It must be a female thing. Yeah, yeah.

Further to my 11 August Farmdoc’s Blog post [1], I’m now the proud owner of a Survival Ark grain mill. I collected it from the Mole Creek Post Office nine days ago. And seven days ago I bought a few kilograms of organic wheat. But I haven’t yet ground any. I duly unpacked the mill, attached the table clamp and installed the grinding stones. As the stones are grooved obliquely, it occurred to me that the handle should only be turned one way, i.e. clockwise or anticlockwise. The instructions didn’t say which, so last Friday I emailed the supplier (who’s also the designer) to ask him. Last Monday he emailed me back as follows: ‘Yes, it does make a difference. Clockwise when turning the handle from the rear of the mill. If someone is watching from the front, the flour falling from the stone from their view, it would be turning anticlockwise’. Blimey, I was even more confused. So I emailed Sweetheart Vivienne thus: ‘Am I visuospatially challenged or is he linguistically challenged? Can you understand what he’s trying to tell me?’ To which she replied ‘I understand. You turn the handle in a clockwise direction. It must be a female thing’. So now I know. And tomorrow I’ll no longer be a wheatgrinding virgin (or a virginal wheatgrinder). ‘It must be a female thing.’ Yeah, yeah. Just to prove how clever men are, take a look at this 19-item slideshow [2]. I rest my case.

Shit, eh.

Shit. When I was a nipper my Dad washed my mouth out with soap for saying that word. Which naturally only encouraged me to say it more. In those 1950s days, that word didn’t appear in the media. But in the decades since then, life’s become more liberal, in Australia anyway, and so formerly forbidden words are now seen and heard regularly in private and public [1]. And nowadays shit’s used as an adjective and a verb as well as a noun.

So yesterday I had a shit day. Though I had a mountain of work to do including watching 4½ hours of surveillance video, I couldn’t resist the temptation to download iOS 4 [2] and install it on my iPod Touch. The download was flawless, but soon after the installation started it crashed. It crashed several more times. It kept giving me various error messages. Finally, out of desperation, I attached my iPod to Sweetheart Vivienne’s MacBook Pro computer, and the download and installation went without a hitch. But this all took me hours. So yesterday I didn’t get much work done. Including no video watched. Ho hum.

Whilst on the subject of shit, Sweetheart Vivienne and I have habitually different ways of inserting toilet rolls onto the holder. She does it with the end sheets back touching the wall (pictured), and I do it with them forward away from the wall. I suppose this is an example of the Mars and Venus thing [3]. Shit, eh.

farmdoc's blog post number 261

Last Saturday, Sweetheart Vivienne blogged about last Friday’s hay carting. And yesterday I did the same. I knew we’d write about the same topic in different ways. For a start, she’s a Writer and I’m just someone who writes. Or tries to. Sweetheart Vivienne’s post doesn’t contain even one number. But my post’s dotted – or littered, depending on your viewpoint – with them: counts, times and durations. This partly reflects my aim of diarising this year’s hay carting, so next year we’ll have a record of this year’s to consult. And it partly reflects the way I see the world; or at least my world. Obviously I see my world the way I do, because I’m me. And this incorporates my age and gender. Last week Sweetheart Vivienne and I were having a discussion with our darling fourth daughter, and I continually brought up the practical, ‘nuts-and-bolts’ consequences of various courses of action. My doing so irritated said daughter. Sweetheart Vivienne explained it with the epithet ‘That’s such a Dad thing’. I don’t know if all dads think the way I do. How they think is not my problem; but how I think is. Anyway, enough of this. I’m now going to click on the Tasmanian Library Service website and order Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.