Boo, some nostalgia, and recent visits

Hello from a rainy (most days some precip) and pretty cool NZ. Our thoughts and prayers are being sent out to Bill and his family in their recent struggles with a poor hand fate has dealt them. Lots of support from their friends should help them get through this hard time. We are fine. We had a lovely visit with Sue and her mom, here for a week. Toward the end of their stay a nice guy has been coming over and is building a replacement fence for the old, beat up, cracked and gnarly painted one that was there along the east side of our property, plus adding fencing at either end to provide yet another enclosed space in which Charlie the wonder dog might amble at her highnesses convenience. We did take her to a two day stay south of Taupo, and also took there our out-of-town guests, seeking snow but alas, alack none was found within driving range of our vehicles (though had we had chains or a four wheel drive vehicle we could have gone higher in elevation and found some, for Emily had plans to make a snow angel, throw a snow basll at Joseph, etc.). Previous to that jaunt I had a nice trip to Auckland riding a bus up and another back, on the Naked Bus line, though to my disappointment (sp?) there was no nudity anywhere (or perhaps to my shame for wrong thoughts?). The maratime museum was splendid, with many fine models. Also went to a natural history museum with a variety of exhibits, some creaky, some not. Walked a lot, too. Per recommendation of a podiatrist had bought some Asic gel running shoes, designed to reduce my tendency to pronate my arthritic feet, and they do make a (positive) difference. Stayed in Mt. Eden, with no sign of Adam or Eve, at a Quaker owned rest house, could take the train or a bus there from downtown, free for old geezers like me, after nine a.m. Ferry free, too. But it only goes in the water. Huh. Imagine that. The workshop there has inspired me to try and contact other mortals to see what I can do re possibly testing kids or adults for auditory processing disorder; the Listening Program sounded (har, har) pretty good for the right type of disorder. There are other rehab progrms for auditory processing difficulties. Google those three words in that order all on one line for more info re that topic. I'm sorry, did not mean google "those three words" - google (while you giggle?) auditory processing disorder, and you will learn more. Carrie and friends attended fielddays yesterday, a serious get together of almost everything related to mostly rural NZ life, hopefully she will blog that experience. I am trying to get pictures on Face Book. More later. Here is hoping all our readers are well and in good spirits. Manford

A lesson and fences

Well, I learned today that if you put a small Revere sauce pan on a very hot electric burner the used to be flat bottom will distort and no longer sit flat on any burner. Re: fences, Hamilton is a city full of them. What is your neighborhood like? There are small ones, short ones, some only a brick high, tall ones, decorative ones, ugly ones, freshly painted ones, mixed brick or stone and wood ones, some token ones, like one that has a post about every fifteen feet and fairly strong wire strung between them at the top and in the middle one, keep out ones around a transformer facility, with barbed wire at the top, sagging ones, new ones, old ones, painted ones, unapinted ones, partial ones, long ones, short ones, pretty ones. Look around. Let me know. It has been very interesting to note that to date we have not heard from anyone in the USA since our April visit. Hmmmm. Wonder what that means. I am planning to go to Auckland toward the end of this month for a one day workshop on a listening program that seems popular here, though controversial elsewhere or at least some places. I have built in a little extra time to see the maratime museum that is there - looks pretty good on paper, and maybe another museum. Hope the weather isn't too bad, but even if it is I'll be inside, won't I. Well take care. Hope to hear from you. Manford

It ain't over 'til it's over and it ain't over yet

It ain't over 'til it's over, and it ain't over. I apologize for not getting on the computer more often to let my faithful readers know what is up with the Barbers in NZ. We had a wonderful trip stateside in early April. We are finally settling down from that trip. A good friend from Kansas, and her mom, will be visiting in early June. Events of note - Emily's screaming girls late birthday party on May 9 that went off without mishap. She wants a living pet. Any suggestions? I thought snake, but those are not allowed into NX. Maybe a bird? No mice for me, thanks, and am allergic to cats, spiders don't seem friendly, possibly a gerbil/hamster if not a bird? Yesterday we had a brief hail storm, unlike our unfortunate neighbors to the East at Mt. Monganui, where I believe they reported 8 inches of hail and one shopping mall shut down because of flooding. Lows here are in the 40's, so we have lots of blankets on the beds. We had the carpet cleaned yesterday - thinking it would be prudent to wait until after the party to get it done. Joseph is working on a project related to NZ's part in the Vietnam conflict. Emily is designing a pocket plucker for science, a musical instrument of sorts so far composed to two 9 mm long old croquet mallet handle pieces with a rubber band or two or three tied to each, so when you hold one handle in each hand and stretch the band(s) you can pluck them with your teeth and make music. She is taking clarinet lessons at school and has to practice at home - sometimes when doing this she will hit a sour note and that sends Charlie the wonder dog skeedadling. She is pretty good. She also draws well. Does anyone in the reading group ever look at Wired on the web? Interesting article today about a guy who is trying to create a more powerful search engine than any available currently - ask it a question and it will tell you no lies. Cool. In NZ if the listener does not understand the speaker the NZ person will say "Pardon?" I also was asked to give two lectures on sound and its perception at the local uni - the first one was to me pretty bad, the second better - I do not know if I will ever be asked back or not. Will be interesting to see what happens. I learned a lot about the cochlea and organ of corti, anyway. I miss my old friends, and hope to be back for a visit in two years. We don't know when/where Joseph might go to college, and that may influence our travel plans. Well, it was so good to see old friends, and I wish all my readers well. Manford

Better late than . . .

Hello gentle reader(s). We got into Auckland International Airport a little before 5 am on Sunday, and I still have some jet lag, having not slept any significant amount of time on the good ole big iron bird in the sky - but did watch most or all of four (possibly five) movies including one Japanese, one Chinese (with subtitles), Yes Man, and something else i may remember some day. How wonderful it was to see old friends, and it was not without a touch of sadness that we left. I think that was the happiest time I had had for a long time, for adjusting to NZ has not been all peaches and cream (though it is pretty tasty here at times). We had roast chicken to eat for dinner Sunday night. The house was so pristine thanks to the house sitter and her friend. The dog was retrieved sunday late afternoon from the kennel where we take her, and looked a little shaggier but was otherwise recognizable - there was a real bark symphony (maybe Beethoven wrote a symphony for assorted size and voice barkers - one seemed to have a hoarse voice from barking so much). There are tiny, medium and large dogs at the kennel - a pretty cool place - we like the people who own/run it. Back to the past - i really wasn't sure how it would feel to go back for a visit, but it felt right. Of course, I wish we would have had more time, but we feel we did ok with what we had. Contact with old friends certainly measured out in generous dosages the value of friendship and family. I did at times feel I was in a foreign country - possibly from the differences in appearance of USAers vs. Kiwis? And the stores have such a rich bounty of things compared to NZ, which seems rich to people from a lot of countries. There were so many cars in Los Angeles (do the angels cry about this?) that I almost couldn't count them. Same for some areas in San Francisco. Fortunately more were heading north when we were heading south from Sac to SF. I found I did miss walking, since I am not very good at working things in when there are such nice people to be with. There is new construction on a major road that is about two blocks from our house, started today, i believe, and will go on for a while. I will avoid it, taking long cuts if necessary since no short ones seem to be available. I did learn from this trip - one thing being that I need to get out more, be more in contact with others, socially and intellectually. And I needs to get me muscles stronger, a la Popye (sp?). Maybe I could take up an instrument - eg gong, bell, glass bottles, stems of grass, or humming? The options seem endless, and may end my existence if i annoy others too much. Hmmmmm. Better rethink that. I will go on reading, and will try and post a list at some point of ones I especially liked or found very interesting. Emily and mom, mostly, are getting ready for her birthday bash somewhere around May 3. She will be 40 (in 31 more years), and we hope she enjoys her youth before aging kicks in. I am reading a couple of interesting nonfiction books that talk about the brain, CNS and socialization aspects. I may get to tell some people about Fast ForWord, a remedial program i like. Well, my boots and tennis shoes are made for walking, so that's what I'm gonna do and one of these days they'll walk right back to you. Salud and love to all. Manford

An interesting week

This has been an interesting week. Carrie left last Sunday for Sacramento - she flew Auckland to San Francisco then got a ride with a friend of her mother to Sacramento. We have lost a very lovely man, Vince, Carrie's step dad - he passed away a few days before she got there. She has been, I am sure, a great help to her mom (or mum as they say here). The kids have been real troopers, with little fussing or complaining. As often happens, things did not go as I had expected, primarily blood test results came back and Emily was diagnosed as having whooping cough. So, she had to go on a regimen of an antiboitic, and was told to not go to school or any other activities for five days, to give the medicine time to do its work. I negotiated this down to four days with her school nurse. We suspect she had pertussis for some weeks prior to the blood test results date, but the rules are once it is diagnosed there is an isolation period. So she won't reinfect already infected ones? So she has been pretty much mome bound since this past Wednesday, missing a school swimming meet, chapel at school (this is a mandatory requirement one time a term - hope we are not all doomed to Hell for not going), drama lesson, tennis on Saturday, a picnic on Friday (it was called off because of rain), and a birthday party (she will party on dude with the little girl who invited her at some unkown date). Joseph has an amazing (to me, anyway) new computer game - Empire Total War - that is not in the Quaker tradition you would think, but prior to any wars it is pacific - it lets him create towns and settle other territories, I believe, and of course as with most of the new software has remarkable (again, to me) graphics. Of course it has also caused him to want a more advanced graphics card! He has a little more homework. Emily has some Mon - Thurs, and is liking the clarinet (no way as squeaky as a violin can be, at least in her capable hands - with encouragement from her mom, whose clarinet it is, and who played clarinet for many year). Well to change the subject, we watch the news from MSN, NY Times, other papers and internet sites, and hope none of our readers have been deeply stung - I am hoping that if we are patient enough we will get back, if not all, at least some of our mutual funds and other investments. So far New Zealand does not seem to be hurting quite as much, though house valaues have gone down considerably and the NZ dollar is the weakest it has been in a long time. There are still flowers of one or another kind blooming prettily but leaves are starting to turn on the relatively few decidious trees, and there is a little touch of fall in the air. We are looking forward to our April visit. Hope all of you are well and getting along ok. Remember the phrase in fake latin - Illigitimus non carborundam (I think I almost spelled it right - look it up in Wikipedia for a number of different versions). Sincerely, Manford

I'm back in the saddle again

Well, not really. But I am today feeling much more like the old me. It is a lovely day here, temp in the 60's this morning. I took Charlie for a walk, left her in the back yard, and walked some more to the local grocery store, and as a reward had a scoop of hokey pokey icecream. I have a few aches and pains, but my surgery went well and blessedly I don't have to go pee nearly as often. Let's see: I had laser surgery on my eye to close up a small retinal tear, then on my bladder to demolish a bladder stone (wonder how they did that ? I don't see any scars) so I guess next will be one or the other foot - maybe to wipe out a virulent foot fungus? Oh, well. Here is a family update: Charlie recently went to the vet for a sore on her nose - it seems to be clearing up, hooray. Emily has her first clarinet lesson at school today. She has lost/misplaced her uniform hat so we will probably need to buy another. Joseph has more homework by far than last year. Carrie is still not having to teach - classes start in March, but is very busy with research and with departmental matters. You have already heard enough about me. There are lots of peppers on our raised-bed pepper plants. We had some burly guys come and take out all the junk vegetation (privet hedges, grass, miscellaneous green things) so right now, today, our flower/plant beds look swell - I will really try to keep up with removing unwanted things from the beds from now on out. Rhubarb plants are very interesting - huge leaves, and you don't eat them, do you. Our strawberry plants have pretty much stopped making strawberries. Our tomato plants would, if we let them, take over the world, so it is snick, snick, snick to their unwanted branches. Marigolds have done well. Something is eating holes in the recently planted broccoli plants. Charlie is digging holes in the yard here and there. We will soon be putting down more bark in the beds. We are having pasta and homemade by Carrie tomato sauce and garlic bread tonight. Energy companies here are discouraging baths - one ad shows a bird on the edge of a plastic small pool, with the text "baths are for birds. Have a shower instead." Our nice big phillips lcd tv has been intermittently going blank though the sound remains on, so we have left it at a local repair shop for diagnosis and possible treatment. We had a sweet Valentines day, and hope you did, too. More later, hot potater.

When the examiner starts calling you "sir" you know

Welcome to my story page. Every year I have to take a driving test, with a driving instructor and an occupational therapist giving me their attention as I ferry them around in my car under varous conditions (country driving vs. city) for which I pay them a couple of hundred bucks. Well we started off on not so good a footing - after a short time I was asked to pull over and was told I needed to look in the rear view mirror more often, keep more to the center of the street or road and scan upcoming cross streets for possible intruders (well, something like that). I did those things better and did fine at speed (up to an exciting 60 miles an hour, or 100 kilometers per hour), then I was so happy that the test was almost over that I forgot some of the things I was supposed to do (like signal a left turn when going through a traffic circle and continuing on straight) and did not watch my speed so went a little fast in traffic and the instructor said something that included the term "sir" which I realized was a sign of displeasure. Sure enough my lack of defensive driver got commented on, but they are still letting me drive. Whew. I need to keep drivig to get Emily to and from her new school. Enough of that. Except as I watch other drivers I think they would get zapped more than me - as they cruise into the bicycle lane, fail to signal when they should, etc. Ah, well. For some reason I became rather brain dead, or developed writer's block, after our South Island trip, and life has not been a barrel of laughs - I had a bladder stone and could not get it taken out for no charge at the local hospital for at least six months, more or less, because they don't have enough docs and suites to meet the general populaces needs - so paid for having it done privately, in secret, far away from the prying eyes of the hospital. Apparently I did not recover consciousness in the recovery room, but in the post recovery room. And I was out from a cocktail of various drugs that worked quickly. I am much improved in the bladder department so I guess I will stop wearing diapers (just kidding). But enough about me. We are thrilled to think we will be seeing old friends during our upcoming April visit to the states. I will have more to say tomorrow. I want to post this before I erase it. Manford