naptime.

Dream on in peace, little boy --
Or is it time for the next adventure? Go for it.

Two years since he left us. Ye gods, how time flies. The next year will go just as fast, and I'll be back with another swag of pictures ... and a few tears. (To answer a question -- the poem, Ode to a Black Cat, is one of mine. I wrote it about eight or ten years ago ... in another lifetime, as it sometimes seems.)

It's so weird --

With Pandora (the ailing Dell Inspiron notebook) in the workshop possibly till Tuesday, I'm borrowing Dave's desktop to post this. And it's weird. Just because I'm looking at a different screen, and the keyboard feels different, and the chair is a different height, my brain is trying to tell me that Blogger has spontaneously moved every single icon; nothing is where I left it. Now, intellectually I know for a fact everything is in the same place ... but it's not. Is it? Eep.

IT Warehouse booked Pandora in for brain surgery, but they don't have a tech in over the weekend and they're busy, so ... by Tuesday I'll be so used to this keyboard and chair, I'll have to rewire my brain to switch back. What did I say about weird?

And there's more...

Who told Australians there's cream cheese and sugar in guacamole?! While exploring the supermarket a little while ago I happened to glance at the label on a dip, and was bemused. The first ingredient listed on the guacamole tub is cream cheese!

People, there is no cream cheese in guacamole. There is no sugar in guacamole. Trust me. And I say this as an Australian citizen who's been in this country for 45 years, 6 months and 2 weeks. There are EIGHT ingredients in guacamole --

Avocado (duh); salt and white pepper; onion and garlic; cumin and coriander; and lime juice. There are no hard and fast rules about how much of each ingredient you use -- it's all "to taste." We use organic powders for the onion, garlic, cumin and turmeric, and pink Himalayan salt. If Dave is making the guacamole, it's saltier and more peppery than if I make it, but the basic mix is the same.

In fact, I just made a batch for snacks this evening; here's the proof:

Locally grown avocados, just before they were whacked with a fork
and seasoned up into guacamole. Yum.

Delicious. And Dave has just finished whipping up the first-ever batch of peanut butter we ever made -- with extra virgin olive oil, pink Himalayan salt and raw sugar. Not that we're picky or anything, but we do like to know what we're eating. Why is every food label you look at covered in numbers standing for additives, preservatives, modifiers, stabilizers, colors, flavors, agents ... is there any actual food in this jar?! So we tend to cook, and make a lot of our own stuff...

Then again, we're weird. We admit it.

Pandora is wheezing

Pandora is wheezing.

No, not the glorious planet in Avatar.

Not even the first human woman the Classical Greek Gods created, the handiwork of Hephaestus and Athena, working to blueprints by Zeus. The gal with the box, you know? The box she couldn't resist opening -- and all the twaddle the world now endures came rushing out of it (which is more than you wanted to know about Greek mythology, right? Incidentally, the image at left is from Wikimedia, captioned and credited thusly: "Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson as Pandora by Alexandre Cabanel. The Walters Art Museum." Used here according to their "fair usage" agreement.)

Nope. The Pandora to whom (or which) I refer is a Dell Inspiron notebook, and it's ... wheezing. It seems to have major overheat problem: yes, it's sitting on a powerful laptop cooler -- it's been sitting on one for over five years now, so I've been nursing it for a long, long time. It also has a powerful little desktop fan sitting 3cms away, blowing right on the left side of the case, and under it, which is where these computers gets hot. So I'm doing everything possible to keep her cool, but I have the strongest intuition, she's going to be in the workshop very soon; because it's still far cheaper to fix a cooling unit than it is to replace the whole laptop/notebook --

We were at OfficeWorks (same thing as OfficeMax in the States) just last week ... actually getting archive boxes and a printer cartridge, but I took the time out to look at prices as I went by. Hmm. Most modern notebooks seem to be pretending to be tablets. They all have teeny-tiny little screens, 11" -- just a whisker bigger than the screen on your average iPad. Gak.

This ol' laptop has a 15" screen -- and I need that.Yes, you can still get a laptop with a bigger screen, but they cost around a thousand dollars, which is out of my price bracket at the moment; and the laptops falling inside my price bracket are all pretending to be tablets. Omigod. It's perfect.

So -- a couple of hundred bucks for a new cooling unit sounds like the best way to go. I spent the whole day, Monday, running diagnostic tools, and was really sweating by the end of the work, fearing this machine would melt itself down before it finished an eight-hour checkdisk routine. It survived those rigors, but today the cooling fans are kicking in every few seconds for no reason whatever. Yep. Time to go to the nice repair man and get fixed...

Wouldn't it be wonderful if people could be fixed the same way? We're not even going to talk about my back today!

AWOL ... and I didn't go fishing!

I've been gone from this blog for a few days, and I wish I could relate that I've been on a fantastic holiday ... Dave and I went to Fiji, lay on the beach drinking coconut punch, chartered a sailboat and cruised the outer islands, worked on our tan while we took an indescribable bus into the hills and fossicked through the local markets, trying their traditional food and listening to bands nobody ever heard of...

Well, I could write all that. It would certainly make for a great post -- and people would be wondering why I didn't share the pictures.

And the reason would be, because we didn't go to Fiji. I had a Very Major Migraine. People too often dismiss migraine as just a really bad headache, but the fact is, it's a lot more. It is a really bad headache ...  plus nausea, and the shivers of hypothermia while sweat pours out of you; plus dizziness, tachycardia, disorientation, light- and sound- sensitivity. Basically, you sit in the dark for twelve hours, eyes closed, nursing a whole suite of symptoms and wondering if you're even going to survive. The next day, you contend with the after-effects of the pills, which have some nasty side effects.

On the positive side, I think I might have tracked down at least one of the triggers -- and it's not as simple as saying, "Coffee gives me a migraine," or "chocolate gives me migraine." Both of those statements would be untrue: I can drink a cup of coffee once a week and get no hint of migraine. I can eat a little chocolate now and then and, again, get no hint of migraine...

But what happens when you hitch up a fantastic cup of coffee and some fabulous chocolate cake, eaten at the same time? Uh huh.

And it was fantastic coffee, and fabulous chocolate cake...

...as Dave's phone pic, from his facebook page, demonstrates. We shared the cake, about 70/30, and mine was the small, regular cappuccino; we shared the neat little caramel slice sitting behind the cake there. Dave never has a problem with migraine or even indigestion, but me?

Well, I'd be lying if I didn't admit, I had wondered about the combination -- but I don't remember ever having the chance to put this to the test. So: call this the test, right? Right.

Uh huh. The rest is history. So I guess the best thing to do from here on is to NOT have chocolate and coffee at the same time.

People report all kinds of things as migraine triggers: blue cheese, oranges, jalapeños, balsamic, alcohol, peanuts, onions ... even apples. One could live happily without the majority of items on that list, but, well -- coffee and chocolate is where it starts to smart. Sob.

Or, maybe it was also about the increasing barometric pressure plus coffee and chocolate. So the rule would be: don't eat coffee and chocolate when there's a storm coming in! 

Guess I'll have to experiment a little more.

Monday, right no cue, the screen door was fixed and is now rolling smoothly and silently. Wonderful. The company is Sliderfix, from Panorama, and that's all they do -- fix aberrant sliding glass doors. The job took about 90mins and cost under A$300, all up. Fantastic. So I can't grumble about the door anymore.

Meanwhile, Mom is slowly recovering. I think she's just about over the pneumonia now, and we just have to get her up and moving, get some mobility back, strength in the legs and so on. And get her switched to this liquid codeine we were told about at the pharmacy. Hmm. Turns out, you don't have to choke on horse pills after all -- which is a mercy, because she has swallowing problems, and choking many times per day on pills is how she got the aspirant pneumonia in the first place.

Life trundles on, while the next bank of rainy weather comes up out of the southwest. This morning's blue sky is gone, alas. Dave posted a phone pic from the Onkaparinga River mouth about an hour ago, but when I look out the front windows it's GRAY. It looks like RAIN.

Looks like an afternoon for curling up with a good book (or any kind of book), and wondering when this winter will end. Two warm days last week had us speculating about the probability of an early spring and a hot summer, but all that seems to have gone by --

What we need is a prognosticating groundhog. But, since this is Australia, of course it would have to be a marsupial groundhog, and he'd have to come out of his burrow on August 2nd, look around and see if he can see his shadow. Then he can tell us we're in for four more weeks of crap till spring actually gets here on September 1.

Russian and Chinese visitors discover Meader to the Max! This is so cool...

It's a kind of magic, actually ... and it's the first time it's happened to date on my travel blog. I have over 60 posts up, and usually get about 10-15 hits a day, and count myself lucky to get that much because it's a very "general" blog dealing with road trips around parts of South Australia and Victoria. Then this happened, on July 20th-21st (cue Freddie Mercury and Queen) ...

Wowser. 65 page views yesterday -- which is amazing in itself; but see where they come from! That's Russia and China, with a few more in France, Germany, England, Canada, and a bunch extra in the US and Australia. 65 page loads in a day!

Does happy dance around the room (which is harder than it seems ... there ain't much space).

Don't know what happened, wouldn't have a clue how to make it happen again, but it is sooo nice. Worth a blog post, with Queen in the background...

July 20th. Where were you on this date in 1969?

Yes ... July 20^th. Where were you on this date in 1969?

Everyone who was alive way back then, and over the age of about three, seems to know exactly were they were “when it happened.”

I was a kid at school: 10 years old, in love with Star Trek, reading any science fiction I could get my hands on … fully expecting to live and work in space by the turn of the millennium (what a fantasy that turned out to be!), and when the Eagle landed the whole family was glued to the “telly” in a tiny town in the UK’s wild north. It was late-ish at night and both kids (Mike was about 5) were allowed to stay up as long as it took that night...

...and the previous week we'd actually stayed home an extra hour after lunch to watch the mission take off. Numerous kids were kept back after lunch to see history happen before their very eyes, especially kids whose parents thought they might "catch the science bug" and go on to great things. (What a future we all imagined, way back when!)

The sense of wonder is still etched into my brain, 47 years later.

Golly that must mean I’m … how old?! Nah. Can’t be.

What was I reading back then? I ate up all the James Blish novelizations of the Star Trek episodes; I adored John Wood Campbell’s The Islands of Space, and George H. Smith’s The Unending Night, and James Blish’s Welcome to Mars. Yes, I was reading years and years ahead of my age … almost five decades later I’m doing the reverse and reading Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy, and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. (More about those in later posts.)

What memories! The future didn't turn out the way we expected ... no one ended up living and working in space by 2000; we didn't colonize Mars, didn't visit the outer planets ... we did muck up our own planet, and land ourselves in a situation where about 0.5% of the population is now in possession of 99% of the wealth ... and the buggers are trying, hard as they can, to get the rest of it too! We did bust the planet's climate machine; but just about everyone has a cell phone. 

Hmm. Gotta ask if that's a fair trade. Cell phones in exchange for a thoroughly busted Planet Earth. Might have to think this one through...

One other Big Thing happens every July, so one thing’s for certain: the Tour de France must have been hurtling around France at the time Apollo 11 was on approach to the Moon, because they do it every year unless there's a major war and France has been invaded. They’re doing it now. Tonight they’re heading for Mont Blanc – the summit of which looks like it’s already halfway to the Moon, so close, you could reach out and touch it. In fact –

Just to be silly, I Googled “Tour de France July 20 1969” and got this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Tour_de_France#Stages

… turns out, Le Tour got into Paris on the final stage that day; it was an individual time trial over 37k, Créteil – Paris, and Eddie Merckx won it.

Well, I had to ask. So cool. But --

Vive Apollo. And Vive the dreams we dreamed back in those far-off days. We just need to start dreaming again ... and believing we can realize those dreams.

The MRI Experience ... Part Two: After

LOUD.

I said, !!!LOUD!!!

Can't say I wasn't warned, but I'm still surprised. The last time I was subjected to NOISE like that, I was about 19 and it was a Honda 1100RC racing bike with the throttle wound wide open, shrieking in the concrete cauldron of a workshop in Adelaide's CBD.

See Part One of this little tale to know what I'm talking about. Namely, an MRI machine --

"Dangitall, Ash, they sure make these medical scanners quiet these days."
"Yes, Captain; you should have heard them back in 2016." 

If you were hoping for something out of Star Trek, with Doctors Crusher and McCoy quietly ministering to you, you'd be somewhat ... disappointed. Why do you have to strip literally naked to get your HEAD scanned? Why are you taking off clothing that has no single trace of metal anywhere in/on it? Why is the "robe" they provide you with so tiny, it's barely adequate, necessitating one to parade in semi-public corridors, strutting stuff one would never strut in ten squillion years elsewhere? Why is a physically challenged 57 year old female required to limp around this way in the company of some form of technician who is male and 20 years old at a long stretch of the imagination, and who apparently doesn't know where to look?

So -- to misquote Queen Victoria, we are unimpressed by the process, even before we talk about the scan.

The machine is huge, white, and quarantined in a special room. You lie on a rolling board with your knees on a pillow; they trundle you into the gismo -- then the two women who operate the thing run away, so they don't have to listen to it. Just as an x-ray machine is situated in a radiation-proof room,  an MRI machine is situated in a SOUND PROOF ROOM. They give you "industrial grade" ear pads before they take to their heels and flee; and in your hand is what I can only describe as a "chicken switch," in case some poor person panics so badly they have to stop.

It rings. It knocks. Whines. Buzzes. Whirrs. Bangs. Clatters. For fifteen minutes or so, I believe, and the volume is utterly overwhelming. Not everyone is noise-sensitive, like myself. If you're partially deaf because your favorite hangout is a club at 2:00am where you can't hear yourself think, you'd probably get through this with a grin; and if you're a beach bunny, strutting your stuff and flashing those gorgeous bare legs of yours in the little robe would be a source of great joy. If you're neither of those critters ... MRI is a chore, even though it's not invasive (so long as they're not injecting you with radioactive dyes).

Bottom line: it's not invasive, just colossally aggravating. Be prepared. You're not doing this for fun, so ... what the hey?

Now we wait till next week to get the results. Such fun. (Here they are -- just posted, with pictures of the cauliflower the aliens left in my skull some time ago when they made off with my brain... Luckier than Spock, I guess; they didn't even leave him the cauliflower.)

When is somebody going to invent a medical tricorder that they point at you from across the room, and you get instant results QUIETLY.

It's dead, Jim ... whatever it is. And it's QUIET. Like this gizmo of mine.

The MRI Experience ... Part One: Before

The scan is booked for 2:30 this afternoon, and this morning I find myself ... hyper. Couldn't tell you why, because an MRI is absolutely UN-invasive, and the worst you can say for the experience is, it's noisy. They might or might not offer ear protection, so I'm taking my own. They put little kids in MRI machines, fagodsakes, and although I have a couple of phobias, I know I'm not claustrophobic, so...

...so why am I antsy? Probably because of what the scan might reveal, I suppose. For those coming in late, I've been having headaches every day since December 4 last year -- makes over seven months of daily headaches, 95% of them in the same place. Plus an assortment of other symptoms that make an MRI a good idea: make sure there ain't something in this noggin that ought to be taken care of at once, if not sooner (though, seven months after the pain began really doesn't constitute "at once").

The scan isn't what bothers me, honestly. It's the thought of the allopathic treatments to follow, if it turns out there is something in there. All the radio and chemo. Or -- as my father suffered -- the surgery. It's over 30 years since Dad had a brain tumor following lung cancer. By 2000, medicine knew enough that if someone has lung cancer, the next thing they do is scan his/her brain, because that's where cancer metastasizes next.

1985 or so, Dad was lucky -- the tumor was on the outside of his brain, left-hand-side. The surgery was simple: cut a horseshoe-shaped flap of his scalp, take out a disk of bone, lift out the tumor (described to me at the time as exactly like  "lifting an apple out of jelly"), put the disk of bone back into place with gold wire; replace the flap of skin, suture, dress, and ... done. They didn't follow up with any chemo or radio, and he lived 16 years after the surgery before succumbing to  congestive heart failure which was the result of running on one lung for 18 years.

Maybe memories of what Dad went through are making me antsy.

But I find myself hyper this morning. I've been cleaning the house for three hours, and am making myself stop, because I have a headache (duh), and don't feel too good. Exhausting myself will achieve nothing. In fact, it's a daft thing to do.

So here I am blogging about it, to thrash out what I think that I think...

And I think it's this: I usually hate allopathic treatments, drugs and whatnot. Last Christmas, a problem blew up with my gallbladder, and the best orthodox medicine could do was offer to take out my gallbladder in -- oh, a year or two, or three: there's a loooong waiting list for this surgery, since you don't count as an emergency, even though you're in pain.

I didn't want that, so I researched alternative treatments, and by our wedding anniversary dinner in March I was cured. We went out to celebrate the day, and I put the cure to the test by eating fish and chips and cheesecake. No pain; no nothing from the gallbladder. Fixed.

So I think I'm antsy about the MRI, not because I'm anxious regarding the scan itself, but because the thought of all those potential drugs and treatments is getting under my skin like glass powder. Makes your adrenalin pump.

So: calm down, Jen. Do your Taoist breathing exercises. Take some Ashwaganda.

And blog about the actual scan later, when it's been done.

The earlybird catches the best pictures

Dawn on July 19, 2016, photographed over the Old Reynella skyline from
the backyard...with the phone. Ain't technology grand?

One good thing about having an alarm set for 6:30am or so: you get to see the sun rise, and some days it's spectacular. I have to be up early because Mom is so frail now, she needs help early. If there's going to be a crisis, I deal with it better if I'm wide awake and have had a cup of tea before it happens. Best way to make sure I'm firing on at least six out of eight cylinders is to wake earlier ... and then enjoy some of the perks of being an earlybird.

Sunrise in Old Reynella, over the neighbors' roof. We have a little altitude
here, and the building line is only single level, so our skies look large. 
Phone photo, by the new Sumi Rome "phablet."

Living in Old Reynella is almost like being in a village. After five and a half years down in Sturt -- one of Adelaide's southern suburbs -- it's a welcome change; and even after getting-on-for-four years here the novelty hasn't yet worn off.

As per the "camera" ... well, these are phone pictures. I'd forgotten I'd taken the smart card out of my Fuji HS50, so I just grabbed the handiest imaging gadget. We love our gadgets, and I'm very impressed with the pictures from the new Sumi Rome "phablet" (so called because it has a 5.5" screen and a very fast processor. Right now, the phone is behaving like a tablet -- far faster than any computer I possess. Meanwhile, the laptop upon which I'm writing this has become sloooower than the netbook; and we won't even talk about the tablets, which are so slow ... yawn. We all tend to get creaky in our old age. Tell me about it).

The only downside to phone pictures is getting an enormous cache of them OFF the phone's smartcard and into the computer. Turns out, you can't just plug this phone into the computer and have the PC read the card, because the "Camera" folder is utterly invisible, no matter how clever you get with your Windows "show hidden folders" settings. Means you have to physically take the card out of the phone and put it in a card reader ... whereupon, shazam! The computer reads it perfectly.

And as for grabbing  pictures in challenging lighting conditions --

Vines on Rifle Range Road, McLaren Vale

Above is a white-sky afternoon at McLaren Vale ... gnarly, ancient vines, looking like something from Fangorn Forest. They're really in a nice, civilized vineyard off one side of Rifle Range Road. Dave and I took two hours and went for a walk -- just to get out of the house, get some fresh air and exercise. 

Being a full-time, 24/7/365 care-giver can and will eventually take a heavy toll. You need to grab "me time" whenever you can get the chance. If it's safe to get out and walk, breathe, see something different for an hour or two, grab your opportunity and run for it. We're lucky in that we live in the wine country, literally cuddled up against the Accolade Vineyards, while in the other direction is the sea --

A storm breaks over the mouth of the Onkaparinga River

Very low light conditions on a cold, stormy afternoon, last Sunday. Mom was in the hospital and Dave, Mike and I needed to get OUT for a couple of hours. Dave took us on a spin down the coast to the outfall of the Onkaparinga River, which you see here under a rain-heavy sky; then we went over to the town of McLaren Vale for coffee at a favorite cafe, the Vintage Bean.

Again, I'm quite impressed by what the Sumi Rome phablet can do. Very nice pictures indeed.

And as for Mom ... well, ten days after the emergency she's just beginning to recover from the pneumonia, and the major problem at the moment is -- swallowing problems. She has to take something northwards of 20 pills a day (!) and is choking on one in three of them ... which means she's almost certain to inhale particles of [whatever] into her lungs and get pneumonia again. It's a miserable way to live, and there is zip, zero, nada, a care-giver can do, save offer sympathy and a warm drink. *sigh*

...and the wind howled like a banshee!

Sunday afternoon, and even the most diligent carer (care-giver, as our American cousins say) needs a break, if only for a couple of hours. With Mom just out of the hospital and still suffering with pneumonia, the level of care provided in-home is very intensive ... which tends to wear out the support crew. So, when she takes half an Ativan (Lorazepam) pill with lunch and settles down for a nap, time to leave Mike to hold down the fort, and run.

Objective: a walk in the fresh air, plus coffee.

Destination: Range Road West, top of the ridge above Willunga.

Mission Status: Accomplished! It was only a walk of about two miles, but a lot of it was uphill, the wind was cranking at about thirty miles per hour, and the wind chill dropped the temperature well below zero, so it felt like it was a lot further.

Dave the explorer braves the wind to get phone shots for facebook.

Conditions were mostly dull, overcast, but occasionally the sun broke through. Dave got some great phone shots, swiftly uploaded to his facebook page, and I was busy with the big camera --

Range Road Westis a well-packed dirt road through farmland
above the lovely town of Willunga.

-- while we hiked a hilly mile or so (and the same mile or so coming back) of Range Road West. You had to brace yourself against the buffeting of the wind, which howled like a banshee. It was actually very exhilarating. And when the sun broke through...

Dramatic skies, Irish-green hills, and a view of Willunga from up top.

...the view of Willunga "under the hill" was just beautiful. Got some very nice photos, and some striking memories of a big black bull on the hillside, at the edge of his territory: trumpeting into the wind -- either marking that territory by shouting over it, or "Calling all lady bovines!" What a din ... before he put his nose down and went back to his lunch.

After which, we headed down to Willunga for a quick coffee at the Golden Fleece before making tracks for home. Mom's alarm would be going off just as we got back.

Mission accomplished. One more Sunday afternoon in the life of a care-giver.

Like a movie you've seen too often. Or, just shoot me.

Yes -- exactly, life reaches a point where it seems like a movie you've seen too often. You know the plot and everything about it so well, you doze off ... not so much out of boredom (because Harrison Ford will always be a charmer, no matter how many times you've seen him in this), but with the simple familiarityof the action. It's not that this movie is one iota less than it was the first time you saw it --

Just shoot me. Seriously.
Would it be too droll to add "copyright Lucasfilm"or words along those lines?
Fair usage: call it a free promo for Star Wars. (Don't worry, Walt: I won't bill you, LOL)

-- but there's not enough freshness left to keep you awake and aware for two hours. And the real problem starts when LIFE has reached this same point...

Mom's sick again today. Screen door needs fixing. Shower's not draining properly. Garden needs weeding. I'm tired. I have a headache. This laptop is so getting so slow, I think it's having the cybernetic equivalent of a stroke. Blah, etcetera, blah, so forth, blah, such like.

You can always turn off a movie, but what happens if you turn off LIFE?!

Well, the screen door is booked in for a fix-it session on July 25. I have an appointment for an MRI on the 20th. Dave needs to wiggle the wire "snakes" down the shower drain -- again. Mike and I need to get some fresh air and sunshine, and do some work in the garden -- again. I guess I'll take a nap (again) while I have the chance; and I already took the pills for the headache...uh, again.

What the movie of my life need is a new plot, or new characters!

I listened to a podcast last week: turns out, up to 80% of everything we (think we) see with our physical eyeballs is no more than a memory feed. Your brain is showing you old data; most of the time it's not even taking fresh scans of the house, which is why you can be tearing the place apart, looking for something when in fact it's right in front of you all the time, but you can't see it. You're looking an an old scan, in which you glasses were not sitting in front of the TV, or your coffee cup was not sitting on top of the microwave. We see what we expect to see, and only seem to "come alive" when we travel, and the brain/eyes combination is forced to scan new places, new things, or else walk face-first into a camel.

I guess, Step One would be learning how to actually see every day, even while we're not on vacation.

Of course, if I did that, I'd see I also need to dust and vacuum and wash and scrub and...

Uh, tomorrow. Don't want to see all that dust right now.

And LIFE itself begs the question, what does happen if you turn it off or change the channel? But chasing down those answers will take you out of realms of philosophy and into metaphysics.

I wonder if I'll be cross or just bemused if the answer turns out to be 42.

Caring ... because I do actually care

Image of the day: a courtyard under the wines in the Barossa Valley. Why this image?
Because of the peace and tranquility of it ... and the good memories associated with the day I took it.

I've been a carer (or "care giver," as our American cousins say) for a very long time, and I've done the job full time for around twelve years now. Sometimes it seems longer. Other times it seems like just yesterday I was a kid myself, and the frail aged mother for whom I'm now caring was young and vital. But as you go on and on as a carer, and the person for whom you're caring grows ever older and more feeble, the old memories -- the good ones -- begin to fade.

Even now I'm doing the job; I do it to the best of my ability, and I do it every day. I'll do it to The End, however long it takes, because ... well, she's my mother. But I've come to nurse one fear.

The end of this particular trail can't be very far away now, because too much is physically wrong with Mom for there to be a lot of time left. The caring has become a full time job which has overflowed from occupying all my time and brainpower, and is now making deep inroads on Dave's and Mike's time too. Between the three of us we're coping, and we have  great family GP who's as supportive as a family GP can possibly be.

My fear? Simply this: that by the time we reach the end of the trail, the good old memories of Mom as she used to be, in another world -- or is it another dimension? -- known as "The Past" will have been buried so thoroughly under the ocean of more recent memories of pain, mess, exhaustion, that they'll become inaccessible. Lost.

Sometimes when I sit down to meditate I try to open the gateway to the past. It's supposed to be stored in indelible memory and redundant detail, somewhere in this biological miracle, the specific human brain belonging to me.  But I can't seem to find the keys to the gateway. It's closed to me now, and I'd dearly love to be able to jimmy it open.

Strange thoughts to be thrashing out in a blog post, I know; but I have to wonder how many carers are in the same situation.

What I wouldn't give for a Tardis right now!

So Dave and I grabbed a couple of hours while Mike was available to sit with her, and went for a walk among the McLaren Vale vineyards. I'd wanted to "walk a country lane," and Dave made it happen for me. Wonderful.

Inspiration, Tennyson and memories of Alaska

Inspiration is an odd thing: fluid and viscous, and utterly unpredictable. Killing time, I was leafing through an old edition of Palgrave's (the version of about 1920, alas nothing vaguely like the version available today), and happened on a fragment of verse:

...bright and fierce and fickle is the South,

And dark and true and tender is the North.

It's Tennyson, and it's ... odd, to say the least. Dark and true and tender is the North. A frisson travels the length of your spine; the hair begins to stand up on the back of your neck. You see visions (at least, I do!) ...

Of course, I'm probably biased ... when I think 'north,' I usually think of Alaska, which is where I met the other half of my family, met and married my husband. And oddly enough, 'bright and fierce and fickle' is a pretty darned good description of Australia, especially in our summer months. Naturally, me being me, when I get story visions, it usually means science fiction or fantasy, or a combination of both. Hmm.

The story-generating gears are creaking right now. Something will come of this, I'm sure! I even found myself looking at images on the Internet, trying to find something embodying what I'm halfway seeing.

If there were a "photo of the day," this would be it:

Alaska winter fantasy ... not one of my images, guys. It's a wallpaper, from one of those desktop themes sites
where you slog through 87 ads to get to the content. Don't recall the URL, sorry. If anyone knows it,
let me know and I'll add it in right here.

There's a story out there, tickling on the periphery of my mind, itching like a mosquito bite on the very edge of my imagination. It'll come to me.

Which is all very well, but at the same time, each day I try to use this computer (a Dell Inspiron laptop, by the name of Pandora ... gotta give it a name on the home network, and when I got it Avatar was red-hot news), I realize how much it needs some work done to it. Nothing I can do locally; it's a workshop job, for sure. Dang.

So here I am with my mind happily meandering through Alaskan memories -- a good enough excuse to paste in a photo of myself! It's an eons-old shot, scanned in recently and uploaded to the travel blog I've been tinkering with for the last few years.

Most of the posts on the Meander to the Max blog feature road trips around South Australia and just a little bit interstate, but one series of posts is entitled Alaska Memories. The snapshot at left (which Dave took just off the side of the road on the Parks Highway, in ... golly, I think it had to be 1999), is from Four Seasons in One Post.

Good memories -- rich memories, too. People have asked more than once why I don't write something set in Alaska; and the most honest answer is, the Alaska I knew is now almost 20 years old. Things change a lot in two decades. If I were to write something set in Alaska, it would have to be set in an almost historical context --

Which sounds incredibly weird. I recently took part in a discussion regarding how fiction might be categorized. Just where does one draw a line, on one side of which is 'contemporary,' and on the other side is 'historical.' Turns out, many (most?) people these days are calling 1960s fiction historical. Whoo. I was eight or ten years old at the time. Ouch.

A bunch of stuff that happens

The older you get, the more life looks like "just a bunch of stuff that happens." When you were younger, you looked for meanings in things ... not omens or karma as such, but something to put sense to the drivel life dishes up every day. One day you realize, if any such thing as karma actually exists, it's got to be an almost genetic process, where guff that happened (and the good things, too) forty years ago is acting like the building blocks and glue of what's happening today. A dumb decision you made at age 15 is currently screwing up your life, for example; but eons ago it looked like a terrific idea.

One tends, traditionally, to think about good and bad karma -- something angelic you do might win you a reward to cancel out something demonic you did. Well, maybe. But Fate, or Destiny, is just as likely to be simply the aggregate of the sensible and the silly, the lucky and the unlucky, plus a bunch of blind chance ... all of which accumulates over half a century and eventually dumps you right in it, without a spade.

So much for philosophy. But you gotta wonder, when you find yourself "right in it, without a spade."

Actually, we have a couple of spades. But no one is looking forward much to doing the digging.

So --

What am I reading?

The Exile Waiting, by Vonda N. McIntyre, originally published in 1975, and the copy I have is the 1985 reprint. This has been on the shelf for about thirty years (!) but only in the last few of those years have I owned the chance to read. (I'm currently reading up to a hundred thousand words a week ... and since I've actually started to think seriously about writing professionally, I'm not only looking more critically at my own work, I'm looking more critically at the work of others.)

What a marvelous storyline The Exile Waiting promised. It was filled with potential and started out very well. What happened next is a puzzler. After having read several of McIntyre's books in the past (admittedly, her Star Trek titles) I guess I expected more, either from this writer or this novel. Spider Robinson said of it (quoted from the cover matter), "A cracking good yarn with a very real cast..." And Joanna Russ called it "...one of the most vivid and real science fiction words I've seen..."

All of which gave me high expectations which, in turn, left me scratching my head; because the inescapable fact is -- great plotline and fantastic potential or not, the novel is so underwritten and abbreviated, the story barely survives and the characters don't. It's a quick read, at about 100k words in 248pp, and many of the characters are little more than a name and a cursory physical description. This will work for background filler characters, but when some of your main characters are still close to mysteries when the story ends, the reader is left unfulfilled. The action unfolds in fits and starts, sometimes lovingly detailed (in gorgeous prose), other times "dashed off" with critical sequences told in retrospect, and in shorthand. The overall effect is ... lumpy.

If I were awarding stars, I'd give The Exile Waiting three, because the world it builds is refreshingly strange, a couple of the characters are oddly compelling, and from time to time the prose is luminous. I wanted to love this book, because I know McIntyre's other work quite well; but this one is uncomfortably like a third draft awaiting revision and polishing. It was her first published novel, so I guess it's safe to say everyone has to start somewhere!

Having said that, I come around in a big circle and begin thinking as a writer...

First things first...

Lola and the Millennium Possum. And -- snow?!

Snow? In South Australia? Well, okay ... not actually snow. In fact, we had one of the biggest thunderstorms of recent years, got dumped on with ice -- and the July day was cold enough for the hail to "lay," or "stick" for almost an hour. Here's the view from the front door, across the corner of the garden, to where Dave's van and Jen's car are apparently sitting in a layer of snow, with a snowy street right behind them! What's so weird about this is that four days before we were out for a hike along the banks of the Onkaparinga River in this kind of weather:

Onkaparinga River, July 7th -- four days ago...

Well, the fair city of Adelaide, South Australia, is renowned for offering all four seasons in a single day. Even so, hail so think it looks like snow in the suburbs is unusual enough to blog about. In fact, it did actually snow on Mount Lofty today, which is so unusual, it was featured on the News on TV. 

All of which seems like a good place to start a personal blog. 

"First things first..." -- I guess this blog is mostly for me; a way of charting my path through a difficult "today" and into a "tomorrow" I hope to find, or build, or orchestrate. Three clichés that got to be clichés by being absolutely correct: nothing is ever easy ... good things are always worked hard for ... the best things are a) worth waiting for and, b) usually saved till last. So I'll start somewhere and keep moving forward; and this blog will at least help me chart where I've been, if not where I'm going.

Zolie in the plum tree -- in better weather

Mark the date of starting: Tuesday, July 12, on a stormy evening with Mom just home out of the hospital (still suffering pneumonia), Zolie still freaked out after the thunder and parked on Dave's lap as he reads up on the Tour de France and looks forward to tonight's stage (which is leaving Spain and heading back into France), Mike just putting finishing touches to another short story, and a laptop called Pandora that seems to be having a hernia.

Good place to begin!