This Monday I will tell you a little about the Aboriginal flag this one should be pretty well known but for those who don’t know what it looks like here it is.

Now this flag has been around since 12^th July 1971, it was designed by Harold Thomas and was first flown in Adelaide on the 12^th July 1971 before then there was no Australian Aboriginal Flag.

The red stripe represents the land and the black symbolises the Aboriginal people, the yellow circle represents the Sun, the giver of life.

The flag was originally designed for the land rights movement, but has since became a symbol of the Aboriginal people of Australia, is is one of the official flags of Australia.

In 1994 at the Commonwealth Games Cathy Freeman caused a stir when she carried both the Aboriginal Flag and the Australian Flag during her victory lap after winning the 200 metres sprint as only the national flag was meant to be displayed. Despite strong criticism from both Games officials and the Australian team president Cathy again carried both flags after winning the 400 metres.

In 1995 Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating decided that both the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags should be given national flag status despite opposition by the Liberal party. Nonetheless nothing has changed and both flags still have national flag status.

Many building in Australia fly the Aboriginal flag as well as the Australian flag, the first city council to fly the Aboriginal flag was Newcastle City Council in 1977.

Well Thursday is here and this Thursday is going to a bit of this and a bit of that post, we will kick it off with some school dramas.

The school Leo goes to has a system that sends parent an automatic text via sms when their child is absent from school, so yesterday Jessica gets this text saying Leo was absent she rings her sister Natasha (who takes the boys to school) and asks did you take Leo to school, she says of course I did and Jessica broke down and said she had a text about Leo not being there. Natasha jumps in her car and rushes around to Jessica’s place takes about 3 minutes to get there, and they both try ringing the school but it isn’t getting through. So Natasha drives Jessica to the school who I might add is in a right state, they get there and YES Leo is AT SCHOOL there was a computer stuff up with Leo’s name. Jessica was so upset that they took her over to his class room so she could see him and give him a hug, have to add Natasha although not crying was extremely upset herself.

Drama number two concerns both boys, when I went to get Blain from school this afternoon I am sitting in the car waiting the bell rang children exit the school and no Blain this is not unusual he is often pretty much the last child out. However, at 3.15 he still wasn’t out this is 20 minutes after the bell went I go searching for him and he is off playing handball yet again. I have told him a number of times not to do that as I have to get Leo after I get him.

So we are very late to get Leo as the time we where just leaving Blain’s school is usually the time we get to Leo’s school, when we get to Leo’s school Blain says I’ll go in and get him but when he goes to enter the school the gate is locked, this caused Blain to get a little worried and I said we will have to enter via the staff car-park. Blain says you wait here nanna and I will go and runs off as fast as he could to find Leo, when he got Leo, Leo is upset as well he was worried we had forgotten about him.

I am hoping this teachers Blain a bit of a lesson as to why he has to come straight out to the car after the bell rings in the afternoon.

So this morning I had a doctors appointment about what is called a care plan this is plan they do for people with a chronic disease such as Diabetes which I have, the appointment was for 10.30am but he was running close to an hour late and then he was with me for a bloody long time.

I now have to see the podiatrist on the 3^rd and exercise physiologist on the 4^th of next month, have to say this new doctor is pretty good, I do like him he is very thorough and explained to me what a fatty liver is, I knew it was fat around the liver but didn’t know what if anything could be done about it. The answer is no there is nothing that can be done other then having my diabetes well controlled and losing a bit of wait.

I now have time to eat before leaving to get the boys from school, I hope Blain isn’t late getting out today. Speaking of Leo I drove him to school this morning and guess what he wouldn’t let me go and a staff member had to pry him off me yet again. I rarely take him to school because of this behaviour.

I am not going to bother reading and blog posts today, I really just don’t feel like it as I am very stuffed up in the head and taking cold tablets make me tired and oh yeah they tell you when you get cold tablets not to take paracetamol as there is some in the tablets but if you read the label you will notice that each table contains about 250mg of paracetamol when a normal paracetamol table has 500mg of paracetamol in them and you normal take 2 paracetamol tablets at a time so to me it makes sense if you take 2 cold tablets with paracetamol in them you should also take 1 paracetamol tablet. I, however, took 2 cold tablets and 2 paracetamol tablets.

This week I think I will tell you about a fella named Teddy Sheean, Edward “Teddy” Sheean was an ordinary seaman serving on HMAS Armidale whose death during a Japanese aerial attack on his ship has become a well-known episode in Australian Second World War lore.

Teddy was born at Lower Barrington, Tasmania, on 28 December 1923. He received his education in a Catholic school at Latrobe in Tasmania and, having completed his schooling, worked on farms in the area where he grew up. He enlisted in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve in April 1941.

The vessel on which he was billeted, the former ferry Kuttabul, was sunk during the Japanese midget submarine attack on Sydney Harbour. Fortunately for Sheean he was in Tasmania on home leave that night. He returned to Sydney 11 days later to begin his service as an Oerlikon anti-aircraft gunner on the newly commissioned corvette, HMAS Armidale. Armidale spent her early months on relatively uneventful convoy escort duties along Australia’s east and northern coasts.

In October 1942 Armidale’s captain, Lieutenant Commander David Richards, was ordered to Darwin and, on 29 November, the corvette began her last operation. Along with two other vessels, she was to undertake a resupply and evacuation mission to Japanese-occupied Timor.

Having been seen by Japanese reconnaissance pilots shortly after leaving the port, Armidale was destined for a dangerous journey. She and the other corvette on the operation, HMAS Castlemaine, missed the rendezvous with the third ship, in Timor’s Betano Bay, but met her later some 100 kilometres off-shore. The plan having gone awry, Armidale was ordered to return to Betano the following night. Facing a long day in enemy waters and the certainty of attack, the crew waited.

When in the mid-afternoon she was hit by two aircraft-launched torpedoes, Armidale began to sink fast. Sheean was wounded and, rather than abandon ship, he strapped himself to his Oerlikon and began to engage the attacking aircraft even as the ship sunk beneath him. He shot down two planes, and crewmates recall seeing tracer rising from beneath the surface as Sheean was dragged under the water, firing until the end. He died on 1 December 1942 aged just 18. Only 49 of the 149 men on board survived the attack and subsequent ordeal on rafts and in life boats.

Teddy’s actions deserved the Victoria Cross, an award for which he was not recommended at the time although he was Mentioned in Dispatches.

He has subsequently been honoured in a well-known painting at the Australian War Memorial and by having a Collins Class submarine named after him in 1999 – the only vessel in the Royal Australian Navy to be named after an ordinary seaman.

Well it is now Monday and of course the weekend flew past in rush as per usual, Monday is suppose to be a quiet day, I don’t go out or do anything much during the day.

That hasn’t been the case though, as at 8.45am this morning Natasha rings me to ask if I would take Leo to school so I had to quickly change my shoes and leave to go get him. Then when I get to Natasha’s house she asks me to take back the new shoes she bought for Blain yesterday and exchange them for a larger size.

So I take Leo to school, pay for his excursion and then head out to Glendale to exchange the shoes only to find out that Kmart at Glendale doesn’t have his size, so had them ring Kotara and ask if that store has them, they did so I have to go to Kmart at Kotara to get his shoes. The shoes he needs for tomorrows performance for his dance festival.

So since getting home I read some blogs and had lunch and now I am writing this, it is another cold day here was a bit wet here this morning and in an hour or so I will have to go and get Blain and Leo from school.

Oh yeah I am sneezing and my nose is dripping and it is driving me bloody batty. As mentioned Blain has a dance festival performance tomorrow night in town at Newcastle Panthers club I wonder why on earth they have to have these things at night in the middle of winter and a good 20-25 minutes from home.

Naturally it will be me and Tim who will be taking Blain as Natasha will be at work she would love to be able to take him but of course she can’t. So this week I am expecting to have Blain all week and Leo on Saturday night.

Well that is all from me for this post, be happy, enjoy life and if it is cold there stay warm if it’s hot stay cool.

Guess what, guess what, guess what……….it’s Friday yet again so on this Friday what five things do I have…………….

Photos

Camera

Keys

Letters, Bills and Misc holder

Art work (by grandchildren)

Any idea what this weeks theme is?

Hello everyone I have a couple of photos to share with you today was going to just post them for Wordless Wednesday then I realised it was Thursday what the hell how did that happen it feels like I have lost a day.

It must have been because yesterday morning instead of going to see my nan, mum and I went to Charlestown to do some shopping for socks, knickers and bras, as on Friday mum finds she never seems to have the time or she forgets about going to Best & Less which is not on the same level of the other shops we go to.

Anyway back to the photos here they are, this is a small gift I received from a bloody wonderful blogger Nicole she can be found here: www.cauldronsandcupcakes.com I feel so blessed to receive these the necklace is a little tight but I will just use my extender with it and it will be all good, in fact I will wear it on Friday when I go shopping.

I can’t say thank you enough to Nicole if you have not visited her blog you should do so, she is awesome.

Here we are at another Tuesday afternoon, this week in History Tuesday I am going to tell you a little about the history of the ultrasound why because this morning I had to have one done on my stomach area. I think we are used to ultrasounds although I am sure there are people who only think they are used on pregnant women but that is far from true.

In 1794 Lazzaro Spallanzani a Physiologist was the first known man to experiment with ultrasound.

Then in 1826 Jean Daniel Colladon and Physicist used under-water church bell an early ultrasound transducer under-water to calculate the speed of sound through water to prove that sound travelled faster through water than air.

Let’s jump forward to 1915 when Paul Langevin another Physicist invents a Hydrophone (1^st transducer) to detect Icebergs and Submarines during the first World War.

However, it wasn’t till 1942 when a Neurologist and Psychiatrist Karl Dussik at the University of Vienna used ultrasound for medical diagnosis he was looking for brain tumours.

The in 1948 George Ludwig M,D described the us of ultrasound to diagnosed gallstones.

Ok let’s move onto a bit more about the use of ultrasounds here in Australia, it was in 1962 that the first ultrasound machine was used in obstetrics the machine consisted of a trolley running on a circular track and performed compound scan motions. The patient stood on a angled stretcher and her abdomen was brought into contact with the flexible window on the wall of the coupling tank. That first scan took place at the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington, Sydney on the 11 May 1962 and a week later on the 18^th May the examination showed that the foetus could clearly be displayed and that some echoes were seen within the foetal boundary. Examples of this work were presented by George Kossoff at a symposium, held at the University of Illinois in the USA in June 1962 and was acknowledged as the state-of-the-art for the time.

A couple of years later in 1964 the first ophthalmic echoscope was used at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown Sydney and in 1966 the first breast echoscope was installed at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In the early 1970’s the same type of ultrasound used to scan the abdomen was used to look at babies and children’s brains. To scan with this machine each cross section had to be scanned in 17 seconds.

The sonographers’ training in contact scanning techniques was undertaken by scanning in rhythm with a metronome and timed by a stopwatch until the technique was mastered. The later development of the analogue scan converter, thankfully relaxed the method.

They have come a long way since those first days, now days there are several different scanning modes in medical and obstetric ultrasound, the most common and standard is 2D scanning although 3D is also quiet common now usually with obstetric scans, with 3D scanning instead of the sound waves being sent straight down and reflected back they are sent at d different angles, the returning echoes are processed by a sophisticated computer program resulting in a reconstructed three-dimensional volume image of the foetus’s surface or internal organs.

3D ultrasound was patented by Olaf Von Ramm and Stephen Smith at Duke University in 1987

Hello Monday and what a bloody cold Monday it has been, I am thinking I am going to have to try and tell Blain he has to let me do my blog post before he can have the computer during the days he is here. O didn’t get a chance on Friday to do a post as in the morning I was out shopping and in the afternoon Blain was here, he was also here on Saturday as was Leo and my granddaughters Sydney-May and Summer and by the time they all left I just want to put my feet up and watch some telly.

Yesterday Natasha and Jessica with their boys came over for breakfast and when they left Tim and I popped out to the shops for a few things when I came home I read some blog posts then I decided to take a break and watch telly, then before I knew it Kathy was here dropping off Sydney-May, she had a sleep over at nanna & pappa’s house last night and she is still here she will be staying here for the day while her mum is at work, Kathy will pick her up around 2.30pn by that time Blain will be back for the night.

School goes back tomorrow so that means we will be having Blain here 3 or 4 nights a week again he doesn’t like staying at Jessica’s place that much, he does like it at times but he says not that much when he has to get up and go to school the next day, I don’t get what the difference is but he says he likes being here and have to say I don’t mind having him here, same can be said for having Leo I like having him here and the night we don’t have Blain is the night we have Leo sleep over.

Not only is it cold here it is wet I just looked outside and it is raining so I bet Tim is glad he took the car to work today, he has been wanting to take the car more when the weather is cold and or wet and I do understand but unfortunately most days I need the car to pick the boys up from school, so I have told him he can take it if he can bring the car home by midday and take the bike back to work in the afternoon the only days I really go out is Wednesday when I got to the nursing home with mum and on Friday when I go out shopping and I also often like to go shopping on Saturday morning as well.

Also due to Blain hogging the computer I hand wrote a few letters to my pen pals over the last few nights as I was getting a bit of a pile of letters to answer and after blogging and such I found I kept forgetting to answer them.

Tim loved having Sydney-May here for the night he loved that she wanted to sit on his lap and watch telly and when it was time for bed she came in and got into bed with us, she thought it was so warm in between nanna and pappa. She slept all night and has been a good girl this morning at the moment she is drawing behind me and we have had the telly on her shows all morning which is ok with me as I don’t watch much telly in the morning.

I have the heater on and I am still cold what the hell is with that………………………..

Well since it is Thursday and I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday, Blain was here and hogging the computer, I am going to try and get this written and posted before he arrives for the night.

Ok I can’t think of anything to write about, I could tell that I went to the doctors and my knee is fine just an internal bruise and normal wear and tear, he said I should have normal use of it in the next week or so.