Goodbye Jim...hello Bruce

Our parish  said goodbye to Father Rod last Easter. I wrote about our trip to Warwick for his commissioning at his new parish here. While the search went on for a new Rector, Father Jim Nolan was the locum and what a lovely man he turned out to be. But he is retired so his time with us was only temporary. On Saturday night Jim and his wife Fay threw a party which was a thank you to all of us for being so welcoming and this get together was also a welcome to Father Bruce and his wife Patti and a chance for parishioners to meet them informally.

Father Jim standing; Father Bruce sitting

I guess it's a sign of the times that parishes have quite long waits before a new priest is found. It's just as well that there are a number of retired priests who fill in as locums in these circumstances. DH asked Jim what he would be doing now that he has handed over to Bruce. Apparently he will continue to be very busy with a number of projects and locum positions!

Suzanne, church warden, presenting Jim with his going away gift of a weekend away!

My friend Carmen; she's still teaching but will retire mid year

Fay and Marge who have been parishioners at St John's for years

DH

Make- Grow- Thrift

It's Monday so once again I'm joining in with the feature on Jodie's blog.
My contribution to Make-Grow-Thrift  this week is a combination of make and thrift. The knitting group that I belong to, Knitting for Brisbane's Needy, had a Summer Challenge which ends tomorrow. We were making beanies for children in a remote community where the husband of one of the members works. I've had ages to make heaps of beanies (one member made 150!) but I just started the other day as I've been working on other projects. I think the count overall so far is around about 400 beanies!

The navy yarn is some 'frogged' yarn which was in a bag of yarn given to me by a friend, and the colours are scraps from my stash. The navy yarn had been rolled into a big ball and there was more than enough for the 2 beanies. It is satisfying re-using something!

Some dentists I've known...

The decor at my dentist's

I went to the dentist today to have my first appointment of 2 to get a crown. Hmmm...dentists...hasn’t always been a favourite subject of mine!  My first experience with going to the dentist wasn’t until I was about 7, but that wasn’t unusual for those times. My parents were concerned with my ‘over-bite’ so I was taken to my dad’s dentist. Dr Rappaport was his name and my parents said that he had been in an internment camp during the war because he was a Czechoslovakian Jew. (None of that meant much to a 7 year old)

I developed an overbite with protruding top teeth (genetic, from my mum's family)

I’m sure he was a nice man but I hated my visits to him. He took impressions for a brace for my teeth and I can remember that the ‘plate’ was a bit big for my mouth and the dentist also said that the white stuff on the plate was icecream. Well it wasn’t; it was peppermint flavoured plaster! And guess who hated peppermint flavour then??? Over the years I went to regular appointments with fear and trepidation. He didn’t use local anaesthetic for fillings, even deeper ones. Dr Rappaport was indeed a kind man because when my dad died when I was 15, the doctor never charged my mother for any of my treatments. When I left home to get married at not quite 21, I refused to go to him any more, much to my mother’s disgust with me!

That meant that I had to find my own dentist. Someone recommended a dentist in the next suburb, ‘who didn’t hurt’! That was enough for me so Dr Gil Shearer became my dentist. (and he didn’t hurt!) After a few years, he moved suburbs, but I followed. Then he decided to go into ‘specialist dentistry’ so Gil recommended a new dentist to the practice, Harvey Carter. Harvey was a blond blue-eyed ‘dreamboat’! Going to the dentist was a real pleasure. When my children came along, I took them to Harvey too. We had Harvey for years and then the inevitable happened. Harvey retired from dentistry (in his 40s mind you!) to devote more time to his extensive cattle properties in northern Queensland.

The suburb where that practice was, (Toowong) was getting busier and the trip there was getting longer due to heavier traffic so I just didn’t go for a while L. Then one year I was teaching Year 1 at the suburb next to where I lived. The local dentist would park his car in the staff carpark so that left an extra space for patients, outside his surgery across the road from the school. As a trade off for this carpark, he would talk to the Year 1s about dental care each year.

So that’s how I met Tony. After he talked to my class I chatted to him and told him of my dentist phobia and how the dentist I liked and trusted had flounced off to a new life without a backward glance. Tony was very sympathetic and claimed that his dental work didn’t hurt so I made an appointment. He has been my dentist since 1999 and touch wood...there is no talk of his retiring yet!! A few years ago he moved a few streets into a group practice and the good thing about that is that he is easier to get an appointment with now. Urban Dental also has a TV above the dentist chair which is probably quite swish...most of the time the sound is off or it is set to the news channel! lol

The photos of the staff  on Urban Dental's webpage shows them as children; this is Tony my dentist.

The other day when I went to the dentist because last Sunday night a piece of tooth broke off a molar, I discovered something that made me like my dentist even more. Kellie, the receptionist said, 'I don't want to offend you, but are you a senior?' And of course I am (business seniors card only). Now apparently that means I get a 10% discount. So that appointment left me very little out of pocket. (My health insurance doesn't pay full 100%, so I'm always out of pocket) The quote for my crown work also had the discount applied and I was happy to go ahead with the work. Then yesterday I got a letter from the Tax office. At first my heart sank....then when I opened the letter, I found that there was some money owing to me, to do with superannuation. A phone call revealed that I will get that money directly and guess what? It's just a little bit less than my out of pocket expenses for the crown!! How good is that?
Just another little bit about dentists I've known:-
A few years ago one of my nephews married a dentist; a beautiful girl. My BIL goes to Yas and says she is the most gentle dentist he has ever been to. Unfortunately the practice where she works is in the middle of Melbourne, a bit too far away!

Happy Australia Day...

It's a public holiday throughout Australia today and I wish all Aussies a great day celebrating with family and friends. The day celebrates when Captain Arthur Phillip landed in Sydney Cove to start a British penal colony which eventually became this nation. In more recent times there has been acknowledgement that there were inhabitants here before Phillip and his First Fleet arrived...the aborigines. Many of the indigenous people refer to today as 'Invasion Day'.

My forebears were not convicts (it is considered very trendy to be descended from a convict these days :-/)but most came from the UK, especially Ireland, and of course my dad came from Sicily. My father loved his adopted homeland and I'm pretty proud to be an Aussie too! For a few years now, DH and I have celebrated with friends at one friend's house. That was called off this year.

Photo; Courtesy of my friend Jane Kleeman Marsh

Due to the heavy rain over the last week many A.D. activities have been cancelled. DH and I had planned to join some friends in a big open-air concert in the Moreton Bay District Council area of Strathpine...too muddy etc so it's been cancelled. We talked about going to festivities at some of the local sporting and RSL club but have decided to do our 'own thing'....watching the cricket and the tennis on telly! lol Then small lamb roast with baked vegetables for dinner tonight...then maybe a dessert made with slices of fresh mango!

We'll leave the more boisterous type of celebrating to the young ones.

Make- Grow- Thrift

Today I am joining in with Jodie The Haberdashery Goddess's blog, for her Monday feature 'Make-Grow-Thrift. This is how Jodie describes it...

'Each Monday you can link to a post on your blog sharing with us something that is handmade, homegrown, homemade (such as a recipe) or recycled/thrifted.
This does not need to be craft or sewing based. This is all about making our lives a little greener week by week.'
Well my contribution this week concerns 'grow'. We've had some very hot days here in Brisbane in the last month which have not been good for the garden, especially the veggie patch. But we have been lucky enough in the last week to get a few showers and even a tropical downpour or two!

The grasshoppers have been busy and many of my vegetables have very 'holey' leaves but that's no real drama. With the rain, my eggplant bush has suddenly started producing fruit again; I have 2 lovely, purple baby eggplants and one flower on one bush and another bush is covered with flowers. The silverbeet have a new lease of life and there are rocket seedlings just about everywhere in the veggie patch. The sweet potato vines are starting to create their own jungle as they spread through the almost empty veggie garden #1.

In one of the big tubs that I grew potatoes in last spring and early summer, there are green shoots on what must have been an unharvested potato...what a lovely surprise!

An addiction...

When I retired last year one of my 'plans' was to do something about the large collection of photos. I needed to sort them and I needed to organise them in various ways, especially using digital storage technology. I wanted to find old photos and share them with my children, my brother and his children as well as the few other relatives (cousins that I know of). For about 3 weeks now I've been working on and off on this project. I made an album on Facebook that most of those family members can access and they can also copy and save from this album. It's a WIP, (Work in Progress); as I find photos, I add them to this folder with captions. And then I started wondering about the generation back from my mother...didn't have many photos of these people.

One thing led to another...I started putting some family tree information that a friend did for me about 3 years ago, on to a family tree in Ancestry.com.au . She had used the 'Digger CD sets'. My mother had spoken very little about her family so I didn't know who my great grandparents names were until my friend gave them to me. I didn't know Pa's siblings but did know of 2 of Nanna's sisters. I wanted to know more...I tried the free use of Ancestry...hmmm not very good. Then I paid for 10 views of documents...$10.95. Still not great...you couldn't access people who shared the same forebears. I agonised...I asked for advice from my friends on Facebook...should I pay for a 'proper' subscription to Ancestry.com.au???? There was a 25% discount if a sub was bought before midnight January 16...I 'bit the bullet' and paid up!!

Within 24 hours I had found a cousin I didn't know I had. She was so happy to share family information from her side of the family. She remembered her father talking about my mother but didn't know that I even existed. Then T started going through family photos and steadily emailed them to me over 2 days...absolutely amazing these photos were! In this post I'll feature my nanna and  a selection of the photos I have of her:-

My mother had this photo of my nan when she was a young lady; this is the original photo. As a gift to my mother I had this restored years after I started working. The restoration cost nearly $200 !

My aunt gave me this photo of nanna in 1973 when I visited her.

My nanna was in her 50s I think in this one

I didn't meet my nanna until 1973. this is a photo I took of her then. She died the next year.

So that was a cross section of photos that my family had of my grandmother. Not many really...Then I got some more from cousin T.

My nanna as a girl with her 4 sisters. (second on the right)

We wondered whether this was a wedding photo?

Nanna standing in the middle, Pa seated in front of her. We think that's her father on the left and the women are sisters.

So while everyone has  been going about their daily lives, I have been feverishly looking up census and electoral rolls, birth, deaths and marriage indexes and finding big families who are my ancestors...and this is just the Australian/UK side of the family. T has sent me lots more photos but these are just of my grandma. But I'm going to add one more photo to this post...my long-lost cousin T and her siblings...just like nanna's family, 5 girls!

Cousin T is second from the left :-)

FNSI or Friday Night Sew In...

Last night was the first FNSI for the year and I had planned to sew up some knitted teddy bears. 'Best laid plans' and all that! Instead I finished sewing up some donated squares into a blanket. Knitted and crocheted squares are often donated to K4BN and Karen, the organiser is always looking for volunteers to sew them up.

I'm slowly working my way through a large box of squares that I took home a number of months ago. At first I just sewed the squares together but I thought that it didn't look as good as it could. So then I started working a round of double crochet (I think it is called single crochet in the US) in black yarn around each square, and then sewing them together. I found it so much easier to sew them up then as the edge of each square was easier to sew and stitches didn't show.  The black formed a border too. So for weeks I would take a bag of squares and black yarn to K&Ns, waiting rooms, or in front of the TV at night, and crochet around these squares. Last night I finished sewing up another blanket...but there are still lots of squares left in the box!

This week the Knit and Natters started again. When I collected some donations from a lady a few suburbs away last week, I invited her to come to some of the K&Ns and she said she couldn't as she didn't drive. Naturally I offered to give her a lift which she accepted. So last Wednesday Pam and I headed out to the Albany Creek K&N. Despite the notice being on the forum page no one else turned up so we had the meeting room to ourselves, the librarian organised coffee and we enjoyed the lovely chocolate brownies that Pam had made and brought along! We thoroughly enjoyed chatting, getting to know each other, and, of course,...knitting! Bliss lol

Pam, her knitting...and the brownies