Asleep on a Train

Dee has started going through our books again, and between us ,the conclusion is that they are a mess, which comes as no surprise as neither of us have much grasp on money matters except when we don't have any, or enough. The good part of all this is we usually find some to do the stuff that must be done, but it is a continuing empty account feeling that drives back to work each day. Dee files old paper differently from me, so my system, which I kinda had been using for the past year has been tossed out and Dee's system reinstated. I felt it easier to do it this way. We've thrown a lot of clothes out recently and it has made the house feel a little more livable. (There was a LOT of clothes) We will now work on losing some furniture we don't need, like spare tables and couches.

If this ever becomes a record of our lives in the future, researched by my descendants , then May '07 is when we recorded the Internal Flood @ Niagara, where the Great dog Gizmo, crushed the grey water hose being used to avoid the Great Dry of '07, which in turn was caused by El Nino '07. There is always someone or thing to blame for these accidents isn't there? Anyhow, all the bedroom carpets got soaked, and we were faced with the options of keep or replace. The end result was 'keep', but that meant that the carpet's underlay was replaced and the carpets themselves had to be cleaned several times to restore them. This was a hassle because we all needed to work or school as well, so I had to work from home to be here the following weekday to let the guys in. In retrospect this incident was nothing compared to the Great Laundry Fire of '92. This happened the week after we moved into Niagara and was caused by turning a clothes dryer upside down to mount...

When I was growing up up NZ, I spent some time in the country side, living in a small coastal town of 3000, that had one sole means of support, the freezing works, and of course the surrounding farms that feed the freezing works its raw material. During that time in NZ there was an emerging new style of comedians, or social commentators, who borrowed from the likes of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the Goons, to create a source of great humour based on the NZ bushman cum farmer, struggling with wethers and weather. My favourite of the time was John Clarke, or as he was also known as, Fred Dagg . Fred brought me songs and skits that I played on my cassette tape in my little old Mini Cooper as I roared around the back blocks of Taranaki . "You don't know how lucky you are" was a song that appealed to the optimist in me; The Gumboot Song taught me the importance of protection during inclement weather, and my all time favourite, in fact one I still sing to myself, or m...

There's something wrong with my PC, the main one, where my truck loads of RAM keeps getting eaten up by SNMP . I think it is some sort of system compromise (malware, spyware virus), but I'm buggered if I can find what's wrong. This has been my constant companion (the somethingswrongbutIcan'tfindoutwhatitis feeling) since I started working with PCs back in '85 I know I can fix it by rebuilding the PC, but the issue there is that my PC is unique, in so much as it has programs and "things" on it that are just the way I want them, and it will take time to put it back together. It's not that I can't do it, I've done it dozens of times, it just that I'm sick of doing it! A PC's software or contents is now made up of hundreds of little contacts with the outside world. It becomes nuanced In my case, the whole family still uses the main PC sometimes, even though we all have late model laptops as well. We all use the PC for something different...