Sue – Page 15

Computer Blues

Filed Under: Reflections, Wordpress · February 8, 2012 · 2 Comments ·

Technology is a wonderful thing. A boon to us all, a time-saver and a wondrous miracle of information, communication and connection…

… when it works! :)

And when it doesn’t? It’s a pain in the proverbial, a huge time-eater and a frustrating, bang-your-head-against-the-wall monster of immense proportions!

That’s exactly what it’s been for me for the last three days.

I’d just completed a gazillion (well it felt like that, at the time) improvements and tweaks to all our sites. And our main BJ Seminars International site had gone through a major overhaul – new focus, new design, new content. The work on all the sites had been done mainly in an hour or few here and there – but the whole process had taken a couple of weeks.

I’d finally finished it all off, working late on Saturday night. I knew that, now it was done, a full backup of all sites was needed. But I was tired. And of course those backups could wait until the morning, couldn’t they?

Boy, was I wrong!

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Farewell My Lovely

Filed Under: Journeys, Reflections, Resources, Stories · November 12, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

My badly neglected blog has been calling me to write for some time – but today it’s a sad post I’m finally writing.

This morning I am saying farewell to one of my beautiful Tonkinese cats.

Seven years ago Hershey and Creamy came to me as adults from a breeder, after they’d had their litters. Such different personalities, with different quirks and habits, both have been a wonderful joy in my life. Two furry mischiefs who have, with gentle paws and soft voices, taken their firm places in my heart.

But now poor Creamy has developed an inoperable cancer. Although several visits to the vet over the last few months gave no answers, now they can feel the large mass in her tummy. She has become restless and is obviously increasingly uncomfortable. She’s almost stopped eating and has lost so much weight so quickly, that she’s feather-light in my arms.

So today it’s time to say goodbye – before she starts to suffer in earnest. It’s time for a last breakfast, a last ‘yin-yang snooze’, curled up with Hershey. And lots of pats and cuddles before her final visit to the vet.

Such a hard decision – and I am typing this through my tears. But when our hearts are too full to find our own words, it can be comforting to find someone else has said it for us:

A Pet’s Prayer

If it should be that I grow frail and weak,
And pain should keep me from my sleep,
Then, you must do what must be done
For this, the last battle, can’t be won.
Don’t let your grief stay your hand,

For this day more than the rest,
Your love and friendship stand the test.
We’ve had so many years,
What is to come can hold no fear.
You’d not want me to suffer, so
When the time comes, please let me go.

Take me where my needs they’ll tend,
Only, stay with me to the end
And hold me firm and speak to me
Until my eyes no longer see.
I know in time you’ll see it is a kindness you do for me
Although my tail its last has waved,
From pain and suffering I’ve been saved.

Don’t grieve it should be you who this thing decides to do.
We’ve been so close, we two, these years,
Don’t let your heart hold tears.
Smile, for we walked together for a while.

(Author Unknown)

Laugh, Kookaburra, Laugh!

Filed Under: Reflections · July 16, 2011 · 5 Comments ·

Almost every child who has grown up in Australia over the last 50 years or so learned a song in primary school called “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree“.

How many of you remember singing this one waaaaay back all those years ago, as I do? And it’s still taught to primary school children today, as in this YouTube video made in 2009.

What you may not know – as I did not until a recent controversy – was that the song was penned 79 years ago by a Melbourne school music teacher, Marion Sinclair.

She wrote the song in 1932 and later entered it into a competition run by the Girl Guides Association of Victoria in 1934. The rights to the winning song in this competition were to be sold to raise money for a camping ground (which became Britannia Park). The first performance of the song was at a Girl Guides jamboree in 1934, held at Frankston in Victoria, to which the Baden-Powells (founders of the Guiding and Scouting movements) also came.

Fast forward 54 years … Marion Sinclair died in 1988, when publishing rights to the song passed to Larrikin Music.

Meanwhile, in 1979 and 1981, an Aussie band called Men at Work had written and performed a song called Down Under. The song became very popular, gaining heaps of airtime on many radio stations.

And for many of us who remember the 80s, Down Under became almost as much an Aussie icon as the Kookaburra song we learned at school. :)

Simple so far, yes? But here’s where things get more complicated …

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