More Things to do in Summer

Mrs Bloggs has been busy this summer  it is our first bottling (Americans call it canning) season.
Squiz the bench space taken over by bottles of apricots and the start of a cupboard full:

To Love Another Person is to See the Face of God!

Go figure this as a dual theme for the summer holidays:

I was given, by my daughter, and am reading a newer translation of Les Miserables.
I also went to see the movie on New Years Day.
The ebook I am reading this summer is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Les Mis is on of the most powerful stories written and the musical, and now the movie, opens deep emotions about what it means to rise above one's past, to seek redemption from wrongs and what it means to love.
The God Delusion explains that there is no God, that sins cannot be forgiven and that 'love' is meerly the effect of neurally active chemicals in the brain that evolution has ensured is the mechanism to ensure loyalty to one co-parent!
Go figure!
A great line from the book looks at the 'proofs of God's existance' by Thomas Aquinas one of which states that 'Things in the world, especially living things, look as though they have been designed. Nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Therefore there must be a designer and we call him God.' Dawkins goes on to mention a schoolfriend who, when studying geometry smuggled into a Euclidean proof that 'Triangle ABC looks isosceles, therefore it is isoseles'. Love it! (and that must mean that neurally active chemicals in my brain have reacted favourably to that story.
And then, some of the final lines from Les Mis:
FANTINE
Come with me
Where chains will never bind you
All your grief
At last, at last behind you.
Lord in Heaven,
Look down on him in mercy.

VALJEAN
Forgive me all my trespasses
And take me to your glory.

FANTINE & EPONINE
Take my hand
And lead me to salvation.
Take my love,
For love is everlasting.

VALJEAN, FANTINE & EPONINE
And remember
The truth that once was spoken
To love another person
Is to see the face of God.

How does your garden grow?

I can only take credit for helping to build the boxes. Mrs Bloggs does the actual planting, feeding, tending and watering.

So we have three different varieties of tomato...

yellow zucchini,

regular zucchini,

 onions drying off - almost ready to pick,

 spring onions, carrot, lettuce, beetroot, some random cat,

 climbing beans (I still don't know how to rotate pics in this program),

 corn - nearly as high as an elephants eye,

 the great pumpkin pacth,

 and strange teepees - we stick drill a hole in a tennis ball and push it on to the end of a length of conduit and tie the conduit to the tree trunk. This then holds the bird nets up over the fruit trees.

This time of year is good in the garden.

I'll call it craft

When I take my new airplane out for a fly I spend the evening afterward with glue, scissors, plastic ice cream lids and bobby pins.

This machine has a had the nose cone glued back in place, a new wing fin made from an ice cream lid fitted, new under-wing landing guides made from bobby pins, the rear section of the fuselage glued back in place, the battery compatment door catch glued in and some strenthening tape added to the upper cockpit area.

I am getting better at flying it - at least the crash landings seem to be less severe.

Let's talk about friends and friendship

I'm thinking back to 1976. We were camping with a school group. It must have been near Alice Springs. Here are, us four friends, brought together by our geography and demography. We were merely the same age, growing up in the same area and ended up in the same public school. That was all that friendship was made of in those years.

Is that a bad thing?

From left to right:

Luke was one of the nicest of people I have met. He went to NIDA I heard. Something to do with stage direction or lighting.  I never heard from him again after this year.

Gavin was a good bloke. Supplied us with some good whiskey at times. I managed to stay out of trouble but still managed to spent some great schooldays down at the beach with a bottle of Johnny Walker or two. Remember in particular 'borrowing' David Lockyear's little Corola (I think) and going for a spin to the beach. I had no license and hadn't ever even driven a car but we still made it to the beach, put down a bottle and made it back to school alive! I think Gavin took an apprenticeship somewhere. I never heard from him again.

David was a good mate. He lived up the road from me and we spent some time together. We even camped out in my backyard one night - do you remember that night David? I bumped into David at the beach one day. Our kids were taking swimming classes at the same time. This was soon after I ran for parliament on a 'Save Our Schools' platform. He said he voted for me. He was the only person I have ever met that had said that to me. I have not seen him since.

That's me on the right. That's 36 years ago. I sometimes feel no older than that and yet at the same time feel that that was another world away.

So, where do our friends go?

They go and live their own lives and, I suppose, we go and live our own.

My mother has a friend that she met when she was a teenager. They would often spend their holidays together. they speak to each other at least every year but they don't travel to see each other anymore. It has probably been 20 years or so since they've seen each other. But they are friends. How many people can we count as friends in or life? Should we be counting?

What is it with words and music?

Great songwriters can bring forth from a series of notes and letters some of the deepest emotions of our lives. If our lives a just a series of waking, eating, working, sleeping and repeating then so be it but just stop and listen to a piece, any piece, of Les Miserable and try not to moisten in the eyes - go on - i dare you. But let me break that down a bit.
Good song writing seems to be made from the juxtaposition of the personal with the global. let me expand. A favourite song of mine is 'A Great Day for Freedom' from 'The Division Bell' album. In this song the writer pulls together the idea that great divisions in nations (walls?) can be broken down and new days dawn wherein people can see new light and freedom. the writer in this piece also directly compares that great nationwide breaking down of barriers with his own personal insights into intimate emotional re connections.

The story of Les Miserables follows the journey of one Jean Valjean a poor retched creature who seeks redemption from his poverty and crime in revolutionary France. The songs in the musical adaptation speak of despair, revenge, revolution, friendship, forgiveness and finally, redemption. but all of these emotions are set against both a personal journey as well as a national upheaval. You see - we can all measure our own journeys through and within the journeys of our our societies.

so, when a great song brings tears to ones eyes is that just a rhythm creating a biological reaction or are we as humans attuned to feel deep and heartfelt meaning to words and music?

A new whiteboard can solve everything, part 2

Well, the whiteboard is up.

All I've managed to put on it at the moment is some post-it notes from my desk.
That is a start and actually a good start because those notes were attached to various parts of my desk which is now becoming clearer by the minute and once again allowing me to see the various adornments that have been added to my desk over the years. Presents from my wife and daughters that remind me of them and how blessed I have been.

 The Turkish style magnifying glass that seems to allude to my failing eyesight.

The wooden 3D jigsaw wine glass (which I cannot seem to rotate in the program) which combines three things I like in one object.

1. Wine, naturally,

2. wooden objects and

3. a desire to solve problems and return things to some sense of order. 

The hand made elephant themed recycled notepaper box which now houses some of my secret and useful cards. 

And the pin clock which is simply amusing.

The new whiteboard however is not amusing, nor elephant themed, nor will it require magnifying but it will create some order to things - in business - in life - and in my mind so that I can indeed celebrate all that is good - home - family and life.