Shouts From Down Under

Where are we going with our take on time...on track?

Today, I had the oddest chore to do for my Dad, who is away having cancer treatment.

He didn't ask me to do this, but it was one of those things that niggle. Like a dependant phrase without it's semi-colon.

Mum and Dad have a sundial in their garden, one of those ornamental ones that are a bit of a nod to ancient times, retro good-will salutations towards a time in the dim past, when everyone depended on this method of keeping time. (During cloudless daytime anyway)

I have never had anything to do with sundials, and only vague memories of learning about them at school.

The thing with this sundial was that it didn't tell the time; not even close. I was puzzling over it one day, trying to nut out what time the shadow claimed, because the deck of this one has all sorts of jumbled up information, that's probably quite good, if you know what it's all for, and how to read it.

Well, it's not that complex. But it will never indicate the correct time or near enough, if it's put together, out of the box from Bunnings, incorrectly in the first place. So it seems with this one.

The arm for the shadow, the gnomus, was installed 180 deg out.

I tried to fix it last visit but there were two bolts with very rusty looking nuts on them. Knowing my luck I'd crack the bolts off trying to undo them.

But this visit, it was too much for me. So I removed the whole thing into the shed, after knocking all the dirt off the wrought base.

With an overnight soaking of WD40 penetrating oil, the nuts came loose.

I reinstalled the gnomus the correct way, took out my trusty iPhone compass, found north, then set up the base of the dial, in the garden again, so that the gnomus was to the north. It's cloudy today so i can't really check if it's indicating the correct time yet.



The use of sundials is quite ancient. And designing, making them and setting them up isn't as simple as I thought.
This site is for Australia, but unless you live here, these probably won't be any good for you.

http://www.sundialsaustralia.com.au/index.cfm?fuseaction=browse&pageid=68&id=824...

This subject has me thinking. What if we had forgotten what our original purpose was in our writing? What if the lines had blurred, edges dog eared, and our thinking fogged, until we are facing 180 degrees from our literary goals?

Are we still interested, and passionate, about why we wanted to be writers in the first place?

I took a little trip down memory lane, and further, deeper, until I was standing in the past, an era about the time of sundials first being used.
I didn't have a calender with me, and my iPhone didn't seem to go back to 3000 BC give or take a few hundred years, but I did see some things that indicated to me the time period in history. My iPhone camera was working still, so out with it, and snapped off some pictures that managed to survive coming back to this, our time, of 2014. Below are some of the pictures I managed to take.

Ancient original portable seats. Before this, it was only the heavy burdensome stone ones, or permanent fixtures. People weren't that keen on carrying a cave or a forest with them just to have a picnic seat to use.



Then there was the sundial, not sure if this was Julius Caesar's garden, but whosoever it was, the sundial looked like it had been set up by an expert. Yes, very good job.



I spied an ancient wheel, perhaps from the same era, or a later period when steam-punk gathered machinery momentum morphing into Mercedes Benz buckets of bolts.



After this, time seemed to speed up, retracting me like a quick release garden hose, through the ages of invention when humans accomplished unthinkable strides in progress. Unthinkable!
The adze for those railway sleepers / beams, and a miner's pick, plus you can see they had a pet cat back in those days; there is a special feline sized notch cut in the wall.



Then we slip into the two man (or woman, or kangaroo) saw for slicing up those timbers of our forebears.



After this, people who had made their livelihood out of standing with their arms upraised, holding the roof from falling on our heads, were then in the dole queue. They felt sad and very unfit, with the lack of biceps exercise. (I think I've been watching too much Family Guy. Thanks Seth McFarlane for the cerebral corruption)

On to the Dairy industry era with a cream separator. This model featured a free set of cobwebs for early "fibre enriched" milk / cream.



Then, relatively modern by any Sunbeam standards, this iron was petroleum powered, for that extra sharp crease, especially if you were a smoker refilling the tank. You may have to re-iron some garments if an explosion takes place using this device.
But be thankful that you live in an era when people had the privilege of owning clothes requiring ironing.



Now here we have the modern era of repair work and special sundial safety shoes, Sid-chrome spanners and stretch Levi jeans.



That concludes a complete lesson on history, and lining up your writing with your original purpose.
If you're wondering where to find that purpose, I suggest you too return to your "roots", your family or ancestral history, as I did today.

The time machine I've used is always available. It's called imagination and is located behind each person's eyeballs, and between their ears.

If you look closely at the sundial's raised lettering, you may see a quaint quote therein.

"Be as true to each other as this sundial is to the sun."

That, dear reader, is what inspired this blog entry.
If we could just couple that saying to our writing, our keyboards would be a better place.

Sparky