King (blue) and Prince (white) have taken a liking to flirting with the peahens just outside my office door. Needless to say, and the pictures show this I hope, the two white princesses are indifferent. King and Prince have a fraught relationship, but they never fight because Prince, being younger, always capitulates and stops showing off when King comes along.
Gutsy9 came to my office door, a bit confused, and wanting a pat!
Anthony has a lot of antique clocks – a magnificent grandfather clock, three carriage clocks, two mantle clocks and one cuckoo clock. All of them chime on the hour and some on the half hour.
Well they used to.
Ever since Anthony went into the nursing home, all of the clocks have stopped. Mostly this is because Ants always did the clock winding and he never really taught Ming and me. Also, once Anthony wasn’t at home any longer, there didn’t seem any point any more, and letting all of the clocks stop seemed a natural reaction to his absence. My love of their chiming diminished in equal proportion to my increasing grief (if that makes sense, which it probably doesn’t!)
I finally got my act together a few months ago and invited a clock man over to have a look. He serviced all of the clocks, got them going again and showed us how to wind them without overwinding them and pronounced one of the carriage clocks as too far gone. Well, Ming and I lasted a week, so all of the clocks have once again stopped.
Oh the guilt. And the silence! If you are used to the constant chime of clocks, the silence is like a thrum of nothingness. I miss the noise of the clocks, the complaints of people staying with us who said, ‘how can you stand it?’ I miss all of those hundreds of Sundays when Anthony wound each clock with such joy until he forgot how to.
The other day, when I brought him home for the day, he tried again with his favourite clock.
It didn’t work.
Tock tick (no, that is not a typo).
This is Gutsy9 flaunting her unusual feathers today. She is ‘pied’ – half blue and half white. We still don’t know who her parents are exactly because we have too many peas (three whites and 12 blues) and none of them wanted her so she was mine from day 1. (Previous posts describe this).
Peafowl are tactile defensive (they don’t like being touched) but they will take bread or any other tidbits from your hand if you are patient. G9, having been hand-raised by me, is unusual in this respect. For example, today, she came up to me when I was hanging out the washing and she sort of purred until I reached down to stroke her neck and every time I stopped, she chased me for more.
Happy birthday Gutsy9!
I have never taken to Facebook as much as I have taken to blogging, however over the last few weeks I have become more and more obsessed with checking up on my family and friends to see if they are okay, to find out if they are happy or sad, to ‘share’ information that might be helpful etc. But this morning I realized that the level of anxiety I experience before going to FB is too horrible. I.e. What if I have said the wrong thing? What if they don’t reply? What if they are sick of me commenting on their situation? What if they just wish I would go away?
But it’s not just my insecurities that have influenced my deactivation decision; I am sick of the advertisements, the miserable media reports, the posts from people I have never heard of, the disturbing images, causes, and cries for help from people I cannot possibly help. One of the many strange things about FB is its strangerness.
I will probably hop back onto FB in the near future but at the moment I’ve just had enough – not of my family and friends of course – just of Facebook itself and its paradoxical facelessness. After all, I do have a phone number, and an email address, and have a bit more animation than my gravatar.
Also, I might now be able to get to my mountain of paperwork – bills, tax return etc. I’ll just check my emails first haha!
If any Gutsy9 look-alikes turn up in the next few weeks, I have already found a home for them at http://www.fergusonfarmstay.com.au/ (a lovely place closeby.)
Today I picked Anthony up from the nursing lodge to take him for a doctor’s appointment to get some of his never-ending skin cancers burned off with that ice stuff. Having been a farmer all his life, out in the full sun before the days of hats and sunscreen, he develops many of these on an almost daily basis – new eruptions from old sun damage – on his arms, face and back mainly. Even though it hurts, Anthony has a strange liking for the procedure, mainly because he really likes seeing our doctor and so do I.
In the car on the way to the doctor’s office I asked him did he remember what had happened last night and he surprised me by saying yes.
Me: Well I think we should tell the doctor because this seems to be happening more often and you sounded so terrified.
Anthony: I didn’t want to be ordered around.
Me: So you fought the staff, told me I was part of a conspiracy against you, thought you were being tied up, and frightened the hell out of me.
Anthony: They deserved it.
Me: But they were just trying to put you to bed! Was anyone being nasty or pushy?
Anthony: Not really.
Me: So why did you fight them?
Anthony: Oh, just for a bit of fun.
AAARGH!
Before I go on, I should explain that this kind of conversation flows much more smoothly on the page than it does in real time. In real time, there are a lot of pauses and sometimes Anthony’s voice is so soft now that I have to say, “what?” or “say that again?” before I understand what he is saying.
Anyway, his ‘bit of fun’ comment made me laugh, until I became a bit cross.
Me: So you think it’s funny to torment the nurses and make me cry for worrying about you.
Anthony: The first thing yes but not to you. (He reaches out and pats my knee as we pull into the doctor’s parking lot)
Me: Well I’m going to ask the doctor to prescribe you with something for when this happens again.
Anthony: So you want to drug me.
Me: Nooooo! I just don’t want you to have one of these terrified episodes again with nothing to calm you down. Even I take something like that now and then!
Anthony: Yes, but you probably need it.
He has a point there!
When we went into the doctor’s office, he already had his ice-spray thingy in his hand like a weapon (a little joke he and Anthony share), but I told him that our visit was two-fold and then described last night’s incident, including Anthony as much as I could, despite his point of view being different from mine. He, too, thought it was funny when Anthony said it was all a bit of fun and Anthony’s eyes did that rare twinkly thing and he nearly smiled.
A new medication was prescribed, several skin cancers burned off and we left feeling as if we’d been on a social visit. By that time it was early afternoon, so I suggested we eat at a restaurant but Anthony wanted MacDonalds (most unusual!) So we got burgers from a drive-through, went to a park and ate them in the car (much easier than getting Ants in and out of a restaurant), then went to a bakery and bought a fancy tart which he vacuumed up, and a big chocolate cake for the nurses. By the time we got back to the nursing lodge, he was exhausted.
Okay it is now nearing the time I usually ring Anthony to say goodnight. The new pill won’t be available until tomorrow so we may well have a repeat of last night’s situation but this time I will be ready and I won’t let either of us be disarmed. I have to be prepared for the worsening of Anthony’s condition even though every single morning he says to me, “I’m so much better, Jules.”
jmgoyder 
Who are you and why are you so nasty?
by jmgoyderI have a rather nasty taste in my mouth at the moment because I have been reading about some people’s taste for nastiness, or cyber-nastiness to be exact – well that’s what I call it anyway. A few moments ago I saw a lovely photo on Facebook (yes I am back on it!) of a black man reaching his hand out to a white baby.
I liked the photo and its caption and found it heart-warming. So I was surprised to read some very nasty comments and interchanges in response to the photo. Various critical points were made by some and phrased politely, but other people became quite hateful in their comments.
Lately I have been seeing more and more of this on the internet – people voicing nastiness with such ferocity it is breathtaking. Of course, with Facebook and WordPress and other social media sites, there are rules, but obviously this is almost impossible to monitor unless someone is being obscenely abusive.
The thing that most bothers me about this trend is the anonymity with which nasty comments, statements, opinions etc. are made. I read a couple of news feeds and often a human interest article will be attacked by certain readers and then readers will attack each other with no respect for the fact that we are all real people. Many of the nasty things written on social media sites would never be said face-to-face because in real-life, real-time situations, there is usually an expected decorum. Not so on the internet. Anybody can pretty much say anything they like to anybody else behind the safety of their computer or phone screen.
But why? Why do so many people expend so much time and energy on being nasty on the internet? I was the recipient of some rather nasty commentary on my friend’s blog the other day. The person commenting was not known to me so I was flummoxed by his passionate diatribe against my rather innocuous comment and he proceeded to crowd my friend’s post with long-winded speeches against me, and against my friend who rose to my defense. I responded a few times then gave up because I realized everything I said just seemed to fuel his irrational fury. I would love to recount the dialogue but respect my blogger friend’s privacy so suffice it to say that my initial comment had nothing to do with politics, race, gender or religion – ie. it was not an attackable comment!
The experience was a learning curve for me, so I am glad for it because it has made me even carefuller of my words than I already was – ha. But the main thing this experience showed me was what cyber-bullying might be like for a young person. One of the things this particular bully did was to make assumptions about me and to label me; when I didn’t immediately reply, he equated my silence with guilt; when I did reply, he launched another sermonesque attack. Even though I was astounded and felt extremely misunderstood, I wasn’t hurt – more bemused I guess.
But if I had been 12 or 15 or even in my 20s, I would have been profoundly hurt and affected. And this, I think, is what is so worrying about social media for our beautiful young people. If you read of cases of cyber-bullying and its effects on so many young people (including suicide), it is easy to brush this off as a passing phase, a bizarre incident, or ‘my kid isn’t on Fbook so s/he’s okay’.
I am not saying that my above experience was a case of cyber-bullying exactly. After all, I am an adult and I can take it. But if I had been a kid, I would have crumbled.
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