My social 'colander' is full of holes these days, but somehow a whole lot got pushed through today: an early-morning float in the 34° warm-water pool followed by an eye test for my driver's licence followed by a quick dash to the RTA to renew it.
At my age I hate to over-capitalise and would've been happy to renew it for six months, but they offered me five years for $234, which I took on the condition that, if I don't use it up, my heirs will inherit the refund.
With the whole day still ahead of us, we drove the fifty kilometres to Ulladulla for lunch at the local bowling club followed by some grocery shopping, which I sat out on the 'Waiting Husbands' Bench' outside a second-hand shop. I'd gone back there because during a previous visit it had displayed an old OLYMPIA typewriter which was almost the same model I had bought in New Guinea and then schlepped around the world for twenty years. It was still for sale at $200 but without a ribbon, and where would I be able to buy a new typewriter ribbon these days?
And so I went to my other favourite op-shop where I picked up several interesting books, such as "It's All Greek to Me!" and "The Summer of my Greek Taverna", to remind me of one of my more memorable and laid-back work assignments (I refuse to call them a career; they were more like a succession of occupations that seemed interesting at the time).
I also picked up two books by Hugh Mackay, "What Makes Us Tick?" and "Turning Point - Australians Choosing Their Future", but since none of my readers would be interested, I won't mention them - or did I just now?
P.S. A frequent reader of this blog in my old hometown replied to this post with this clever little message typed on his very own OLYMPIA typewriter which still had an inked ribbon and includes the German character 'ß' and even the umlaut 'ü'. It's enough to make me homesick for a 'Vaterland' that had ceased to exist for me a very long time ago.
And this is the German reader's very own OLYMPIA typewriter full of 'Ü' and 'Ö' and Ä's which, if you look at them, they look right back at you, but the no longer much used 'ß' is tucked away below the question mark. I still remember the rule: a double-s is used after a short vowel ('Wasser') but an 'ß' - which is just another form of a double-s - is used after a long vowel ('Straße'). Strange, how some rules stick with you all your life! Such as "'Gar nicht' wird gar nicht zusammengeschrieben!"
By the way, did you know that if a standard western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph, it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide? That would make it slightly less portable than my trusty old OLYMPIA typewriter.
