St Valentine's Day; 1968 and 2018

When I read through my 50 year old diary earlier this year, I was both charmed by part of the entry  for February 14 and also found some of the entry cringeworthy! Lol. Then I shared with my schoolmates with whom I'm still in contact. 

Yes, my classmate Richard gave me an iced biscuit with a heart piped on it with 'M' in the middle. Now Richard  and I are friends on Facebook, so I sent him just the first 4 lines. He didn't remember it of course but we had a laugh together. 

Here he is at a class reunion a few years ago...

The diary entry shows that I was a fiery girl...apparently a fellow student called Pat P accused me of sending him a love letter for Valentine's Day. From what I wrote, I seemed to know it was another student with the initials CP who wrote this letter. I've checked the class photo and there were 2 people with these initials. I couldn't imagine one of them writing it but the other was a great mate of mine with a wicked sense of humour and I CAN imagine her writing it. Lol!!! You see, this Pat P was a real sleaze...if he sat next to you in the library, he would rub his foot up and down a girl's leg 😬. Maybe that's why I slapped him that day in 1968! Fiery!!!

Anyway enough of the past...DH and I rarely celebrate Valentine's Day by going out to a restaurant, usually preferring to having a nice home cooked meal. Sometimes I might be surprised with some flowers and sometimes I would buy DH a nice bottle of red. But this year my friend who owns a cafe was having a special St Valentine's Dinner so I decided to 'shout' DH to a night out. 

It was a wonderful night; worth every penny. My previous experience with St Valentine's Day dinners at restaurants was overcrowding and food obviously not freshly prepared; just squeezing a many people in as possible. Not so at Crema and Cream! 

The food was gorgeous...the handmade ravioli for entree...( photo from the Crema and Cream Facebook page) 

DH and I chose the salmon for our main course...delicious! ( photo also from the cafe's FB page)

Others chose the duck...from the comments at nearby tables, it was as divine as our salmon. ( photo from Crema and Cream Facebook page) 

The dessert was a shared plate of all sorts of sweet treats...mmmmm 😊. 

At the end of the evening my friend gave each of the ladies present a 'rose' and asked us to guess what it was made of. It had a slight fragrance like Vanilla but I couldn't work out what it was made of...

Eventually Gracelyn told us...it's made out of soap! When we want to wash our hands, we just have to pull a petal off, wet it, and wash our hands! Amazing how lifelike it looks! 

Time to hand some things on...

About 6 years ago, while looking through items stored, I came across a school uniform that I had worn during the last 2 years of high school. I don't honestly know how, or why I still had that dress! It had obviously been packed up for the few house moves I had done over the years.
 I am still in touch with a number of my former school friends and when I told them of 'my find' there was a lot of banter about my being a hoarder...but all those girls enjoyed acquainting themselves once again with that uniform that we had worn for those high school years. ( note that there was no attempt to actually wear this old dress! 😉😉😉)

It was suggested that I bring along the dress to a reunion and one of my friends offered to bring along a mannequin that we could dress it up in my old uniform...and pose for photos...

That year we posted some of these photos on our high school's Facebook page and drew lots of nostalgic comments. Many of my former students at our local primary school were also former students of my high school so comments came from different generations. One former student of mine who runs a business selling vintage household/decorating items, as well as vintage clothing, was particularly taken  with the fact that my old 1967-8 uniform was still around. This lady decorates her home with lots of vintage items and has a real appreciation of such things.
So during last year when I decided that although I was 'attached to the memories' of that dress, it was time to divest myself of it. I have lots of photos of it and that is enough.
And Darlene would be an appreciative and excellent caretaker of it, I was convinced. So I posted it to her in Maryborough. D wrote to me privately, and with my permission, wrote this post on her FB page...

So my choice of who to pass it on to, was the correct one.
Darlene posted some photos of herself WEARING the uniform. This is someone who was in Year 7 in the late 1970s and unlike my friends and I, she can fit into my uniform from my teenage years. 😉😉😉

The following photos have been posted on a blog post a few years ago but I thought I'd share them again...
Year 11 Swimming Carnival at the Valley Pool. That's me leaning on the rail in the stand and looking at the camera.

And this photo is our Grade 12 cohort of  3 classes...

So that's one less thing for the girls to throw out when I'm no longer here! Whenever that will be! 

Last Saturday...

Last Saturday I went to my high school reunion. It was just for my year level, not a whole of school one. I spent a large part of the morning getting ready...a girl has to look as good as possible when attending a school reunion :-)
Unlike many of my former classmates, who came from other states, or even from overseas, I just had a short drive to the venue. It was a wonderful 4 hours, with the time just flying by as we reminisced, laughed, joked and chattered. We have been having a reunion for a few years now and the number of attendees is growing. There were some 'new ' faces this year...each year we gradually find more of the 200 Grade 8s that our cohort numbered.
Conversations stopped when my friend Alison arrived pushing a shopping trolley...

 Hmmmm...lol!

 Pretty soon, with a bit of help, the mannequin was assembled and dressed in my old school uniform...
Somehow or other this uniform hadn't been thrown out and I found it in a storage crate last year...now my friends 'forbid' me to throw it out as we've become a bit sentimental about it!

During the afternoon a number of us posed beside the mannequin...

 Some of the 'boys' catching up...

 One of my former classmates came all the way from Western Australia where he works for the department of agriculture...here we are last Saturday...

And here we are 48 years  a long time ago...forgive the blurriness...my mother was famous for her blurry photos! lol

This is my friend Richard who came all the way from PNG to attend the reunion. Richard handed out strings of 'money shells' to each of us...note the lovely woven basket he carried all the strings of shells in...In my last year of school, Richard made a cupcake for my birthday complete with a candle...a lovely boy who grew into a lovely man.

Peter, the man in this photo, not only went through 12 years of school with me, but also our children all attended the same school so we served on the same P&C committee for years.

We had a lovely surprise when the couple below dropped in on the celebrations...

These are 2 of the most popular and respected teachers at our old school. He is still an inspiring maths teacher but not in the school system any more. She was my geography teacher for year 10-12 and as well as teaching me that subject she taught me to develop organisational skills and resilience to continue to strive to do my very best...a wonderful teacher!! I've always been proud of my A in the Senior Public Exam!

 And here is our group photo taken by my friend Jean, who set the timer on her camera and then ducked into the photo on the front right (dark top).

Some of my classmates are still working but most are retired and enjoying the good life...but none of us know where all those years have gone!

A picture's worth a 1000 words so they say....

A picture's worth a 1000 about 400 words, so let's see what I can come up with :-)

This photo was taken last Monday night when a group of old schoolfriends gathered to celebrate a friend's 60th. we gathered at Valerie's home who is standing next to me in the photo. So what are some things that come to mind when I look at the photo?

• We all went to Newmarket High in the 1960s
• I'm the odd one out in a kind of way; I was in the 10A2D class, the others were in 10C1 which was a commercial studies class.
• Valerie's son James, took the photo with the instructions,'don't make us look fat!' lol
• It was an unbelieveably hot evening with temperatures in the 30s celcius.
• Most of the group left in Year 10 to start working.
• Two of us trained as teachers but only Christine (middle of back row) is still teaching.
• All of us have children.
• One of us, Valerie, is a widow.
• Two of the group are still married to their first husbands
• Three of us have been through a divorce
• Alison, in the white, is now in the process of her second divorce.
• The three of us in the front row are not grandparents yet
• All of us have travelled overseas and two of us have lived overseas for a time.
• Six of us live in Brisbane; the birthday girl lives in Sydney.
• A couple of the 'girls' have at least one parent alive.
• Some of us admit to joints stiffening and the dependence on reading glasses.
• Three of us don't work but one of those is looking for work as investment returns are disappointing.
• We enjoy recounting anecdotes of our school days.
• We tease Jane, front left, for forgetting that we used to do sewing at primary school. She's blocked out ant memories of those samplers we stitched! lol 
• Sue (white hair in back row) hated high school :-(
•  All of us have a Facebook page and we are big fans of the social networking site as that's how we've found lots of other classmates.
• On Sunday we are all meeting at Alison's new place for a deck party to celebrate her moving into a new home. Alison has downsized and says that the deck is the largest part of the house!

Now during the vening we talked about lots of things, and one topic for discussion was our school uniform. As a group we rather liked our old uniforms and the outfit was certainly different to other school uniforms of that time. Most other high schools had a pleated skirt and a button up blouse with a hip yoke; we had a dress. Jane commented that it was a shame that we didn't keep our old uniforms...heh heh. I have a surprise for them all on Sunday.
Ta dah....!!!! From out of a storage crate in the crawl space under our house...please ignore the creases as it's been in storage a looong time! lol

The uniform that I wore in Years 11 and 12

The hat that was introduced when I was in year 11 to replace the old panama white hats

Mock chicken...

This morning I received a text from DD2 asking me what the ingredients were in a dip I used to make with the rather curious name, 'Mock Chicken'. Talk about 'a blast from the past'! I hadn't even thought about it for years so I wondered what had prompted DD's question. I tried to think where a copy of the recipe might be. I had this vague recollection that it might be in a 'moth-eaten', scruffy and scraggly exercise book that was my 'Domestic science notebook' way back in 1964. It was quickly found in the 'recipe drawer' in the kitchen and leafing through the ramshackle book, I quickly found the recipe. I decided that it would be fun to scan the pages and send the copy to my daughter, complete with my untidy teenage writing.

My scruffy Domestic Science notebook; It was ok when I used it at school in 1964, but gradually fell into serious disrepair in the late 1970s

For once, Mrs Kahl didn't write 'untidy writing' on my work! lol

Very soon I got an email saying thank you and explaining how the text request came about. At morning tea at her work DD suddenly thought of 'mock chicken' and mentioned it to her workmates. Apparently it was unknown to, not only her contemporaries, but also unknown to older co-workers. I reckon it dates back many years before 1964, especially the years of austerity around the depression and war and post war years. There's no chicken in it and it doesn't even taste like chicken...but 'mock chicken' is its moniker!  DD plans to make it ASAP, possibly to share with her workmates. It's funny what offspring remember about their childhood, isn't it??

My daughter commented that she didn't recognise my handwriting. And then I remembered and shared the story behind this. Like a lot of teenage girls I developed my own style of writing; mine was straight up and down with an occasional tilt to the left. Qld cursive was supposed to slant to the right! When I was a first year student teacher (1969), my pract teacher ordered me to change my writing, not only for the blackboard, but also for my Notes of lessons' book. It used to take me ages to write up my lessons during that prac as I had to concentrate on every letter as I wrote it!
Eventually writing in the 'correct way' became second nature. Then a year or so later, my signature wasn't accepted on the CBA (my bank) withdrawal form...the teller said it was a completely different signature. My mum talked to the bank manager (we weren't adults in those days until we were 21) and I had to have an interview with Mr Baskerville, the manager. He said that my 'new' signature was quite immature compared to my old (14years old when I opened the account) signature, but he organised for me to change the one they had on record. Co-incidentally DD2 works for the Commonwealth Bank now!.