A friend recently posted on FB that she hates judgemental people. It brought to mind something I’d heard sometime ago – the minute you label someone as being judgemental, you are being exactly the same. Yes, I’m as guilty as the next person of being judgemental. I think we all are. We all have our values that we live by, and when someone does something that doesn’t sit right with our particular values, we can become judgemental.

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I love quotes and proverbs. The one above is one I read a good few years ago.

There’s been times in my life since, when things haven’t been going as well as I’d like. It’s so easy to wish and hope that, at such times, things will magically change without any input by me.  Experience tells me though that ‘magic’ doesn’t ‘magically’ happen. Experience tells me that, ‘ if I always do what i’ve always done, i’ll always get what i’ve always got’, (I love that one too). When the changes have happened, it’s been me, myself, I, (or me and mine), that’s caused the changes. We’ve made the changes, and the changes we’ve worked at, have changed our lives. No magic involved.

It’s easy to hear someone be-moaning their bad fortune and to clearly see the changes they need to make. I remember well a person I used to work with . He never had a cent to his name. He used to tell me how lucky I was to be able to afford holidays.

Our place of work didn’t supply tea or coffee, but they provided a good kitchen with fridges and microwaves. My colleague always arrived at work with a take away coffee and a takeaway toasted penini from the local cafe for his breakfast. At morning tea he walked around the block returning with his second takeaway coffee, and often a muffin. He  went out for lunch daily too.

I had my breakfast of yogurt and fruit before I left home in the mornings.  I kept a jar of Nescafé at my desk, and a litre of milk in the work fridge. I either cooked extra dinner at night and brought in left-overs to microwave, or I made a salad the night before for my next days lunch. Once a week I treated myself to a takeaway coffee and muffin for morning tea, and once a week I treated myself to a takeaway Greek salad from the local cafe – they did make lovely coffee, muffins, and the best ever Greek salad.

My holiday money didn’t come by luck, or by magic. It came because I went without things through the year, saving the money for other things. It was easy to see that my colleague could easily change some simple things that he was doing, and his financial situation would ‘magically’ change accordingly.

There’s a couple of things I’d like changed in my life now. Nothing major, and certainly nothing that’s out of my control. But I keep doing what I’ve always done, just waiting for the ‘magic’, to magically happen. If I mentioned the things I’d like changed,  anyone who knows me will clearly be able to see the changes I Should be making. It’s easy for outsiders to see the glaringly obvious….. it’s not hard for me to see either. Perhaps it’s time. Time for me to took ownership, time to take control, time to ‘change what I’ve always done.’  With one of those things being a greater level of fitness, – I guess it’s time for me to get off my butt and go for a walk.

Finally I’ve touched base with grandson Tim and picked his very clever technical brain for some tips on tidying up this website. As a result, the clean-up has begun.

I’ve started quite a few new classifications and have re-classified most old posts – previously most posts were lumped together in ‘unclassified’. I really am very technically challenged! but I’m working on it.

It’s by no means up to the standard of organisation I see in some of the wonderful blogs I follow, but it is organised better today than it was yesterday.

I’ve created categories for Tasmania, The East Coast, Northern Territory, South West WA, and WA The Kimberleys. I imagine the Kimberleys will shortly expand considerably when we’ve completed the Gibb River – wow, we’re only two weeks from setting off for this years trip north. It’s scary how quickly the time has flown by. I think that will be the most exciting to date.

There’s now also categories for family, friends, and our places (our homes in both WA and Tassie), as well as categories for England and other travel. And there’s categories related to ‘Our Rig’ detailing how it’s evolved over the years including repairs and alterations.

So now if you’re reading a post and want to read more related to the same topic, you’ll be able to click on the hyperlink at the conclusion of the post.

I’ve still to work out how to get a proper menu listing of categories at the top of the home page. I’ll be catching up with a Tim again when we pass through Perth in two weeks time, so I’ll pick his brains again then. Watch this space for an even organised web site….

Don’t you just love proverbs, I know I do. One of my favourites is, ‘A stitch in time, saves nine’.

Taken literally, I think this refers to the odd little stitch that’s needed for repair, the hem on trousers that starts to unravel, the button on a shirt that’s coming lose, the side seam on a skirt thats starting to separate. As we all know, if we take action immediately it’s only going to take a minute to repair, a bare stitch or two. However, when ignored, it can become a momentous task, sometimes with undesirable consequences – the trouser hem that completely unravels and you end up tripping over it, the button that completely falls off and gets lost rendering the shirt unwearable until time is taken to find a replacement matching button, and the embarrassment of the side seam on a skirt extending beyond decency.

Reflecting on how ‘time poor’ people  seem to be today despite all the wonderful time saving devices now available, leaves me wondering if it isn’t time to bring back some of the age old proverbs that used to be mantras to live by.

Extending the idea of ‘A stitch in time…..’ to everyday life beyond a needle and thread, I can think of a few time saving ideas that could go a long way to creating a few more minutes in a day to spend doing something wonderful, or perhaps, having the luxury of a few minutes in which to do nothing at all!

Here’s a few that come to mind:

Laundry: Don’t overload your washing machine (it’ll screw up your clothes too much), and use a gentle spin. Hang clothes on the line carefully with thought to minimising ironing, or better still negating any need to iron at all. Fold and hang clothes immediately they’re taken off the line, even if it’s something that does need ironing.  Less time will be needed to iron a blouse that’s been hanging on a hanger,than if the blouse stays screwed up in an ironing basket. You may not have time to empty your clothes line completely all in one go. Decrease the line load – each time you go past the clothes line grab just a few items, perhaps a shirt or two that can be hung up immediately, or a few tea towels that can be folded and put away. Three such trips will make the final unload so much easier to deal with. If you have space, perhaps in the laundry or a spare room, leave your ironing board set up. It’ll make it so much easier to iron a couple of items without having to set up and take down the ironing board repeatedly.

Meals: Cook in bulk and freeze. Line plastic containers with freezer bags for the frozen left overs and when frozen, remove from the container, label and stack in the freezer. You’ll fit considerably more meals in your freezer in freezer bags than you will in plastic containers. Reheating a frozen meal in the microwave is not only more time saving that going out to purchase takeaway, it’s better for both you, and your bank balance. If you need to make sandwiches for lunches, make them in bulk with meat and pickle, or  cheese  and chutney fillings and freeze in sandwich bags. A small salad container can be packed in the morning to go with the frozen sandwich if time permits, if not, perhaps a stick of celery and an apple and you have a reasonably healthy lunch that’s taken no time at all.

Dishwashing:  Rinse and reuse your cups and glasses until you’re turning your dishwasher on, that way you won’t end up with an empty cup drawer and a dishwasher full of dirty cups. Stack the dishwasher as you go, and teach other family members to do the same. Consider if the dishwasher is going to save time – sometimes it can be quicker to do a sink full of dishes by hand that to spend the time filling and emptying the dishwasher. When emptying the dishwasher, use the same principle as clothes from the clothes line – if you haven’t time to empty the whole dishwasher, whittle away at it. A few items removed while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil will make the full load smaller to deal with later.

That’s just a few things I can think of. I’m sure you can think of many more. Care to share…..

In my last post I mentioned my oven was cleaning itself as I typed. Since then I’ve been reflecting on technology and the gadgets invented in a relatively short time since my granny passed away approximately 60 years ago.

These are some of the things that Granny never saw, nor could have imagined in her wildest dreams. I’m sure you could all add to this list.

In the 1950’s household telephones were few and far between. Most people rarely needed to make phone calls, and when they did it was usually from a coin operated red phone box. Almost every corner had one.
Not so long ago I remember phones became cordless, and then completely mobile. Today, most people in each and every household have their own mobile phone to take with them where every they go. I wonder what granny would think of that!

And computers – well if someone had prophesied the invention of computers and the internet, and that, again, almost every person in every household would have their own by the turn of last century, I’m sure granny would have been trying to get that person committed.

Granny used to wash the households clothes using either a copper and hand wringer or if she was lucky, a wringer washing machine. I remember my mother using the same. Then the twin tub – wow how sophisticated was that. Now we not only have washing machines that wash, rinse and spin dry automatically, some even switch to dry mode and will tumble dry the clothes at the end of the wash cycle. How good is that!

Our gardens are watered automatically at a time of our choosing. Today I woke up to the sound of mine switching on at 6am. What would granny have thought to see me lying in bed whilst the sprinklers switched on and off around the gardens.

We all have super duper refrigerators, some that are even plumbed in to automatically make ice for our drinks. Perhaps fridges became more common place earlier in hotter Australia than they did in the cool of South Island New Zealand. In New Zealand I don’t have to go back a hundred years ago as some may imagine to remember households without refrigerators. I was around 12 before the household I grew up in had our own refrigerator. Prior to that I remember clearly how, in the summer months, mum would make the jelly for Sunday’s after dinner treat, cooling it in cold water in the concrete laundry trough until it set. After we’d eaten our Sunday mid-day roast dinner, one of the older boys who could cycle fast would be sent to the local shop to purchase a block of ice cream to go with the jelly. He’d return with the cardboard wrapped ice cream block, wrapped in multiple layers of newspaper to keep it frozen. What a treat that was for us. I don’t even have to go back to granny’s days to remember households that survived without the aid of fridges to cool our food.

Granny may have been lucky enough to have watched a tv program on a black and white television playing in a shop window. She most definitely would not have owned one, nor was it likely she would have known anyone else who did. I wonder what she’d think if she could come back now and see more than one ‘colour’ television in almost every household. And there’s more….. we don’t even have to arrange our days around the time of a program we want to watch. If it’s at an inconvenient time we simply record the program and watch it later.

Most likely in granny’s early married days she would have baked all her own bread, spending hours kneading the dough, then cooking it in her wood, or coal fired stove. Perhaps occasionally her budget may have stretched to a store bought loaf which she would have sliced herself. Then, sliced bread became available in the shops, most likely the most amazing invention during her life time.

Now, not only do we have an amazing variety of breads to purchase, but we can also buy our own bread making machines. We boast that ‘we’ve made our own bread’. Have we heck! All we’ve done is measure some ingredients into the machine. The machine’s done all the kneading, then proved the dough, then knocked it down and kneaded it again. Then proved it again, and finally switched to bake mode, and has baked a perfectly cooked loaf according to our liking. I’m sure granny would have been in awe of such a device, but I doubt she would have credited us with having baked our own bread.

Swimming pools used to be something associated with Hollywood stars. Now having a pool in our own back yard is within almost every households budget if we so choose. If a household does choose to have a backyard pool, the water can be heated with the aid of either solar, gas or electricity, and cleaning is a breeze with the assistance of automatic pool vacuums.

For those of us who don’t chose to have a pool for the hot summer days to cool off in, we use our ducted air conditioning. When summer’s over and we need heating , a different selection of the touch pad switches the unit from cooling to heating and our houses are warmed to whichever temperature we pre-select.

I’m sure my granny would be in awe at all what have at our disposal today and take for granted. I’m not so sure she’d be so much in awe if she saw how we used what should be spare time. Most of us are more ‘time poor’ than ever. I’m sure she couldn’t relate to texting codes, but if she did, and if she could bring herself to use such an expression, I could well imagine her typing WTF in the boldest of capital letters!

I love life’s little routines:

Things like eating three meals a day. Not so much for the sustenance, but the meals somehow divide the day into manageable breaks. Without regular meal breaks a day can seem endless.

So too can a week. Some of the little rituals Paul and I have are as follows:

Monday,Tuesdays,Thursdays and Saturdays: As we’re aging we’re realising the creep of old age decrepitness is approaching at more of a gallop than a creep. In an effort restore some flexibility, or at least slow it’s loss back to a slow creep, we’re trying to establish yoga as the ideal start to several days a week. The more we stick to the routine days, the more we realise how important it is. So, four days a week we try and do our little yoga routine upon rising first thing in the morning. If we leave it till later, it inevitably doesn’t get done.

Wednesdays and Fridays: I start my days with a walk with a local women’s walking group. I love those days. Paul starts those days with a cycle ride.

So, that’s the routine parts of our weeks that ensures we at least do some exercise. We try and fit in a few additional walks along the beach in the afternoons. All to often though we forget, or allow something else to take precedence. Perhaps we’ll have to allocate a few more days to those walks, make them routine, ritualise them…. It would ensure fewer things intervened.

Then theres a couple of weekly food rituals.

Friday night is still a hangover from our working days. When we were working we always tried to get started our weekend as soon as possible. Fridays we celebrated the end of the working week with a couple of drinks, and dinner was always some sort of finger food. Knives and forks were banned. It could have been pizza, or burgers, or fish and chips, but it was never purchased take away. Part of the ritual was cooking for ourselves foods typically associated with take away. Sometimes we only had a good bread, cheese, pate’, and some cherry tomatoes, cucumber slices and grapes on the side. Other times we went all out and had a selection of tapas, cooked and eaten over several hours. We still stick to our Friday night ritual as much as possible. It keeps us aware that the working week is over for our families.

Sunday is cooked breakfast day. We look forward to our bacon and eggs on a Sunday. Not only do we enjoy the meal but it reminds us that shopping hours are reduced, and some shops aren’t open at all. Additionally, not always, but Sunday is still our preferred day for cooking a roast. I don’t know why – it’s a ritual that’s been with us since childhood, and somehow still feels right.

That’s just a few of our little daily and weekly rituals. Without them, I doubt we’d know what day of the week it was. I’d love to hear what your little rituals are? Do you still have rituals even though you’re retired? If you’re still working, do you have rituals that end your working week, or set you up for your working week to begin? I’d love to hear about them.

I was born in 1955. My mother was widowed twice, the first time before my first birthday, and again when I was seven. She was left with seven children to provide for, and didn’t have the benefit of any life insurance policy.

By standards even in those days we were considered ‘poor’. But were we? Everything’s relative, and compared to our immediate neighbours, yes, we were poor. We wore hand me downs, often visibly darned. We were kept warm at night with wool patch work quilts which mum spent days sewing from scraps obtained from a local coat manufacturer (I think my oldest brother worked there). Our warmest winter clothes were also patchwork skirts lovingly made from the same scraps. Our jumpers and cardigans were all hand knitted, often from old jumpers unravelled and re-knitted in a size to fit.

We lived on a 1/4 acre block, common in those days in Christchurch NZ. Much of the block was planted in vegetables. We looked forward to the first of the potatoes, always the first of the year dug for our Christmas nights dinner. Fresh beans when they came into season – I’ve never tasted beans like those mum used to grow, and pick when they were young and crisp and sweet. Cabbages, carrots, peas, cauliflowers, tomatoes, lettuce….. Mum grew them all. And she always found time to plant a lovely flower garden too. I loved our garden.

We were fed cheaply but well. For dinner meat and three veg was normal, with the meat being either from a weekly side of mutton, or sausages, saveloys or mince. Sometimes there wasn’t enough money for meat to go around eight people, so mum would buy a ham hock and make a thick vegetable soup. Milk in those days was subsidised, so the occasional pudding was usually milk based, either rice, sago or custard to go over a home made steamed pudding or crumble. Breakfast was usually either week-bix, porridge or toast, and lunch was sandwiches.

Mum always managed something small for us for birthdays and Christmas’. One year, I think it was about my eighth birthday I remember getting a pair of knitting needles, a ball of wool, and a small bar of chocolate. I was thrilled.

I didn’t know we were poor. To me, how we grew up was normal. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised that whilst people in those days didn’t have the same abundance that is evident now, none-the-less, most had more ‘store bought’ things than we had.

Compared to our Christchurch neighbours, we were poor. But compared to most of the world would we have been poor? I suspect not. While we were wearing darned hand me downs and patchwork skirts, and eating home grown veggies with the cheapest of meats, much of the world was famine or war ravaged, the same as it is today. Much of world had no real roof over their head, no shoes on their feet, and only the clothes on their back. Much of the world wasn’t getting one good meal a day, let alone three, and it’s still the same today. I suspect that as poor as we were compared to our neighbours, we still would have been amongst the top 20% of the worlds wealthiest.

And what’s bought about these reflections? I’ve just been reading about the low fat diet revolution that has taken place over the passed 40 years – now in the process of being completely debunked. That had me thinking – The Pritikin diet, The Aitkin’s diet, Low carbs, High carbs, low protein, high protein, the 5 and 2 (two days of fasting weekly), vegetarian, vegan, dairy free, wheat free…… the list goes on and on in our over abundant western civilisation. Yet for most of the world, food, any food is welcomed.

Food is such a pleasure, and we’re so lucky to have it in abundance. Yet we insist in finding ways to deprive ourselves of some of it. We cut out fats, we cut out carbs, we cut out meat, we cut out our daily bread. My thoughts today are that any diet that omits a complete food group (true allergies excluded) is likely to end up being debunked at sometime in the future. In our Western World of true abundance, relatively new in society, we haven’t as yet developed the self discipline to prevent us over eating in preparation for the next famine. Today, I don’t think omitting any one food group is the answer – tomorrow I may think differently, but today I can’t see any sense in it.

I don’t know how or what we should or shouldn’t be eating in our over abundant western civilisation but the words of Robert Burns come to mind:

The Selkirk Grace

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.

Food is such a pleasure. I’m going to keep enjoying it while I can (but I wish I could develop a little more moderation).