THE HILLS REPORT FOR THE NEWSLETTER 2017 BEP KLEIBERG AND MICHELE MIDDENDORP co‐LOS
Our first meeting( always in January) was to plan the year’ s program, which was then followed by a brief game of celebrity heads before supper.
February saw 19 of our 21 members gather for an evening of commenting on a wide variety of newspaper headings and articles. At times the conversation became quite animated and required the chairwoman to intervene with her bell. Surprisingly‘ Trump’ was mentioned only once and almost just in passing( thank goodness, as it would be easy to spend an entire evening on that subject!).
Have you noticed how quiet it is on public transport these days? On buses & trains you’ ll see most commuters are on either their phones, computers or tablets or dozing off. No verbal conversations— no friendly‘ in person’ connections, however fleeting. In March we had interesting discussions about body language, communication and the effects of social media. We all agreed that texting and using social media have their uses, but take up too much of our children’ s time and that the art of oral communication is getting lost in the process. An example was brought up of two people having dinner at a restaurant while both were texting on their phones. Maybe to each other? We learned that various body poses mean different things, but that there is always a combination of at least 3 of these poses necessary to determine what is actually being said through body language. All in all a very informative night which was expertly led by Thomasina.
April’ s Trivia night, thoughtfully put together by Sue, saw great rivalry between the 2 teams of 5. Questions such as name 3 states in the USA with either an x or a z in them, and, where is the world’ s most ancient forest, had us scratching our heads. The final result was just a half mark separating the teams.( ANSWERS: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico; The Daintree).
For our May meeting we were lucky enough to have a lady called Thelma Scanes. She is part of the soft furnishing group of Old Government House in Parramatta, set up in 2004. The group is responsible for making curtains, bedding and other soft furnishings as near to the original as possible, as the various Governors took those with them when they moved out, because materials were scarce in those days. The volunteers worked on designs sourced by Elizabeth Wright from old sketches & descriptions, and later, photographs. Tassels and fringes would have cost lots of money if the group had had to buy them overseas so they were hand made. Only natural materials were used; wool, cotton, linen and silk‐all hand stitched. The volunteers had to learn painting on velvet, spinning cords and binding tassels. Thelma showed us many examples and we had a real insight into what was involved in replicating the beautiful soft furnishings of the era.
The June meeting saw 15 of us sharing our research on topics beginning with individually and randomly selected alphabet letters. We covered many diverse topics. Imagine using soap, chalk, crushed oyster shells or ground charcoal as Toothpaste( T). In 1890 Colgate introduced toothpaste in tubes. Paper( P) was invented during the Han Dynasty in 105 AD. The Chinese also invented envelopes and toilet paper. Zip‐a‐dee‐doo‐dah( Z) is a song everyone is familiar with, but where did it originate? It is from the 1946 Disney film‘ Song of the South’ featuring 2 white children
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