Encycopedia of Me Meme: Z is for .. the END of the alphabet ...

..... but the beginning of a new life for the Fleas. Talk to you all soon(ish). And, thank you again.

Encycopedia of Me Meme: X is for ......eXtraordinary

It's eXtraordinary what crisis and change reveals about people - good and bad aspects of their nature that you had not appreciated in the ordinary turn of events.

We have had a lot of help from friends and family - and as always, when the crunch comes, have discovered who our true friends are. Disappointing to find that someone you would move heaven and earth to help, because of your friendship, is not prepared to move out of their own way to do you even a small favour. It's a bit reminiscent of when Gpa Flea had cancer, 11 years ago - all sorts of unexpected people came out of the woodwork to lend their support, moral and physical, while someone we thought was amongst our closer friends showed their true colours in a quite unnecessary and hurtful way. That sounds a bit judgmental - it IS judgmental, but the hurt lingers long after the event. However life moves on and we don't take those people on our journey. (See why I find blogging so demanding? - the potential to be misunderstood is enormous - do I sound bitter and twisted? I hope not - just disappointed.)



The photo is the Flea family - minus the little Fleas, whose faces I don't like to expose to the world at large. The biggest Flea (third biggest in height, biggest in age) is in the purple jumper, second biggest (actually the biggest but second oldest) has the goatee, third biggest (but second tallest) is in the heavy duty jacket while Gpa and Gma Flea are the two oldies. Clear as mud? They have been a great help and support. They all came home to this house as newborns and did all their growing up in it, but have all said their goodbyes. Gpa Flea is a bit short-tempered and I'm sure it's because he's sad to be going, but he seems excited at the prospect of moving into the new place - he's a stoic like his Mum. My dear neighbour came down today and was quite upset and I felt a bit guilty that I'm so happy to be leaving - although I will miss some of the neighbours and our beautiful wildlife. Our two lovely young male neighbours have been so helpful with lifting things for us, and on Friday night had a good-bye neighbourhood get-together for us - we are only moving one station away, so we'll have no trouble staying in touch.

Encycopedia of Me Meme . . U is for Unknown

Yes, UNKNOWN - the completion date of our new home. My blogging has, of necessity, been neglected for the last couple of weeks. The sorting, packing and throwing out of 40 years of accumulated junk takes a lot of energy. When faced with an overwhelming task - I postpone/avoid. I have to confess to playing scrabble online instead of writing my blog. Writing my blog requires thought - of the introspective kind - do I say this - do I reveal that - what have I done that others might find interesting - while scrabble is in the moment - racing the clock and concentrating only on the things immediately on the screen. My apologies.

Somehow, despite my worst efforts, it all seems to be coming together.

Encycopedia of Me Meme . . R is for RIDICULOUS.

R is for ridiculous - I'm talking about the scrabble dictionary and the "words" that are allowed. How can words that have NO MEANING in English be considered words for the purpose of the game, when the rules say that no foreign words are allowed? eg "Li" is in the scrabble online dictionary is defined as:
1. A Chinese measure of distance, being a little more than
one third of a mile.
[1913 Webster]
2. A Chinese copper coin; a cash. See {Cash}.
[1913 Webster]

Yet "dux", being the "top pupil at a school", listed in the Oxford Dictionary, is not listed in the official scrabble dictionary. I have used the word "dux" (one of our daughters was dux - twice) but I have NEVER used the word "li".

Well, that's my wobbly for the day! Good news - we have a new baby!


I have been watching the possums for the last couple of months and have seen a certain expansion in the size of at least one. Then, yesterday when we were having lunch on the balcony, the possum opposite woke up and was fussing around in the box, when a baby possum appeared on it's head, squirmed across its Mama's back and generally made a nuisance of itself! Poor Mama Possum - she had a long-suffering look on her face as if to say "these broken days! I need my sleep!".

The baby is too small to ride on her back yet, and mama is very hungry - yesterday she appeared at her window before it was fully dark, and squirmed out and across to the feeding tray when I appeared with some fruit for her. These nursing mothers have big appetites! I am really going to miss the wildlife when we move.

R is also for ROOF - the roof is now on our new place, so the R is for RAIN won't hold the building up as much. It is now due to be completed in mid October until mid November, so we'll be homeless when we get back from India/Thailand on 10 October. Our furniture is being R is for removed on 11 September and goes into storage until the house is finished.

The Australianism for today is : "Received Standard English" - not exactly an Australianism, but this is the English to which we all aspired when I was a child - only people who had private school educations, or came from the upper classes in England spoke that way. All the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission") announcers spoke "Received Engish" - they spoke "proper" unlike the rest of the rabble. Nowadays RSE is not often heard on the airways - we seem to be quite comfortable with our own Aussie accent. Another blow struck for a classless society!

All blogged out ..

I guess it's obvious that I'm feeling all blogged out - I had been spending so much time reading and writing blogs and putting on weight with my sedentary lifestyle, that I was fearing that my life was slipping away as I sat at the computer. I think what I'm really feeling is overload with the move-after-40-years coming up. I've been feeling too blah to leave comments on blogs, let alone write one. But today, in a break between packing boxes and carting all my size 14 clothes to the op shop, I was reading some blogs I haven't visited in a while and came across Bella Dia's Encyclopedia of Me Meme. She was talking about "A for Ageing" - not a good thought for a blahed out oldie! So I have decided to join in, a few days late. Please refer to her blog for the details - I'm too blah to go over them! So, as today is 3 August (here) I'll have to do A, B, and C in one go - no doubt my alphabet will be very move oriented, but it may provoke me into some knitting blogging - who knows? who cares? . At least it will keep me in touch - I start to worry when other fairly reliable bloggers don't post for a while . So here goes:

A is for the first letter in my "maiden" name. I was always very self conscious and shy when I was a child. It was absolute purgatory for me to have to stand up in front of the class and read or give an answer. It was sheer hell when the teacher decided to call our names to do that, by reverse alphabetical order (afferbeck lauder in Aussie speak).

B is for boxes. Our downstairs room is FULL of boxes - we can't envisage even using half of them, but we trust that the moving man has done the odd box estimate before.

(At this point I decided to take a photo of the boxes, and it has started to lift me out of the blogged out feeling.) This photo doesn't do justice to the number of boxes in this room - believe me. They are stacked flat behind the two assembled boxes and also behind a lounge that you can't see....

B is also for books - we are getting rid of as much as we can, and the time has come to let go of my childhood favourites. When I was a child we lived in country towns. At Swan Hill (on the Murray River) one of our neighbours was a school teacher and he had a little lending library at the end of his shed - I loved it. I can't remember ever going to the Public Library there, so I assume there wasn't one. Books were very precious, and unlike the kids of today, we only received presents on our birthdays and at Christmas - or when we were very sick - and usually, only one book, at that. I was an early reader and I loved the Enid Blyton books - especially "The Secret Seven" and "The Famous Five" books. I referred above to my self consciousness - when I was six, I was learning Scottish dancing, and we had to do a performance at the local Show - on a stage, with everyone looking. To this day, I am sure that came down with pneumonia because I didn't want to get up in public. I remember feeling guilty about it, even as a six year old. My mother and father hovered over me with worried looks, the doctor came and ordered poultices for my chest - horrible things made up of something gooey and brown paper. It sounds like a Dickens novel!! Because I was so ill, my father came home one day with a great surprise for me - a book! A copy of Gulliver's Travels! I will never forget my disappointment! I was only six, after all. To have a book wasted on something I didn't want to read was a huge tragedy. I could have had a "Famous Five " book!

Back to the subject - so today I photographed the inscriptions in my childhood favourites - as it is the sentimental value of the books that I really want to hang onto. My mother was very keen on signing my books "with special love" to a "special girl", and for years I thought I was adopted! Here we have "Robinson Crusoe", "The Swiss Family Robinson", "What Katy Did Next and What Katy Did at School", "Fifth Form at St. Dominics", "The Father Brown Stories", "The Coral Island" (which I absolutely loved!) and "The Dean's Watch" (which was given to me by my friend, Ingrid, who now lives in Vancouver). Did you notice that "Gulliver's Travels" is absent? Along with "The Water Babies" which I think I received during the same illness. "Little Women and Good Wives" is the only book from my childhood that I've kept. It is falling to pieces, like the others, from having been read and reread so many times. It was given to me by people that we came to know when we lived at The Entrance, a coastal village (at that time) that was popular, even then, with holiday makers. There was no public library at The Entrance. Once a term we would get a box of books from the State Library and we'd all get to take one home. I'd devour mine overnight and I'd then have to wait for days or weeks for other class mates to return theirs. Purgatory again.

We moved to The Entrance when I was 8. It is now a huge, bustling community, but when we lived there, we had tank water, the "night cart" for sewage, and the place was so small that the shopkeepers had two sets of prices - one for the residents, and one for the summer holiday visitors! I used to save the newspapers for pocket money as the greengrocer would buy them for a halfpenny a pound. If we found a soft drink bottle it was celebration time, as we got threepence for returning it to the shop. (Talk of getting old! This is really making me feel ancient!) Those were the days when the grocer had big barrels of flour, sugar etc around the shop. Married women were addressed as "Mrs" so and so. Once a week my mother would visit the grocer's, where she would sit on a chair while she gave her order. The grocer would measure things out on the scales and later that day, he would knock at the back door and place the box of groceries on the kitchen table along with the bill, which was paid in cash. For the children, there was always a small white bag of boiled lollies that the grocer gave to good customers.

It was a special treat when Mum would send me up the street with a shilling, to buy " a shilling's worth of broken biscuits" - biscuits didn't come pre-packaged in those days. There were always large tins of Arnott's biscuits on the shelves which were weighed out on request. Broken biscuits were put in a separate tin to be sold at a cheaper price. My mother used the broken biscuits to make "Hedgehog Cake". I'd carry them home in a brown paper bag with the sides twirled together, in great anticipation of the finished cake.

Grocers didn't carry things like bread, milk and ice-cream at that time. Every day the baker's horse and cart would come around. The bread was carried in large cane baskets covered by white cloths. In school holidays, my mother would ask me to go out and get half a high top loaf for lunch. The baker would break the loaf in two and give me the half to take in. The smell of warm, fresh bread would invariably prove too much for a hungry, growing child and by the time I'd walked down the front path and into the kitchen, I'd have eaten the bit that bulged out and also pulled the fresh bread from the centre of the loaf. No wonder my mother got cranky! I used to love the burnt high top crust with lots of butter. It had the added advantage, that if I ate it, I was increasing my chances of getting curly hair. Sadly, no matter how much crust I ate, my hair remained straight. Damn! I still love crusts, although they don't taste as good as they did then.

Milk was delivered fresh each day by the milkman. My mother would leave a billy with a lid on the front door step each night. Each morning, before the sun was up, the milkman would carry a huge urn of milk down to the step and ladle the milk into the billy. On special occasions he would leave some cream, in response to a note left out with thebilly. Once a week he would leave a bill under the billy, and Mum would leave an envelope with the money in the billy. Milk wasn't homogenised back then, and my father would scald the milk and lift off the clotted cream on to eat with fresh bread and jam. Far nicer than the cream we buy today in the supermarket.

Every Sunday "the ice-cream man" would come around in his van, ringing a bell. We always had a baked dinner for Sunday lunch and the big treat of the week was having dessert. Mum would send me out to the ice-cream man to buy a small block of ice-cream, which she would cut carefully into four pieces to go with tinned peaches. But my all-time favourite dessert was baked rice pudding with melted butter and nutmeg on top. Again, the pudding served just four people. and it was always a squabble over who would get to scrape out the pan - I think my father had more than his fair share of wins!

Well, for a "blogged out" person, I'm not doing too badly. I'll leave "C" until tomorrow with "D". In case you think I never knit:
This is "Eloise" knitted in Noro Blossom that I made for the oldest Flea. I was pleased with the final result (good grief! I hear you say - pleased? you must be sick!) with the knitting-in elastic carried all through. It has made the fabric denser and with a bit of luck, less stretch-out-of-shapey (love that English).
This is a scarf with the ends turned up to make pockets, in the absence of self-heating mittens a la http://Roxie's Sanna, Sorceress Apprentice. Ordered by Ms 11 of course. (Roxie, I haven't forgotten about Ms 11's review - I'll check it out with her Mum tonight.)

Thank You and Questions Answered

I've been very remiss in responding to comments and questions left on my blog and want to play catch-up.

First of all, Roxie asked what PROBUS is - it's an organisation for PROfessional and BUSiness people who have retired - an off shoot of Rotary, except that there is no fund-raising or "good works" involved - people meet for fellowship and recreation. There are male, female and mixed groups. Grandpa Flea belongs to a male only group. He has a committee meeting once a month (he always gets involved in organising things), has a PROBUS meeting once a month with a guest speaker (partners are invited to these a couple of times a year), an outing once a month to all sorts of interesting places (partners go on these), and a day walk once a month (partners go too). Twice a year there is a bus trip away for 5 or 6 days (partners go too). So while Grandpa Flea is busy with PROBUS he is not at home organising me, so I enjoy it too!

Next, thank you to everyone who has commented on my possum pals and expressed concern for their welfare when we move. I will certainly take up the suggestions to leave the new owners a note asking them to start a blog with photos - and I'll let you know if they do (that is, if they let me know). I have started a folder for them with guarantees, instruction books etc and I'll add a possum page. So, Roxie, Carson, Kate, Willow, and Celia I hope that is reassuring.

Thank you, also, to everybody for the advice and words of reassurance about the move and the process of packing up. I appreciate it. Also to Roxie, Kate and Willow for the stash and UFO comments! There are certainly more UFOs yet to be confessed ....

The rare and unusual sighting of a FO brought a lot of very lovely comments and suggestions about a suitable closure. I think I'll have to finish a few more things! So thank you Janette, Roxie, Carson, Kate, Willow, Lynne and Sandra. The pattern was from Patons Book 1253, for size 2 - 10 years, "Zhivago for Kids". I knitted a size 10 as Ms 11 is quite skinny and my tension is a bit loose (the word "swatch" is in a language I don't understand!). The book looks like this (excuse the poor quality, blurry image!): Also a correction - I said in my last post (since corrected) that the yarn was a wool/tencel mix. It is in fact, 50% acrylic and 50% tencel.

Last, but not least, thank you to Roxie and Dodi Raz for your comments on my David Hicks rant. I feel very strongly about this issue.

Blogger won't let me preview this post, so I'm sending off as is - please overlook the typos etc.