Counting down …

Vista seen from the bus station across the road. My unit not visible behind the trees.

Counting down 11 sleeps till moving day.

Filling in forms has been the name of the game for the last couple of days. But … I am an arcane procrastinator and have been putting stuff off all weekend. Like now. Writing a blog post. Pearling out some of the news. And I just wrote a hard letter.

An astounding amount of stuff still to do. Like, pack up the contents of the whole apartment? Stuff I haven’t started. Like, deciding on what I’m not taking? I’m squeezing from a small three bedroom place into a smaller unit with 1 bedroom and what they call a Multi Function Room.

I have four shelf units and place for only three. There is an amazing amount of storage in the new unit. All of it behind cupboard doors, unfortunately, though good for keeping dust out.

Or stuff I’m in the middle of. I’ve started packing the Lego. Though not the models yet. I want to get a few more photo sequences done.

Tim, fixing Nin Wiz’s cabin. Working alone instead of with the rest of the crew, out of pure frustration with a certain person’s obstreperous manner.

Plus, I’m potting up some plants to go while deciding which plants will have to stay behind.

And, not to forget, my new tech to get used to …

… new modem situation. Huh? All looks very tidy but I only recognize the power-point in the lower right, and the modem in the middle right.

On The Run …

Lol, you’ll have to look down the bottom for picture I tried to post here. I tried twice, there are two pics.

Not that I’m really running or even jogging. Though at times I’m up for an elderly heavy-footed jog up the corridor, this is a one-fingered jog over my mobile’s key pad.

In other words, I have no time for regular posts. No time for fiction, construction or even a slightly fictionalized cat story. This is an update on what’s going on in my life.

Next May the rent where I’m living is set go astronomical, $700 AUD per week! I decided no way can I afford that.

So I’m in the process of buying a place in a retirement village. Two meetings already with management, and half a dozen phone calls to secure my unit. Today I am going there to sign the contract and pay what they call a ‘soft’ deposit.

I laughed about that. Two weeks rent at the present rates! But I guess they know that people not working in the money economy have their money tied up in banks and super annuation schemes.

Modem vs IOS

When I finally knuckled down and dedicated a couple of hours to the problem, I learnt that the trouble was the ever-renewing IOS, macOS Sonoma 14.1.1 in this case, that was refusing to shake hands with the now five year old modem. How is that good for the world to come, Apple.com? We need tech that is compatible to old as well as new.

Let me tell you this image is 20! years! old! I think I made it using one of the first versions of the ProCreate design program installed on an early iPad I had a taste-test of. It represents a techie, of course. How we imagined techies in those far gone days.

First the wait for contact on the help-line. Twenty minutes. Then the wait for my turn with a technician. 45 minutes. By about half an hour of waiting, I settled in, having already spent/used/wasted too much time to want to do it all again at a later date. Nothing has changed in 20 years in that respect.

I don’t know how many people have got an Archer VRI 1600, Version 2 modem but if it was a popular one, there’ll be a lot of people like me out there with modems stunned into silence, even hibernation, by new and brashy operating systems. Hence the long wait. Which is how I comforted myself.

I told the technician helping me reset the system, it is almost as if new operating systems are sweeping the old out to make room for the new.

Madam, she said, we don’t recommend our customers to just update their systems willy nilly.

I wanted to tell her I just do as I’m told, and my technical equipment the same. We upgrade to stay in the game. I don’t know what’s in an upgrade. Who out there is going to explain?

Yeah yeah. I could go to a forum and find out there. But tell me … do you do that?

But anyway the point is moot. Rion gave me a task that needed my attention. Find the xyz in System Settings and tell me what it says.

She is good, knows her stuff, and she’s patient. Took me through the process step by step. Even tested my mobile while we were at it. There, she said at the end, no new modem needed.

Her name is Rion and she works at the TPG call centre, if you need help retreading your modem.

Life Admin xyz …

This is one of those days that I need to “make my daily march (back) with the heavy baggage wagon” These words from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching as interpreted by Ursula K LeGuin.

Meaning to me that I need to attend primarily to my physical and on-ground community needs.

I must be out of the house by 9 AM, spruced up and ready for anything. First an after-care eye specialist appointment that’s walkable. Then bus into the city for early voting on the Yes/No referendum, and a bank ‘appointment’.

I call it an appointment despite that they don’t know I’m coming.

If you’re interested, I’ve begun summarising entries into the Lodestar Timeline on its dedicated page, accessible through the menu.

“Add new post!”

Seriously? I’m completely boondoggled … is that even a word, I imagine you’re asking … I’ll need to check that myself. It’s been a while since I saw it written.

That suspicion was right. Not the right meaning. The Navy has my favorite explanation … a boondoggle is a fun, but unproductive meeting.

So. Try again. I’m completely at a loss … not as descriptive is it?

But me going to the thesaurus from here and then trying to get back with a good word under my arm… will take me another half hour.

I’m at a loss. My writing is on my laptop and the external hard drive. My research ditto. Everyplace where I might check somthing, also inaccessable.

It’s Friday, and here in Queensland, Monday is a public holiday. I won’t be able to take my ailing laptop to a repair place until Tuesday!

Couldn’t take it today, yesterday or day before due to too much other stuff those days. I have ME/CFS and am constrained by a frequent lack of energy.

I’ve been training myself to take 2200 steps per day. If I go over my daily limit, I’m setting myself up for a three day crash.

The computer repair place visit has to be done on the same day I need to go into that direction for another thing. Three blocks distance is all it is, and three blocks back. It’s all I’ll be able to that day.

Life: Cataracts? Done!

Colors have improved! In this photo of a sunset during rain looking into the center of the complex where I live, lights are whiter, the pink clouds aren’t as pink as I remember them, but the greens are definitely greener. And there’s a difference now between the greens of the shrubbery and the green of the lawn. The palms at the back look grey-green. Being able to see more colors has also improved my depth vision.

Now to wait for four weeks of healing and having my brain adapt to my eyes’ new lenses, and adapt to how they can now work together before being prescribed new spectacles for reading … maybe.

An additional plus for me is that the original reason that I started wearing spectacles is gone too. When I was 17, I was diagnosed with astigmatism, and my new intra ocular lenses take care of that. I’m sitting here typing without any spectacles. Almost unbelievable after wearing them for nearly sixty years! That, below, was me about twenty years ago.

This, the second day after having my second eye done, I can already clearly see what I’m typing on my laptop, on my lap … a distance of 60 cms … that previously I wouldn’t have had a hope of seeing clearly.

One of the amazing things is how the quality of light has changed to a lighter and brighter tone. The sky is now sky-blue. Clouds are both whiter and greyer, and don’t look like thunderheads rightaway. I’ve had to trust my phone weather app for a couple of years already to figure out what to wear, or whether to take a brolly with me, to go out. I should now be able to learn again, to gauge the weather by looking at the sky, as I used to.

Previously I thought the walls of the complex where I live were a gold-cream tint. I discovered when I had my left eye done that the color is a more neutral-cream tint. The carpet in the unit I rent is grayish, not brownish. Still a “tenant-grey”, according to my son. It’s easier to tell close shades apart.

Another ability I have got again is peripheral vision. Anyone first getting used to multi-focals will know that feeling, of the world suddenly narrowing. I hated that, not being able to see out of the corner of my eyes.

I could go on and on. Colors of anything and everything have always played an important part in my life. I’m happy!

Life as She Lives It

Thank you everyone still reading despite no new posts since about February. I’ve been busy, is all I can say. Online I’ve been looking into one or two other platforms. Always coming back to WordPress as the platform I’d rather be exploring and learning to use better, than platforms I’d be learning from scratch.

There have been changes here enough to keep me interested. For example, I just noticed the vastly bigger choice of fonts. I will love exploring those. The one I’m using today is ‘Albert Sans’. Easy to read but not going back all the way to the old Times New Romans.

In my real life too I’ve been looking at a few different ‘platforms’ … make that, places where I might want to spend the rest of my life. After experiencing both my parents not preparing for their retirement, and then being forced by circumstances into situations where they did not want to be … well, I don’t want to lay that decision-making on my kids.

So. My elder years … my physical health is set to continue somewhat shaky. Although I’ve celebrated two years in remission from lymphoma … with a teaspoon of champagne! … I recently had a flare-up of me/cfs that has left me a bit ragged round the edges. I’ve even had to use my walker again and I thought I’d recovered my balance.

I narrowed my choices for somewhere better to live down to the Retirement Village option and am researching those in the South Brisbane (Australia) area. Nothing wrong with this place, mind you, it’s just not that good for a future where I’m more decrepit. And it’s coming.

Out for a walk just now, I made it to 3000 paces. Say, 4000 in total for the day. That’s only two thirds of what I was doing before I got sick with the lymphoma and that is now nearly three years ago. And time doesn’t stand still.

I’ll miss the sunsets here when I finally go. [Lol, I think the sunset above is from my previous town, I see Wollumbin in the background (also known as Mt Warning)]