Pinky's Book Link

Showing posts with label Age. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Age. Show all posts

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Some Things You Really Don't Want to Know!

                               

Some time ago my sister Sam told me about a website I’d never heard of before. I may be late to the party and you and every man and his bone has already heard of it… but maybe not.

“It’s awful,” Sam cringed, “you type in the country you live in, your parents’ ages and the average amount of times you see them a year.”

“Yeah… and what? It tells you what a slack arse daughter you are?” I asked swallowing in guilt, trying to recall the last time I called the oldies.

“No,” she murmured in a hushed tone. “It tells you how many more times you’re likely to see them before they die. It’s worked out using national statistics and life expectancy.”

‘A bit morbid,’ I thought. ‘I’ll be steering clear of that gloomy harbinger.”

But just like the curious box that allured the wayward Pandora, the site of macabre mystery beckoned me and before I knew it I was typing the details into the text box on the site.

I can’t reveal the actual figure it displayed as occasionally my father reads this blog (only to provide him with further evidence his eldest daughter is indeed an idiotic time-waster) so let’s just think of an arbitrary figure.

Imagine the result was eight times; I’d see my parents eight more times before they drove the grey nomad trailer up to the stars towards a celestial eternity of lawn bowls, All Bran and bickering over the speed limit.

Eight more times certainly doesn’t seem like much does it? 


But what are you supposed to do? You can’t suddenly start dropping in on them all the time. If you decided to visit them once a month instead of the usual annual trip you’d dramatically cut their life expectancy by years

I don’t think they’d be too impressed with that.

I guess you could leave the eighth visit as an undetermined mythological date in the future thus ensuring your parents lived forever… but then you’d never see them again anyway.

Or you could space out the visits to every five years guaranteeing them both living well into their one hundred and thirties. But isn’t that defeating the purpose of the site i.e., encouraging progeny to be more attentive towards their elderly parents in their dotage.

Whatever the solution is, I don’t know.

But if my father does read this post I’m pretty sure his next Google search will be,

“How many more times do I have to see my brainless daughter, Pinky again before I finally find peace in perpetuity?”

Friday, February 7, 2014

How being a Primary School Teacher can Destroy your Self-Esteem!

                                 

I was on playground duty the other day and a rather candid Grade One-er approached me with her head cocked to one side staring at me from under her long lashes. I smiled at her indulgently. Those little ones are so cute.

“Are you old?” she enquired with all the delicacy of someone slamming a blackboard ruler into my face.

“Apparently,” I replied after a few seconds stunned silence.

There was not much more to say.

I recall a couple of years ago some older girls strolled up to me in the playground. “Excuse us for asking Mrs Poinker… but are you expecting?”

I burnt that dress as soon as I got home… burnt it dead.

“What are these?” asked a curious eight year old one day, as he pressed the bulging veins on my wizened, thin-skinned hands with intense interest. “My Grandma’s got them too!”

Another time a young boy vigilantly ogled me with a wary look on his face the whole time as I read the class a story using my most dramatically expressive voice and facial expression. I thought he was interested in my excellent rendition of Roald Dahl’s “The Twits”.

“You look like Cap’n Jack Sparrow,” he lisped in horrified fascination when I finished the chapter and put the book down.

I was mortified last year when one of my boys greeted me in the morning with his frank, albeit blunt comment, “Are you tired Mrs Poinker? You have really big bags under your eyes! You need to go to bed earlier.”

Then I remembered I used to say the same thing to him when he arrived at school after staying up all night watching the State of Origin with his dad.

I used to be miffed when the kids accidentally called me “Grandma”. Now it doesn’t worry me anywhere near as much as when they accidentally call me “Grandad”.

On another happier note, please note the excellent Avatar my darling husband Scotto, created for me to replace the out of date profile picture I’ve clung to for the last twelve months.




There doesn’t appear to be a jowl, wrinkle or grey hair in sight! I only look about twenty-five! At least someone still thinks I look okay. Those overly forth-right kids know nothing!

Thursday, March 7, 2013

The Interweb and Pinky's attempts to Googlise!



Hello, my name is Pinky and I’m a reformed Luddite.
I must have been the last surviving person in the modern world stubbornly clinging on to her bank passbook instead of using an ATM card.

At the tender age of forty I enrolled at university, freshly divorced and in need of some decent qualifications with which to gain remunerative employment. 


The five kids were all finally at Primary school so from 8:30 am until 3:00pm each week day I was free.

I enrolled in a four year Bachelor of Education degree. In retrospect the actual course was quite straight forward and I miraculously slipped into study mode straightaway. 

The biggest impediment to my progress was having to grapple with two new-fangled contraptions that had been invented since I left school twenty-three years beforehand; the computer and the internet. Not only did I not know about Microsoft word or how to send an email, I didn’t even know how to turn a computer on.

In blind terror and panic I enlisted twelve year old Thaddeus to deliver some crash courses in technology. 

“Mum! You can’t break it you know!” he would say impatiently to me when I would be scared to touch anything. 

Thaddeus ate his words a few months down the track when I naively opened the ‘Snow White’ email thus crashing his beloved computer.

During the first week of Uni I had to submit a one page summary of my background and yes, they expected it to be typed. I must have spent three hours on the computer composing it. Every time I spotted a mistake on the page; like an imbecile I would backspace all the way back, correct it, and start again. 

Thaddeus hadn’t yet told me about clicking the cursor on to the page.

My tutor was dumbfounded when I handed the first draft of an assignment in to her, completely written out in longhand. 

“It’s much easier if you type it up on the computer you know. Then you can just go in and cut and paste the modifications.” she encouraged pityingly. 

In bewildered confusion at these foreign terms, visions of steely scissors and clag glue popped into my mind.

Students had to sign up for tutorials via email and it was a sh#t fight to get in early because no one wanted to attend the late night sessions. Of course I was one of the last to get on and had to send a begging letter to the tutor to allow me to come to one of the already overfilled daytime sessions.

Dear Louka,

I’m really sorry but the only tutorials I am able to attend are during the day, as I have five babies under twelve and I’m a single mother. I can’t afford a babysitter as my ex-husband doesn’t give me much money. 

Also I’m a mature age student and I feel it’s unfair that we have to sign up through email as the young ones can run faster and they know how to get on to their emails very quickly whereas I am still using a list of fourteen step by step instructions.
Yours truly, 

Pinky Poinker.

I optimistically hit send. An email immediately appeared on my screen and I opened it. Who could it be? I thought in excitement. 
What?... it was the email I’d just sent to the tutor.

“Excuse me, sorry to be a pest,” I interupted the pimply faced geek in the booth beside me. “Can you tell me why this email I just sent came back to me?”

“It’s because you hit ‘reply all’.” He drawled in a patronising tone. “Your email was sent to everyone doing the same course as you, so it came to you as well.” 

Oh for f#*k’s sake ! I thought in shock. There are four hundred students doing this course. Now everyone doing an education degree knows what a d#ckhead loser I am writing that pathetic sob story.

Another horrifying thought struck me like a bolt of lightning.

“How much does each email cost?” I asked him in terror.

Things did improve and eventually I grew confident enough to throw away Thaddeus’ list of “Steps to Turning on your Computer”.

Six years ago we were issued with laptops at work. They were a brand new device to me and as I despise change I found fault with everything about them. 

“I don’t like sliding my finger around this little square instead of using a mouse pad. “ I whined.

“You can always plug in a mouse to the laptop.” My friend Lisa offered helpfully.

“But that’s just silly!” I replied haughtily. “How could a mouse fit in to this little square.”

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Pinky's Guide to How You Know You're Getting Old

                               

1. I remember going to the cinema when they still showed
the Marlborough Man advertisements before the movie.


2. When I get bored in meetings instead of checking
messages on my iPhone, I amuse myself by pulling those
stubborn whiskers from my chin.

3. Students in my class don’t accidentally call me ‘Mum’ any
more, now they accidentally call me ‘Grandma’.
4. I know who Donny Osmond and Shaun Cassidy and H R
Puff n Stuff are.
5. I’m always going to work with flat, lank hair because I can’t
make out the conditioner from the shampoo in the shower.
6. When I click on to my year of birth on a drop down box I 
have to scroll down a REALLY long way.
7. I have wrinkles on my knees and bat wings that Padraic 
my eighteen year old, loves to poke and make wobble.8. I know that ‘The Lion King’ was a rip off of ‘Kimba the 
White Lion’.
9. I remember when kids didn’t have names like Shaquilla 
and Shaqquinelle, they were called Gary or Barry.
10. When I was choosing a lacquer colour for my new acrylic 
nails and I chose a pretty orange shade, the archetypal
young nail technician screeched,
“NO YOU NO HAVE THAT ONE! YOU TOO OLD FOR THAT!"

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