Life snapshot

Wednesday shopping. Phyllis drove. He is competent at driving, quite good really, but I still had my foot on the passenger side imaginary brake pedal at times.

After shopping, Kosov drove with his learner plates displayed. Kosov did drive a car in India, and has an Indian driving license, 'bought' by his parents. 

He was a left foot braker in India, which really isn't the right way to drive. I don't think our driving test people would accept that now, although I know it still happens with local drivers born overseas. It can be easy to tell as they ride the brake with their left foot as they drive and their rear brake lights are lit. I am seeing this less that it used to be. 

Kosov's driving has steadily improved. He is far from competent yet, but doing much better. I had prepared myself to compliment him, and so build his confidence.

I don't fully understand what happened, but when it came to turning into our carpark entrance, he went past where he was meant to turn and then went up onto the footpath. I yelled 'stop', and he did. I told him to get out and I would reverse the car back onto the lane and drive to our building's garage. 

I now know he confused his left and right feet, and was braking with his left foot and accelerating with his right foot. Before he should have turned, he was already getting the turn wrong. There was chatter about when to press the button to open the carpark gate. Maybe that distracted him. Look, his speed was only about 10 km/h but had someone been standing on the footpath...

More driving Thursday, and it was clear the experience yesterday had rattled him, as he drove less confidentially. While at about 20 km/h, I warned he and Phyllis that I was about to test the electric handbrake It worked well enough, and I can stop the car with my intervention. He did make a serious mistake today, but without consequences, and nothing like yesterday's. I do feel preparing him for a driving test is going to be a long haul.

Naturally he was mortified, and kept apologising. Phyllis kindly said nothing at the time. What my mind was occupied with was what happened and how to ensure it didn't happen again. 

Not too much has happened this week. Ex Sis in Law and her husband flew off to Bali this morning, and had to leave home at 3am. 

This afternoon my Indonesian neighbour invited me out for coffee, he being the father of his daughter who has twice locked herself out their apartment, and called on me for help. 

He grew up in poverty in Indonesian Borneo, with an abusive father and an uncaring mother. Somehow through sheer will and being smart, and some luck, he ended up being a being a highly desirable employee, working in the tech area of public transport and other areas and became a rich person in Australia. In the last few years he spent time working in Indonesia. He is very handsome, for a fifty one year old. There came an opportunity to ask him if he had Chinese heritage. Indonesia has a population of Chinese heritage people but mostly a native Moslem population. His heritage is Chinese. Sorry if this offends you. It is the way my mind works, and I established that he is not circumcised. Wouldn't mind seeing it.

He has a house too, in an expensive outer eastern Melbourne goes up for auction today. I need to do some searching. Maybe it's a middle suburb now. What were outer suburbs seem to have become inner suburbs.

Whatever nonsense I've written, it was a nice catch up with my neighbour. He was kind to me when Ray died.

Friday Fandango

Gosh can this guy dance. He must have put so much time into this short clip, but must also must have a natural dancing gift. It would have been nice to see him do some Irish tap dancing or perhaps the world famous Melbourne Shuffle.

Quiz answers

I've visited the Canadian provinces British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. 

Ray had cousins in Saskatchewan.

Surely we all know Quebec, province and city. 

I also knew Newfoundland and Labrador. 

I missed Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

So you've been edjicated about Canadian provinces, but probably not remember most.

We won't go down the road of Canadian territories.

Quiz

My couple of efforts at a quiz were ok, but not nearly as sophisticated as YP's.

This quiz is simple and without hints, eh.

Canada doesn't have counties like England, nor states like many counties have, including my country, Australia. Canada has provinces, I expect related back to its strong French connection, eh.

So please name Canada's provinces. There are ten. I knew six of them without checking, and then it was a matter of, how did I forget that, eh. 

If you knew one of the less known ones, or all of them, speak up. Naturally Canadian and US citizens will know them all, eh.

If you don't know, Canada is in the process of ditching its formerly strong connection with the US, and building trade relationships all over the rest of the world. Canadians have stopped visiting the US in large numbers. This is all down to #47 the US Republican Party that's treated the country in the most appalling manner. Guard the Leaf, if you care to. 

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.