G'Day,
Today I went out for lunch with Mum to Dickson where there is a strip of all kinds of restaurants. There is many types of Asian and Indian foods and Turkish, Italian, etc. And the chain food places like Subway and KFC. We had Yum Cha. Very nice it was too.
Then we drove round to the Film and Sound Archives and spent the rest of the afternoon dawdling through there. The archives consist of a collection of Australian radio, film and T.V. history. They preserve and repair old films etc. One of the things in their collection is all but 17 minutes of the worlds first feature length film. It is a Ned Kelly film, no sound and of course no colour made in the very early part of last century, I can't remember dates. Mum enjoyed it as did I. I think it bought back some nice old memories for her of early film and advertising. There were clips of early radio broadcasts, she even piped up in the middle of the presenters presentation that her Mum used to play piano for the picture theatre in Menindee before they had any sound to accompany them.
Something else that Mum knew about, that we saw there, was a radio announcer from the early days called Jack Davey. She used to be his housekeeper for a couple of years in Sydney. She said he was a bit of a pig and a womaniser. He was originally from New Zealand.
Got me thinking about the stuff we see and experience through out our lives. The changes we go through along the way.
Mum was born in 1922, the first of her 6 siblings and one adopted child,(their cousin) to be born in Griffith, N.S.W, in a place called bag town, (that is what the houses were made of) which was later renamed Hanwood and is now famous as a fruit and wine producing area. Her parents were early settlers there. She grew up singing and dancing and bike riding. She even held the Australasian women's record for road racing on her bike for many years before some one beat it. Her mother was a music teacher and taught them all to sing or play an instrument for the family dance band, "The Rhythm Aces". She was known for her lovely voice. She was quite the tomboy and tells many happy stories of those days hanging out with her brother and her great mate, my uncle Wally. When she was young she was picked out by some talent scout bloke from Hollywood who wanted to take her back there with him, but her parents said no way. Her first marriage was at 17 and a disaster and she moved away to Sydney in the war years. She was at Bondi beach and had left there just minutes before hundreds of bathers were swept out to sea by a freak wave. She was also there when Sydney harbor was attacked by mini submarines which sunk a navy ship there. She recalls the sirens and search lights and the harbor lit up by explosions. Fate must have had more in store for her to live through all of that. She bought up three daughters, often through difficult financial times. With an absent first husband and a second husband, my Dad, often away from home with his work.
She now has three grandsons and five grand daughters, three great grand children and two great great grandchildren and another due in august this year. Quite an achievement. Even though she drives me mad, you can see from my writing today that I am proud of her. We are quite different, but the same. She talks non stop, I think quietly without it all tumbling out of my mouth. Discussing the minuate of life annoys me and I can get a job finished while others are still discussing how it should be done. She loves a drama, I steer away from them as much as I can. We don't think alike, thank goodness. We do look alike, though I am a bigger build than her. We have aches and pains in similar places.
I wonder if I will be around that long and if so in what condition.
She is 87 in November this year, still mobile and doing quite well for some one her age.
For some unknown reason the blogger site had decided to not recognise my password even though it has not been changed so I have not been able to sign in here for the last few days. All is fixed now.
Tomorrow I have to face up to my boss Brett and tell him that the cleaning jobs I have been doing are too tough for me and I want to cut back. I am dreading it as I feel like I am letting him down but also that I am getting older and can't afford to be knocking myself around with hard work. I want to ask him if I can cut back on doing the school I have been cleaning on Thursday and Friday nights, as by the end of the week I can barely move and am walking like a 90 year old. For the last two weekends I have been over tired and been in pain with my back. As I now have arthritis I need to take more care of myself. I don't think he will sack me but I don't think he will be happy about it either. I am a chicken when it comes to stuff like this. Wish me good luck.
O.K. gotta go now and cook some dinner as my dearly beloved will be home from work soon.
Bye Love Linda