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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (30660)	3/9/2008 10:12:26 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 217679

TJ, for a while, I pampered myself with "high civilisation" and can still afford to do so. I took the car to the car wash, to the mechanics to change the oil. I spent quite a lot of time in restaurants and can travel first class to London if I like. Now, I find more enjoyment doubling grandson Hayes on my bicycle, him sitting on some old polystyrene with some old foam rubber I found over the top of it for comfort because the plain metal bar soon got uncomfortable when we started going further than the end of the drive-way. The polystyrene is held on with some 13 year old Castrol tape I had in a cupboard. My bicycle is my 21 year old venerable machine I got in Antwerp for recreational bike rides on the wide and flat cycle-ways with the family. He holds onto the handle-bars and off we go. We have traveled as far as Mangere Bridge, 5 km away, [his great great grandparents' stamping grounds [a few of them]]. There are many adventures en route. Judging by the smiles we receive, people get vicarious enjoyment from such an obviously happy scene. We have bare feet of course. But we have hats so that we don't get melanoma from the viciously intense southern sun with bright blue skies which don't exist in the northern hemisphere due to circling pollution, desert dust etc. The shed is for fun. I can afford to hire electricians to fix the fan in the bathroom, but it's more fun to climb up there with Hayes, disassemble it, go shopping for a new second-hand motor for $2 at the scrap place, get out the glue, heat the plastic in the oven to bend it back into shape, test run it in the shed, play with it etc. I could just get out money and buy everything and leave the tradesmen to it while we go to a beach, play-group, or some amusement. But how things work always seems to be an important thing to understand. He certainly loves it. The wounds have been slight. He knows that some things get very hot, very noisy, very dusty, are very sharp etc... I understand why your German friends went to live a self-contained life in oceanic paradise. It's too rural for me. But I understand such ideas. The advertisement for Hong Kong with the dancing business-men with the pumping music was to me a surrealistic nightmare. A decade ago, a Taiwanese girl came from Australia, and Jessica, a Melanesian girl from New Caledonia, came to stay with us for a week or so. Hayes' mother Melissa was friends of Crystal as they had gone to school together in NZ before the family went to Brisbane, and Jessica was on an early OE to get some English language experience and other experience. We took them to Piha, a wild west coast beach. Jessica was a natural with climbing over rocks and interacting with the 3D world. Crystal was more accustomed to high civilisation. It was funny because Crystal had a bit of an attitude that she was somewhat superior to Jessica, who was in fact a highly intelligent girl, yet Crystal was far less capable of things. Shirtless and barefoot is a good way to be. Preferably with a fire and some fresh corn, fish and bananas to eat, with a 450MHz OFDM/CDMA cyberphone handy. Mqurice