One of my future ambitions is to one day, using Lego, construct an Australian bilby, near its burrow with the Currawinya Bilby Enclosure Fence in the background.
A good few years ago now, I was involved in raising funds to build that enclosure. Seeing the ABC’s feature on it a couple of years ago, it seemed to me a good subject for a future Earth Day celebratory build, or alternatively to celebrate National Bilby Day, which I just now discovered is a thing. September 8th, if you’re interested.
But my bilby build will have to be for next year, or thereabouts. A lot to learn in the meantime.
In preparation, I’ve started to learn how to do some animal builds, of which this little bird (one of a pair) is one. [Lego set 40522] Nice plump body, I thought. I can learn something from that, maybe adapt it to become a bilby body? Or maybe not.
In this case I am quite taken with the way the curvy bits are shaped, and internally how all those shiny bits are attached. Also the little wings are quite moveable and can be angled as liked.
People in the know will see that the base/terraforming is not complete, and Pretty is just perched on it. No way can my ‘weak old fingers’ clip together the turn-table thingy that the two little birds sit on. That will have to wait for a visitor.
[One thing good to see is how well the scenery backdrop works, this is part of the eventual town diorama]
Just tripped over the above post while searching for a more wholesome, easier to use theme for Reet’s Brick Town. It blows me away the stuff still to be found, here and there, despite that so much is being fenced off behind paywalls and in personal domains.
I remember the beginning of the internet, when it was the wild west, when everything was free … a sort of common ground where anything could be borrowed, referenced and returned by dint of letting it go.
Thinking about grief, and what helped me recover, I was surprised to discover I’ve used the strategy-following four times in the last 25 years.
When I was 50, after two years of floundering with ME/CFS and grieving over the loss of my previous life, I still needed a lot of down-time. I decided I needed an activity I’d never done before to get into a place where I didn’t have to worry about the disease and everything that went with it. Where I could spend a bit of time creating, relaxing, being a normal person. I gave myself an hour, whether I produced anything or not. A lot of time was thinking about it.
Obviously, an activity I’d never done before needed time learning how to do it and lots of it. That was part of the charm. I had a lot of time. I decided I would learn how to write flash fiction, little stories of about 500 words. I’d read plenty but never written other than letters at that point. Learning is by doing. So every morning I would spend an hour writing or thinking up what I would write. On the backs of envelopes and other scrap paper at first. Eventually I got my son a word-processor and used that too. Writing gave me a reason for not feeling bad about having to spend so much time alone. It helped pass the time. As I grew stronger I began to spend more time on it and one thing led to another.
Then my mother died. I recall coming home after the funeral, aware of a huge empty space in my mind where she’d been. I had been thinking I wanted to learn how to paint with watercolors, but no time, sick mother. The next day I bought a cheap set of little tubes, five colors, with two brushes and a plastic daisy-shaped paint mixing thing that I still use six years later.
I painted on all kinds of paper at first, the back of weetbix cartons and the backs of calendars. A few free online youtube lessons and away we go. I posted many of my efforts here and on my FB page. Had a great time in between all the sad thoughts and might’ve beens.
Fast forward to 2020. I was diagnosed with lymphoma, had 5 months of chemo, moved to Brisbane, weak as a kitten, and fumble-fingered in the extreme due to neuropathy, a side effect of my chemo. After a couple of months of recovery I cast around for a way to retrain my fine-motor coordination. I tried knitting but could only hold the knitting pins for a few rows. Flat puzzles didn’t do it for me. Pieces hard to pick up. I got my son’s 30 year old Lego out. Made all his models, learning to follow the instruction booklets. Started to make my own ideas. Decided I needed more Lego … started to feel better. I’m building a tabletop town.
January 2023, with three huge stresses all coming together, I fell apart. I didn’t at first know what was happening. Lots of fatigue. More allergies reared their heads. Fluttering heart. Hot feet. Eventually recalled my ME/CFS symptoms. Learned all the modern names for them. POTS. PEM. To name but two. I was obviously in a flare-up.
At that time I had already been posting little slideshows of my Lego stories to my FB page, for my friends. So when I felt slightly better, I decided to start a blog with Lego stories. That needed a lot of thinking through first. Now already it’s hard to limit myself to one hour a day. There’s the building. Ordering spare parts which means poring over various online secondhand Lego catalogues. Writing stories for the characters to act out. Taking photos of the scenes. Editing photos. Blog posts etc etc.
Some days I hardly think about my crappy indoor life. Before I know it, it is time to go for a little walk. Then make my dinner. Watch TV one hour. Paint dreams for one hour …this last is my third thing that is helping me recover. Another time for that one. Bed.
After I read an article recently on how to make the perfect coffee1 I started to experiment on how to make ‘my’ perfect coffee. Coffee and I have had a troubled relationship for a while now. In my youth, say my 20s to 30s, I regularly drank up to 3 espressos for breakfast. I got into the espresso habit while traveling overseas. In many places cow’s milk was not available.
When middle age hit, I had to cut back on the amount of caffeine everyday as my heart and brain became more and more intolerant of its effects. For about six years, I could only drink green tea2 with only two or three tea-leaves in teapot.
Finally, I entered a time of falling over. Six falls with various injuries such as a broken wrist, and six months later a broken thumb. A General Practitioner stopping by my bed in hospital, told me to drink one cup of coffee a day, to wire me up, he said.
I started that and it works. The only time I have fallen since, was when I was unable to take the cure due to gastric illness. Another big plus is the taste. I love my long black.
However, now that I am in my seventies, I’m becoming intolerant again. It’s so frustrating to have to give up drinking coffee socially. If I have it at 11 AM, when most coffee meet-ups happen, it’ll interfere with my night’s sleep. Like, I don’t sleep that night!
A long black, with between 105 to 240 mgs of caffeine per a 250 mls mugs is way too strong for me now. It’s useless me buying them. A waste of money. I can only drink half or less and have to throw the rest away. At home I used to make myself a plunger coffee daily, with 8 grams of strong ground coffee. And that’s off the menu too now.
So I’m experimenting. Rather than decreasing my intake until I hit the sweet spot, I decided to work up from a lower than necessary level, to also re-establish my sleep pattern.
But, 2.5 grams of coffee does not make a very satisfying cup. [I decided to start with 2.5 purely based on the measuring spoons I have.] Then I read about a coffee and cocoa mix. How the cocoa flavanoids have a good effect on platelets, a blood component, and the caffeine content is lower than in coffee. Since I definitely need more platelets, having lost most of mine during chemo, I was looking for a way to add cocoa to my diet without sugar. So that’s my drink for the present.
2.5 grams ground coffee, 2.5 grams cocoa powder in a mug. Add hot water. Stir. Allow to brew. Don’t stir before drinking. The coffee grounds sink. Very mellow.
How I imagine the pesky little critters, by Rita de Heer
Despite the Rebuilding the Hardware Store post being downloaded nine times, no one has commented on the irritatingly small size print in the second slide, first slide of the story. Maybe when you download it, it isn’t bothersome?
It’s a puzzle to me that something that seems fixed in a supposedly published text nevertheless changes size when transferred to another platform. Why? Why? Why? And the rest of the slides are fine. Must be a gremlin in the system. One of them above. Painted with watercolors, outlines with black ink.
Wait now, I was going to try a different font.
I see that just talking about it caused the gremlins to cut me down to size by cutting the Albert Sans font down … yet not down to the ‘small’ size mentioned in the box to the right, headed by ‘Typography’, but a size intermediate to ‘small’ and ‘medium’ as the size I’m typing in now is ‘medium’.
Yep. OK. I just customized my size. And so we will type at 20 px forevermore. It looks the same size as the paragraph above. So, something I learned. M is 20 px. I hardly dare to click anything else on the right today.
I was meant to go out … look at this! WTF! I’m not in the habit of swearing out loud but this is very irritating! Small, again. Probably 15 px. I don’t like it.
I was meant to go out today for a medical appointment, a yearly heart check-up. So at nine A/M sat on my couch and fell asleep. Dreamed even. A pair of sharks, visible only by their fins, swam from a moat into a water channel running through a medieval castle. As witnessed by a couple of guards on a pedestrian walkway adjacent. Their surprise woke me.
By about 9.30, with four more completely unrelated dream scenes, I decided a coffee might wake me. Uneventfully washed out my coffee plunger, put in the ground coffee, poured on the not-quite-boiling water. Let it steep for five minutes while I gathered up a load of washing and started the washing machine.
Stirred the plunger with my wooden stirrer, pressed down the plunger and poured the coffee into my favorite mug. As I went to sit back on the couch at the same time setting the mug beside me on a little table, I naturally spilled the coffee all over me and the couch. When did I ever try such a crazy move?
Mopped up. Decided there and then to either have the couch cut apart so I could in a next similar instance–it’s bound to happen again–dry the cushions in the sun; or get a new, different couch. Or probably a different secondhand couch.
I was to leave for the appointment at 2 pm. Plenty of time to get my act together, I thought. With half an hour to spare, it started raining. I had to haul in the washing drying out on the washing line, hang in under the patio. My big plan of catching a bus, walking through a park, catching another bus went out the window. Dithering was my next strategy.
Time went by while I figured out how to get there instead. On foot, rain-coated, walking four kilometres? Not an option while I’m so tired. Cab? None to be had at short notice. Uber? Uber has a problem with my email address that I’ve never been able to fix. Call it an Uber gremlin. Bus the whole way? Four hundred metres to the appropriate bus stop? Don’t think so.
At 1 pm, I called the place to reschedule the appointment. Got to believe I’m ‘sickening for something’ … what I used to call it when I had kids around. I’m fiddling around on this when normally I’m out walking this time of the day. No energy.
Gremlins love it when I’m not well enough to be sharp. What about you, Readers? You have run-ins with gremlins?
This is totally experimental, did it in Canva, still a raw beginner, so expect to see glitches. Please let me know if any have slipped through my radar.
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)]
Rita de Heer 