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Well, my year certainly didn’t get off to a very auspicious start!
With a rare day off on New Year’s followed so quickly by a weekend, I had some pretty high hopes of getting a whole bunch of jobs cleaned up. I had a real “flying start” to the year.
Unfortunately, the flu “put paid” to that idea, and I spent most of my time off sleeping it off. And now, at the end of the first week of January, I’m already almost a full week behind schedule.
Not the way I wanted to start the year!
I guess I can say I still have plenty of time to catch up, and if I repeat that often enough, maybe I will start believing it.
Since getting back on my feet, I seem to have spent more time looking for stuff I knew I had last November and December, but now just can’t find anywhere.
I know I had these items back then because I remember thinking “now I will need this again in the new year so I had better put it somewhere safe until then.”
If only I could remember what that “safe place” was, I’d be in great shape, I’m sure. In several cases I can actually remember standing, holding the item in my hand, wondering where I would put it so it would be out of the way for now but easy to find again when I needed it.
I just can’t remember the answer I came up with!
I’m going to be a total mess when I get old and really start losing it!
On the plus side, in trying to find my mysterious “safe place”, I’ve managed to find several items I carefully put away even earlier in the year and then couldn’t find later when I wanted them.
So I’m hoping this is just a cyclical problem that will sort itself out eventually, and I’m going to try to get out of the habit of “putting things carefully away for later” when I don’t need them.
One thing I have resolved is communicating the temperatures at this time of year to relations still living “down under.”
Both Australia and New Zealand use the Celsius scale for measuring their temperatures, which is very different from the Fahrenheit scale, and trying to do the math can be a pain, especially if I am talking on the phone.
New Zealanders (generally speaking, of course) have no real concept of the Fahrenheit scale, although, up until maybe the early 1970s this was the preferred method of temperature measurement.
New Zealand moved to metric measurements in the 1970s. Part of that, saw Celcius replace Fahrenheit as the preferred system for measurement of temperatures.
In Fahrenheit scale, 32 degrees is the same as zero degrees Celsius scale. It never gets any colder than that in New Zealand, and my cousins in northern Australia are used to much warmer than that, even in their “cold” weather.
I’ve found now that if I just say its “below zero” here they don’t want to know any more. If its snowing I might say that it’s 10 below, or if it’s one of those really nasty ice storms, I’ll probably say it’s 20 below.
That usually tells them far more than they want to know. The conversion might not be spot on, but it actually isn’t too far off either.
Thinking back, the conversion to metric must really have been quite a huge transformation - I was a little too young to appreciate it at the time.
I was at the New Zealand equivalent of middle school when the change to metric measurements came in. I was at the point where I had spent just enough time learning how many feet were in a mile and so on to be confused by all the big numbers, when I found out that none of that mattered any more because we’re changing to metric measurements.
I guess now that I’m living in the United States, all those numbers do matter once again!
I do remember my mother being terribly confused by recipe books that only listed grams etc, when she was used to ounces and pounds.
A quick scan of the internet tells me that only the United States of America, Liberia and Burma (Myanmar) have not yet officially adopted the metric system.
I can’t imagine the United States wanting to change though, given that county roads are named (or perhaps more accurately numbered) according to distance from an agreed point. (Here in Wells County, it’s the designated center of the county, or back in Ohio, the county lines to the west and south.)
That really would be like trying to reinvent the wheel!
by FRANK SHANLY
frank@news-banner.com
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