jmgoyder

wings and things

Oct 29

This, that….

by jmgoyder

20150927_143929This,
that….

Well I got back from Perth last week and the first thing I did was to rush to my new beaut vegetable garden and also check the chooks. I fed and watered both with a sense of quiet glee.

The second thing I did was to go inside and log on. When nothing happened I didn’t panic since all the green lights were indicating merrily that the internet wasn’t too far away.

Six hours later, having spoken to six different technical support people, all of whom were amazingly patient, kind and positive (with the exception of one woman whose sighs, when I didn’t understand her click34xcableetc instructions, became thunderous on loudspeaker) were confident.

At one point, during this ungleeful, longwinded experience, I rang Ming who said that when he got home he’d sort it out in a jiffy. Well he tried, and even spoke to other technical support people, to no avail.

The Ming then said, with great compassion and a generous hug, “Maybe you’re just not intelligent enough, Mum….?”

I let his observation linger for the ten days during which I had no internet except via my phone. When I began to get the 5s mixed us with the Ss, I gave up.

Anyway, yesterday the replacement modem arrived at the post office and Ming picked it up, brought it home, connected it and voila!

So what am I supposed to do now? I can’t possibly answer all of the zillions of emails and comments and facebooky stuff; I can’t possibly catch up on ten days of my blog friends’ blogs; I can’t even catch up with what I was going to do before I lost the internet because my blog kind of reminded me of what to do.

I survived my ten day blip of no internet, but the person most affected by my off-the-internet-radar status was my beautiful mother. Meg and I have a strong internet relationship via email and Facebook, but she is more attentive to messages than I am, so, when I lost the internet, she was the first to miss me.

And today is her birthday. She is 81, looks 61 and acts like 21. So today Meg came to the farm to see the vegetable garden then we went to a local winery for lunch. The secret surprise was that Ming and A. would join us and that was a fantastic thing!

It’s great to be blogging again. That internet blip taught me something really profound: I need the internet!

One of the hardest things for me now is having fun – the guilt of it. Lunches with friends, learning how to garden with new friends, figuring out the future, altering and/or discarding things in this old house, renewing ….

This,
that,
and the other….

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Oct 16

Full of beans!

by jmgoyder

A long lost dream is coming true via a tall man with red hair, named Dan, whose business is called Full of Beans. Thanks to him, my vegetable garden is being created! If it weren’t for being invited to join the gardening group I would never have known about him, so I am very grateful. Ironically, I can’t attend tomorrow’s get-together because Dan is coming back to do the planting and I want to learn.

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One of the things that really appeals to me about Full of Beans is that it provides an ongoing maintenance service for gardening novices like me.

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Okay, so gardening friends far and wide may see this as a kind of cheating on my part (employing someone to make me a vegetable garden) but oh well. I am already crazy about what Dan has begun to create and can hardly contain my excitement.

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Anthony was an avid gardener, despite not having much time, with milking the cows and looking after his mother. Nevertheless almost everything he planted, over 50 years ago, still survives. But he was never the least bit interested in growing vegetables. A couple of years into our marriage, I asked for a vegetable garden but he said there was no room. I argued that there was plenty of room (5 acres around the house!) to no avail.

And, as Ming grew up into an adolescent, he formed the same opinion. It was just a small dream of mine but neither of them would have a bar of it. That’s okay; they just weren’t interested and maybe didn’t realise how much I wanted the vegetable garden. I couldn’t do it by myself so one year my brother came out and dug me a patch and every single gigantic zucchini gave me a thrill. But that went by the wayside in the face of Anthony’s mysterious deterioration in health (we didn’t know about his Parkinson’s then) and the fact that I was working full-time that year.

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Now that Anthony is no longer cognisant of our shared reality; now that Ming is in a fantastic relationship; now that I am learning how to be completely alone, a vegetable garden seems profound.

A long lost dream is coming true via a tall man with red hair, named Dan, whose business is called Full of Beans.

http://www.fullofbeans.com.au

Australia blogging Friendship Happiness joy LOVE STORY Marriage nursing homes Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease dementia Teenagers Western Australia Wings

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