Fourth Quarter

Waist Management

2012-02-09T07:26:00.000+11:00

We've been on this diet a month now. It's pretty much the South Beach with a few tweaks here and there. The first two weeks are the toughest - no booze, no starch, no fruit, no sugar, almost no carbs and almost no fats. Of course you lose weight fast, but the creator of the diet knows that you don't get fat because you have great will power so he moves you onto Phase 2.

It seems like a mini-Christmas. You can add in a starch, a fruit, a couple of glasses of wine. It's still small portions, of course. LK and I almost drooled as we toasted a single piece of spelt bread for our afternoon snack. I even surprised myself by discovering that I craved fresh fruit more than old wine. So I had a small apple one day, counted out my allowance of 12 cherries the next and went into dieter heaven with four apricots the day after that.

All of which is odd because I ate almost no fresh fruit before the diet.

The wine allowance is vague - and I am delighted it is. "You can even enjoy one or two glasses of wine with your dinner" is the wording. Now you may not consider that vague, but I believe I am remaining well within the limits of the diet if I use large water tumblers instead of those skimpy little wine glasses. After all, they don't say you can't.

The second phase, of course, slows down the rate of weight loss. After losing a quick 10 pounds in the first two weeks, I've now lost 4 pounds in the next two. (By the way, I am truly bi-measured and can think in pounds or kilos. But there was never any question that pounds was the measurement of choice for my diet. Can you even compare the psychology of "I've lost more than 2 pounds" to "I've lost 1 kilo"? I don't think so. And if our scales measured in ounces, I would probably move to them.)

The slower weight loss in Phase 2 makes sense and must be healthier, of course, but with my size and target weight, it also means I am likely to be on this phase for another year or more. Which is where my bride enters the picture.

Linda started us down this course of weight loss with the stated desire of keeping me around longer. Had she really thought that through, I am not sure she would have been so committed to the program, but nonetheless it is her efforts that are making this work.

Like a contestant on one of those cooking competition shows, she has set about trying to use the allowable mix of foods to make meals that taste great, are varied and don't rely on large mounds of lettuce and veggies to fill you up.

And for four weeks, we have had dinners that make me forget we are watching our waistlines. Last night we had three lovely lamb cutlets with a salad of broadbeans, mint and quinoa. After hearing so much about it, last year was the first time LK used quinoa, the grain that seems to me like a stepchild of rice and couscous, and she was excited to see it on the list of starchy foods that could be added back to the diet on Phase 2.

Perhaps in her excitement, she overdid it last night with a whopping huge serve of the salad. You know you've locked into the dieter's mentality when you're eating grains and beans and the cook apologizes that tonight is a bit of a carb overload.

Which, it turned out, was OK. I still lost 16 ounces yesterday. More quinoa, LK!

By Sea and By Land

2012-01-30T09:32:00.005+11:00

We still have more than a third of summer left, but celebrating Australia Day always makes it seem as if we're nearing its end. The kids here in Tassie still have a couple of weeks left of their summer holidays, but just about everyone except teachers is back at work with only memories of holidays for this year.

So, before we move any further from the sun, I want to catch you up on a few things from the past month.

The tall-masted leaders approaching the Iron Pot lighthouse

First, we had a fantastic day on December 28. It's the first time we've been here then, and from our back deck we had a great view of the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race. (Although I believe that there is significant reason to rename it the Hobart-from-Sydney race. We certainly call it that already.)

The flotilla welcomes the leader passing Kingston Beach

It was a pretty summer's afternoon when the first two yachts came into view. LK had made mojitos as we transformed the back deck into our very own corporate hospitality box.

It was the closest result in the race in decades, and it was quite special seeing these two huge sets of sails loom out of the ocean haze and approach the Iron Pot on their way past our place down the Derwent River to the finish line in Hobart.

I remember my Dad once commenting that yacht racing was about as exciting as watching grass grow. To non-sailors like me, that is undoubtedly true. But on a beautiful summer afternoon, it was fun watching a couple of those massive sails looming hugely over the dozens of smaller boats that came out to welcome them to our city at the end of their 2 1/2 day race. Of course, the mojitos didn't hurt the ambience.

The rest of January has been much more focused on land than sea, as we tended to our garden. What looked easy at the beginning, needless to say, is not quite the cup of tea it seemed. We lost all of our peas to pea blight (which is just about as bad as it sounds) and several of the tomatoes went down to fungus. The good news there is that still leaves us with about 25 tomato plants.

The veggies do seem to grow well here, and if we were growing them for their leaves we would be deilghted with the results. Unfortunately the bits we do want to eat are coming along but more slowly than we hoped - even adjusting for the climate. But with sunny warm weather forecast for this week, we remain optimistic gardeners.

Mind you, we have eaten a little bit of our efforts. I think the radishes are averaging $85 a bunch and the one zucchini I did cook wouldn't have cost us more than $30 to grow. On the other hand, the beans are coming along niceley and were very tasty with dinner the other night. The carrots, beets and parsnips look quite promising. The cantaloupe (rock melon here in Oz) looked like it was growing brilliantly until we realized yesterday that what we were nurturing was a weed and the melon was dead. (This is, after all, a learning year!)

I have such great memories of the garden my grandfather had in Rutland. And every summer my Uncle Bob and cousin Jerome pop round to my folks with enough stuff from their gardens to start a farmers market. So I know there's some farmer genes somewhere in my makeup. Now if I can only figure out how to make them come to the fore.

It's not quite a cornucopia yet, but the garden is definitely coming in:

Yellow and green beans, oddly round zucchini, the first little squash, weird purple carrot, strawberries,a very late spring onion and a very badly shaped RolyPoly carrot that is supposed to be round

Mrs K Meets Some of the 99 Percent

2012-01-26T10:09:00.002+11:00

Welcome to 4Q's new year. Sure, it's late in the month to be posting for the first time in 2012, but with personal batteries recharged and a refreshed look for the blog, it is back for a new season.

I knew it was time to get back to posting for a couple of reasons. One, it seemed like every other phone converation LK has had recently has included comments like "I know, and I'm disappointed too, but he just doesn't seem to want to do it any more."

I am pretty sure she was talking about this blog, but actually her comments were not all that compelling a reason to re-start. Survival in retirement years requires - at a minimum - the ability to not pay attention to whatever critiques your spouse is making. And that's if they're talking directly to you. If you can't ignore it when they're talking to someone else, you may as well go get a job flipping burgers at McDonald's because life around the house will be just plain miserable.

No, the real reason I knew it was time to post again was that the other day we went through an experience and all I could do was think about how I wanted everyone to know what had happened.

And this is what happened.

With Jason and Laura moving down here in a couple of weeks, we've been doing house-hunting for them, checking out rental properties in the area. LK has been a woman on a mission, spending hour after hour checking out the ads for rentals, scheduling viewings and scoping out the prospects. In recent days she has been the Communications Center for the project, this week spending more time on the phone with Jay and Laura than she probably has in the past five years.

Her reports are pretty predictable: "It's small but in good shape, you should apply"; or, "Don't bother, it's run-down and it doesn't look like the landlord bothers to keep it up", etc, etc. We have walked into very attractive places with views of the water and very unattractive places with clutter everywhere and a dwarf trying to stop his dog from jumping on us. (Really.) The latter, by the way, elicited the report: "It's not bad, but I wouldn't apply. It's the vibe." Apparently clutter, jumping dogs and small people make for bad vibes even though, presumably, they won't be around once new tenants move in.

But the icing on the cake happened Tuesday. We arrived at a property to be viewed a few minutes early and parked near the house. While the five or six houses on the cul-de-sac were in fairly good condition, I couldn't help notice that the lawn next door hadn't been mowed in a long, long time, most likely not yet this year.

That's not a good sign for the neighborhood, I said to LK who - ever the optimist - said it was hardly anything to worry about. As we sat there, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a very large child sitting on a neighboring porch. The kid was quite a bit overweight and several years over age to be sucking away on a pacifier (dummy, to my Aussie friends). Then I started to notice the little things - a rusting, abandoned washing machine by a back door, a few engine parts in a yard. I was sure I could faintly hear banjo music playing nearby - da da da dang dang - and was getting ready to practice squealing like a pig.

The agent arrived in time to distract us from the neighboring houses. LK and she went into the house as I re-parked the car. It would have only been four or five minutes before I walked into the house, but before I got to check it out (well, other than the mattress leaning against the wall in the entrance foyer) LK came bustling out of the living room.

Her eyes were a little bigger than normal, her lips pursed a little tighter. "No, no, no, no, " she whispered to me. I thought she meant the house wasn't right for the kids, but she meant she didn't want me to come into the house and she wanted to get out, Which we did.

Apparently, after she saw the kitchen and living room, the idea of examining the bathroom and bedrooms sent her into panic mode and she was in full retreat. As we walked down the driveway, the duelling banjoes were getting louder and louder.

The agent told Linda that the house would be cleaned, of course, and LK replied that it really needed blowtorching. She later told me that even if they cleaned it, she could never go back there because she had seen what it was like now. Skeeve City was the term she used, I believe.

We saw one other house that afternoon, but LK was by then in no mood for anything but wonderful. She noted the very worn carpet, the damage to the wall and the agent's attitude that it wasn't that big a deal. LK left without looking at the bedrooms. She was so distracted, in fact, that she hadn't even noticed that the current tenant had taken a black marker and written profanities and racist comments all over the refrigerator, next to his collection of 20 or more empty bouron bottles. I waited until we had driven away to let her know about the fridge graffiti.

So we ended our househunting Tuesday learning a couple of lessons. First, our alcohol-free lifestyle experiment was officially over after 14 days and ending as soon as we got in the house.

And second, when it comes to bad vibes, we now know that clutter, a dwarf and a jumping dog are not anywhere near as bad as they seem at first.

------------

And as a postscript, today is a national holiday here (not that this is very important once you're not working.) Happy Australia Day to all our Aussie mates and family.

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

2011-12-28T16:22:00.000+11:00

The Best Present This Year

We are home again, landing back in Hobart on a glorious warm, sunny Christmas Day.

We had been cruising in New Zealand for almost two weeks and arrived in Sydney on Christmas Eve just in time to have lunch with Shirley and then a very special dinner at Rachael's with Lily, Matt, Jason and Lora.

We haven't Seen Lil in months and she and her mother are heading north for a six-month assignment Rach has drawn, so being able to get together with her these holidays was very special.

In fact we haven't celebrated Christmas with any of the Oz family since 2008, having spent the last two with the US families. So it was a really great evening all around and was the highlight of what has been a very good month.

I know the families are eager for some photos, and it has taken me a couple of days to set up my new laptop and edit the photos, so I will make this a short post and write more about our journeys later this week.

Let's just say, we left our garden untended for two weeks, hoping for the first time that Hobart would have regular rain. Our wishes, however, must have been garbled because we had very regular rain once we got to New Zealand. That literally put a damper on some of our Kiwi ports of call, and our big concern became whether we would be blessed with magnificent weather on the only day that really mattered when we cruised the three beautiful sounds - Dusky, Doubtful and Milford.

Throughout the whole trip we also felt vaguely like neglectful parents (admittedly plant parents) as we kept wondering if all our gardening work leading up to the trip would have been for nought or if the vegetable gods would smile upon us.

Here are a couple of pictorial clues:

Leaving Dusky Sound

The zucchini is flowering

So, for more pictures of our month, go to dklktravels.shutterfly.com . By the way, the flash wasn't working properly during Christmas dinner so the pictures are a bit grainy and dark. But I know you all share my view - any picture of Lily is better than no picture of Lily.

More later. Promise.

The Farm Report

2011-12-08T18:01:00.000+11:00

Linda the Herb Lady and her elevated herb garden

I am becoming concerned that this gardening thing is becoming a little bit more than a hobby for the two of us. Those who know LK will probably not be surprised to learn that once she embraced it, she began giving it 110%. Two days ago she spent hours tying bamboo sticks together and creating a crazy Tinker Toy city where her tomatoes can live when they grow up.

By the way, those who know me will be quite surprised that I am still sticking with it even though three weeks have passed. I find myself resenting rain showers now. Not because they ruin a nice day, but because they take away my quality watering time with the plants.

We are both spending far too much time looking at leaves and stems. Every morning LK visits her babies and reports back on who is looking good and who needs attention. Excuse me, they're not really babies, they're peas and turnips and carrots. And when I say "who" is looking good, I mean "what" is looking good.

We have undoubtedly invested waaaaay too much emotion into growing our own but I think the award in this category is LK's hands down. She seems to treat each new chute and leaf as a cause for rejoicing. Conversely, when one of our seedlings didn't thrive when transplanted, I had to convince her there was no need to change into mourning clothes.

That tomato seedling (one of about 70 ot 80, by the way) has done poorly since leaving the seed tray to live in the garden. While all about it thrived, this one failed to grow and its leaves drooped and curled. That's OK, there are plenty more so throw it away, right? Not with the new Florence Nightingale of the Veggie Patch.

LK is a gardening equivalent of the Marines and lives by the motto "No plant left behind." She is quite sure we can still save that seedling. So we will move it to its own pot and give it plenty of TLC. You know, kind of like an Intensive Care Ward for sad little tomatoes.

I am not so sure. When I checked it out, I could see only slight signs of life; its roots were sparse and on the Tomato of Life Meter it is tilting more to Dead than Alive. But we will try. Of course, as I told LK, even if we do manage to save it, it is still going to end up a vegetable for the rest of its life.

Here's some pix:

3 1/2 weeks - everything's looking good

Zucchini and squash looking happy

The bean and pea jungle gym

Strawberries - the birds love 'em

Apparently the tomatoes love living in places built like this

Head Over Heels

2011-12-07T07:50:00.001+11:00

Scabrous: Having or covered with scales and rough to the touch

Scabrous is one of my game words, meaning I know it's a word and can play it in Scrabble or Words with Friends, but I have to look it up in the dictionary to know what it means. Which is what I had to do yesterday.

I was pretty sure it was a nasty word and more or less suspected it meant what it sounded like - full of scabs. But I needed to be certain in this instance. Because the night before, for the first time in my life, someone had actually called me "scabrous".

The fact that it was my darling wife and it happened in bed should in no way be seen as a reflection on the state of our marriage.

No, in fact we were back to one of my old topics - cracked heels. LK expressed such disappointment as her foot rubbed against one of my dried, rough-to-the-touch heels. "What's happened to your heels? You had them so smooth, but now they're . . . they're . . . well, now they're scabrous," she said.

If I had known what that word literally meant, I would have pointed out that, yes, my heels were a bit rough to touch, but technically they weren't covered with scabs. Unfortunately I did not learn the definition until it was far too late to reprise the brief discussion that followed being called "scabrous".

("Scabrous! Thanks a lot!"
"Well, maybe they're not that bad, but I really wanted to use that word.")

Anyhow, it's now back to pumice stones and Eulactol cream. That stuff is made from urea, which seems to prove that it is better to soak your feet in a byproduct of urine than have them seem scabrous to your wife.

Backsliding on the condition of my heels is probably just one more manifestation of my general trend in retirement. I had heard that a certain class of men tend to, shall we say, lower their standards of personal care once they no longer have to answer the starting bell at a job. Or, in my instance, perhaps the standards were always lower, but having to report to work kept them in check. In either instance, I have to acknowledge that I haven't been all that good on the dapper front since I retired.

Bill Belichick - Hoodie Master

You could point to my dressing in slavish emulation of my sports hero, Bill Belichick, but the point was driven home even more strongly last week when LK insisted it was time for my semi-annual haircut. "Either get it cut or I am putting it in a ponytail," she said. Which is another instance of things that happen when you retire.

Perhaps the best way to make you understand this is to ask you to imagine the reverse -- me telling LK that she had to get her hair cut or I would force her to wear a ponytail. Nope, we all know that men are not about to start bossing their wives around about their appearance - or at least not if they want to ensure they wake up every morning with all of their bits still attached.

But women seem to fall so easily into the notion that the old guy is in his second childhood. And we all know how well they play the role of Mother.

Hillary Wins This Contest

Or perhaps it is not that psychologically complex, for when I expressed these thoughts to my beloved, she just shrugged and said, "Look, it's as easy as this - I have to look at you and you don't." I tried to argue that I was just trying to see if I could outlast Hillary Clinton when it came to getting a haircut that was desperately needed. Obviously, with LK pressuring me I wasn't going to win this particular contest with Hillary.

So back to Whitey's Shearing Shed I went. Despite its name, they really don't tie up your hands and legs and run an electric razor back and forth across your head. They're very friendly there and in a matter of minutes I was presentable again - or at least as presentable as I am likely to get.

Presentable, like scabrous, might not be the precise word to use. Perhaps I can come up with a new phrase. Does "Retirement Casual" work for you?

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Garden pix tomorrow for the thousands clamoring to see how our peas and carrots are doing.

Giving Thanks

2011-11-25T15:51:00.003+11:00

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it.

I have given up trying to explain it to my friends in Oz who don't. Most Aussies know it's a big day for Americans and that its centerpiece is a huge family feast featuring turkeys the size of which astound people who haven't grown up with genetic breeding and steroids for their farm animals.

And for some strange reason, Aussies know about the dessert. "That's where they eat pumpkin pies, isn't it?" they will ask, with the tone of their voice leaving no doubt they consider it excessively weird to use pumpkins as the chief dessert ingredient. When you think about the fact that most Aussies start out each morning spreading on their toast a black paste made from the yeast left over during beer fermentation, you get a sense of just how weird it must seem to the rest of the world to eat a pie made of pumpkin.

That is, of course, until you feed them one as LK and I used to do many years ago when we would host our new Aussie friends so they could sample a genuine Thanksgiving dinner. But those annual extravaganzas were when we were younger and much more energetic. Even then, though, our energy had its limits and we finally gave it up when we realized we had served turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie to about 30 people and had barely had the time to chat with our guests. In fact, we weren't even sure we knew all our guests.

So now Thanksgiving is just another day for us. Which is a shame, really, because for the first time in our lives we are emulating those 16th centuries Pilgrim refugees in America, finding ourselves on a fast track to filling the cornucopia with, among other things, lots of tomatoes, radishes, beans, peas, squash and beets.

And this doesn't include the 2 dozen she's repotted!

Lacking the guidance from the native Americans that the Pilgrims received, we have already made several errors as we plant our garden. LK, for example, did not have great faith in her ability to get seeds to germinate. As a result, she is trying to figure out A) should we go ahead and plant the 60 or 70 tomato seedlings she now has; B) assuming we do, what will we do with the several hundred tomatoes they should yield and C) how much will it cost to buy all the jars and other gear to preserve these things.

I would laugh at her, if only I wasn't trying to figure out what you can do with 60 or 70 radishes. I am quite sure that's the number I will end up with based on the number of seeds that have already germinated. And similar excessive yields are likely for beets, carrots, cucumbers, zucchinis and turnips. Turnips! What in the world was I thinking of?

It will be January or February when most the great harvest begins here in the southern hemisphere. That is also about the time that I should be considering renting a stall at the Sunday Farmers Market. But lacking that, I guess we could revive the tradition and invite our neighbors over to share in our bounty and offer thanksgiving for our plenty.

Or perhaps I am jumping the gun. This morning LK stormed into the house. "Something ate one of my strawberries," she growled. Obviously many gardening challenges remain, but today I think it is nicer to just hold onto my Aussie Thanksgiving fantasy. And make sure I pay special attention to those squash growing in the corner patch. They should make good pies.

Who's been eating my berries, Mrs K wants to know

myPods

2011-11-22T13:07:00.001+11:00

"I have a pea!" -- MLK (Mrs Linda Kennedy)

LK burst through the door yesterday with a wide grin on her face.

"Donald," she said excitedy, "we have a pea!"

Now, because I often burst through that door yelling, "I have to pee!" I at first misunderstood her. But then I realized what she was saying. Our garden was starting to make some food for us.

It should. We have put more work into growing our own veggies than just about any of the other 30 or 40 projects we embraced enthusiastically for a week or two. You know about moving the dirt to set up the bed, but since then we have each spent hours every day planting, thinning, pruning, transplanting seedlings, watering, staking and - as often as not - just standing there admiring our agricultural skills and trying to convince ourselves we really can notice a difference from day to day.

This is a bit surprising to me. It's not like we left Sydney to move to a farm. Our house is in a suburban cul-de-sac near the beach. Real farms are a good 7 miles away. But for some reason, LK and I have it in our heads that we are starring in the sequel to Green Acres - with the very surprising difference that both of us have chosen the Eddie Albert role and LK shows no interest in reprising a latter-day Eva Gabor.

The (Patient) Big Green Egg

And it's not just backyard farming. We're pretty much going the whole Nine Green Acres Yards. We are now baking our own bread a couple of times a week and LK has bought a new sewing machine and some quilting kits.

Yesterday we discussed whether we should make some of our own cheese, and the Big Green Egg is waiting patiently for us to begin making our own sausages and smoking them. (Yes, that's the two-year-old Big Green Egg, and when I say it is waiting patiently, I mean very patiently.)

The Herbal Deck

We love roasting chickens now so we can use the carcass the next day to make our own stock, which is especially rich in flavor because I use the parsley, thyme, rosemary, bay leaves and tarragon that LK is growing on the deck. Those are the herbs, by the way, which LK visits first thing every morning. "They're looking good," she will report or, less happily, "I'm a little worried about some of the basil." That's a worry, of course, because LK needs it to make her own pesto.

Growing your own does bring us back to the New Age Victory Garden out back. That has more than its fair share of great moments -- like this morning when LK rushed in the door and told me excitedly, "We have a second pea plant with a pod!"


"I have another pea!"

Dirt

2011-11-08T10:24:00.000+11:00

A big - a very big - pile of dirt

became a little pile of dirt

until eventually it wasn't even a pile of dirt any more

So how did this happen?

No, not how did the dirt pile get smaller. I mean how did it happen that I managed to start a post with two shots of my big fat ass. Every time I get on the scales, I realize I am overweight. But it is pictures like these that drive the point home most cogently. I mean, honestly, I could sell billboard advertising space on the back of my shorts.

Of course, if you look closely (and I doubt that any of you have had the courage to look that closely) you may notice that my BFA is ever so slightly less B in the second picture.

And that's because I have been on the 3-Day Garden Bed Workout and Fitness Regimen as we set up a "No Bend Over" garden bed in our back yard. Our 8ft x 4 ft x 2.5ft corrugated bed was delivered on Saturday along with veggie mix soil.

Unfortunately that 2.25 cubic metre (80 cubic feet) of soil that was delivered with the garden bed couldn't get past the front yard, while the garden bed sat in the back yard. So this past weekend has been spent moving dirt. Lots of dirt.

For the better part of three days, my life became quite routine. I would fill the wheelbarrow in the front yard, catch my breath, push the wheelbarrow about 35 yards to the garden bed, catch my breath, shovel the dirt into the garden bed, catch my breath and go back to the dirt pile.

There were a few steps in between. LK had researched how to properly set up one of these planting containers. Trusting the Internet to be accurate, she recommended a layer of straw near the bottom and, closer to the top, a layer of lucerne mulch and finally some cow manure.

Now here's the shocking news. The cow manure was virtually odorless, not even remotely similar to the smells I recall from my grandfather's dairy farm. But the lucerne mulch? As our friend Jaki often says, it was nasty. I mean rank, rotting smells that rivalled the worst sewage pits. You can see in this picture how enthusiastically I embraced putting that into the garden bed.

But you can also notice in that picture that the level of dirt is getting pretty high in the bed. It would have been nice to complete the dirt transport on Day 2, but I was discovering that one day of moving dirt doesn't really get you ready for the second day.

About the time this picture was taken, I was getting ready to give into my aches and pains and head into Day 3 the next morning. But after putting down this layer of foul mulch I felt I absolutely had to cover it up. So a couple more barrows and then I called it quits.

It was interesting to see that LK was still researching on the Internet. Only now, instead of finding out how to set up a garden bed, it seemed she was watching a YouTube video of how to administer CPR. That's what I like about her - she's always prepared.

Anyhow, yesterday the bin was finally full; we went to the nursery to buy seedlings since we're a bit late to be planting from seeds for most veggies. They will, we are pretty sure, turn into the most expensive vegetables we have ever eaten.

And then we started planting. And much to our surprise, that was a pain in the butt, too - although admittedly not the same kind of pain as you get lugging dirt back and forth. We took turns putting in carrots, spring onions, leeks, tomatoes and peppers before agreeing that the rest could wait until today and cocktail hour could begin early.

It's funny to realize that now that I am retired I get satisfaction from the strangest things. Whereas once I got a buzz when our company won publishing awards, now I am energized by moving dirt around. Somehow it didn't even matter that all this effort was only so we could have fresh vegetable. If we were planting barley, hops and malt, I could understand. But carrots and onions? Yep, things are different.

And now it's time to finish planting. We've got turnips and parsnips and squash and peas and beans to fill out our garden above the ground.

Boo! Boo Hoo!

2011-11-01T15:15:00.002+11:00

Mr Jack O'Lantern staring from behind the bars of our porch railing

Happy Halloween!

Or not.

The eve before the Feast of All Hallows (now All Saints) Day has become a unique fun night, with kids in their costumes trick-or-treating their neighbors and hauling in bags full of sweets. Well, let's just say some kids are trick-or-treating because others are not. I am pretty sure kids in Burma don't do it, nor do kids in Iran, Libya and certain conservative Christian neighborhoods in the US.

Nor Kingston Beach, regrettably.

They were doing it in Sydney by the time we left. At first Lily and a couple of her friends were among the few who door-knocked in fancy dress, but five years later there were good, solid numbers of kids who had caught on that all you had to do was put on a funny face and you could get enough candy to stay awake until Christmas.

And we loved it. Cute kids, scary costumes and all we had to do was open the door and hand them a miniature Snickers bar. No turkeys to cook, no presents to wrap. Just buy enough bags of candy to keep the goblins happy and enjoy yourself.

But we have apparently lost our Halloween in Oz now that we've moved here. It's not like LK didn't try her best to get the neighborhood in the mood. She carved a great jack o'lantern and with his gap-toothed grin he stared at the neighbors from behind the bars of the porch railing, virtually begging them to knock on the door and demand one of the dozens of treats we had optimistically bought for the big night.

Oh well, we can't expect every holiday from our youth to translate into Strine. It's just that we more or less hoped this fun one would have made it. Our expectations rose here in Tassie when the local grocery stores started selling American-type pumpkins for carving (the "flesh" of the Aussie kind are too thick to carve).

But perhaps we could have figured that they really hadn't quite mastered all the details when they cut the stems off the top so you couldn't easily lift the "lid" you carve in order to light the candle. LK solved the problem with a stroke of Halloween ingenuity. Like Dr Frankenstein himself, she held her creation together with your standard bolt and not quite so standard wing-nut. Now she just has to be as creative figuring out what to do with 47 miniature Snickers bars.

In My Room

2011-10-25T23:27:00.000+11:00

Just so you know, this is what I look at now every time I pee. The window sill in the loo used to be home to a couple of starfish and a crystal boat, but now it's proudly presenting a golliwog holding a duck next to a chook (sitting on blocks spelling its name in case you didn't know what it is.)

Having stood in front of them quite often, I can tell you the three of them are all quite different. The chook, for example, never ever ever looks you in the eye. There are few rules I live by any more, but one of them is that you should look someone in the eye. I think this rule is especially important if you're a chicken.

The duck, on the other hand, is just the opposite. He has no white around his pupils and his dull, dark eyes just stare at you continually. He is, by far, the most initmidating duck I have ever known. (And yes, you would be right in assuming I haven't known any other ducks. But just try to stay with me on this.)

The golliwog, of course, is horribly politically incorrect. Not that it's his fault. But the dilemma we face - now that we own him - is that to not include him means that we are creating an all fowl display and not permitting him his place. So he's there. LK had the duck next to him, but I thought it would make matters more amenable if the duck sat in his lap, so that's how they stay now. And yes, the duck is much less intimidating sitting in the golliwog's lap.

Oh, by the way, these are all johnnies-come-lately. This beautiful elephant has been the light of the night in the loo for many months before these latest interlopers arrived. Truth be told, I don't even know if the elephant likes its new neighbors. I am pretty sure she doesn't like the duck.

But then again, nobody likes the duck.

Today LK nagged me that I haven't blogged lately. I told her to stop nagging, that I have been trying to think of something to write about and was coming up blanks. I told my Dad this, and his solution was elegant in his simplicity. "Just make something up. You used to,"

But then I was peeing and looking, once again, at the chook, the duck and the golliwog, and I thought: "I have a post." But it need not stop there.

Not to nag the four young men who could have a say in resolving this, but were I to have another very young grandchild, say two or three years old, I might even write the story of the chook, the duck and the golliwog. And how the beautiful elephant saved them all one day,

An Old Mate

2011-10-19T16:09:00.000+11:00

They call me The Wanderer
Yeah, the Wanderer.
I roam around and around and around.

Dion

That's a map of a now infamous walk that I made three years ago. I wrote a post then describing how I had become enthused over my newfound ability to walk (or more properly, walk without stumbling or collapsing). I was so enthused that I roamed parts of my neighborhood that I had never visited.

And with a not-so-precise sense of direction, I mistakenly took a path that led me into the woods and away from home to the suburb next door. Most people who know me thought it was pretty funny - the idea of the fat, newly retired guy huffing and puffing his way through a nature reserve and up what seemed like sheer cliffs but in hindsight are more similar to a modest hill.

Well, I had thought most of you thought it was funny but last week I discovered that an old mate of mine had a distinctly different view.

When I say old, I guess I mean it in just about every sense of the word. Old, in the sense our history goes back a long way; old, in the sense that we haven't had much - if anything - to do in recent years; and old, in that he is definitely getting along in years.

At one time I was quite a good friend of this guy. But in his later years (and probably earlier than that) he got in the habit of going to industry functions and often saying quite a few negative things about me and my company.

I knew him well enough to know that he couldn't help himself. He loved an audience, and he loved acting as if he knew something that no one else did. The problem was that he wasn't on the inside of very much by that stage of his career, and so he repeated gossip (often false stuff dreamed up by our competitors), blew up minor criticisms of our company into major probelms, and generally didn't think about what he was saying.

In America, he could have had a successful career at Fox News, but in Australia he was pretty much limited to the status quo. The funny thing is that I knew him so well and had heard him do the same thing so often regarding other companies that I didn't blame him. For a man who thought of himself as the Godfather of IT, I knew it was nothing personal, it was just blather.

No Matter. After more than a few reports of things he had said about our company, I decided the best approach would be to stop sharing information with him and just skip the occasional lunch and get-together he and I had had for about 15 years during my last year or two working.

Somewhat regularly, reports would come back. He would be at an industry event and collar one of my staff, asking what had happened to me. Why had I fallen off the face of the earth? Which was a tough question for them since I hadn't fallen off the face of their earth, only his.

I have now been retired three full years, and I assumed these questions had stopped. But no, some bones are just too tasty for old dogs to leave buried.

A week or two ago my friend Caroline was at an industry event and there was my old mate, still managing to pick up the odd free PR lunch. "Where's Kennedy?" he asked her. He then proceeded to tell her that I had fallen off the face of the earth and no one had any idea where I was.

She explained that she knew very well where I was, that I was alive and well and loving Hobart when we were not wandering around the world.

But is he all right, my old mate continued. He then told her in front of industry peers that he had deep concerns for my mental state. You know, he told her, he went for a walk and got hopelessly lost in his own neighborhood only a block or two from his house. He has obviously decided that the only reason I am not hanging with him any more is that I have early onset Alzheimers.

I don't know how he knew about my earlier post, but I am pretty sure he isn't a regular reader. If he were, he wouldn't need to keep asking what I am doing. It doesn't stop him from letting the folks in my old industry think that I am now wandering around with not the foggiest about where I am going.

I guess if I cared about my reputation in my former industry I probably would have kept in touch with key folks over the past three years. I haven't, and I just assumed I would be fading from memory. Little I did I realize my old mate would be keeping my name alive, but convincing people it was my own memory that was fading.

I think there are two conclusions here: One, I was surely right to stop hanging around with him when I did. And two, the perfect response to what he is doing is to just forget about it. Which I am happily doing.

My Cruise

2011-10-12T06:24:00.002+11:00

Cabo San Lucas

I am quite sure I have entered full retirement mode this year. First of all, we have spent so much time having fun that we are just plain worn out and tired and don't want to have any more fun for a couple of weeks.

The 2011 Southwest Road Trip (about 2,300 miles)

The month of visits to family and friends in the Northeast, the two-week drive through the the Southwest, the cruise through the Panama Canal, a couple of nights in Coconut Grove in Miami and the day-and-a-half flight home have left both of us recalling that old gag that our get-up-and-go just got up and went.

The cruise was fun, and you are only finding out about it now because the second part of full retirement mode kicked in: I went cheap when it came to posting. Actually, at about 65 cents a minute for slow satellite Internet access, I don't think it's so true that I was cheap but that I refused to pay outrageously overpriced services. (And justifying being cheap is, I believe, the third part of full retirement mode.)

When I was working, I had to be in touch with the office so I booked all those expensive Internet packages when on a cruise. That package let me also have the time to upload posts and pictures so people could follow our travels. Of course, part four of the full retirement mode is wistfully recalling the abuses of expense accounts but since we are still within the statute of limitations, I won't say much more about that.

I am only going to write about a few highlights of the cruise for two reasons. First, I seriously doubt that anyone wants a travelogue of "Our Central American Experience" that goes for more than three paragraphs. Second, not having wasted money on the Internet on the cruise, I decided we had more than enough to buy lots of drinks. For some reason, this seems to have diminished my recall about a few of our days aboard.

There is no question that the highlight of the cruise occurred midway. No, it wasn't the Mexican ports of Cabo San Lucas or Puerto Vallarte. Not Guatemala or even Costa Rica. It was actually aboard the ship on the night we sailed to the Canal. For that was the night (cue Eric Clapton) I not only shot the captain, I also shot his deputies.

I was one of four passengers who had qualified to play poker with the captain and three of his officers. I had tried to convince LK, Shirley, Walt and Terry to come down to the casino and cheer for me. After several drinks, the best cheer we could come up with was "The Captain Sucks", only it was quite a bit cruder, but never mind. No one from Team Kennedy managed to get there to cheer me on.

Didn't matter. With a fairly large crowd looking on I quickly became the Captain Lou Albano of Crowd Pleasers by knocking out the captain within the first five minutes. Frankly, he wasn't all that cordial and it was all I could do to not say to him, "I hope you drive this boat better than you play poker."

Over the next half hour I knocked out the Food and Beverage Manager, the Hotel Manager and the Environmental Officer (who didn't look anything like Leonard Nimoy). By the end, it was me vs another guest and he went all-in with a weak hand. My prize for winning was a t-shirt, a certificate and a trophy that had a little plaque saying "Tournament Champion". If you lifted the plaque up, it read "World's Best Mom". But that's all right, it's my first trophy for winning at poker and I will cherish it forever. Well, I would cherish it forever if I hadn't thrown it away when we cleared out of the ship.

But enough about my triumphs, what about the rest of the trip? Well, since I'm running out of time (which is to say, I am just about at the end of wanting to write anymore), here's a few snapshots:

Our great friends Walt and Terry made the cruise a lot more fun

How beautiful is this Costa Rican girl, part of a student group doing folk dances for us tourists

Checking out the Panama Canal

If I were an engineer I might understand what you are looking at enough to explain it

Closing one of the locks

Taos, Santa Fe, Sedona, Scottsdale

2011-09-18T09:36:00.000+10:00

Nice pose, Chief!

The last few days in New Mexico and Arizona have not involved the camera-snapping, tourist-driving stuff we did earlier in the road trip. I think it is safe to describe Taos as an artist-centric spot, with a quaint plaza in the center of town catering to two groups: people who like native (and other local) arts and crafts and the others who like t-shirts and inexpensive jewelry.

In either case, we spent a couple of hours wandering around their picturesque plaza and only Shirley took out her camera. So the pictures from New Mexico at our travel site are courtesy of guest artist, Shirl. They're here.

LK continued her "I'm-in-retirement-but-I'm-not-giving-in-completely" adjustment to hew new life, buying some stuff but not as much as in her glory days. She picked up some quilt patches (and no, she has never made one for those wondering) and a little later she bought a small painting. But she is developing some important retired folk skills, and she actually haggled with the artist and got him to knock about 20% off the price.

It was a pretty uninteresting drive from Taos to Santa Fe. The landscape was pretty ordinary, even though for quite a while we drove alongside the Rio Grande. Which, at this point, quite frankly looked like the Rio Not So Grande. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the trip was the astounding number of casinos popping up in the middle of absolutely nothing. There must have been six or seven, and none of us could figure how they made any money. At least after our Vegas days, we weren't tempted to stop.

Santa Fe was a pleasant city. The state capital has a population of about 75,000 and a very attractive plaza. At least it looked that way as I drove through when we arrived in late afternoon. The next day I was just a little under the weather and skipped what was always going to be a shopping expedition for LK and Shirl. Their report was thumbs up, but that's about all I can tell you from personal experience. And the only pictures that we took in Santa Fe were some Shirl took of the casita we rented.

The next day was a long drive to Sedona. About 6 1/2 hours on interstate highways - not very interesting. But once we got to Sedona that changed. LK and I have been here before, but it didn't take away from the beautiful drive in as you come down the mountain from Flagstaff.

But the highlight had to be sitting on our deck at the Sky Ranch Lodge facing west and overlooking some of the most gorgeous scenery America has to offer. LK took lots of pictures and captured some lovely shots as the sun set, painting the red rocks and hills in all sorts of shades. Those pictures are at the same spot.

A quick drive yesterday to Scottsdale outside of Phoenix, where we are declaring it Pool Day in the 98 degree heat. Bound to be more great Mexican food for dinner tonight. Tomorrow we have another long drive to San Diego, where the road trip ends. On Monday we board the ship to head south, eventually going through the Panama Canal.

Rocky Mountain, Hi!

2011-09-15T03:44:00.001+10:00

That's my boy!

What a great weekend we had in the Denver area.

First, getting there was spectacular as we drove over the Rockies from Grand Junction. After days spent on desert floors, we were suddenly surrounded by lush, towering evergreen forests. And as we climbed (and climbed) it felt as if we would be able to reach out and touch the clouds.

We stopped in Vail for lunch. I got lucky. Very lucky.

LK discovering Vail has about the same emotional impact as Indiana Jones discovering the Temple of Doom. In this case, the sidewalks virtually squeaked "Twee! Twee!" as we walked, and I nervously watched LK eying the shops.

When I say I got very lucky, I can only add that the credit card sustained only very minimal damage. I think part of it is because we are already so close to the luggage limits that our options are pretty much reduced to offering to pay total strangers to take extra bags with them.

So, I suspect it was more that practical fact than shopping restraint that spared the budget. Nonetheless, it was mildly disconcerting (not to mention not very PC) when LK said, "You know, now that we live in Hobart I can justify having a mink coat."

Once in Denver, we had a great time catching up with Tom. He's living in Centennial on the southern edge, and we stayed in a motel in the Denver Tech Center, which is jut a few miles from his house. Dinner the first night turned out to be a typical (for us) first-night-in-a-new-place dinner. Which is to say, after a few drinks we decided to stay in the room and order in. In this case, it was a pizza. Not haute cuisine, but it went with a fun night.

The next day, Shirl and LK went to the pool in perfect weather while Tom and I drove to a microbrewery/sports bar so we could watch the Tampa Bay Bucs in their season opener. It was not meant to be, but the beer at the place heled ease the pain. (Actually, it was Tom's pain. My team is the Patriots, who creamed Miami the next night.)

That night Tom had us over for a barbecue. He's staying with his friends Cliff and Shanna until he starts his winter job working at a hotel in Vail (Brrrrr!). They were a great, fun and gracious couple. And somehow I discovered my old skill at getting virtual strangers to open up their wine cellar and pour some good stuff.

We were joined at the barbecue by three rottweilers and a toy terrier. Shanna is a professional dog show handler, and her babies were astonishingly well behaved and gentle. Not once did I get the sense that the big dogs might be studying me as a potential meal.

Monday was heading-out day as we drove to Taos. Tom drove as far as Colorado Springs - about an hour south - to take us to Garden of the Gods Park. It was yet one more incredibly beautiful place that we have seen in our wanderings. Interesting rock formations, beautiful evergreens, Pike's Peak in the distance. I couldn't help but wonder how rocks could be shaped in so many ways and still end up beautiful.

A great side light of the park - it is open for certified rock climbers, and we saw a pair of them atop a scarily steep rock. Pix of them and the Garden of the Gods at our site, http://dklktravels.shutterfly.com

Taos that night and we're in Santa Fe now. New Mexico reports in the next post.

The Week in Review

2011-09-11T02:18:00.000+10:00

LK has booked this trip and her research has yielded fantastic results, as the sites we've seen are fascinating, beautiful and at times jaw-dropping.

Today we drove from Monument Valley to Grand Junction Colorado, with a side trip to tour The Arches National Park in Utah, not far from the Colorado border. Oh, maybe it was just more rocks to look at - but oh what rocks. Some of the formations in this park make you wonder if the laws of gravity have been suspended, while others are fascinating arches or openings in very dense rock. Check out the pix at the travel site: http://dklktravels.shutterfly.com/

We've been driving a lot and doing the touristy thing so the posts are running way behind. So let me suggest that the best way to get a handle on the various things in the pictures is to check out the various park sites at Wikipedia.

And since I know I am unlikely to ever do a catch-up post and go into detail about our journey, here is the quickie recap of the past week:

Saturday - Monday. Las Vegas. We went to see Rod Stewart's show, and all three of us loved it. Surprised me, since I've never been a big fan of his. LK and I discussed a blog in which we list all the big rock stars who we didn't see until they were way past their peak (a lot) and those we saw before they became a big deal (only a few for me, a few more for LK).

Other than that, I can't write much more since it is apparently a strictly enforced law that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Tuesday. Zion National Park. Lovely big sandstone mountains inspired us --- to take a drink out to the hotel's hot tub and sit and look at them. As for the outdoors experience the next day, the choice was to either take the park shuttle around the canyon or hike in the 90+ degree heat. The shuttle was very comfy. Off that afternoon to Monument Valley.

Wednesday - Thursday. The awesome beauty of Monument Valley experienced up close by staying at The View Hotel on the Navajo nation land. Compare the beauty of the structures in the valley with the terrifying fact that the entire area is an alcohol-free zone. First night was OK. We brought our booze into the room in our luggage and had such a good time sneaking a drink or two that we never quite got around to going to dinner. The next night was a different story. Shirley was reduced to drinking minibar-sized bottles of some blue fruit juice and vodka concoction. I had to fight LK over her scotch, which was still in ample supply. It's a good thing I won, because it would not have been pleasant to see monkeys hanging from the overhead lights.

Friday. A visit to The Arches National Park on the way to Grand Junction. The park was stunning and beautiful. So, too, was my favorite site in Colorado - a building with a big sign reading "Liquor Store".

Today we are taking what Tom has promised is one of the most beautiful drives we will ever take as we go over the mountains to get to Denver. Catching up with Tom tonight. Should be a good day.

Quick Catchup

2011-09-09T14:02:00.000+10:00

A very busy holiday so far - a couple of days in Vegas, then Zion National Park, and now we are in the Navajo Tribal Park in Monument Valley, Utah.

Tomorrow we visit The Arches on our way to Grand Junction Colorado, then onto the Denver area to catch up with Tom for a couple of days.

Getting pictures up onto Shutterfly took hours more than it should have, but you can take a squizz at our travel page, http://dklktravels.shutterfly.com/ In a day or two I will have time to write about the trip in more detail, but did want to share this much.

Family Names

2011-09-02T03:45:00.004+10:00

They call me NotBob.

"They" - LK's family - welcomed me as most families do when I replaced husband #1 more than a quarter of a century ago. However, over those many years they have learned to ignore most of those things they didn't care for about me initially.

They have even given me a new nickname within the family. Whenever I do or say something stupid or offensive (as I seem to do quite often), they just raise their eyebrows a bit and shrug their shoulders, dredge up old memories of LK's first spouse, Bob, and call me by my new name: "At least he's NotBob."

I came to understand this when we were talking about other members of the family this week (as you do when you get together). One member of the clan had been married to a guy I will call Harry. It was a general consensus within the family that Harry was a complete idiot, incredibly annoying and extremely vain with no earthly reason to feel that way about himself.

Although this view that he was a super-jerk was widely held, little was said to Harry or Mrs Harry until the marriage came crashing down. Now whenever Harry is discussed, it is with a roll of the eyes, a snigger and a favorite story proving what a twit he was.
Harrry was eventually replaced by a guy we'll call Jim. He was such an improvement over Harry that a few in the family started googling "canonization" to see how long before he could become Saint Jim. Unfortunately, familiarity bred not contempt, but certainly a lowering of enthusiasm.
A few weeks ago Jim did something that really, really annoyed the brother of Mrs Jim (formerly Mrs Harry). Uh-oh, one of us said as we were talking about this, and most of us began to wonder if she had helped another super-jerk cross the clan's moat.

Having spent more than 25 years in the family, I was able to join in the discussion. "Nope," I said, "Jim has a long way to go and a lot more mistakes he can make before he's in trouble. Remember, he's NotHarry. And anyone who is NotHarry starts with at least 100 points worth of mistakes they can make before they have their license revoked."

Strangely enough, everyone understood what I meant and nodded in agreement. "Not a bad way of looking at it," said LK. "You're absolutely right. Now that you've mentioned it, I can't count the number of times I have said to myself, 'Remember, he's Notbob.'"

We changed subjects soon after that so I didn't have to go into more detail about this NotWhoever business. For I am well aware that my first two wives each divorced their next husbands, meaning that being NotDon apparently came with a Use-by date. So I've been extra nice to LK lately, not knowing how much longer being NotBob will work but figuring after this long it can't have much credit left in the account.

And just a piece of advice to Jim. If I were in his spot I'd certainly stop annoying members of the family. NotHarry won't last forever, either. And replacing Harry at the top of the super-jerk mountain is not a result anyone should want.

Yo, Sandy, What's for Dinner?

2011-08-29T01:27:00.001+10:00

Much to my surprise, I discovered last night that I have been wearing a belt this week.

This has been a week of major eating. LK comforted with her food - shepherd's pie, pulled pork, burritos - and last night she, Peg and I squeezed into the car for dinner at Sandy's. (And really squeezed in for the ride home.)

Sandy was debuting a Low Country Boil. I had not heard of this before, but in the future I will make sure to find a seat at any table that is serving it.

If you haven't had the pleasure of this dish before, my description probably will not make it sound anywhere near as delicious as it is. It amounts to a clambake in a pot. Sandy flavored the water with a couple of traditional mouth-kicker seasonings - each of which seemed to have pepper, pepper and a little more pepper as its key ingredient. Into that boiling water, she added potatoes, corn on the cob, andouille sausage (in case there wasn't already enough pepper in the boil), shrimp and mussells.

Being Sandy, she prepared enough food to feed everyone if several dozen friends dropped by unexpectedly. She was so worried that the five of us might not be satisfied eating the equivalent of three or four meals that she even had Dave grill a couple of steaks and asparagus. My favorite part of the feast came at the end when she said there was no dessert, as if any of us could have handled it. (Not even a wafer-thin mint.)

Other than eating, this has been a typical dog days of summer week. One day we drove to the outlet mall where a record was set as I managed to spend more on my stuff than LK did for herself. But how can you pass up $29 sneakers? Anyhow, neither of us bought all that much. I think we spent more buying fancy dips and sauces at the food store.

We read a lot this week. LK finished "The Help" and is engrossed right now in "Word War Z", and I have just downloaded that last one onto my Kindle, ready for some low-brow stuff after finishing the very interesting "A Visit from the Goon Squad", which won the Pulitzer this year. (Obviously, reading quality writing has not taught me how to avoid run-on sentences.) But before the zombie book, I want to tackle "Blood, Bones & Butter", a chef's autobiography that Sandy is reading.

Enthused by the novel, LK wanted to see the movie version of "The Help", and she and Sandy and I went to see it Thursday. It's a movie about minorities, which in this particular case also applied to men in the audience. LK had told me the movie is about how badly black maids were treated, and I was quite surprised that they could make a movie about Dominique Strauss-Kahn so quickly. Turns out it is actually about black maids in the south during the early 1960s. It was OK but I think others liked it a bit more than I did. Probably my favorite part was watching Bryce Dallas Howard channelling Michelle Bachman in one of the key roles.

Speaking of movies, LK and I made a short one (2 minutes) this week as well. More on that later on, though.

Other than that, I didn't do any work this week. Didn't exercise, didn't write a blog, didn't answer some e-mails that just beg to be answered. Oh, I did start playing Words with Friends on my iPod. Sandy is addicted to this game, which is as close to Scrabble as you can get without violating the copyright (or whatever it is that board games have). And now I am approaching the addiction, too, as she and I seem to constantly be taking turns in the last couple of days.

And that, for this week at least, is pretty much what I did on my summer vacation.

Tourists at Home

2011-08-22T21:54:00.000+10:00

This picture is an object lesson in some basic principles when photographing chubby folk. First, overweight people look better when filmed from above. The downside for me is that bald people look better when filmed from below. Face-on, needless to say, isn't flattering for either. But I am used to that.

The other key principle is that people tend not to notice that the subject is overweight when there is a very large elephant head in the frame. This isn't always possible, of course, but when it is, the smart photographer will take advantage of it.

I am focusing on photography because this picture was taken by Sandy when we visited the George Eastman House in Rochester yesterday. Eastman was the guy who started Kodak after inventing major breakthroughs in film technology. He ended up being so rich that when he died they called his place THE George Eastman House, rather than George Eastman's Old House.

Walking through the house was a fascinating way to spend the afternoon. (OK, half the afternoon. The other half was checking out the bar with $2 Bloody Marys down the road.) Besides being a fantastic building filled with so much beautifully detailed work, the house was also a testament to another time.

Take the elephant head, for example. For the life of me, I cannot imagine wanting to put the head of a dead animal on my wall - even if I had a wall big enough to hold an elephant head. More bizarrely, throughout the house there are numerous ashtrays made from the hooves of various critters. This must have been considered pretty cool 100 years ago, but it's really off-putting in the 21st Century. Perhaps not enough to make you a vegan, but it certainly would make smokers think twice before lighting up.

The visit to The George Eastman House is part of an effort by LK and me to do a little more of the tourist thing when we make our annual visits home to be with family. Last week in Vermont we stayed one night in Stowe and checked out the shops the next morning. LK - retired from some work, but still very much a professional shopper - decided we needed to compare the Stowe shops with the Woodstock shops, and so we made a bit of a loop on our route back to Rutland. She gave Woodstock a big tick.

In Rutland, we decided to stay in a hotel up on the mountain near the Pico and Killington ski resorts. And one night we went out to dinner with Bob and Deb at a lovely resort high on the mountain overlooking Chittenden Dam. All in all, doing a bit of the tourist thing made me realize why people flock to Vermont. It's a beautiful state.

We also made a side trip during our time in New England and caught up with an old friend, but I will leave that for another post.

Meanwhile, this is another shot Sandy took during yesterday's tour of Rochester.

It was taken at the bar after, I believe, a second Bloody Mary. I assume you can see that I look much happier by this stage of the tour.

And you photographers might want to note that another tried-and-true method for photographing us big guys is to place someone else in front of us and have just our heads pop into the frame. Works for me.

Marketwatch

2011-08-11T06:42:00.001+10:00

Off the top of my head, I can rattle off lots of advantages of living in Oz. This week I can add another. It is not good being in real-time while Wall Street goes through its manic-depressive extremes.

At home I usualy wake up after the US market has closed, and what's done is done whether it be good or bad. Here, especially when there seems to be a sense of panic about the market, it is too compelling not to take a peek at what's happening. And so for the last three days it's been Ouch! or Whew! or Arrgh! but of course there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. Kind of like watching a train wreck from inside the train, I guess.

Our financial advisor wrote to us and used words like "gloomy", which is not a word that makes you feel real good, but immediately added that the good news is that much of our retirement fund right now is not in shares. Apparently that is the difference between wet and dry cat food if this doesn't sort itself out.

So in the wake of the world having a financial nervous breakdown, there is only one appropriate response - and that is to eat, drink and be merry. The other night we did just that when Sandy and Dave had us over for a barbecue. Peg, Linda and I arrived just in time for cocktails (which I think is whenever we show up), and it was a classic time with this family - great stories, lots of laughs and great food.

This particular meal featured gorgeous grilled veal chops, fresh sweet corn, roasted potatoes and cucumber salad. So good! And the zinfandel washed it all down way too easily.

We sat around after dinner talking and laughing until it got late. OK, it was only 10pm, but you've got to understand that for most of the people at the table this was late. And for LK and me, jet lag was still a factor. But the real giveaway that this night of festivity was over came when we noticed that Peg had put her arm on the table and was resting her head on it.

I know you have to make allowances for 92-year-olds, but we were all pretty sure this was her way of letting us know it was time to go home and to bed, so we bundled ourselves into the car and made the very short drive.

It was during that drive that LK said to her mom, "When I looked at you with your head on the table, I didn't know if you were tired, drunk or dead."

Peg thought for a few seconds. "Well, actually," she said, "that wouldn't be a bad way to go."

----------------------

We're making the Pittsford-to-Pittsford run tomorrow, from Pittsford New York to Pittsford Vermont. The good news - if we keep the radio off, we can ignore whatever is happening in Wall Street.

It will be great to see the folks again.

Rat-a-tat-tat

2011-08-07T22:05:00.000+10:00

With all my focus on the excitement when we landed here in Rochester, I forgot to mention a funny incident as we were clearing immigration in Los Angeles.

Because we hold dual citizenship, we are lucky enough to always get in the shorter lines both in the US and Oz. Well, not quite so lucky this trip.

It wasn't a long queue leading up to passport inspection, but it had snaked back so we were standing beside the people about 8 ahead of us in line. Tired after a 14-hour flight, no one was saying much. And then we all heard it. The unmistakable rat-a-tat-tat of gas escaping from the Valley of the Cheeks.

It was fairly easy to figure out who the culprit was because the woman next to us acted out of reflex, taking a step backwards from the man in front of her and grimacing as if the smell of the flatus that was wafting her way might very well prove to be lethal.

That quick thinking undoubtedly saved her from distress, and no further noises were heard - except for the odd snuffly sound a dozen or so people make when they are all trying hard not to laugh out loud but trying at the same time not to breathe through their nose. As the great Benny Hill knew all too well, there just isn't anything quite as funny as a fart.

When the culprit made it to the immigration agent, he came under a lot of questioning until finally the agent rose from her chair and escorted him into some sort of detention area marked "For Further Questioning". I assume I was not the only one who was pretty sure that this further questioning was in no way related to his expulsion of gas. But this being US Immigration, I also was not 100% certain that farting in public may now be one of the actions that marks you as a suspicious person.

Or perhaps immigration officers just perform this as a public service, acting as Fart Police who remove guilty transgressors from public areas. At any rate, LK and I were especially relieved when we cleared passport control. Neither of us had any desire to sit in a small room with that guy.

Welcome to America

2011-08-05T02:06:00.001+10:00

It is official. By going to America, Linda and I don't count any more in the eyes of the Australian government. Literally, we do not count.

Next Tuesday is Census Day in Oz, and the official census guy stopped by the house a couple of days ago to give us our forms. We opted for the online form. On the Tuesday before leaving, completing the census was No 5 on my To-Do List.

It was a quick process. The first question asked how many people would be present in the house on Census night. Since we will both be domiciled in the US that night, the answer was 0. And so the next screen came up and abruptly told me to sod off:

So that makes it official. This time around LK and I are non-persons. When Australia makes policy decisions in the future, they will be based on numbers that do not include us. That means that retirees moving to Tasmania will be undercounted, thin men with a full head of hair will be overcounted and - as a fitting continuation of my retired life - I will be ignored.

But that was the price to pay for going to America this month. And what a welcome we had!

Our first two legs were uneventful. The final leg taking us from Chicago to Rochester, however, was just a little bit more noteworthy.

It all started innocently enough when we began to board the plane. A woman was putting a bag in the overhead bin above our seats. When she saw us waiting in the aisle, she stepped aside to let us pass. Problem was - she stepped into where we would be sitting.

She seemed to wonder why we were still standing still and looked at us quizzically. "These are our seats," Linda said. At this point the woman seemed to get flustered, although I cannot imagine why. She told us that she was just helping the woman next to her seat put her bag in the bin. Which seemed like way too much information when all we wanted to do was sit in our seats.

By now the queue trying to get on the plane is stretching further and further down the jetway, and I could sense eyes burning holes in our backs. Anyhow, the woman decided that we didn't need any more conversation so she stepped from our seats and, instead of returning to her seat in the row in front us, she stood in the seats across the aisle.

To make a very long story a bit shorter: At some point, since she was still blocking people trying to get to their seats, someone apparently told her she made a better door than a window. And she apparently decided it was me, although to that point - and in fact to this point - I have never said a word to her.

Oh well, doesn't seem like much, anyhow, does it? Nonetheless, two of her friends were sitting across the aisle from her and the female friend kept reaching out and patting her and asking her if she was all right. Since I knew LK hadn't been rude to her and I hadn't even spoken to her, I figured it was something else bothering her or at the very least it wasn't my business. I forgot that we were now in America.

Once we landed I started getting the stuff out of the overhead bin and the man from the couple came up. Since the only thing that wasn't ours was the bag that had started the original tie-up, I said I would get it for him.

"It's not mine," he snarled.

Which made me wonder why he had come back to our row. Turns out his next sentence or two made it quite clear. (And by the way, I will use the Australian spelling here so I can avoid dirty words that might offend my mother and mother-in-law.) For he called me "an arsehole for being so rude to our friend and ruining her flight."

At this stage I did notice that his pudgy face was turning quite red under his silver brush cut. It occurred to me that he had all the looks of ex-military turning to seed. Which meant I really should just back off. So of course, I didn't.

I told him that I had never spoken a word to his friend, that my wife had told her only that she was standing in front of our seats and that anything else that was bothering his friend was her probem but clearly not mine. I then suggested rather vigorously that perhaps he should get his facts straight and think twice before calling someone an arsehole.

To my surprise, he seemed a bit taken aback that I would be kind enough to explain these facts to him. "Well then forget it," he snapped.

So of course, I didn't forget it. I decided I would lecture him on the importance of getting his priorities right. "You are getting all exercised about something that didn't happen," I told him. For some reason, he had let on that somehow he knew we were travelling from Australia. So I decided to end the discussion as a true-blue dinky-di. "You know, mate," I said, "you've got your knickers in a knot over nothing." I assume he got the gist of this even though he had no idea what I had just said.

At this stage all the people who had been delayed getting to their seats because of the little episode on boarding were starting to get delayed in getting off the plane. So there was a collective sigh from behind us when he turned and left the plane. I assume the sighs were of two kinds: Most were just happy that the idiots having an argument weren't going to hold them up any more than they already had, while a few certainly were hoping it would go further and make their evening more entertaining.

No matter, that was the end of that. Well, almost. I had actually enjoyed our little stoush once it became clear I wasn't going to get a knuckle sandwich. First of all, I was 100% in the right - and believe me, that doesn't happen very often. Second, I got to publicly lecture a guy who called me a naughty name and he ended up skulking away. As Nelson says on The Simpsons, "Ha! Ha!"

And finally, I thought it was pretty cool that I was able to go all Aussie on him and leave him with a line which he probably was still trying to figure out this morning.

Naturally, I wasn't able to let our little set-to end merely by having him walk away. As we walked down the concourse to the baggage area, he and the two women were a few yards ahead of us. Pressing the advantage of my obvious victory, I kept up a rather loud patter with LK about just how wrong he had been to initiate this exchange.

Rather loudly - and maintaining my newfound Aussieness - I said, "Such typical bloody Americans! First they lie about something and then they want to start a war over the lie!"

But then I remembered. I am also an American. And for all my posturing, Australia isn't even going to count me this year. So I shut up, collected the bags and was very, very happy when Sandy and Dave pulled up to get us.

Welcome to America!

Don

2011-08-01T08:39:00.000+10:00

Perhaps because I have answered to it for 63 years, I quite like my name and was bemused to see Tropical Storm Don barrelling through the Caribbean the other day. Bemused, that is, until I read some of the comments on the CNN web site.

"Don? Seriously? I refuse to be prepared for anything named Don," wrote ksig162. "Don is the weird great-uncle that shows up at the family reunion and eats all the potato salad. We need better names like Prometheus or Shaniqua."

Well, ksig162, let me address a few of your issues. First of all, yes, I am the sort to show up at a reunion and eat all the potato salad.

But Don (and its formal version, Donald) have a proud tradition. In the 1930's and early 40's, it was one of the ten most popular baby names in the US. In my birth year of 1948, it ranked 14th which means there are a lot of baby boomers named Don. Which, to be fair, may very well explain thinking it sounds like a great-uncle's name.

Even as late as 1990, Donald was in the Top 100 for boys names in the US. Now, inevitably, it has declined in popularity and in 2010 it had fallen to #377. But you think Prometheus or Shaniqua are better names? I challenge you to name even three great people with those names. (OK, the guy who brought us fire and the lady wrestler, but have you got a third?)

Yet consider the Donalds and Dons of this world. (And I'm not even going to go for the the honorary title of Don and bring in such characters as Don Corleone and Don Diego de la Vega.)

In the field of entertainment, we have Don Cheadle and Donald Sutherland, Oscar winner Don Ameche, the great hoofer Donald O'Connor and my favorite soul singer, the late Donny Hathaway. Here in Oz, our greatest sporting legend is Don Bradman, probably the greatest cricketer ever.

We do seem to have dropped the ball in politics. All I can come up with right now are Rumsfeld and Trump, but I think even with those two you wouldn't refuse to be prepared if they were coming your way.

And then there's my Uncle Don. The man I was named after and who was one of the great gentle men of this earth. (And I do mean gentle man and not just gentleman.)

You may mock my name, but it is a great legacy. The brainy ones at Wikipedia explain the name means "world ruler". coming from the Gaelic "donn" for chief. And it is such a Gaelic-sounding name, isn't it? "My name is Don," sounds just about right in English, but "Soy Don" or "Je suis Don" just doesn't ring true.

Nope, when a storm is named Don, it's coming from the cold north and carrying a shilelagh. So maybe the problem was that they used the name for a tropical storm from the Caribbean. In any case, I have to admit that you were right not to get too fussed and prepare for the storm.

As the Gonzalez Cannon reports on its web site, Tropical Storm Don was more accurately named Tropical Storm Dud.

Food

2011-07-29T14:04:00.002+10:00

We had fun shopping for food yesterday. With less than a week's worth of meals here before our trip, we didn't want to buy more than we could use (and this is coupled with LK's mad drive to use everything in the fridge and freezer before we leave, as well).

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of will power in play when we go to the Italian market. You just know you're going to buy some sausage, pizza crust, olives and ciabatta. We skipped the cheeses and fresh pasta (that turned out to be a mistake) but left with pride that we had limited our purchases and a commitment that no matter what we would eat this stuff before we left.

Then a nasty thought came into my head. It's the very short truffle season here in Tassie. They won't be available again for another year, and we weren't all that far from a store that was selling them. (And that's why it was a mistake not buying the fresh pasta, although LK is approaching the possibility that I can try my new pasta maker toy and we'll make our own.)

So now the truffle is sitting in a glass bowl in the fridge with four eggs and some butter. After a couple of days it should have done the rather easy job of infusing them and will serve the nobler purpose of being the key ingredient when I ask, "Yo, LK, what's for dinner."

All of which is a long way round of telling you that this is a fantastic area if you love your tucker. And there are plenty of people who love their tucker here. I think there are more foodies than possums out this way. Two of the best (foodies, not possums) live about half an hour away from our place.

Steve Cumper is the creative chef behind the Red Velvet Lounge in Cygnet, which I wrote about last year. Matthew Evans lives in Cygnet, too. He used to be a major restaurant critic in Sydney, but has moved down here to do his own farming and get closer to the food and its sources. Mind you, it's not quite the same as if you or I decided to chuck it in and become farmers, since he is the subject of an ongoing TV series that chronicles his experiment. (OK, it is kind of the same if "you or I" includes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. You Americans will have google his name if you wish to know more.)

Both of these guys spend part of their time in Cygnet writing blogs that I follow. I don't know if it's the cool weather or the long nights of winter, but they have both recently posted about living down here. I think it would be hard to say it any better than they have:

Check out Steve Cumper's love letter to this region here.

And here's Matthew Evans' answer to a question LK and I hear quite often, as well.

Checklist

2011-07-28T10:22:00.000+10:00

Getting ready for the long trip to the US. Lots of little things to do:

1. Medicine. Must have enough drugs to ensure my lifestyle choices don't kill me. The good news is the doctor looks at my lab work and wonders if I'm still diabetic because my glucose is so low. She takes a blood pressure pill off the list because my bp is so low. And she marvels that my cholesterol rivals that of most Olympic athletes.

She is so impressed that she forgets to tell me I need to lose weight, cut back on the grog and exercise more. "Keep doing whatever you're doing," she says. "OK," I respond.

Her one concern is slightly low numbers for the thyroid test. "Even if we need to adjust that, it's not a serious problem," she says, adding that this could explain why I have so much trouble losing weight. For years I have raised a metaphorical eyebrow at overweight people who blame their metabolism, figuring that their metabolism wouldn't be put to the test if they skipped that bag of Doritos and tub of salsa. But now I have a doctor who is on the cusp of giving me precisely that excuse. Life just keeps getting better.

2. Money. If we buy our US currency at the Post Office here, they don't charge a fee so it makes sense to pick up some. The problem is that buying US dollars right now is like driving a new car off the lot. No sooner do you pay for it than it loses much of its value.

On the plus side, we will be getting the equivalent of a 10 percent discount on everything we spend in the US. On the negative side, LK knows this.

3. Haircut. I try to get my hair cut every six months whether I need it or not. It seemed about time, especially when Caroline made references to it last week in Sydney - something about my "windswept look". I had suggested I was beginning to look like a televangelist, but the consensus seemed to be I was closer to Jeff Bridges in True Grit.

No matter, back to Whitey's Shearing Shed for a cut. I think of myself as a regular customer, since I get all my haircuts there now. However, they don't seem to remember me since I have only been there once before. Either way, the woman who cut my hair gave me an odd look when I told her that even at my age I had to get my haircut so my mother wouldn't be disappointed in me when I visited. I forgot that most people here don't get my jokes - in fact, don't even know they are jokes.

A bit more to do today and tomorrow. We need to choose some of the stuff for the bathroom renovation which will start almost as soon as we return. Have to notify the security company that if the alarm goes off, they need to send the cops since it won't be me forgetting the code.

And I have to call the credit card companies so they will approve overseas purchases. Although I can think of a few good reasons to forget doing that one.

Just a few more sleeps now.

Visits

2011-07-24T08:37:00.000+10:00

I dropped in to hear LK's speech at the Sydney conference Thursday. Just in time to hear such gems as:

"I asked my husband to help me put this slide together. Looking at it, I think you can see why I don't ask him to help me decorate the house."

Or, how about: "Think hard before starting a blog. The Internet is a graveyard of blogs that have four or five posts and stopped. My husband has been blogging for three years, and he tells me how hard it is to keep coming up with topics. But he has a mother who gets on his case if he goes too long between posts. You won't have your mother telling you to write."

It's nice to be someone's punchline. I guess I have become the latest in that long line of husbands that includes Cher's Sonny, Gracie's George and Phyllis's Fang. The good news is that the people that used to work with us thought it was funny stuff.

The trip north was great this week. Well, the weather sucked - rainy and cold in Canberra, even rainier in Sydney - but it was great seeing all the people we did. You couldn't have crammed too much more into the five days we were on the road.

We had two lovely nights staying with Jason and Laura (aka Lora) and the two cats that actually own the house. It was our first time ever staying at one of our kids' places. I think it kind of counts as a rite of passage for them. And a rite of getting old for us.

In Sydney we had a schedule that ensured we never went hungry. Tuesday night dinner with Davy - a fantastic meal and great catchup. Wednesday lunch at our old haunt, Lee's Fortuna Court, with Andrew B and Shirley - a fantastic meal and great catchup. Wednesday dinner at the Mexican restaurant with Lily (and I have vague memories of Matt and Rachael also being there) - a fantastic meal and great catchup.

We skipped lunch so LK could prepare for her afternoon duties, but had martinis with Caroline, Andrew G and Ian - fanastic cocktails and great catchups - and then another martini and tapas with Caroline.

For some reason, neither of us was all that hungry the next morning, so we were ready for the dry sandwich on the flight back to Hobart - not so fantastic. And no one left to catch up with.

What a feast of friends and family. There can only be one thing better - more of the same. So we head off to the US in ten days. And it won't hurt that we're heading to heat wave territory from a place that went down to the low 30s last night!

(And by the way, my mother didn't nag me to write this post even though it has been 2 weeks since the last post. Oh, I was nagged al right, but you can guess who cracked the whip and told me to get back to work.)

Marriage

2011-07-07T08:10:00.000+10:00

I have been married three times. My three wives have had five other husbands. I have no idea how many wives those husbands have had, but it does make modern-day marriage look like a sort of relationship Ponzi scheme similar to the financial one masterminded by Bernie Madoff.

Obviously the people of my generation have taken "Til death do us part" as an advisory, rather than a mandate.

The Catholic Church, of course, will have none of this. Get a divorce and remarry, and you're out of the club. (Unless you have enough money and clout to buy an annulment, which is a divorce-only-we-will-call-it-by-another-name. But I don't want to get into that whole can of worms.)

As a former seminarian, I always found it curious that a man who has taken the vows in Holy Orders to become a priest can change his mind later on if it all isn't working out. Even if he gets married, it isn't a deal breaker with the church the way divorce is.

That is interesting for two reasons: 1) the guys making the rules have been much more understanding and easier on the penalties for breaking the sort of vows they have to take, and 2) the church seems to have decided somewhere along the way that breaking your vow to another person is much more serious than breaking your vow to God.

Gee, these are odd things to be thinking about. I guess it's because matrimony has been on my mind this morning. Today is the 27th anniversary of the day my true love and I tied the knot. And after more than a quarter of a century, 7/7 remains the luckiest day of my life.

By now we have been together so long that we are starting to become like one another. For example, I am developing hyper-organization habits; LK occasionally does something clumsy. (But only occasionally, dear, and I will never write about them. Promise!)

But we still laugh a lot with one another, do most everything with one another, care madly for one another and love being with one another. (Well, I love being with her. I am assuming she is cool with being with me since she hasn't run away yet.)

So I guess there's one fundamental difference to a financial Ponzi scheme and the marriage-go-round of my earlier years. With Madoff and the like, the last guys in are the ones who suffer the most. With marriage, the last one was winner-take-all. Love you, LK. Here's to many, many more great years together.

Mail

2011-07-05T07:44:00.002+10:00

By now most of you who received last week's e-mail from me will have either correctly deduced that I did not in fact get "a iphone from my relatives" and deleted the spam message. Those of you who did seize the precious chance to shop for PC, TV, motorcycle and so on at that site are probably still awaiting delivery. You may want to check that status, and while you're online perhaps check out your credit card accounts as well.

This is the second time in eight months some spambot has been able to access my Hotmail contacts list and send similar messages for sites hoping to capture credit card details from people who haven't already donated their life savings to that unfortunate guy in Nigeria.

There is an upside. I heard from several old friends whom I haven't corresponded with lately. The downside, unfortunately, is that more than a few thought that perhaps I had actually written the e-mail after a tad too much vodka.

After this last attack, I went into my Hotmail contacts list and altered everyone's e-mail address so a spammer couldn't automate sending a message yet I would still be able to remember what the true address is. I also deleted contacts who aren't contacting me (and vice versa) anymore. That left me with only a handful of people who will be annoyed if the spambot gets by my rudimentary protection and strikes again.

I say rudimentary because I sent an e-mail to about five people last week and when I typed in their names two addresses came up - the original and the altered. I am not quite sure why those I have changed are still showing up and will try to figure out how to permanently remove them. But I am a little worried that the final solution may involve dealing with Microsoft technical support - something I have been able to avoid for years by switching to Apple Macs.

You know Apple Macs - the ones that don't get hacked!

I may have been tempted to revert to old-fashioned snail mail where you just lick some glue, put the stamp on and throw it in a metal box in the shopping mall. Then you wait to see if you can still taste that glue on your tongue when the letter arrives.

I should add that the recent record of Australia Post has not inspired me to seriously consider reverting to traditional mail. When we went to Bali, I completed the form to have them hold our mail for the week. They are supposed to deliver the held mail on the day you designate as your return.

In this case that was June 20. I am pleased to report that AusPost successfully held our mail for the week. Unfortunately more than two weeks and three phone calls later the held mail hasn't been given to us. And don't even think of going to the post office and collecting it. It is held in the distribution center and mere mortals like us are not permitted there.

There's obviously more to come with this story (although I'm not sure it's the held mail that is coming). And I am especially pleased to report that LK, fresh from her successful campaign in the Optusian Wars, has taken it upon herself to lead the fight.

Obviously something is holding up our mail. Be it rain, hale or dark of night, I don't know. But I suspect that LK might be the answer to our problem. I'll let you know.

Solstice

2011-06-26T07:52:00.000+10:00

The day after I was born, the sun stood still.

Well, technically it did not stand still, but that is the literal definition of the word "solstice", which happened the day after I was born. It probably makes more sense to say that the day after I was born was the longest day of the year for my parents.

Now that I live in the southern hemisphere, that is turned on its head. The day after my birthday is now the darkest day of the year.

I thought that was true when I wrote that a couple of days ago, but then I discovered that the solstice - which occurs on June 21 in the north - actually happens on June 22 in the south. And yes, the 22nd here is the 21st there for much of the day, but I had just assumed that the sun ignored the international date line and more or less did its own thing.

Which is why I never did well in science, I suppose.

All of which is a very long lead-in to telling you about my birthday last Monday which was just about the longest day ever for me. We knew going in that it was going to be tiring. Catching a 5-hour flight at 11pm on Sunday from Bali always meant that we wouldn't get enough sleep. Having to wait around for 8 hours before catching the leg to Tassie, we could either snooze in the lounge or get home tired.

LK snoozed a bit sitting up. I didn't sleep but I am not sure I was conscious at all times as several times I seemed to suddenly snap to and focus my eyes on whatever it was I was staring at. Anyhow, no real dramas that day (unless you count the joys of flying Crapstar - excuse me, I meant Jetstar).

But I did learn that I am nowhere near as resilient as I used to be. The next morning I slept longer than I have in years. I dragged for that and the next couple of days. Bali Belly (the Bali version of Montezuma's Revenge, for you North Americans) waited until I was home to strike. As they say, my get-up-and-go got up and went.

And that may say more about this year's birthday than the solstice.

Coincidences

2011-06-21T11:39:00.000+10:00

The ash cloud finally blew off, flights were restored, and we had no problem flying back to Hobart after connecting through Sydney yesterday.

Well, technically I should say the first ash cloud has blown off because this morning we read the news that all domestic flights from Sydney are being cancelled this afternoon because a new ash cloud is moving in.

Strange coincidences. We fly from Hobart and the next day they close down flights to the island. We fly from Sydney and the next day they cancel flights from Sydney.

Of course, it has nothing to do with us. No more than the fact that the northeast US airports basically shut down for days in December the day we flew out of the only one that was still open. Or British Air went on a strike the day we flew them from Europe last June.

Or the Iceland volcano stopped air traffic the day we arrived by ship in Greece last year. By the way, that was the day before Greece had a bloody national strike that stopped everything in its tracks.

Of course, bad things don't always happen promptly on the day after we leave places. Some times they take a little longer. It was literally weeks after we left Egypt and Jordan before those places ground to a halt during the Arab spring. And we had left Tunisia a couple of months before they had their national strikes.

To repeat, of course it has nothing to do with us. Just coincidences.

But if they are not -- if we are leaving some strange karmic spore behind after we visit places - then it's a bit spooky. I don't believe there is a cause-and-effect in play here, but if it is then I have a bad feeling that the effect is coming faster lately.

In our earlier days of travel, it seemed to take longer for stuff to happen once we left. Our first big-deal holiday was in Monterrat, and it took years before the volcano blew and removed that island from the list of places people visit. But it took less than a year from our visit for Christchurch to be ruined by earthquake.

Sure, we do not have any responsibility or link to any of this. But. Just in case, there's one ongoing disaster I really feel bad about. For it was only a couple of weeks after we left Alaska that John McCain named Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate.

Sunset

2011-06-14T21:05:00.001+10:00

That's a picture at the top of this post of the beautiful sunset here at Jimbaran Bay in Bali.

Well, it would be a picture of the beautiful sunset had I charged the camera before rushing down to get the shot. Instead of capturing the fat blob of sun melting into the gold and pink waters, I got a message from the camera: "No battery power remains." I even tried to argue with it that it was impossible to give me that message if there was no battery power, but the camera wasn't in any mood for that sort of debate.

I had wanted to take a shot - and will over the next day or two so you can see it - so that everyone would understand what a beautiful thing it is to watch the sun set in the Bali Sea. But even moreso, I wanted to then tell you all that the sunset here is nothing compared to what is going on in Tassie right now.

Had we been home, this is the sunset we would be seeing there this week as we looked out our kitchen window toward the ocean - which we do quite often:

That's a photo of Sandy Bay, which is just a few miles down from us. Here's a spectacular one taken from Seven Mile Beach, which is across the bay from us.

These photos are published by our local newspaper, The Mercury, and they have lots more (and credits for the photographers) at this address. It's worth clicking through because there are some really spectacular things going on.

It's great being here in Paradise, but what a light show to have to miss. It reminds me that two years ago Sydney had a similar spectacular light show from dust storms blowing in from the desert, and we were a day away from landing back home and had to rely on friends' photos.

In this instance, Tasmania's show is caused by the dust spewed by the Cordon Caulle volcano that went off in Chile last week. That dust has managed to go east across the Atlantic, past Africa and over the Southern Ocean to end up blanketing Tasmania and other southern parts of Australia.

And besides creating spectacular sunsets, it's also put our little island state into virtual isolation as flights have been cancelled for the past couple of days. In fact, we were very lucky to have left when we did or we wouldn't be basking in the Bali weather.

It gives you a sense of the power of vocanoes and the amount of debris they send into the air when you think that that much dust could travel that far around the world and still be so formidable that it disrupts air travel while putting on great light shows.

It's not the first time this has happened again. Check out the sky seen at sunset from Mount Wellington, which looms over Hobart. It reminded me of the sky in Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream.

There are many experts who believe this Norwegian painter saw a sunset very much like those in Tamania as the ash from Krakatoa filled the northern skies in 1883. (Other experts say that is far too literal and he was not depicting something he actually saw when he painted. Which, I guess, is their way of telling us to ignore him when he wrote in his diary: "I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red.")

Anyhow, that brings us full circle. Many of you will recall the movie "Krakatoa, East of Java" - or at least the title. It is notorious for being astonishingly incorrect, since Krakatoa is west of Java. What is east of Java, of course, is Bali. And that's where we have been watching beautiful sunsets even if they aren't the technicolor shows going on at home.

Transit

2011-06-12T17:30:00.000+10:00

The story you are about to read is true. No names have been changed to protect the innocent, because we never really learned anyone's name. Besides, I'm not sure any of them are innocent.

We boarded the flight to Bali in Sydney having done all the usual overseas travel stuff: completed and turned in immigration cards, had passports scanned, bought duty-free booze, then sat in the lounge drinking free booze and snacking until they announced the plane was boarding and we move there for more free booze and a snack.

The flight from Sydney to Bali goes south, even though Bali is north. That's because Qantas stopped running the route and gave it to its cheap-as-chips low-class (oops, that probably should have been low-cost) subsidiary Jetstar. Jetstar pretty much runs its schedule as if the planes were just very big and very fast buses. The Sydney stop, then the Melbourne stop, then the Bali stop, then do it all over again. And please stand clear of the driver.

In Melbourne we had to get off the plane even though it was the plane we were taking to Bali. But they had to clean it and didn't want annoying things like customers getting in the way. We were also told to take all our belongings. I am pretty sure this is because seeing a bottle of duty-free booze would probably prove too much temptation to anyone actually working for Jetstar.

As we disembarked, a typical Jetstar customer service rep stood at the end of the jetway, barking out every few minutes that people who were going on to Bali had to step aside and wait with her. She then led about 20 of us to a subterranean security point that screened transit passengers to make sure we somehow hadn't acquired weapons on the flight from Sydney.

OK, so far this isn't all that unusual. However, as we waited to put our bags on the belt to be x-rayed, a slight commotion started near the front. When I looked up, the security guard was taking a bottle of bourbon out of a passenger's duty-free shopping bag and announcing that she was confiscating it.

The booze was purchased in the international duty-free shop in Sydney and was perfectly permissible to carry on any international flight leaving from there. But by getting off the plane in Melbourne, it became just another example of liquids they won't allow through security. Good-bye to our Johnnie Walker Black and Ciroc vodka. Farewell, in fact, to all the bottles in all the bags of our travelling companions.

You need to know a few things about Aussies. They love bargains. They love travelling on holidays. And they love to combine the two by buying cheap booze for their holiday. Most of us going to Bali were watching liter after liter of booze being taken away as if we were a bad episode of Boardwalk Empire and wondering how much we could drink on the plane to make up for it.

But there's some other things you need to know about Aussies. First, they really, really, really don't like anyone taking away their booze - especially if they just bought it and the bottle is not even open yet. And oh yes, most Aussies don't give a crap if someone is wearing a uniform and acting as if they're in charge.

I understand why most Americans bow their heads slightly and put up with whatever the security screeners do to them at airports. One of America's great national fears is having our lives messed up by insecure people suddenly thrust into positions of some power -- small town cops, assistant principals, airport security people.

So Americans wait until they've cleared security before grumbling about the screeners. Deep in every one's mind is the likelihood that if you tell these minimum-wage, poorly trained, previously unemployed people that they're not doing a good job, they are likely to retaliate by pulling you aside, questioning you, frisking you, perhaps calling others to see if there is some way to make you miss your flight. So in America, when they confiscate the booze you bought inside the security zone, you just sigh and live with it.

Not quite the same here. Faced with injustice - and the loss of our holiday booze, we passengers became one voice, demanding they give us our grog, refusing to accept that there was any logic whatsoever in what they were doing, arguing that it was our right to keep it. Kind of like Arab Spring, only on a scale we were more comfortable with.

Anyhow, a supervisor came and sorted it out. Let us know that it wasn't something he should do, but since we were all obviously good people (albeit with some of us starting to show evidence of DTs), he would let the booze through. Our Jetstar customer rep moaned that she could be fined for helping us do this but she would do it and wanted us to know what a wonderful person she was. And, by the way, could you please write to Jetstar and let them know they should tell you not to buy booze in Sydney but to wait until you get to Melbourne.

Which is a good idea, except I would expect that in a good company you wouldn't need customer complaints to adopt a good idea. It might be just enough to have an employee suggest it. Oh wait, this is Jetstar. Never mind.

Falling

2011-06-07T08:43:00.001+10:00

So there I was, lying on the concrete and thinking several things simultaneously.

First, I was replaying in my mind just what exactly had happened to make me fall so heavily to the sidewalk. I also was taking an inventory of what hurt and what didn't and deciding that my wrist might be sprained (it wasn't) and my ribs on the right side were hurt (they're sore).

And let's be honest, I couldn't help hearing that little voice in my brain saying, "A fall is often the beginning of the end for the elderly." Oh please, I thought, I am only going on 63, please don't let that be elderly. Please, dear Lord, just let me be middle-aged.

Then the most serious thought entered my head. How am I going to get up? Oh not because I had done any damage to my hips or shoulders. Just the general issue I would have any time I was lying flat on the ground and had to figure out how to get upright without anything to grab hold of.

Turns out it wasn't difficult at all this time. Perhaps because the concrete was so damned cold or perhaps because I noticed that the neighbors would see me sprawled out there if they looked out their windows. No matter, I was vertical wth nary a grunt.

I had been carrying large empty packs used to ship our pictures, which we are finally starting to hang. The shipping packs are large and I couldn't see the ground, and in particular hadn't seen that there was a fairly significant drop-off beside the footpath just as it turns toward the trash bins. So that's how I put the tumble into stumble.

Anyhow, not much damage done. I am quite sore in one precise spot halfway up the ribs on the right. I don't think I cracked a rib, but then again if I did there isn't much they can do for me. Of course it hurts if I laugh or cough, and strangely enough for the past couple of days LK has been very, very funny. I do not, however, believe she is doing this to hurt me.

I put off telling LK for a while, knowing what would follow. Finally, though, I figured I would have to explain why I was wincing every time I took a deep breath. I thought I would make light of it, and told her that because the packing material was padded, I had actually bounced a few times when I landed.

She shot back that I probably would have bounced even without the packing material. Which, come to think of it, is how I learned that it hurts when I laugh.

She did, of course, have a few choice thoughts about all of this. After asking at least ten times whether I really wasn't hurt badly, she then reminded me of the time my Wii exercise program had asked me if I fell a lot when I walked. I did recall that.

And then she reminded me that we had recently discussed that I don't tend to notice the sort of things that tend to trip you as you walk. I remembered that discussion. In fact, I remembered it so well that I hadn't even told her how I tripped over the curb at the shopping center the other day.

And then she played the trump card. "I know you think I nag you about being more careful and taking better care of yourself, but I worry about you and I don't want you hurt."

After only a couple of days, the pain in my side is already much better. However, I am quite sure its long-term effects are going to last well into my old age.

GUEST BLOG: Three Degrees of Separation

2011-06-06T18:34:00.001+10:00

By LK

It's been almost two years since my last guest blog. (That sounds a bit confessional, doesn't it?) The circumstances were extraordinary: I was basically blackmailed into it because I wanted to spend the morning shopping and Don didn't. I blogged. I shopped. Don came along.

Once again, circumstances are extraordinary, in fact, dire. Don is making noises about not blogging for awhile, or perhaps not at all. Last night I mentioned he hadn't blogged recently. He said he wasn't inspired and cited some blogger who had observed that 500 or so postings was pretty much the limits of most blogs.

I'm not happy with this possible turn of events.

Yes, I'm a big fan, and our families look forward to his blogs, however Don's blog yielded an unanticipated benefit. Since he started blogging three years ago, I discovered I didn't need to write newsy e-mails. All I need to do is drop a note, which says “Hi, how ya doing?” along with the URL to Don's blog. “This is a good way to keep up with what's going on in our lives,” I add. Presto, the ball is in their court and I'm sans guilt.

This has to be fixed. I need to get Don rev'd up about blogging. And to do that I evidently have to guest post (his suggestion last night). So I'm writing about the weather, or current temperatures in Hobart to be exact.

Winter started officially here on June 1 (I know, that's not the scientific date but Don's already covered that one). April and May (our autumn months) had been largely sunny with reasonable temperatures. Yes, the nights were coldish, but the days seldom required more than a jumper (sweater).

Today that all changed. This morning I got up and saw another beautiful blue sky. While pouring my coffee, I mentioned that it looked like another nice day, Don demurred. “It's three degrees out,” he growled. “I froze my butt off getting the garbage cans.” Then later in the morning I discovered him warming that same butt next to the radiator.

In five days we head to Bali for a week of 29+C (88+F) temperatures. This afternoon Don observed that Bali was was looking better every hour.

I figure if his butt continues to freeze and his knees don't give out, come June/July we'll be heading to a warm spot somewhere for quite a few years.

This is a turn of events I am happy with. And worthy of a biennial blog.

Howling

2011-06-01T15:41:00.000+10:00

"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Silver Blaze

LK and I are foreordained, I believe, to live near howling dogs. Here in Tassie, our neighbor's dogs erupt in yipping and yowling several times a day. In Greenwich our neighbor's dog lived up to our name for it - Little Yappie - by barking pretty much every few minutes. And before that, it was our own dog, Sadie, that barked and yelped so much that in desperation we called in an outfit called Bark Busters.

Even Maddie Faye, our beagle in the US, could lure a pack of wolves to our doorstep when she decided to let loose baying at the moon. But her barking and baying was inconsequential to her chief bad habit - chewing everything in the house. And I mean everything from table legs to sofas to books to album covers to wallets to - well, you get the picture. (She drove us mad, but we at least got some small satisfaction when we moved to Oz and convinced a pair of lawyers to adopt her.)

As to our immediate issue, much like Sherlock Holmes' famous hound, the dogs next door are quiet over night. But when our neighbors put them out on the patio when they go to work the pooches also go to work ensuring that everyone knows it is their turf and they are there, ready to defend.

One of the dogs is a doofy looking labrador-type that stands up only to drink water, eat and howl. I call him Butch.

The other one is a curly-furred thing that looks like a french poodle had a brief fling with a chihuahua. If the name on its doghouse is to be believed, this thing is called Pepe. So maybe the chihuahua idea isn't that far-fetched.

When Pepe howls - and Pepe howls a lot - he does his best to sound like Butch but, bless him, his little throat just can't make those big wolfy sounds. So instead Pepe sounds more or less as if he's being strangled. Or as LK said the first time she heard them, "I think the big dog is eating the little one."

It's difficult to figure out how to deal with this. Or even whether to. First of all, unlike Little Yappie in Sydney, we go hours on end without hearing Pepe and Butch. But when they do go off, they inevitably startle us with a sound that is about as pleasant as listening to Yoko Ono rehearse at full volume.

Despite having evil thoughts, I just don't have it in me to throw poisoned meat over the fence so I have looked for more socially acceptable alternatives. One solution that has a bit of appeal is a device that lets you emit a sound that only dogs hear whenever they bark. Oh, did I mention that apparently it hurts their ears when you emit the sound?

So it's kind of a Bark! Ouch! Bark! Ouch! Bark! Ouch! until Butch and Pepe figure out there's a connection to the noise they're making and the noise they're hearing. Being dogs, of course, there's absolutely no guarantee that they will ever figure that out.

I will probably buy this audio zapper and try it. Even if it doesn't stop the racket, it will give me some small comfort to think that Butch and Pepe's ears start hurting whenever mine do, too.

Order

2011-05-24T11:28:00.001+10:00

I think I am changing, or perhaps I am just becoming aware of a part of myself that I had not been aware of before.

For a long time, I have had fun teasing LK about her penchant for precise organization. That's a nice way of saying that "A place for everything and everything in its place" is not a proverb to her, but a religious mantra.

Her organizational skills are often mysterious to me. Why, for example, are these utensils all together? Because they grate things. OK, then why are those in this drawer together? Because they have wooden handles. And why haven't you put the soup ladles together? Because the big one won't fit (often accompanied by a look that says, Gee you're dumb.)

And it's not just about where you put the utensils. For example, towels have to be folded in a certain way. I used to think this was very odd until I brought it up in conversation with friends a few times and discovered that how you fold towels is actually important to quite a few people. Kind of like whether the toilet paper comes from the top or bottom, I guess.

This information is really just a prelude to what I realized this morning. I, too, am becoming like that. I may have always been this way and am only just coming to realize it now. Or I am changing - either because I am getting old or perhaps LK's become my role model. It's quite confusing, but it's happening for sure.

It all started to dawn on me this weekend. A couple of friends were visiting Hobart and came over for dinner. Early on he slid one of the lounge room chairs aside in order to look at something on the table.

And then he left the chair where he had moved it, sitting in the middle of nowhere.

Not where it is supposed to be.

And for a very long time, that chair was just about the only thing I could think of. I thought it might be rude to my guest to get up and put it back in its place. But it became clear he wasn't about to put it back. And it just sat there, virtually screaming, "I am not where I belong!"

Finally, I decide he was the rude one for moving it in the first place, and I got up and put it back.

What worries me is that this is not the sort of thing that would have bothered me before. At least I don't think so.

I was thinking about that today while I ironed the sheets I was putting on the bed. Then I realized something else. I was ironing sheets.

I not only iron sheets, I like ironing sheets. I like removing wrinkles. I enjoy watching the spots of water I spray on them disappear under the iron's heat. I love the fact that when the bed is made, it is neat, precise, and wrinkle-free. I have to confess, I have even thought how unfortunate it is that we have to sleep in it and mess it up.

It's not just that, either. I need the kitchen to be tidy. I have to turn on certain lights as soon as it gets dark. I must do my Wii exercises in precisely the same order every time. And so on.

I once prided myself that it was LK and not me who really cared whether the cushions on the bed were zipper-side down. In fact, I believed I was proving that this precise organization isn't for me because when I make the bed every day I deliberately arrange the cushions slightly differently each time. A little off-center, a little further apart, a little further forward. I now think it is different to me, but probably not to anyone else. With the likely exception of LK.

I am starting to believe that this "variety" is just another way of organizing things precisely. For I did realize this morning that no matter how differently I arrange them, I always put the cushions with their zipper side down.

News

2011-05-18T16:46:00.000+10:00

Not much happening lately. We have done very little as LK spent much of last week fighting a pretty bad cold/flu. Thankfully, she's recovered well and feeling good again now.

She's brave when she's ill, which of course is the opposite of me and, I believe, most men. I kept telling her she should learn from us: when you're sick and feel awful, then go super pathetic, whimper every once in a while and look at your spouse with red, moist eyes begging for a little cuddle or kiss on the brow. That is, become a big sooky baby.

But no, that's not how women do it, apparently. They just take care of themselves quietly, curl up on the couch and apologize three or four times for not having enough energy to make dinner. What fun is that?

Anyhow, with not much to do not much got done. Funny how I lost all my energy and desire to do stuff around the house when LK was sick. I could try to explain that I didn't want to disturb her, but none of you would believe that anyhow.

So with not much to report about our lives, I want to share some recent highlights from the Mercury, our local Tasmanian newspaper. I think they will give you a good sense of what life is like around here.

First, there's this poster for the Hobart paper that I saw outside the news agency when I popped over to the IGA to get some parmesan.

(I forgot to tell you that during her illness, LK had decided it would help her get better to make gnocchi for the first time. The gnocchi was delicious, but the effort took so much of her energy that I got to learn how to make a butter sage sauce for the first time.)

Anyhow, I love this headline and think it conjures up lots of ideas about A) what gets classified as sport down here at the southern tip of the continent and B) the proper role of lawyers

There was also a great story about a new folk hero emerging here:

This guy figured it was OK to take his mobility scooter across the main bridge at peak time. He said most people were cool about the fact that he slowed his lane down to 8 km (that's 5 miles) per hour. I can only guess that he left his hearing aid off that day. Or perhaps the folks here are even more laid back than they claim to be.

And finally, this is some good news for yours truly - but hopefully won't matter for quite a while:

I am sure it is a coincidence that they decided they needed these ambulances for fat people just a few months after I moved here. Regardless, there is good and bad news about this new purchase. The bad, regrettably, is the number of people who commented on this news story by suggesting in tones not too far different from Fox News that if people chose to get fat it was too bloody bad if they get sick, but it certainly shouldn't involve spending taxpayer dollars to get their chubby butts to the hospital.

The ambulance can carry patients weight up to 500kg - that's 1,100 pounds for you Yanks. And that, needless to say, is the good news. I have a new goal! Well, OK, a new guideline.

Messages

2011-05-10T14:38:00.001+10:00

Apparently we have been incommunicado for quite a while. Well, perhaps not completely. Let's just say we've been near communicado.

It all unfolded slowly. Shops that had merchandise on hold for us called to let us know it was in. And when we finally showed up weeks later, they asked if we hadn't received their messages. We figured they had the wrong phone number, but it was right when we checked. Oh well, one of the mysteries of life that isn't worth solving.

Then we started getting narky e-mails and SMS messages from friends and family. Why didn't we answer their calls? What calls? was our response, but you know how lame that sounds as an excuse. I think we would have been better off claiming the dog ate our answering machine.

Then LK got a testy note from Caroline wondering why we were ignoring all her calls. Since Caroline has one of the sunnier dispositions (except when it comes to the weather and real sun), this set Linda to worrying that something was wrong with the system.

I, on the other hand, am pretty much like the guy in the cheap sci-fi films who ignores all the signs foreshadowing the monster's arrival on screen only to become a late night snack by the second reel. Surely it was more easily explained by saying we were dealing with people who had not quite mastered the art of leaving a voicemail message. I pooh-poohed the complaints, but I did agree to check the phones.

Neither of our mobiles had any messages, nor any record of receiving calls so I assumed we could leave them. The home phone had some old messages, so it seemed obvious that the answering machine was still working. No problems I could find, and my final test was to ring the home phone from the mobile.

Oops.

Instead of the answering machine kicking in, the unanswered call went to MessageBank, the phone company's automated answering system. Well, that would explain things. I had no memory of ever ordering it, and cannot imagine why I would have since I prefer our own answering machine. Nonetheless, Telstra had it up and running, apparently since last August when we installed the home phone.

Since the system doesn't let you know you have messages waiting, we - well - we didn't know we had messages waiting. And when I tried to listen to them yesterday, it turns out I didn't have a password, so I still don't know how many messages were waiting or what their contents were.

In part that's because, at $6 a month, I cancelled the MessageBank service yesterday. And then found out that once it was cancelled all our messages were gone forever.

So, to make a long story a tad shorter, if anyone out there has left any messages on our home phone in the past 7 or 8 months, we may have been ignorant of your call but we weren't ignoring you. Now I just have to come up with an equally good excuse for not answering e-mails promptly.

Painting

2011-05-09T10:53:00.001+10:00

"We get along wonderfully unless we try to do something together."
Linda to me, May 6

It's hard to justify a getaway holiday when you're retired and all you're getting away from is doing the bare minimum to keep the house livable. But LK combined a great e-mail travel deal with a kind-of-justify-the-trip non-essential business reason to get us away to Far North Queensland last week.

There is a downside to a week of warm, sunny weather. When LK returns from sitting by the pool she has ideas. These ideas range from the costly, offbeat and unfortunately-likely-to-happen ("I was reading about the Faroe Islands and think we should visit there") to the not-so-costly but really not likely to happen at all ("When we get back, I think we should do a liver-cleansing program")

Or, even scarier, the not-costly-at-all and probably-going-to-happen. As in, "I was thinking that, if we can figure out how to not get a divorce by the end of it all, we should consider painting the guest bedroom ourselves."

Sure, you're probably thinking, What in the world is so difficult about painting a room? And the answer is, nothing. It's something that even I can do. And believe me, when it comes to d-i-y there is mostly stuff I cannot do.

But the key phrase in LK's proposal was "if we can figure out how to not get a divorce." It may surprise some of you because LK and I get along wonderfully when we live day-to-day, when we travel, when we cook, when we choose entertainment, in a million different things we do together.

But we don't work well together. It boils down to this. Neither of us likes to be managed, yet neither one of us can find the STOP button on our compulsion to manage.

Back when we worked, it had been easy. LK ran a very successful division, produced a top-quality set of products and made sound decisions. So I just stayed out of her way. (And to be honest, in the interest of our marriage, I probably would have done that even if she produced crap and lost the company millions.)

But in the division of labor that is our retirement, it's becoming clear that there is a burr under my saddle when I hear suggestions on how I can do something. I've pretty much trained myself to let LK move the ladle from the drawer where I put it to the drawer where she wants it. I deliberately ignore if the cushions on the couch aren't in the same place that I put them when I cleaned up.

And if I ignore her suggestions on how I could do something in a slightly better way, I don't even get upset when she mocks me when I screw it up.

These are the things you learn to do (or not do) when you love the person you live with.

But the idea of painting a room together. Oh, that is scary. As we sat in Port Douglas sipping the first drink of cocktail hour, I told LK we could easily paint the room. "We'll have to move the mattress and box springs out," I told her. She told me they could be rested against the wall while we did the ceiling.

My next suggestion was close, but needed a wee tweak. As did the next. About the only thing she happily accepted was when I said I didn't want to do the trim. We both knew that would be a disaster. But even from this discussion we could both see the future: Me starting to do something, LK suggesting a different way, Me pursing my lips, Me doing something else, LK quietly changing it just a little bit, Me pursing my lips even tighter.

It was pretty clear the room could be painted, but I might be nothing but beard from nose to chin as the week wore on. For a couple of hundred bucks we could get a professional painter to do it. We would have no stress between us. And as a bonus, my shoulders wouldn't ache after the first day.

But something made me stubborn. Perhaps it is just the retiree gene that rebels against paying money for something you can do yourself. Yet I knew that it wouldn't be worth the savings if we were to debate every paint stroke or I had to bite my tongue every time LK complained that I had tipped the paint tray over onto the carpet.

Then the solution hit me. The problem isn't that LK is a manager-by-nature. The problem is that I am not a works-for-a-manager-by-nature person, that I can't seem to get past the fact that I no longer am the muckamuck of the company. And then I saw a solution.

"We can do it," I said, "but I think we need to settle one thing if we're to avoid fighting over things." I swallowed hard and said it. "You need to be the manager. I will do whatever you tell me, however you want me to do things. If I know going in that I am working for you and you're the manager, then I won't mind it."

LK took a slow sip of Johnny Walker and thought. She put her glass down decisively and nodded. "Yep, that will work," she said. And so we have launched a new project.

Readers

2011-05-04T13:59:00.002+10:00

Stephen King has an affectation that I feel even he cannot get away with. He loves to call those of us who have bought 50 or 60 of his various works his "Constant Readers". Since that was the phrase he first used to describe Annie Wilkes, (the character played by Kathy Bates in the movie version of "Misery"), I am not sure he means it as a compliment to us. But either way, it is the kind of phrase even the world's all-time best-seller hero cannot use without sounding a little (a lot) forced, a bit writer-ish.

It just doesn't sound like good writing.

Be that as it may, my Constant Readers, I have come to let you know something. You are all just the tiniest bit in a rut. And since I come from RutLand, you can trust that I know what I am talking about.

Why do I say you're in a rut? Well, for reasons best left in the appendix of my autobiography, I have not written a post since April 17. And that was, to be frank, a whining, self-indulgent complaining lament that someone may be taking away my games. Since then - nada.

But what do my googling eyes reveal but Constant Readers who come back to the blog day after day, finding nothing and still not letting it make them stop coming. Loyalty? Or just plain bad habits?

I don't know, but here's the stats:

They compare the blog's readership for the period April 17 to yesterday this year (when nothing was added) and last year (when I was writing about our adventures in Mumbai, Dubai, on the Suez Canal, in Alexandria, Athens and Mykonos - not to mention the trip through Pirate Alley in the Gulf of Aden).

And what do the stats reveal? Well, for starters you can see that on several days there were more visits to the blog since I stopped writing than when I was actually telling people stuff.

It showed that the number of visitors to the site over the two periods was EQUAL. That's right. I didn't lose one visitor by not bothering to do anything. In fact, about the only two significant statistical variations were, first, that people spent less time on the site this year than last.

Which is a good stat, because I would really worry about you, Constant Readers, if you spent as much time reading nothing as you had reading something.

And secondly, I actually had a 71% increase in new readers by not writing anything. It's almost as if retirement is a sound business decision on top of being fun.

For your information, there is a bit of variance by nationality. As you would guess, most of my Constant Readers are American or Australian. Well, the Yanks more or less cottoned on that not much was happening, and there was a 41% decline in visits. The Aussies, however, posted a 24% increase in visits. Read into it what you will, but I think the best phrase to explain it is to use the American spelling for the Aussie chant: "Oy! Oy! Oy!"

Anyhow, after a long period of inaction, we're back in action. More later this week, Constant Readers.

Poker

2011-04-17T08:32:00.000+10:00

I was thinking about how confusing it is to understand the conservatives in the US right now. From half way around the world, the Loud Right Wing (aka the Tea Party) seems to be screaming that the government needs to get out of people's lives and stop spending tax money on things that are not absolutely essential.

And yet it seems that these same people want the government to spend tax dollars and get involved in people's lives if those people want to smoke the leaves of a plant they can grow in their backyard. Or marry the person they love if they are both of the same sex. Or play poker with other people.

Sometimes I think the Loud Right Wing's motto should really be "Less government interference in my life but more in the lives of the people who aren't like me." Which isn't, I suppose, dramatically different from the Loud Left Wing that wants the government to get out of their bedroom and backyard but please give us more consumer protection and environmental policing.

It's not so much illogical as a contrary way of thinking that is very definitely strong in America.

But enough politics. What started this rant is, of course, the decision yesterday for the US government to spend taxpayer dollars to indict lots of people who run the biggest online poker websites - Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker. With all that is going on with US government budget cuts, I am hard pressed to figure out why someone thought this was a good way to spend tax dollars, but my reaction has little to do with that and lots to do with the possibility that I may eventually lose one of my favorite pastimes if the anti-gambling conservatives in Washington continue to have their way.

I do play lots of online poker lately. Mostly because I am getting into low-entry tournaments and have reached the point where I tend to survive in them for several hours.

I did get a sense of how this looks to people when Jason told me last night that he and Lora had been watching a cooking competition show on TV where couples have to prepare restaurant-quality meals for a panel of judges.

"We imagined if you and Mom were on the show," Jay said. "She'd be in the kitchen working up a storm making the dishes and you'd be sitting there playing online poker."

That's really not fair, although it's not exactly unfair. For one thing, I tend to be the breakfast and lunch guy in the family (as well as making macarons, don't forget). So it's not like I don't do my stint at the stove.

Secondly, I have mastered quite well the art of bringing my laptop to the counters and playing poker while making a meal. In fact, there are only two things to worry about: splashing liquid on the keyboard and going all-in when you meant to hit the button to fold.

(I won't even mention the care you need to take when nature calls and you have to take your poker tournament into the smallest room in the house. LK says that's her favorite of my poker moments. I tell her it helps motivate me that my competitors don't know what I'm doing at the time. It's also curious how often I get a flush when I am there.)

The poker sites are still open today, and there are plenty of Americans playing at them. But I have a hunch those numbers will dwindle dramatically as they use up their current bankroll and find they cannot deposit any more money into the site. And once the Americans go away, the sites will be fighting for a very small share of the rest of the world's players.

Of course, if the Americans go away it is likely that the players typing mean-spirited and insulting comments will also go away since those are mostly Yanks, as well. It would be nice not to be called a fish, a donkey and several curiously misspelled variants of just about every dirty word you can think of.

Of course, the Yanks only tend to call me a bad player when I've beaten them. So maybe I would miss that, as well. At least it reminds me of how hard it can be to understand that contrary tendency in American thinking.

Dinner

2011-04-13T08:04:00.001+10:00

LK was asking why I don't blog so often anymore. Having no real answer ready, I did what I have learned from watching Fox News. I got angry and annoyed and tried to make her feel guilty for asking the question. Since she is a CNN person, that unfortunately didn't work.

So I figured I would ask the world's greatest company if they had any ideas. Microsoft, not surprisingly, came up with a quick reply when I turned on Messenger on my iPod.

I'm not sure I agree with Microsoft on this, but I am hard pressed to think of a proper rebuttal.

Oh wait, that changed last night. When I asked my bride, "Yo, LK, what's for dinner?" she surprised me by answering slow braised short ribs. She had found what she thought would be a great recipe online and wanted to try it.

It involved soaking the ribs in turkey brine mixture for six hours and then slow roasting them for another six hours. The sauce they cook in requires a full bottle of cabernet sauvignon, While I am willing to send one of my soldiers on such a mission, I hoped the sacrifice would be worth it.

It was.

In fact, it was one of the most delicious dishes I can remember eating. I was raving with my mouth full (and I suspect, thick, dark gravy dripping into my beard) during the whole meal. The meat was tender and full of flavor. The gravy was rich and almost decadent. So good.

LK was typically modest. "I was just following a recipe," she said, as if any cook in the world would have the same result. I had to remind her that while making it, she hadn't liked the original taste of the sauce and decided to add a couple spoons of chili honey. And later she felt it needed a bit more something, so she chopped up some fresh mint and threw it in.

Not quite opening a jar of Ragu and boiling spaghetti, and hardly anyone I know would think adding chili honey and mint to a first time recipe is "just following" it. Anyhow, it was 5-star yummy.

That was something new. And by golly, here's a post about it.

Excess

2011-04-11T15:28:00.000+10:00

"Donald, we have too much stuff!"

In the category of I-never-thought-I-would-hear-my-sweetie-say-that, this was a significant moment, a world record as it were. But in the last couple of weeks, LK has been unpacking boxes, sorting through stuff, putting some in the closets, some in the area designated for the garage sale, and some back into boxes.

It has been tough, physical work and she has been tired by the end of the day. And maybe it was a combination of fatigue coupled with a near total immersion in all the stuff she owns, but at some point in these past few days she decided we really do own too much.

I know I had written earlier posts making fun of her for having more than 200 pairs of footwear or 100 cashmere sweaters or seven sets of dinner dishes or more pictures than we have ever had wall space to hang them. But I loved that part of LK. She has loved acquiring beautiful things and she has certainly worked hard enough in her career that she need not apologize for buying whatever she wants.

And besides, having LK around meant no one raised an eyebrow at my 100+ neckties or 700+ bottles of wine etc. After all, LK did say "We" have too much stuff.

There is an interesting article in the Wall St Journal this week called "Downsizing Boomers Looking to Sell Their Stuff". The gist of the article is that my generation never learned how to say No and acquired "mountains of accumulated stuff", as the article calls it.

Now entering retirement, we Boomers are either downsizing and moving to smaller places, looking for some extra money, or just finally coming around to realizing that we really do have too much stuff and should get rid of it.

In our situation, there are several categories:

The Stuff We Just Don't Need Anymore: Business suits, briefcases, all but a few neckties, four cigar boxes, size 36 pants, size 38 pants, size 40 pants
The Stuff We Could Use But Probably Won't: Exercise equipment, the third barbecue, the digital voice recorder, bicycles, the cassette-based video recorder, the 5-year-old half bottle of red vermouth
The Stuff We Don't Need As Much Of: the fourth-through-seventh set of dishes; the fourth and fifth iPod speaker sets, the 50th-through-100th cashmere sweater, the paintings that won't fit on the walls, some of our 120 wine glasses, most of my 26 pairs of underpants. On second thought, better hold on to those.
The Stuff We Had in Storage for Years and Never Missed: the electric piano, eight director chairs, the 7 or 8 suitcases we don't use anymore, the walking machine

The first date we set for the garage sale has passed, but we are still piling the things up that we hope to sell. We have already resigned ourselves to the fact that won't get great prices for most of our things, but as LK just said after sorting through her handbags and sweaters today, "If we just sold everything we don't want for a dollar, we'd make quite a bit of money," she said.

I don't know if it's classier to run a Dollar Store than a Garage Sale. But if it is, maybe that's the way to go.

Fog

2011-04-07T08:42:00.001+10:00

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg

Daybreak was something special this morning. Bright sunshine flooded through our windows, but on either side there were massive fog banks crawling down from Kingston to the beaches.

To the south, you couldn't see a thing in Blackmans Bay, and just a short ways away to the north Kingston Beach was hidden.

Not much to say, but I thought you might like to see them, too.

Blackmans Bay last week

And here it is this morning.


The last finger of the cloud still covering Bruny Island

As Wendy Matthews sings, "Hey, there's not a cloud in the sky"

And to the north, Kingston Beach. Cue Judy Collins - "I've looked at clouds from both sides now"

Dropsy

2011-04-05T17:14:00.002+10:00

I love my wife. Especially when she finds a way of putting a good spin on one of my less than wonderful characteristics.

This happened the other night when I placed a drink awkwardly on the end table while watching TV and we ended up with olives, vodka and vermouth all over the floor. "I swear I put it in the middle of the table," I said, but I could see in her eyes that she doubted that the laws of physics had altered briefly just to make me look clumsy.

It probably wouldn't have been a big deal except that about a week earlier I had placed a drink awkwardly on the end table while watching TV and we ended up with olives, vodka and vermouth all over the floor. That time it really wasn't my fault. I had seen the glass hydroplane on the coaster and just scoot over the edge of the table. Honest. I did see it happen.

I should add that both of these were the first drinks of the cocktail hour, so it would be wrong to blame the vodka and vermouth for the misadventure since most of it ended up on the floor.

That may not be quite the case in explaining why I spilled a full glass of wine right after pouring it the other night. In that case I bumped it with my arm as I cleaned up the sink after spilling a little wine in it.

And then there's the tub of cottage cheese that I knocked out of the fridge this weekend, which then popped its lid and made a pretty pattern of curd on dark wood.

And since I was just preparing the first drink of the day yesterday when I dropped the tub of feta-filled olives, you know you can't blame the booze. I tried to blame it on a case of dropsy, but then I discovered that dropsy is an old word for edema and has nothing to do with dropping things. So even then I dropped the metaphorical ball, as it were.

LK was on the phone with our accountant at the time I dropped the olives. Since the olives were in one of those little plastic containers from the deli department, it didn't make any noise when it fell. LK first noticed that something was up while still on the phone when she glanced over and saw me kneeling on the floor with a soapy sponge and spray cleaner trying to get all the olive oil up.

Or perhaps she first noticed when she watched me grunting and groaning and very nearly going ass-over-teacups as I stood up after cleaning the floor. At any rate, when she was off the phone she asked what in the world was going on.

When I told her that I had dropped yet one more thing, she shook her head and said (quite calmly, I should add), "Donald, you're not having a real good run right now."

Well, I replied, I guess those are the sorts of things that happen when you're clumsy.

And God love her, LK shook her head and said I wasn't really all that clumsy. "No," she said in a very thoughtful tone, "your problem is that you're always looking ahead to the next thing and not focusing on the current moment."

"You mean I don't pay attention?" I asked.

"Not exactly," she said. After a few seconds she came up with one of her specialties - a detailed hypothetical example to illustrate her point.

"Let's say we were both walking on the beach (that part lets you know this is hypothetical) and there's a minor car accident. You would remember so much more than I would. You would know how the accident happened, what the drivers did, what colors the cars were, maybe even the license plates."

Of course there was a "but . . ." hanging in the air, and I let her off the hook by completing her thought for her.

"But I would probably trip over something on my way to help them out. Isn't that what you're saying?"

"Exactly," she beamed. "You wouldn't pay attention to the things around you but would be very focused on what you were going to."

Bless her heart. I know she was doing her best to make me seem less like a klutz. But if I am totally candid, I would have to say that if I am a visionary, it still sounds like I am a very clumsy visionary.

And I think it was quite telling last night I went to get a bottle of wine from the storage fridge. "Oh Donald," she said, "you're not having red wine, are you?"

As a forward thinker, I understand exactly where she was heading.