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I've figured out some positives. Life is good. We've had twenty seven inches of rain so far this year and the country is looking great. It's finally stopped raining and the beautiful clear and cool weather is here. I have a debt free roof over my head, lots of food, a motor car that works, I can walk, talk, breathe, hear and see and have plenty of fun stuff to do. The first photo is the front yard, the second is the back yard, and the third photo is my best mate outside the kitchen window trying to shame me into giving him some dog biscuits. I've known him since he was born, so he's known me his entire life. There's nowhere I'd rather be.

Just found out that Lorraine Bayley (Grace Sullivan) passed away on 28 February 2026 aged 89.

"Jerry built" has a couple of possible sources. From an 1856 use in Liverpool, "built hastily of shoddy materials," from jerry "bad, defective". Thr jerry could also be a corruption of "jury" as used in the term "jury mast", a temporary mast put up in place of one that has been broken or carried away." and the earliest citation given is from 1616, with the spelling lury mast. It is wrong to associate "jerry built" with anything German, unless the thing was built by a post-war German refugee working for a shonky house builder.

The Later versions Have More Interference on the fit and Pass a Higher load test. Factory ONLY assembly.. Nev

High speed stall on Jets they describe similarly. It's like a shudder. I've experienced it. The road surface has been subject to Compaction. by oscillating Impact forces reaching a Harmonic. As Drivers seek better surfaces the Ridges spread out on the New Path. It appears to Be directional to a Point. IF you drive on the wrong side of the road the effect seems Less. I've Known People to tear the shock absorber Mount Points off the Chassis. I've wrecked 2 rear shock absorbers south of Winton. Nev

Our local Reject Shop was recently renovated to match photos of Dollarama stores, changing aisles from transverse to longitudinal. It still carries the old name but is ready to be updated.

Don't tell Jerry that!

Another little-known takeover has seen The Reject Shop sell out to a huge Canadian company, Dollarama. The Reject Shop got $260M for their business, and Dollarama has plans to change all Reject Shop store branding to Dollarama. In addition, Dollarama are going on a massive expansion drive, aiming to enlarge the range of stuff their stores sell, to compete with Target and K-Mart, and even Coles and Woolworths. Dollarama plan to nearly double the number of stores from the current 390 stores, to more than 700. In addition, Dollarama promise huge savings on their product prices, due to their massive buying power. Dollarama claim that in some cases, consumers will see major decreases in pricing of products they sell, sometimes up to half the current retail price. It will be interesting to see the result, the Canadians apparently love Dollarama stores.

I noticed on that unsealed road beside my place that the corrugations run from one side of teh road to the other. It's a road that only has one vehicle at a time on it so there is no need to keep to the left. Most people would drive straddling the crown. One would think that wheeltrack ruts would form and that the corrugations would be only in those ruts. I wonder why, then, that the corrugations are right across the road.

This is the satirical headline story from the Bell Tower Times - Perths equivalent of The Onion. The bloke may not be familiar to East Coasters - but he's John Hughes, W.A.'s longest-lived car dealer, and a legend in W.A. He turned 90 last December, and still runs personalised TV ads and asks car buyers to call him personally, and regularly states, he's "W.A.'s most trusted car dealer". He's also Alan Bonds BIL. Yes, THAT Alan Bond. But John Hughes has managed to evade any of the Alan Bond taint, in his business dealings.

Thanks Nev, you reminded me of the old trick of driving on the other side of the road to lessen the effect. I haven't been out there for a fair while so had forgotten that one.

It would be hard to reject an offer like that.

I think it will be one or the other. If they are going to get anywhere they'll need more like him.

It's not a good thing to Have something Jerry-built. OME will tell us where that saying originated. Nev

The Poms refuse to do any repair work on their houses, they mostly live in council-owned housing and they expect the councils to fix them. When they do own their own house, they always engage tradespeople to do their repairs and maintenance.

You need to set up a Corrugations Cam at road level, running continously, to record exactly how those corrugations form! I'm amused at how the Americans insist that they're called "washboard" - but all the early American publications call them "corrugations". 😄

At the Men's Shed we have two old desktop PC's which were repllaced from the organisation that runs the shed, similar to the photo below, for use by members. I spend a few hours per week using one of them. The problem is so many websites now require security id by way of fingerprint or facial photograh. These machines do not have webcams or touchpads. The alternative is multi level confirmation with security codes sent to your phone or an email inbox, which probably requires a similar level of ID. Many require you to use their AP, but apps flatten your phone battery and cost money, chewing up your data costs. Surely, if you have a secure password that should be sufficient. Such passwords could be your mother's maiden name and birthday (year not necessary), a symbol, and to differentiate on different sites, a site abbreviation. As an example, for this site you could have,say, Murphy2306#SA. You are not likely to forget your mother's maiden name or birthday. This meets the requirement of 8 characters, upper and lower case, numerals and a special character. For another site such as mygov, you would use the same password up to the symbol and append MG. :- Murphy2306#MG. Another alternative is the model of your car, the rego, special character and site ID :- Commodore1JV6DZ%AP (for Aircraft Pilots).

For all their expertise in hardware sales, it is strange that Bunnings' attempt to get into the British market failed. Probably it was due to cultural differences such as we have seen with the failure of Starbucks and some other US mobs in Australia.

All of the 9xx series are Pressed up also. Nev

Is this bloke a personal friend? He seems to know you.... Another recent headline:- "Perth man still not going to concede that was a storm"

Farley seems like a reasonable sort of individual with a realistic outlook, that is less hardline than Paulines approach. I'm surprised he's thrown his hat in with ON. Perhaps he'll be the sure hand on the tiller of ON and bring some stability to the Party. Or perhaps he won't last long, and there'll be a falling out, and he'll be booted from ON.

Visited the ASC when they were building the last one and refurbishing the Collins. The guide was saying they decided they wanted them to go faster so they put a heap of fairng on them.

That's great news, Willie. One of the problems with getting old is getting older alone. I'd hate to do that. I have a mate doing that now, he and his brother built a big shed on some rented land in the deep SW of W.A., alongside the Blackwood River, which is quite a scenic spot. However, his slightly older brother (79) recently developed dementia (last year), and has moved out of his half of the shed, into a nursing home in a small nearby town. He was assessed as being unable to look after himself. So my mate is now living alone in that big shed, and I've noticed how much he's deteriorated in the last year or so. He keeps falling over, too, as he loses his balance easily. He fell over last week in the yard, and went straight backwards onto the ground, and gashed his head open. So, being the tough old codger he is, he wrapped his head in towels and drove himself to the local nursing post (there's no local doctors or hospital). The nurse there was shocked to see him, there was so much blood, she thought he'd been shot. So then he had to wait 13 hrs for an ambulance to transport him to Busselton Hospital, 60kms away. The doc there stitched him up and sent him home, but when I rang him a couple of days later, he said he was having problems doing jobs in his workshop, and thought he might have had some degree of concussion - although the doc ruled that out with the standard tests. He's just turned 78 last month, and I'm concerned about how he will go into the near future. He's on the bones of his bum, he was never a good money manager, and his ex-wife cleaned him out and took the house, so he ended up in the shed. He's totally resistant to any idea of moving into any form of retirement village, and he can't afford it, anyway. I reckon he would do a lot better with a partner, but he's got no time for women now, so that's unlikely to happen. One of the advantages of having a woman around, is that she can at least raise help, or find you quickly when you've taken a turn for the worse.