Category: Family

Long Time Man

  • March 3, 2020

I saw an interview yesterday with a British bloke who is 112 years old. His earliest memory was from WW1 and was a Zeppelin attack on his town in the UK. This got me thinking of my oldest memories…

I lived an adventurous life as a baby, fighting off cannibals in the jungles of PNG before jet-setting half away around the world for an extended stay in Germany. I don’t remember any of those days, and the earliest memories I do have come from just before I entered Kindergarten, back in about 1976.

I have two very specific memories from that era. The first is of brushing my teeth at daycare. I would have been 4 years old, and while I have dim memories of the daycare itself (playing with Duplo, listening to stories being read to us and sleeping on cots) I have a strangely vivid memory of a lesson on how to brush our teeth where we all copied what the instructor (a dental nurse?) did in front of us.

The next vivid memory – also I suspect from around that time – was of a heavy metal cylinder falling onto my head and cutting me. It left a scar that remains to this day! Bernard was hoisting it up a tree for an inscrutable child-reason and I was standing directly underneath ‘helping’ when the string broke and it fell directly onto me. I recall crying and lots of blood! I bet mum almost panicked!

There are a couple of other trauma-related memories but they are incomplete and not as clear as the above: losing a toenail due to a fall, losing two teeth in one day, and cutting myself everywhere after a fall into a rose hedge 🙂

A year on and I have a very vivid memory from kindergarten about learning to write! We had books containing sentences that were missing words and we had to write using slates and chalk the missing words. As the book progressed we were writing more and more of the sentence until it was just pictures that we had to describe. I expect it’s all done using computers now, and that even in the day we may have found the slates old-fashioned.

Around 1977/8 my memories start becoming much more abundant and I can easily recall specific events at primary school or during the summers of those years. Maybe I’ve lost the correct order and I’ve certainly lost fine detail, but it’s reassuring to know my memories go back over 40 years ago now.

Over 40 years… where did all that time go?

Zoffy

  • February 14, 2020

It was exactly a year ago today we lost our beloved cat Yossie. That was a difficult time, and the tears still flow if we spend time thinking about it. She was a big part of our lives.

But time moved on, as it does. The sad memories fade; the happy ones strengthen. And as all cat-lovers do we eventually took a new cat into our house. You already know who I’m talking about: Zoffy!

I did an update a couple of weeks after we adopted her, but that was almost a year ago and now that Zoffy has grown into an adult I thought it was time once again to feature her!

She’s all grown up now! At about 12 pounds she’s almost half-again as heavy as Emi and not too far off Yossie at her peak. As you can see Zoffy has a lot of dense fur which sometimes makes her look chubbier than she actually is (especially around her chest). She’s also got a ‘dirty mouth’ and a dark fur patch right under her jaw. Both are charm points!

Virtually every day since we adopted her she has eaten her own meals from these plastic bowls I bought from Target. We’ve settled into comfortable routine: she gets a breakfast when I do, and a ‘cat soup’ when I have my dinner. She sits and waits for both, except in the morning when she follows me around from when I get up to when I feed her. She loves her special foods! (Emi doesn’t get special food, and wouldn’t eat it anyway. She’s happy with her kibble and occasional treats.)

From a young age she adopted this pink puffy cushion as her own and she now sleeps on it every day and most nights. Her claiming this was – and is – quite adorable, since this was also Yossie’s cushion, and the two are very alike in personality.

This is most apparent in how close Zoffy and I are (much like Yossie and I were). We always know where each other is and usual what we’re both doing, and when I’m home she’s almost always very close by if not in my lap. Every weekend I usually spend hours in our library working on crafts or hobbies and she’s usually right there with me 🙂

She’s got her own hobbies too of course, and still lots of ‘kitten energy’. We maintain a good pile of paper and boxes in the dining room so her and Emi can play in and amongst them!

She’s also sometimes maybe a tiny bit naughty, such as here when she got inside a recliner for a bit of carousing. There’s also been claims I can’t keep my study door open like I used to do since a fuzzy bandit might jump up on my desk and steal some figurines… but no one has ever witnessed who this bandit actually is 😉

She’s also got a newish habit of looking out our side window. This is somewhat unusual in that no other cat has ever shown interest in this one, but almost every day I find her sitting on the chest looking out. I wonder what she watches?

She’s a wonderful cat, big in personality, charm and love. She’s not Yossie – no one will ever replace Yossie – but Zoffy filled the void and has effortlessly worked her way into our hearts. I look forward to many, many years of joy with sweet ‘little’ Zoffy 🙂

Oops, We Did It Again Again!

  • February 8, 2020

B and I had postcard contests before (read about them here and here) and – after a long hiatus – it was time once again!

There were no set rules, just the usual who could produce the most impressive result. They were both mailed simultaneously to promote independence, and today they arrived.

Once again Bernard defied expectation and submitted not one but three cards. I found these in the mailbox today:

His card selection is clearly fantastic and has an animal theme; one lenticular, one artistic and one incredibly awesome! But the card itself is only half the entry… and here’s the backs:

An explosion of stickers! But what’s the theme? I’ve searched but came up empty. I like the clever reuse of the antique dog/koala card (note the writing under the stickers) and Pac-Man is always appropriate in any situation but I would have liked to see more of a purpose behind the use of these three cards. Plus – let’s be honest here – those printed stamps are worth nothing!

Had I used these particular cards, I may have themed the backs from the front, and decorated them with frog, dog/koala and dingo stickers (and stamps!) exclusively. Possibly I’d have watercoloured the animals and added a few lines of iambic pentameter as well. All good ideas for next years contest…

Which brings me to my entry:

The card itself – showing The 8th Doctor Who – comes from a postcard book AW gave me oodles ago that never fails to deliver just the right card for any occasion! I knew Bernard would treasure it, so I worked hard on the reverse:

It’s tempting to only direct your eye to the lenticular T-Rex stamp and gudetama caviar-sticker embellishments and ignore the 59 Vocaloid stickers I carefully attached with tweezers. But if I did you’d endlessly demand an explanation for that ‘hidden’ message: Hell Of Apes

All I’ll say for now is it was a working title for an Atari 2600 game I’m designing and B is planning on programming. If it ever gets made you can read about it here!

Bernard described my card as “a disturbing lattice of cartoon girls flanked by gibbering egg yolks”, which I think is fancy talk for…

I won 🙂

(Oh, and I wonder if he found the UV ink message I wrote on my card?)