The Faraway Nearby: Diary of a Taranaki Tech Traveller – Part Three

Fame! I’ve had my 15 minutes as promised by Andy Warhol as an article about me as an Age Hacker appeared online in the Taranaki Daily News.

So easy to click on the Facebook button and share my ‘fame’ with my Facebook friends. If we appeared in the paper as kids, Mum used to post a clipping to Nana in the South Island. For our children I would post photocopies to several family members elsewhere in New Zealand and overseas.

Now Facebook lets me ‘skite’ to my whole ‘Christmas Card list’ at once and in response over 50 of my friends and family have ‘Liked’ my post. They are spread from Norway and the Outer Hebrides through the USA and New Zealand. Our lives have intersected somewhere significant in my past. Just reading each name brings a host of memories and certainly brings the faraway nearby. I love Facebook!

Frozen – the musical not the temperature just yet. I hear from an excited small friend that a show on ice is coming. Decide to take her and Waikato grandchildren to a matinee performance in Hamilton. So easy to use my phone to find the event, choose the best time to fit our four hour journey, select what I hope will be good seats, pay with my credit card and have the tickets sent back to my phone. All done while sitting watching TV with a few pauses to txt mothers and enquire about best days, staying over etc. I guess being able to do all that is a reason to call it a smartphone! Now to cope with the excitement building until August.

Apples – at the moment it’s the bumper crop from the tree rather than the computers that present a challenge. Stewing them seems simplest
but then what? Preserving jars dug out of the garage, seals etc bought from the supermarket.
Forgotten the steps to make the jars seal. Need to be shown rather than told so Google “You Tube Water bath preserving” and get several options for instructions. Decide to watch Water bath Canning Basics by Michigan State University Extension Services as they sound an authoritative outfit.

Very helpful to watch a competent person go through the process step by step without trying to be glamorous, sell me something or entertain. Chose to ignore some of her recommendations but followed the basics. Now have jars full of stewed apples waiting for when the temperatures do drop and we need those winter puddings.

Kaye Lally, Age Hacker