family

Sunday Selections Week 29

12 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

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This week I am posting a couple of photos taken in February 2003 of Yananyi Dreaming. You can read more about the flying art aircraft of Qantas here – Flying Art.

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We got to photograph both sides of the plane which is a somewhat rare occurance.

Would you like to join in? The rules are very simple:-
1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title
2. link back to River at Drifting Through Life, somewhere in your post
3. leave River a comment so that she knows you’ve joined in and can come over and see what you’ve posted.

Weekly Wrap Up –

On Friday this week, I received the best SMS ever from my Aunt. I’m going to share it with you, plus my reply.

Hi Sparkles just wanted to let you know scans I had came back showing NO cancer so I’m in remission according to my doctor.

FYI Sparkles is my nickname because I am usually wearing at least one sparkly item. :) My reply went like this –

What a happy moment! Yay. There are no suitable words for this news. I may have to get out the thesaurus.

I’m taking a week off from the weekly wrap up this week. I did not feel very inspired to save links this week. I’ve had yet another cold and I am losing my patience for pretty much everything at this point. :) Though that SMS cheered me up enormously.

My Aunt is coming up to visit in early August, so I’m wondering whether I should put together a celebration package or just put together a gift bag for when she gets here. I am leaning towards the latter because my last package took over a month to arrive. I posted it the same day I posted a package to Sephyroth and he received his within a week, and his package went from Australia to the USA!

family, Sunday Selections, weekly wrap up

Art Time Travel

10 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Back in 2008 I had an art project which did not work out – I had tried sticking sequins to a canvas with glue which dulled the sparkly sequins. Rather than lose the canvas, and because I had already drawn the stencil onto it, I used modelling paste to build up a texture of my Denkyem stencil.

I was not sure what I was going to do with this or whether it would work out in the end. I thought maybe I would paint it one colour and then dry brush in some gold or silver over the top.

The last thing I posted about it, that is how the canvas looked. And then I got distracted by other things and/or forgot to post any further updates. I wasn’t sure myself what had happened with it, until I was cleaning up my art room and found the completed work in a box.

Now, it looks like this –

timetravel

I think it turned out pretty well in the end. :) You certainly cannot tell there are sequins under there, and the texture is really nice. The silver metallic paint helps it to jump out of the canvas. If I were to do it again, I might do a matt black underneath the silver and allow some of the black to show through in the lower areas, just to make the texture pop a little more.

You can read the original posts here – Work In Progress – and here – Short Update plus you can see another work I did with the Denkyem stencil here – Opinions Needed

About Snoskred, family, looking back, Snoskred Art, yay

My Chinese Aunt

6 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

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You may recall my post about My Uncle from a little while back. Now, here is the story of how I got a Chinese Aunt as a surprise to myself.

First of all, there was a relationship misfire. My uncle brought out a lady from China and moved her in with my long suffering Aunt and Uncle, with whom he had ended up living before he left for China. They stayed for 3 months and it was quite the nightmare. She clearly could not handle many of his OCD tics, nor could she tolerate the amount he was drinking which at the time was quite a lot..

The fact that he was quite determined to learn zero Chinese, the fact that he dumbed down his English to things like “I no like” or “It is the Up Money”, the fact that he had little money and he wanted to hang onto as much of it as he could, even to the point of denying this poor woman a bag of peanuts while he bought a bottle of scotch a day and as much red wine as he felt like.. plus the fact that he made this woman do everything for him including emptying his ashtrays.. I am assuming none of this was awesome in her book.

So they went back to China, where she unceremoniously dumped him, and he went looking for a new wife to be. After a while he did find a lady and they moved in together, and thus began his three years of living in a country where he did not speak the language at all, and he resented the fact that she spoke Chinese with her family, plus he was irritated that he couldn’t read any of the menus at restaurants, nor did he like any of the food.

After three years they decided to return to Australia, even though it meant she had to leave her excellent long term Chinese job, plus now she was in a country where she did not speak the language. She does get English lessons with her visa but he is the one who has to organise it and he has not managed it thus far, even though I have given him all the information to do so. She could not easily get a job doing what she used to do, so now she works too many days a week at a local Chinese massage place.

My Chinese Aunt is fantastic and we all love her, even though some of us do have a concern that she’ll be out the door once she gets her permanent residency – and I would not blame her if she was, to be honest. She has a daughter to a previous husband and there is already talk of her daughter and her daughters husband coming out here to live. chtoes

My Chinese Cousins toes in the gorgeous white sand.

So I also have a Chinese cousin. They visited here a little while back and we took them touring about a bit, they loved it. Even though I do not speak Chinese and the daughter has only a little bit of English, we communicated very well. I took them for a day at the beach and it was amazingly gorgeous there – the water was crystal clear, the sun was shining, even *I* went in for a swim.

I’ve told my Uncle to his face that I would find it difficult to tolerate him, and I’ve told him he needs to seek some help for his depression and OCD which just a few months ago had his wife in tears during a family visit and writing “depression” and “anxiety” in Chinese on her phone and translating it to English for us.

I fear if he does not deal with his issues, she’ll be gone faster than he can blink – just as the previous ladies were. We’re not talking a little OCD, we’re talking things like turning a computer on and off for an hour, or checking many times that his cigarette has been extinguished.

I do believe that the spousal visa system needs tightening up. Just my opinion. There are way too many people from other countries married to our older Australians whose marriages last *exactly* the amount of time it takes to get permanent residency here and not a day more.

I think the easiest way to fix this would be for permanent residency to take a much longer time than it presently does, which is 2 years at the moment, or a requirement that if the partner leaves before a certain amount of time – 10 years, I think would be fair – their permanent residency is revoked as well.

Aussie Culture, family

Being That Person..

5 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

cards1
Some of my stored cards.

Since my Aunt was diagnosed with cancer a while back, I’ve become that person.. you know, that person who suddenly realises that many things have been left unsaid, and now is the time to speak up and say them.

The realization that most of the important adults in my family are now over 60 and the reality that there will come a time when they are no longer able to hear those things I have always wanted to say to them.. it is time to get it together and say those things now.

They are all positive things but writing them down in a card gives me happy tears every time. I just did one this week for her partner, my uncle, and it contained the line “Even if I were to say thank you in every language on the planet, there would still not be enough thank yous in the world to say to you for everything that you have done for our family”.

I’m not saying the things to my Aunt yet because she has a lot to deal with right now, though I do plan to say them once her treatment is done. Though, she might have got a look at the card I sent to my other Aunt, which said many of the things I do want to say to her.

Because I’m 1500kms away, I’ve been sending her packages with chatty, hopefully funny cards, and little treats and goodies. She’s been enjoying them and sending me sms’s in return.

I’m so lucky to have these people in my life, and I am really thankful to be letting them know how I feel now rather than leaving it too late to say these things to them.

The details of doing this are pretty simple. When I am out and about in the world, I always keep an eye out for blank cards with beautiful drawings or photos. They must be blank on the inside, because I want to write my own things inside, not some random person making up words that do not relate to me or my people.

You can find a lot of card stands in shops with $1 blank inside cards now. My chemist has one, and two shops away from the chemist is Loot, which has a couple of different stands.

When I see them and I like them, I buy them and put them in a safe place. There’s a photo of some at the top of the post, and here are a few more. I keep them stashed away in a drawer..

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I often buy more than one copy of the cards when I see them, because the same card might go to totally different states and households. Doubling up is not such a big deal, as long as I keep track of which cards I have sent to which person. These cards above are actually fifth copies of these cards. I really like the images.

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The red card in the top corner actually has gold cherry blossoms on it. That one is a Loot card. Here is a closer shot, even so I could not get the gold to fire everywhere on the card at the same time. :)

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Somewhere in this house, I have a ziploc bag with a multitude of cards in it, that I have stored in such a safe place that I can’t actually find it. Yay me, NOT!

So my challenge to you –

Drop by my place and find my missing ziploc bag Nope, not that! :)

get a blank but beautiful card or even make one of your own if you are so inclined – write some positive things you have always wanted to say to a family member or friend – post it this week.

About Snoskred, challenges, family, Greeting Cards, life lessons, looking back

My Uncle

12 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

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I’ve sat down to write this post so many times, and I have deleted it without posting it. But this time I am going to push through, complete it, and post it.

When I was a kid, family gatherings were my happy place. Most other kids would have done almost anything to get out of them but I have such a huge respect for the people in my family that I would always go, even if it meant missing out on time with my friends.

My Uncle has always been a bit of an odd duck, but I’ve always adored him anyway. He has a lot of quirks, quite a bit of OCD, and he loves his alcohol – possibly a little too much.

ducksmanda

He has always been an argumentative type of person. I recall many family gatherings where he started an argument with someone over something so trivial and mundane and the type of argument that cannot actually be won because there is no right and wrong.. sometimes these arguments lasted for hours.

While I never landed on his side of the argument, I had to deeply appreciate his willingness to stubbornly stick to his side of things despite many excellent arguments to the contrary. He rarely won these arguments and some of them could be raised again simply by mentioning them.

I do remember one very long family gathering where one of the cousins had $5,000 to spend, and there was a huge argument – should he buy a block of land, or a car? My Uncle was for the block of land. My cousin chose the car, which he later wrote off in an accident, and this is always mentioned when they see each other.

He split from his first wife fairly early on, and then was single for quite a long time until he found someone new, lets call her Amazing, because she had to be to put up with the things she did.

My Uncle ended up working with myself and my Dad in an electrical store for about 2 years, when I was young and just starting out in the working world. This was a time when I had many arguments with my Uncle. We are a family of salespeople, but some of us in the family refused to sell products we knew to be shoddily built. My Uncle would sell whatever got him the most commission.

One day we had a huge argument about his brand of washing machines – 99% of people would get less than 2 years out of his favoured brand, due to a built in electronics panel which always failed – in fact many of us in the industry believed it was deliberately designed to fail. He owned one himself, and the company routinely paid $20-50 per machine sold to the salesperson – they call it a “Spiv” or a “Spiff”.

My brand was built to last, had an old school mechanical dial which never failed, plus had a 10 year warranty. They did not pay spivs.

One day he arrived at work looking downcast – his washing machine electronics panel had failed. His machine was less than 18 months old and yet, out of warranty, at least for the electronics panel. The replacement panel would cost him around $300, and I said – don’t replace it, because it will just fail again! Buy my machine instead!

I could not tell you whether I finally won the argument – whether he did replace the part or not, or whether he spoke to the supplier and told them to replace it for free otherwise he would stop selling their machines. I’d guess it was the latter option if pushed, but I honestly cannot remember.

What I do remember was this electronic panel failure meant I finally won the argument with him. Though I’d always won that argument with myself all along – I knew the right thing to do was to sell the customer the most reliable product, even if it might not be the one they walked in the door asking for.

joust

I can also tell you that at any opportunity, my Uncle does not fail to remind me of this argument we once had. Neither of us even owns those washing machines anymore! He just loves to argue the old arguments, even if he lost them a long time ago.

Things were going well with my Uncle and Amazing, they bought a house together, moved in, and my Uncle was working in real estate sales and doing really well in general. Then he had a health complication and things began to fall apart. He split up with Amazing and eventually..

..he decided to leave the country and go to China to find a new wife.

*boggle*

Yes, this was quite a shocking development to the entire family, this decision seemed to arrive out of nowhere and many of us were concerned as there is a tendency for Australian men in their older years to marry Women from Asia and then the ladies take off once they get Permanent Residency here.

Coming soon – the story of my Chinese Aunt.

family, looking back

Unbelievable

4 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

pk1

Do you know anyone who is just lucky?

My Dad is seriously lucky. There have been days where he has won multiple meat trays, the $200 bonus voucher, his card has been drawn in the members draw for $1500, and he wins several hundred on the pokies as well.

But recently he broke all his previous records of luckiness and won over 7 and a half thousand in one spin on the pokies. He was playing his favourite machine which was hooked up to a state Major and Minor jackpot, and he won the major jackpot.

Unbelievable!

Even more unbelievable, I did not get passed this lucky gene. :(

family

Too Many

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

Yes, it has been a while – not because I have nothing to say, but because I have far too much to say and not enough time and energy to say it.. :)

Recently we did a redesign of The Mudflats. I was very nervous about this however it turned out awesomely.

There has been much kayaking, many summer type outings, a lot of cooking and chores done. We went on holidays back to Twin Waters at Maroochydore. We went to Adelaide for a flying visit to go to the birthday of a very good friend.

My nephews have been to visit a couple of times, and we went to visit them. We took them to Laser Skirmish which was awesome fun. I used to go to the laser skirmish in Adelaide when I was probly mid teens and they had an overnight lock in session, you would stay there overnight and play laser skirmish the whole time.

Serverguy dropped in from Japan, and got hisself married to a gorgeous and awesome lady. They visited us here and we spent several days “toodling” as my mother likes to call it, eg visiting local beaches, markets, little towns with shops, winerys. The other half is sadly not cut out for toodling, it exhausted him!

While in Sydney we took them to see the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and managed to get charged $32 for parking, for a total of maybe 20 minutes. The place we parked was I believe the Opera House parking lot. They had a sign saying flat rate parking for $15 when we entered, and yet when we left the machine charged us $32. It seems the flat rate was for the night before. Well how about getting rid of the signs then, geniuses?

Although I will say I don’t mind paying it because the 20 minutes we spent there was somewhat magical. There was a dj playing in the bar right next to where we ended up and the music was awesome. I kinda wish we’d stayed for longer.

Now the plan is for me to get a car. In some ways I like this plan, it will be handy for doing my local errands and I think I will try to get out for a beach walk each day. The best beach to walk on is quite a few kms away from here even though we back onto the water, that water doesn’t feature any beaches.

In some ways I do not like this plan – we have one garage and I’m going to have to learn to reverse into it. For this reason I am trying to get the smallest car imaginable. The other question is, do I want a manual or an automatic? I can’t quite decide.

The other half found a game on Wii that I have become quite addicted to. It is called Rune Factory Frontier.

We have had some visits from lizards recently and the cats have been encountering them in the garage as a surprise. I am not certain whether they like this surprise or are scared by it. They fluff up for hours afterwards and jump at anything touching them.

There is a new icecream shop not far from here which has gelati and it is awesome. For anyone reading this who is actually in Sydney, you want to go to this website – Pure Gelato. They deliver! And they have a massive range of flavours. And they have a learn to make gelato night. I want to go to that! ;)

Tonight we are off to Sydney to pick up some family who will be visiting for a few days. We’ve done the Sydney/Home run quite a bit lately.

Oh, and here is something *incredible*. Last weekend the nephews were visiting, and the oldest nephew had just got a new pair of skate shoes. Very pretty they were also. I liked them a lot, and I thought just for fun I would try them on. THEY FREAKING FIT ME. He is maybe 14? And I have size 10/11 womens feet, which is like a 8/9 mens. Jeebus!

It seems to me that with all the earthquakes, volcanoes, and the fact that my nephew now has feet the same size as me, that the end of the world is nigh. Prepare yourselves for eternity, or whatever they reckon happens next! ;)

family, General Chit-chat, stuff

Losing My Memory..

7 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

The other night when we were in Sydney we went to dinner at The Rowers – Me, The Other Half, Mum and Dad. As we were going there Mum was saying “I’ve never been to the Rowers before” and the rest of us were swearing that she had been there.  She’s known to be a little forgetful at times so we all thought it was her and she’d remember it when she got in there..

But she didn’t, and for the entire time we were there all of us were trying to work out when we could possibly have been there without her. Because it isn’t quite normal for us to go anywhere without her.

I’ve been there so many times that I honestly was getting the different times confused. But I am starting to wonder if maybe my middle term memory has gone on vacation.

I remember things from a *long* time ago, and I remember things from a short time ago. There seems to be a huge chunk of time in the middle where everything is just cloudy. In fact I can’t remember being a smoker, which I was for about 8 years or so.

I guess it’s ok, as long as I live a little longer, the middle term memory stuff will become long term memory stuff, and I’ll remember it again.. ;) But I’ll have forgotten that I forgot it, and I will certainly have forgotten writing this post. :)

Maybe I’ll have forgotten having this blog as well!

family