The Digital Mess

I am quite organised, even to the point of mostly knowing what I am doing tomorrow.

Jackie in Toronto posted this about organised  people.

Yes, I tick most of the boxes as being organised. Not being organised would give me great stress. Ray was the same. Phyllis and Kosov are terribly disorganised. I never run out of anything, but they do and have to make a last minute trip to somewhere for something.

My email organisation is up to date, as is everything else, with one exception.

In the mid 1990s when we bought our first computer and connected to the internet, someone who I was chatting to on a rudimentary chat site, maybe MIRC, sent me a photo of a bunch of flowers, followed by a dick pic. How amazing that this machine can do that! I saved the photos, and I probably could find them now if I needed to, but it was a downhill slope from there. I saved and I saved, everything. Photos, videos, messages...everything. My oldest email address still operational is from the nineties, a Rocketmail eddress, which became a Yahoo eddress. Not often, but I still use it.

However, over the years I had organised things, almost everything. Photos are filed in folders, stored in the cloud and on an external ssd drive. The problem is that I didn't name all the folders appropriately, and with near two gigabytes of photos, I struggle to find individual photos.

My brother asked me about a photo he had seen of Mother with her four children standing in front of the fireplace at the Dick Whittington Hotel in St Kilda. I just cannot find the photo, but I have now worked a way to narrow it down. He brought his dog Cobber into the hotel, and he was asked to take the dog outside. Cobber died suddenly soon after. So I need to ask him what year Cobber died, and that will narrow the search down to one year. Wow, I've just remember Jo was there, crawling around on the floor crawling around on the floor and checking out the contents of women's handbags. She must have been two years old, so I need to look at 2009. That's so much earlier than I thought.

Or were these two different visits to The Dick. We went there so many times over so many years. Btw, The Dick has a drive through alcohol outlet where apparently you can pick up your Dick Liquor. 

When I have something stored, while it might take some time and thought, I can usually find it.

The afore mentioned guy who sent me photos in the 90s might be this guy. The photo is all of 45 kilobytes.

Monday Mural

Along with Sami and others, here is my Monday Mural post.

A cat face in the middle of the mural?

Does he have a tail or is it some kind of dildo stuck up his arse?

Sunday Selections

With River and others, here is my Sunday Selections.

This is to gather stats about where issues happen. 

I believe this is an HT Holden Monaro, perhaps with a V8 engine.

Phyllis bought his non stick dishwasher proof fry pan for quite a price. It has seen good service, and worth what he paid.

A carnivores plant which a couple of months later is about to die by neglect. I am not taking responsibility.

 

Reflected lighting on the building stripes, having shown photos last Sunday of the immediate surrounds. 

Did I use these photos already? No matter.

Some lazy arse no good fucker passed out on my chair.

I bought a product to clean the arms of my desk chair, and it worked. God save the chemicals.

 

Not really representative of my family.

Many months after I bought the new lounge chairs, I got out the freebie cleaning box. I cleaned leather, and then nourished it with the cream. 

All cleaned and nourished. 

I am an old man. That was hard work and my back ached.

Of an age

Driving, drinking alcohol, voting, having sex, watching adult media content, smoking, having your own doctor. Most countries have laws in place about such things. The kiddies can't do certain things until they are of a certain age. 

But don't they also have to learn what to do as they become an adult of a certain age? Like turning off lights in rooms they aren't using? At what age do they discover the wonder of saving money by turning off unused electric appliances and lights? 

The third time they have to pay an electric bill? Cast your minds back to when you became conscious of the need for 'turning things off' to save money. 

My lads aren't bad but the unoccupied bathroom light was on for half an hour today, and I turned it off. The clothes on the drying rack in the spare bedroom were dry, so I turned the overhead fan off. I then closed the door as there is no point in heating an unused room.                         

OMG, the new clothes airer is empty, and the pile of dry clothing has been removed from the bed.

So just to reiterate, at what age did you become conscious of saving money by reducing household energy  consumption? 

Modi Matters

India's Prime Minister Modi is visiting Australia to a hero style welcome by the Indian diaspora. He is only visiting Melbourne, probably because 40% of the Australian said Indian diaspora live in Greater Melbourne. 

Modi is a man of the people, especially if you are Hindu. He is not so popular with Sikhs, Moslems and southern Indians, the latter as I am informed by Phyllis and Kosov. India has the largest population in the world, so it is kind of important. 

I don't really follow Indian politics but I've picked up that Modi is a rather autocratic leader who has pushed through some great things for India. India now stands on the world stage, and I think that has been Modi's doing, partly by modernising the country, fixing some issues, but not poverty. And also making world alliances, as he is doing here in Australia. It seems his general popularity will ensure his party will continue to be elected to government until he retires, or is assassinated, as a number before have been. 

My workplace in my young years had many Anglo Indian staff. As time went on, there were more Indian Indian employees. I developed a friendship with a gay Anglo Indian who was educated in one of the best schools in Calcutta and spoke with a very posh English accent in a nice baritone voice. 

We were friends for some twenty five years before he had a mental breakdown (AIDS related I think), cut himself off from all his friends and acquaintances and moved to the country. Ray and I at the time felt it was a very hard rejection but in time we came to understand his mental health issues. 

Through him over those years and even after his breakdown, we became part of Melbourne's gay Indian community and also that of Chinese type Asians, and the good and bad of it all. We got to know many people, some of who I still know.

So Ray and I did know quite a number of Asian and Indian gay guys. On a whim I just thought, I wonder what an ad on GayShare might bring up? A quiet and studious Asian guy student or a young and out there white gay guy? An older white guy? My thought was to offer cheap accommodation to a gay overseas student. 

The guys I could see online were prepared to pay quite high prices. I felt financially insecure at the time, wondering if I could afford to continue to live here without Ray's contribution to half of the costs. 

Within a few hours Phyllis answered the ad and I arranged for him to visit. Renovations were soon to start, so he could not move in immediately, but before works were finished, he was desperate and had paid a substantial deposit. Then his 'straight' friend moved in too, who absolutely adored Phyllis, so not so straight. I think in less than five years, they will marry. 

Indians seem to be my destiny, or at least around for most of my adult life. Little did I know how our lives would become entwined. This is a photo Phyllis may have used on GayShare. I am not sure now. I found it somewhere. 

Trafic (kudos to Jacques Tati)

St Kilda Road in spring and summer looks lovely, especially in spring with the elm and plane trees all in bright green fresh leaves. By the end the summer leaves will look very tired and browned, exhausted by heat and dry soil, willing themselves to die in autumn.

Come winter, the leaves have fallen and the road is revealed, with its shockingly awful traffic; multiple approaching headlights and multiple receding red tail lights, as far as the eye can see in the evening peak traffic. 

Musing about life and death

Twenty seven months after Ray died, how do I feel and how is my grief level?

I still  think of Ray every day. We fell into a vey comfortable relationship in our older years, unlike our passionate and adventurous younger years. We did our own things, and joint things. He cooked meals, I washed clothes. Each of us would do our own thing at home, Ray watching tv and playing on his tablet, while I composed brilliant blog posts. You might say the perfect older couple, a well oiled machine. We knew our roles and what to expect from each other.

Along with buying a new car, our apartment which became my apartment is somewhat different inside, with many things updated, and more to do. I didn't try to erase memories at home, but it seems I have done so quite a bit.

After being together for forty five years, Ray's sudden death was a terrible shock, not just to me, but to everyone who knew him and loved him.

For some time after he died, I wondered if I was grieving in the correct way. Is there a correct way? There were plenty of teary moments in the first few months, and one could not foresee what would trigger them.

Ray died in April, at the time of the year where I had just changed to wearing winter long sleeved shirts. I decided after washing my shirts, I would not iron them, but just hang them carefully on hangers to dry. Ray used to iron my shirts. I became used to unironed shirts.

Come the warmer months, it was time to change to short sleeved summer shirts. Phyllis wasn't home. "Kosov, come and look". I proudly displayed my row of summer shirts to Kosov, ironed by Ray a week before he died, and then burst into a sobbing mess on Kosov's shoulder. What an interesting but unwanted experience for a young man. I apologised the next day, and the reply was, "No problem Onnndrew".

There has only been one moment since when I almost became teary, but I am living a new life, on my own now. I have full control over my life, more confidence because I'm doing on my what both of us used to do, and doing it well enough. Decisions I have made on my own have been good. 

There are so many things I want to tell Ray, but he has gone, and I guess I have adjusted to my life without him. 

Ray's sister is a nice looking woman, with medium length straight 'blonde' hair, slim and a stylish dresser in that northern English way. Her doctor has never prescribed her medication aside from an asthma inhaler. She smokes and drinks a lot, really a lot, and I've just realised she is about to turn 75. A month after Ray's 75th birthday he died.

Who of my current readers met Ray? Obviously occasional blog commenter, our friend Bunyip who we've known for decades, and of course the lovely Fun60 in London, who we met with three times.

As is said, time is a healer.