MrsDoyle

I’ve got an injury at the moment that means I have to order my groceries online and have them delivered. So many items I don’t remember ordering and bitterly regret. Jelly snakes. Chocolate. Bombay mix. Fancy sourdough crackers.

I love travelling solo. My first big experience was in 1976, touring the UK alone on a rail pass. I was really nervous, but it was great and I was hooked. I cycled around Connemara a few years later, walked the Cornish cliff paths too. Always had a better time than when travelling with someone else. The peak was probably a few weeks in Kenya, using local buses and trains. Last year I had a week in Tokyo, brilliant visit.

What I like best is being able to change my plans depending on mood, weather etc without consulting anyone. I also meet more people - I’m no longer shy about striking up a convo, or practising my terrible language skills.

I used to have one of those little joke .exe files called Cupholder. If you clicked on it, it opened the CD drive.

She’s my spirit animal.

When I worked for a newspaper we were asked by a campaigner not to use the phrase “committed suicide”, because it dated back to the days when suicide was a crime. We were asked to refer instead to someone having taken their own life. It made sense, so that’s what we did. You can call it “politically correct” I guess. I see it as just being sensitive to the feelings of people grieving for a loved one.

I picked up a hitchhiker just outside Edinburgh once, and drove him all the way to Devon. The first thing he said was “Aren’t you afraid to pick someone up when you’re on your own?” I replied “You’re right, I’ll drop you off at the next lay-by.” His face!! Happily he realised how dumb he was, apologised, and we had a good trip.

I hitchhiked a lot in my twenties, ie in the 1970s, and only had a couple of scary experiences. Once my boyfriend and I were picked up by a guy who was a Vietnam veteran. He told us horror stories while driving at high speed down one of NZ’s windiest roads. Another time in Australia the driver turned out to be a drunk. It was a long ride so we stuck with it, until it got dark and very frightening. My boyfriend finally persuaded the guy to let him drive.

The best hitchhiking experience was in France, around 1980. A friend and I got a lift from a very friendly, nice man. He knew a scenic route to Marseille, ok fine. At one point he asked if we smoked, and produced a big bag of weed. Bonjour! Very strong weed. Happy days.

Aaaand then he ran out of petrol. On a deserted stretch of scenery. It’s ok though - he had a jerry can in the boot and put out his thumb to hitch ahead to where he thought there was a petrol station. He was away for a very long time, and we started getting paranoid. There was a briefcase in the back seat. We opened it, and it was full of pornography - photos stuck to boards that fit exactly into the case. Sacré bleu!

Very stoned and fearing the worst (kidnapping), we decided to hitch away and abandon the car. Stuck out our thumbs and a car stopped. A man jumped out, and it was our driver! The petrol station was closed, so he had hitched PAST us to another one. He put the petrol in the car and we continued on our way. He took us all the way to Marseille as promised, gave us a couple of joints and waved us goodbye.

I’m 73 and I reckon I’m learning more now than when I was in my 20s. I have a few things I’m interested in and I have a real thirst to know more about them. Not like in school where I was forced to remember a load of names and dates.

I might have hit a wall as far as tech goes though - I see people here on Lemmy talking about servers and I’m interested, but struggle to understand the basics.

I’m old and tech-y, and my contemporaries still use the “I’m too old to learn” line on me - and then ask me to sort out their issue. Deeply annoying.

Now do tides!

Ha ha, that reminds me of some of the performative reading I did as a teen - ostentatiously reading a “cool” or difficult book to impress people. The joke was on me when I started reading War and Peace. I got swept away by it, loved it, and was condemned to carrying around this massive paperback until I’d finished it.

Yes. I’ve got a Kobo reader but mostly use the Kobo phone app to read the books I buy there. For my own files, eg from Project Gutenberg, I use ReadEra Premium, which is superior to the Kobo app. It can handle just about any format, including .mobi, which not even Amazon’s Kindle app does now. I like it a lot.

Finally, there’s Libby, the library app. I use it mainly to read the New Yorker magazine. You need to belong to a library first. Sign up to Libby and you can borrow from the library’s collection. Mine allows you to borrow a book for two weeks, so I mainly stick to magazines.

I’m so used to reading on my phone now that I find print books cumbersome and limiting - I always have half a dozen books on the go and can’t imagine carting around that many books.

I remember telling someone my sister and I were going to the Dordogne in France. He said, “Oh but it’s so touristy.”

We went anyway, and it was awesome! The cave paintings alone made it worthwhile, but there was also beautiful scenery, great food, interesting towns. Highly recommend.

Venice would be my pick too. I was there to see the Vogalonga, which was spectacular. I spent a week wandering the canals, toured the Fenice and a hundred churches. I also had a lesson in rowing Venetian style, in the canals and out on the lagoon. The locals I met (mostly while food shopping) were gracious and friendly. . Magic city.

Mate, I know people who died as babies, as teenagers, a friend was murdered in her thirties, life can be over in the snap of the fingers at any age. My own father died in his fifties; that has had a huge effect on how I live my life. I take risks, I stretch myself.

Oh that made me laugh, because actually beekeepers are a competitive lot. There’s an annual honey show, prizes galore. Not just for the honey, but for wax creations, baking and more. I got a first for photography - a trophy and a book token.

There’s also a more subtle competition over the amount of honey produced, success in splitting colonies, managing to get colonies through winter, fewest stings. It’s great.

I learned about that mystery just yesterday from another Lemmy post - really fascinating!

Hungarian, so I could have a good conversation with my lovely stepfather, whose English isn’t great.

Cantonese and/or Mandarin for chat with Chinese friends and relatives.

What I really want though is a babel fish - you put it in your ear and it acts as a universal translator. Any language, Earth or alien.

You will not be “too frail” to enjoy life at 65, or even older. Don’t let that thought poison your present. I took up a competitive sport in my 60s, as well as beekeeping, and I’m not an outlier.

I’ve been using Zorin for a couple of years and recently installed it on my desktop. It’s free.