Chapter 7

Happy 3 month birthday Eleanor! we saw your very cute picture this morning.

It is tuesday here today and Gramps has already been to his exercise class and come back. Noni and I managed to clean the oven yesterday, which has been on the list. We had to wait until all of the cookie making was finished.

Gramps had another car drama yesterday, this time in the Caddy. He was on his way home from the Eye Doctor when the car started to smoke. He decided to just keep going as long as he could and managed to get to his favourite garage in San Bruno, by which time smoke was pouring out. It ended up being the radiator! Gramps said it was a lucky day on the whole because he got 3 pairs of new glasses for $40, managed to avoid being towed again and managed to not run out of gas on the way home.

I did buy my new camera, stuck with the Sony so that my storage card was still useable. I got it for a pretty good price, $220 US after taxes, and took my first photos tonight at the Historical Society outing where I went with Noni and Gramps. It was their quarterly meeting, election of the new officers and a presentation from the Basque Cultural Centre which opened in So City in 1982. They have just recently established a sister city relationship between So City and one of the towns a Basque regions on the French side of the Pyranees (I now know that there are 7 Basque regions, 3 on the French side and 4 on the Spanish side!)

Everyone likes to come and talk to Noni and Gramps because they are fun and good socialisers. Most people had brought cookies or cake but Noni’s were definitely in the homemade category and were popular. There were a few people I knew there and it was fun to see Noni and Gramps in that social setting. We sat next to Bertha Iskra who has been their good friend for many years and she told us that Florence Ferko had died. She was the mother of one of my primary school and high school friends and so we will be going to the rosary tonight and the funeral tomorrow.

I have set up a skype account to use while I am here and I tested it out just this morning by calling Dad. Our skype name is ssfvisit2010. This morning I skyped Dad at 12PM here but that was only 5am. Anyone who wants to try this let me know and we will see if we can tee up a time. The time scale for a call which would be able to include Non and Gramps and line up with the aussie time zone would be from 1PM to 7PM US time, which equates to 6am – 12 pm Australian time. So please let me know if you want to give this a go.