Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

For some reason computers and laptops breed at my house. I do get rid of them - I turfed out the remains of two dead laptops and a PC in a recent hard rubbish collection. And then... Another one turns up that needs my attention.

Currently I have an old one I'm setting up before it's donated, my dad's very old G3 Macbook. and cousin's old macbook pro.

The later is on it's last legs because his cat peed all over it. I've got it turned on, but it's smelly so I try and keep as far away from it as possible.

And the other Macbook has obviously been around my dad too much, and now smells distinctly of his aftershave! I turn it on and I think he's come over to visit!

Will have to find them new homes soon...

Man, I thought I'd reached that certain age a few years ago - that age where all your friends start having babies. All that is but the committed dinks couples anyway.

But it seems there's another wave... Either I've made new friends or some folks just forgot about it till now. Two of my oldest friends - Julie and Dave, who I met at RMIT in 1994 (gah, that's seventeen years ago now!) are cooking a baby. The girlfriend Deb's brother and his wife are also pregnant. And then of course there's the newly created, three and a half week old Hamish. And my fifteen month old niece, who has started to walk and who's favourite game at the moment is bouncing on a bed. She also loves the "Incy Wincy Spider" song, trying valiantly to do the actions.

Hey, don't look at me! I ain't quite ready to go there yet. Soon, but no yet.

In support of this we have a pile of baby clothes here, mostly from said Niece, which we are about to deliver to various current and prospective parents. Some of the things are so cute, like the little pairs of shoes.

Picture this: I was driving my car to pick up one of my little relatives to go on a little expedition (more on that later). My phone rings in my bluetooth earpiece. It's - who would have thunk it - my dad with a technology question!

He was out of town with his laptop. His wife was trying to read her Gmail on his laptop.

Dad: We can get onto the gmail website, but we can't log in.
Me: What do you mean you "can't log in"?
Dad: It's got someone else's email in the "username" box and we can't edit it!

Keep in mind - I don't use Gmail so I don't really remember what the gmail page looks like. So I'm going to have to diagnose it from a distance!

Me: Ok.... is there a button that says "Log out" or "Log in as a different user"?
Dad: There are no buttons at all... Except a big one that says "Create a new account".
Me: Ok..... can you read out some of the things that are around the login section?
Dad: There's a link that says "Can't access your account" and another that says "Sign in as a different user".
Me: That's it! Read it again!
Dad: "Sign in as a different user".
Me: Click on that one! Click on that one!
Dad: Ah that worked! You're a genius son [To his wife] What's your email address?
Wife (faintly): Ummm...
Me: It's "blahblah@mail.com"
Dad: Thanks son! [To his wife] Now what's your password?
Me: I know that at well, it's "**********"
Dad: Thanks son!

*slaps head* I suppose that at least since I set up said email address and know literally everything about their networks email addresses and so on comes in handy sometimes!

Man, my dad is such a Luddite... Well, no, Luddite implies a certain level of decision... Perhaps technological incompetent would be a better description!

I usually have to help him through anything even remotely complicated related to his Mac or his iPhone (boy was I annoyed when his Uni bought him that). The low point was probably when he asked me to come over to resize his netscape window a few years ago. Then there are the times when some really obscure setting has changed on his computer, and he swears blind that he never touched it. Or his wireless network is not connecting because he's turned off his wireless - again, swearing he didn't touch anything. I suspect he just clicks "OK" on any dialog box that pops up, without reading them. Or just as likely he reads them, then has no idea what it's talking about and clicks OK anyway.

I was over there tonight diagnosing what turned out to be a genuine problem - looks like their wireless phone is interfering with their wireless internet router, which is definitely not supposed to happen. Not sure which of the bits of hardware is to blame.

While I was there, I had a conversation which went like this:

My dad: Do you want to see my new camera?
Me: Sure.
[He pulls out a rather nice new Nikon Digital SLR]
Me: Nice! How many megapixels is it?
My dad: I don't know.
Me: Well what did they tell you when you bought it?
My dad: Nothing about megapixels. What are megapixels?
[We eventually find something in the manual that tells us it's 16.9 or so megapixels]
Me: Wow, that's good!
My dad: What does it mean?
Me: Well, basically it's how many pixels there are in each picture.
My dad: Wow that is good!
Me: What kind of storage card did you get with it?
My dad: What's a storage card?
[I slap my head. Popping open the camera I discover that not only are both the SD slots empty, but so is the battery compartment.]
Me: You're supposed to have a storage card to save your pictures on. It's basically useless without one. Did they give you one at the shop?
My dad: Let me have a look. Is this it?
Me: No, that's a dust cover for the view finder.
My dad: Well, that's all they gave me.
Me: Where did you get this?
My dad: At the shop.
Me: And they didn't mention that you'd need a storage card?
My dad: No.
Me: It's basically useless without one! Where's your compact camera, I'll show you want I mean.
[He finds his other digital camera. It's an eight year old Canon with a tiny weeny little screen. It also has huge storage brick in it, all of 256 Mb. My dad had never seen it before, he just gets the pictures off the camera by plugging it straight into his computer.]
Me: OK, what you need is something like this, only smaller, to fit into this slot here.

I ended up giving him the address of Computer Parts Land in North Melbourne, and writing a detailed note for him to take in - Sandisk SD HC 16Gb, and looked up roughly what the price would be. No doubt I'll get a call later which will be "I've got the card, now what do I do with it? *slaps head*

It's a wonder how he gets by in the world. He just retired as an assistant dean from Monash!

Anyway, I've made him promise to take me with him when he goes car shopping soon, so he doesn't
repeat his mistakes. In about 1982, he bought a lemon yellow Holden Commodore station wagon, in the brief period when they fitted them with a shitty shitty 4 cylinder, which was barely able to drag the damn whale around!

I'm currently down at a little town called Jan Juc (which for all intents and purposes is a suburb of Torquay these days) on the coast just past Geelong.

My sister and her husband and my new-born niece Baby X - OK, so her name is Naomi now - have set up home here. It's a long story, they needed an affordable furnished place to rent, of which there are few, possibly zero, in Melbourne. On the other hand, there are lots of beach and holiday houses down this way, so they decided to set up beside the seaside.

My sister and her husband are itinerant, having not lived in one country for more than two years. In fact they met in Afghanistan. So when they had to setting in a first world country for the birth of their first child, they ended up here.

We're here for the long weekend, which was a lucky coincidence of timing - this was when the house was (relatively) free of other visitors.

Having said that, a gaggle of no less than five other relatives have just left, during a downpour!

My niece is very cute. She's not quite a month old, so she's still in the eating and sleeping and eating and sleeping phase. She sleeps up to 17 hours a day! Babies are funny, they like being reminded of being in the womb, so they like being wrapped up tight and with lots of ambient noise. The radio tuned to static for example. Not to mention our awful singing. Old McDonald had a farm, apparently...!

What does my mother do with her retirement? She writes and sings satirical songs for a choir in Geelong of course...! She's the one singing vigorously in the middle of that picture!

My usual travelogue will have to pause for a moment, although this is a travel related story of sorts. And my apologies for the long gaps between entries - I've been a busy traveller.

When one is travelling, one worries that bad things will happen back at home - your cat runs away, your cousin crashes your car, someone pinches your bike.

But what's the worst possible thing that can happen whilst you're on a long trip out of the country?

Well I just found out :-(

My last remaining grandparent, my Father's increasing frail mother, my grandmother, slipped from us very early Saturday morning Australian time.

I had a premonition this might happen, I mean, it was on the list of worst possible things that could go wrong. I even made a point of visiting her before I left. Which proved, it now seems, to have been the right thing to do...

My family have all urged me to carry on my trip. I was in London when this happened, just back from Paris and heading to Berlin, where I am now, a few days after that. I've never been overseas before, and had been planned this trip for at least eighteen months.

And to give you some idea of how well travelled we are, my family: My Dad was on his way to Hong Kong when this happened - he turned around and came straight back again. My sister and her husband live in Cambodia. I'm here in Europe. My aunt is in Norway. And I have an aunt and four cousins living in Switzerland. And to their credit all these folks will be there later this week for the funeral.

I've written something for my sister to read on my behalf at the funeral, much as I did for her at our grandfather's funeral last year. I will post it here at some point.

She was 97, and so frail she was at that stage when she could slip from us at any moment, from one breath to the next, literally.

And boy has this made me homesick :-(

Things what I did (or learned) today:

This morning, I bought a bed. Well, a mattress in fact. Trouble is the damn thing doesn't get delivered for over a week.

Got two awesome pillows too.

Anyone what a 3.5 year old futon???

Then I visited my beautiful girlfriend. Her housemate is a bike GENIUS. She greased my chain (that sounds rude!), moved my rack back a bit so I'm less likely to kick my panniers. And more importantly, she attached the Bar ends I picked up from a bike shop on Saturday. This was actually a non-trivial operation, since it meant moving my gear change/brake control things inwards a little, cutting holes in my handlebar grips and sliding them in a bit as well, to expose the actual handle bar. And then securing the bar ends! But boy, they make a big difference, I like them a lot. My bike is coming together...

Had dinner with my dad and my little brother. My little brother - who is strictly speaking my half brother - has been researching his mother (who is, unfortunately, long dead, having succumbed to cancer back in about 1988). He's been tracing her ancestors. Her grandmother on that side was called Norma and was the biggest ocker Aussie woman you can imagine! Anyway, it turns out her parents - my brother's great-grandparents - were from the UK (or Europe, he's not sure) and his great-grandfather delighted in the name Moses Joseph! Which means he was most likely a Jewish gentleman, which means technically my little brother is Jewish! Which might actually explain his complexion and hair colour, which are several shades darker than mine. Which wouldn't be hard, I look like I was chipped from marble... And no, vedmajulia he is not available :-)

Speaking of which, my little sister is engaged to a chap of Russian-Jewish extraction from New York. And might be converting to said religion. All in all it's been a very Semitic day :-)

Lets see. Saturday I... OK, the early onset Alzheimer's is kicking in here... What the fuck did I do on Saturday? *gets out nerdphone/diary*

OK! In the morning we quickly looked at a house in Brunswick, although it was so far north it was about 20 metres from Coburg. Nice place, big bedrooms, new appliances. But only one bathroom, and the more I thought about the commute from there to my new office on St. Kilda Road, the less I liked the idea. It looked good mostly because it was available and they liked us... I'm prepared to be a bit fussy.

(Rent's have got "interesting" of late. When I shared in Northcote in 2000-2004, my rent was a bit over $400 a month. Then I moved into a two bedroom place with the then Fiance, and my rent was about $600 a month. When I moved from there to my current place, my rent was about $800 (it's gone up a bit since.) Now we're looking at three bedroom places to share, my rent is likely to be in the $680-700 region... Which is an increase of, what, about 75% per room over about four years... Something is well wrong here, maybe I should just buy a place! Or be a bit less fussy, but then, I don't want to move into somewhere which is worse than my flat...)

Saturday arvo I took my mother out to visit my grandmother (my father's mother, not hers) out in Doncaster. My grandmother is a bit deaf and a bit vague, but heck she's 96 so we can't complain!

Lets see, what else did I do? Ah, that's right, Deb and I went to a great housewarming in Ascot Vale. The house itself was cool - it was on an oddly shaped block, so some of the rooms were triangular! Like the little study, and the laundry and the bathroom. There was also a vaguely trapezoid pantry/room which was almost as big at the kitchen. Deb and I decided it was the coolest room in the house, so we decided to hang out in it.

The best part of the party - they fed us! I had ace soup and various other tasty treats. Which was nice since I hadn't had dinner.

Then we played table tennis on a hopelessly warped table tennis table, and discovered that we're both really really shit at table tennis! I also got to see some amusing family bickering between one of the housemates, her sister and her brother. I teased them all about that.

Deb was a bit grumpy, which is a change from her usual constantly chirpy mood. I thought it was actually good to see her in a different mood. And when I say grumpy, it was like seeing a hungry kitten! Kinda cute grumpy!

I think that was all I did on Saturday. Too damn busy!!!

On Wednesday, we held a funeral and burial for my one remaining grandfather. Who as I mentioned died nearly two weeks ago. The funeral was that much later to allow several people to make it here from overseas and interstate.

I can also report that his full name was in fact "Leendert Boer", a delightfully old fashioned Dutch name. Which was his fathers name, and indeed my uncle Leo's real name.

We did the reverse of the usual thing, and buried him first, before the ceremony. My mother found a delightful cemetery (in so far as a cemetery can be delightful) in a place called Steiglitz about twenty kilometres outside Geelong. My grandfather spent the last five decades in Geelong, specifically Corio, and twenty of those years working for Ford. The cemetery is small and quiet, in a typical Australian forest. Reminded me of the place my friend Daniel is buried in out near Wallen.

I was struck by the distance he'd come. Leendert was born in Gouda (as in the cheese, although the pronunciation in Dutch sounds much more like "Hoow-da", with a hard rolling Dutch H on the front) and was buried on a hot sunny Australian day in a country cemetery something like half a world away. He and my mother and her (then) four siblings turned up in Australia back in 1951.

My four uncles, and my cousin Mathias and myself - the six oldest male Boer descendants - carried him from the hearse to the grave. Something I seem to have done a lot of in my time, most recently when I helped carry Sara's grandmother, when she died on about October of last year. And my other grandfather, about ten years ago, my great aunt about five years ago, and indeed my aunt's father in Bairnsdale back in February of last year. It's actually a good feeling, in a way, very symbolic to be carrying someone on their final journey.

My uncle Ben, who came out from Canada, presided, and my mother sang a song for him. And he was lowered into the grave...

We held the ceremony in a hall in Geelong in the afternoon. Opa was always making stuff, including dozens of toys for us grand children. So when he died, I put out the call to my cousins and second cousins - bring all the Opa toys you have! It seemed a wonderful way to remember him. And we had quite a collection in the end, a whole series of tops, hand carved windmills, a marvellous little steam engine, and a hand-powered vehicle we always called "the flying Dutchman".

My mother and my uncles all spoke. And I gave a speech I'd prepared the night before, about Opa and his toys. I might post the text of it here at some point. This was one of the hardest things I've done. I'm a good speaker - years of Toastmasters will do that - but talking in front of thirty or so members of your family and about as many strangers at a sad event is quite a different thing. Fortunately my experience served me well, and everyone was very complimentary afterwards. I talked about remembering him through the things he made for us, and how they'd always be with us.

We pottered around afterwards, and ate fun Dutch biscuits, and I talked to my relatives. Everyone of my cousins was there along with all my cousin's kids. In fact, the only missing relative was my sister Vanessa, who as I've mentioned is in Kabul at present. She did send a message which I read out.

A couple of old family friends turned up, which was nice. Richard and Adrianna. It was funny to see them, thought, since I haven't in a long time, even though for six of the last seven years I've been living about a kilometre from their house.

We also had a series of photos taken of the entire clan. There are so damn many of us, it'll probably have to be a montage! Twenty eight direct descendants in all!

My cousin Cameron and several other people dragged the Flying Dutchman out to the carpark and rode it about the place.

So. Now I have only one grand parent left, my dad's mother, who we call Farmor - a Norwegian honorific which means Father's Mother. I do love living in an ethnically diverse land. I will have to go visit her more...