Trying to get into an organized frame of mind … we’ve been warned there is to be a Fire Drill this morning, and also I should/must get my new mobile phone SIM installed that I have already done the online stuff for.

Now just waiting for the old SIM to stop working … no that’s not right … they’ll first send me a code that I’ll need to put in somewhere. Then wait for the phone to stop working and THEN change the physical SIM card. Something which I will need help with.

My weak old fingers can’t even get the case off the mobile, let alone negotiate the teeny tiny fork to open the little draw, to then insert the minuscule card! None of this stuff was invented with old people in mind. And times like these, I really do feel like the geriatric aviatrix (IE the geriatrix negotiating the virtual skies of the web) I sometimes write about.

I stopped thinking of myself as any kind of surfer about the time I did the research about surfing I needed to be able to write knowledgeably about the process in MONGREL. I knew just ordinary body surfing was simply giving myself to the power of the water to take me, straightened in a torpedo shape, with itself to the shore. Surfing using a board was a whole other process.

As a child in the 1950s I was pretty sure that one day I would be a pilot. I collected cigarette cards of planes, identified planes going over (not nearly as many as these days) and imagined being a pilot by extrapolating from my father’s actions at the wheel, driving his first car.

Which was a share car, by the way. The two families owning the car used to take turns going on camping holidays.

This example from http://www.simoncars.co.uk/coachwork/woody.html

As near as I can recollect, the sides of our woody were all wood panel, that there no windows in the sides of the back. And of course it was old and decrepit. Traveling in it, if I wasn’t staring out the front at the horizon, between my father driving and my mother in the passenger seat, I’d be car-sick, the smell of petrol pervasive. As it was originally a tradesman’s van, there were no seats in the back, and we kids had pillows and an old mattress to sit on. And I do seem to remember that my mother and father sat in old arm chairs.

What happened to the dream of becoming a pilot? A girl, in the 1950s? It was kindly explained to me that girls did not become pilots, but that I could become an air hostess instead. I grew and grew. By 1960, even that dream went by the way. There was a height restriction of 167 cm, 5′ 6″ for air hostesses in the days of low cabin-ceiling prop planes. I was too tall!

And that was only the first fly-away this morning.

Reading my emails and posts, I side-tracked into Susan Cornelis website again this morning, this time about her Norwegian memories. She quoted the Garrison Keillor sign-off from A Prairie Home Companion,

“I couldn’t help but remember Garrison Keillor’s sign off on Lake Wobegon “where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average”.”

That was so familiar, I can practically hear Keillor say it, a radio show I used to listen to way back when. I clicked away from what I meant to do and to the website, and it’s all still there.

Not that I’m listening to anything right now other than the sounds of people in the corridor. Next, the announcements and the siren … the cat shot under the couch … and it’s time to gooooo!!!

While down on the podium, and after signing my name off, a kind person with strong hands helped me by getting my phone case off.

Now. Off across to the shops where I’ll get the SIM changed.