Shouts From Down Under

Contiguous ?continuous? Reading phone books or dictionaries.

When you return to your childhood region, go back and stay with your elderly parents, and spend time with your middle aged siblings, you find it all exciting and nostalgic to begin with.

But after a while, like a few weeks, a couple of months, you come to the end of your imagined "good old days", and slowly awaken to reality again.
Not that it's that bad. I mean, I love my parents and sister and brother dearly. We scrape along OK.

But time really has moved on. When you're young you think 20 years is a long time.

I was fixing up old cars that were rusty, had flat tyres and were full of cobwebs, perished windscreen and window rubbers, faded and peeled paint, when I was a teenager. These old Holdens, "old bombs" were about 25-30 years old then.

I thought they were so ancient. Vintage even. Well, now, here I am, the same span of time further on from then plus a bit. And I look at the cars that young kids out here in the country muck about with.

Yes, 20-25-30 years doesn't seem so long ago now. Time has flown. And times have changed.

Some of it's depressing. It beats me how our world has become slaves to boardroom committees, number crunchers and rule makers.
People are sucked in by it, by the media, by the sanctimonious gum champing of a noisy minority.

I can now say, without flinching too much, the term "when I was young". I'm not that old yet, not ancient, not veteran and not vintage. I can't say I'm elderly.
But when I was young(er) we had so much more freedom than now. You could do a lot of stuff without licenses or permits. You could be young. You could be kids. You could have fun.

People carry on about young people speeding in cars, speeding with speed, doing gang stuff, antisocial behaviour, computer game addicts and all the rest of it.
Well, unless they have parent's who are comfortable / well off, how can they do anything else?

I'm not saying there should be this entitlement attitude. (although if you don't have that attitude these days you get nothing) but that the red tape and revenue raising tickets, licences and permits, registration and so on, should be scrapped. This prevention of young people doing healthy fun things is supposed to be for safety reasons.

Well, you know what? We are all going to die. All of us. 100% of the earth's population will die over the next 100-120 odd years.
There will not be one person alive after that time who is now. Sobering.

I'm surprised there's no license to go to garage sales, yet. And we can still walk / jog up the road without a special permit. In Australia, at least.

Anyway, I don't mean to be negative about it all. There are some good things about these modern times, the Internet being one of them.

Siblings. I'm enjoying being here with our family together (for some hours of some days) again, and sharing old times.

My brother has always been someone that does odd things. He reminds me so much of Simon Baker out of the Mentalist.



His odd activities generally (sometimes) have a clever reason, or he is usually right about whatever issue he's talking about.

But...reading the phone book?

Then, it occurred to me that I read the dictionary sometimes. It might be weird, but its surprising what you learn.

Contiguous
[kuhn-tig-yoo-uhs] adjective

1.touching; in contact.
2.in close proximity without actually touching; near.
3.adjacent in time: contiguous events.

Continuous
[kuhn-tin-yoo-uhs] adjective

1.uninterrupted in time; without cessation: continuous coughing during the concert.
2.being in immediate connection or spatial relationship: a continuous series of blasts; a continuous row of warehouses.
3.Grammar- progressive

(http://dictionary.reference.com/)

My sister, along with her husband, own a sheep and cattle farm. It's not big enough to call a Station.

They do have a shearing shed.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=shearing+sheds&espv=210&es_sm=122&source=lnms...

My dad was a shearer, and my brother too. Now my nephew is a shearer, but he's at University being trained as a teacher. He still does do some shearing. He's a mature age student. This may mean some odd sort of conversations at Uni I think.

Women are shearers too.



Below is a wool bale hook I found sitting in Mum & Dad's shed.



Now if we could only have a narrative hook like that, we'd tow along some readers!

They have a few old bits and pieces there still.
Collar and Hames from draught horses, bridles and other stuff.



Sparky