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The Icarus Kronikles - Mike Barkman | ||
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Went into town in the morning to book the car and ourselves on the Cook Strait Ferry in January. We're going down to Christchurch to attend the wedding of a great-nephew, and come back via Nelson. I called into Don at his office to look at the second computer, which had 'lost' the cd-rw drive. It is a parallel-port HP drive about three years old; can only manage a 2 x burn -- but it works OK. I reinstalled the drivers, and all was well again. Don hurriedly transferred some graphics files to the computer, and I burned a CD to take into another graphic designer who needed them in a hurry. We met Joanna and Rebeccah for lunch -- 'Bec was having a day off school to recover after an intense ballet practice weekend. We changed library books, then called in at the Vodafone shop to buy a new mobile for Rebeccah; her old phone was a hand-me-down which had lost a battery contact. The repair cost would have been only $20 cheaper than a brand new phone -- what a ridiculous situation. We called into the supermarket for a topup, then returned home. The boys were dropped in on the way to ballet class, and stayed for a hamburger tea (they like home-made hamburgers!). I spent the evening reading the third volume in Elizabeth Moon's Serrano series - most enjoyable. |
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I had a busy morning with one of Joanna's friends; Debbie is a registered nurse who has done much extra study for qualifications in the field of rural nursing. In the district where she lives (about an hour's drive from Rotorua) there is a huge need for medical information and practical nursing help outside the framework of the local doctor. He is badly overworked, and is looking to Debbie to assume part of the role of a GP in advising patients on medication and use. She is exploring the possibility of setting herself up in practice as a Specialist Rural Nurse, and needed help on formulating her goals and drafting business plan. Ultimately, funding would have to be sought from regional health providers; and she needs to produce a coherent plan/proposal which would attract the interest of these people. Consequently, we spent a couple of hours booting ideas round until we came up with something which would keep the local doctor on-side, and provide an avenue for expansion in future development. It's great to see someone grasping the nettle, and trying to get something like this established. I shall await developments with interest, and will report from time to time. Not much else done in the rest of the day; I finished the last Camera Club newsletter for the year and have the masters ready to photocopy in the morning |
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Out at 9.15 am to drive to Aorangi School for the opening of the Senior School Art Festival. We went into the school hall and were shown to seats. There would be about 15 - 20 parents and grandparents attending. The school had asked two local artists to assess the paintings, and they awarded certificates to the best paintings. The standard was amazing, considering these kids range from 8 to 9; the artists made a point of saying that they enjoyed childrens' art, because kids don't know the so-called 'Rules of Art' and consequently produce fresh, interesting results. We had been given numbered slips on entering; the teacher announced that four children has donated their work for a raffle, and four numbers were drawn at the end of the official procedings. Lo and behold, I had the fourth number drawn, and was conducted by the young artist to collect his paintings from the display. As it happened, we had noticed and admired the two paintings he had painted. The Family Page has Ethan's paintings on it. After that, we went back to Lisa Crescent, as Joanna needed two power sockets rewiring, as her new kitchen benches were in place and she needed to connect the waste disposal and dishwasher. That done, we drove into town to collect my print exhibition, taken down that morning. I was surprised and gratified to have the head display person tell me that they would be happy to exhibit my prints -- any time I cared to produce some more. None of them sold; photos are notoriously hard to sell at these exhibitions. Anyhow, Aorangi School jumped at the chance to have them up in the hall later in the week, and I'll also dig out a selection of my old work to put up. It's an excellent opportunity to expose young children to good photos; most of them don't realise that you can enlarge snapshots -- and a good big one beats a good little one every time :-] Oh yes -- dork time again. The reason why I couldn't get the Mac Powerbook to talk to the network? The Nokia DSL modem/router has a row of RJ45 sockets on the back; the cables had obscured the labels on them, and I had plugged the Mac into the one reserved for programming via the CLI, instead of an ethernet port. Doh. |
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A hard day at the coal face, shuffling paper in the office. This is something that retired people -- who rely on investments to provide adequate income -- have to do from time to time. My brother (a successful accountant) once said to me: "If you don't look after your own money, you have to pay someone to look after it for you. Not only is that expensive, but if they stuff up, you still have only yourself to blame for letting them do it -- so you might just as well do it yourself. That way, you at least know what went wrong." We are in the middle of a north-westerly airflow at the moment; lots of sub-tropical air coming down from the Pacific and making it humid. Although I hear from certain North Americans who are already bitching about -10C and having to chip ice and snow off their car. That's why we live in the North Island at 38 deg south. Looking with the aid of my Britannica DVD, the equivalent 38 deg north corresponds to Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, South Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and hits California about San Francisco. Seeing that no part of NZ is ever far from the sea, I would think that coastal California would approximate it -- but we get a lot more rainfall in general. Have a look at Joan's garden if you disbelieve me. It does get much colder at the other end of the country in winter, but that's around 46 deg south latitude. Here's an
email quote from John
Dominik in Minnesota: Also a reference
to yesterday's 'dork time': |
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Friday, November 30, 2001....... Happy Birthday to me, Happy birthday to me... Yup, 68 years ago, Mrs Barkman's little boy saw the light of day. And the world hasn't been quite the same since. Joan went off with Joanna in the mid-morning, leaving me to my own devices until mid-afternoon. I have busied myself downloading the latest version of Opera -- V.6.0 -- and finding it OK so far. Except it rendered the Goodwife Dominik's newly unveiled web page almost unreadable; after a plaintive email from Goodhusband Dominik, I opened her page in Internet Explorer as normal. Very curious. I managed to get a drawer full of genealogy material sorted, but wait, there's more to come. Another two drawers, in fact. Over to Lisa Crescent for my birthday tea: in the Cox menage, the birthday person gets to choose the menu. My request was for sausage and mash; long-time readers may remember that, after nearly four weeks of Greek cuisine (nice as it was) in May, all we wanted when we got to London was BANGERS & MASH. And we got them. And I got them tonight as well, along with some Strongbow cider to wash them down. Brandy snaps and fresh fruit platter to follow, with some nice dessert wine that was actually part of my present. What else did I get? An insulated carry bag for wine (filled with comestibles like beer sausage, and chocky bars) -- and the Lord of the Rings book from Sue mentioned a couple of weekends ago. |
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It has been raining on and off all day. I took the opportunity to attack the drawers full of genealogy stuff which desperately needed a big sort-up into family heaps. That done, I tackled the job of photocopying all my Dad's World War I memorabilia and his other records I had to hand. I'm going to pass the originals on to my nephew Bruce in due course -- he is collecting military stuff, as well as being interested in family history. I transcribed an interesting letter from a fellow soldier he had retained, dated 1918. I'll get it posted tomorrow -- it's rather late to be doing it now. I've also got to finish transcribing a cassette tape I recorded of him reminiscing about his war adventures; this material all needs to be properly run through Ventura and printed for the family. I might even post it on the site as well. Another badtrans virus email just arrived. I've only had a few infected emails, but the virus checker in Ontrack System Suite stops them dead. Then I delete them and their nasty embedded cargo as fast as possible. They're not attachments, so Zone Alarm is not picking them up. God help those who do not keep their virus signature files up-to-date. |
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More rain, and the forecast is for more during the rest of the coming week. The roses are starting to rot on the bushes with the high humidity. This morning I completed the genealogy sort-out and put things away. After lunch, it was into tidy gear, and into town to the Convention Centre (which is set up as a theatre) to see Rebeccah's ballet group end-of-year show. This year, they did The Lion King; well choreographed with a mixture of classical-type dance and modern interpretative fitting in well with the music. The costuming was particularly good -- apparently all done by two mothers who sew through most of the year. You'll find some pix on Family Page 2; also, I fluked a charming study of ballet motion which I'm pleased with. It's made a gorgeous print. I also printed the Camera Club End-of-Year Competiton certificates -- needed for Wednesday night. |
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