Most of my chatting time with other women comes by phone. I can't go to the coffee shop or out to lunch by myself, Ray always has to come too so the talk is always general and not that kind of talk women get into to problem solve. Over the last few nights I have had phone calls from real time friends not seeking advice but using me as a wall to bounce information off. Discussing problems in this way is good if the problems aren't too big and at the end you might not have the answer but you have explored a few blind alleys and crossed them off the map.

This is one of the things we do here on the message boards and in chat. We pose a problem and other people throw their 2c worth in and sometimes one of those postings provides us with an answer or something we can try. This is a great use of our experiences as we feel we did not go through all of this for nothing but what we have experienced in some ways can help others.

Last nights call was from my sister-in-law. She is married to Ray's brother. We have that in common and not much else. She is of European descent. Like a lot of people in the early 1940's her mother tramped Europe, eventually with two small children and survived by staying ahead of the war. We think the war ended in 1945 but for a lot of people it went back to local skirmishes so her mother just kept on moving. She finished up coming to Australia but by that time her husband, unintentionally or not, had left her. The rest of the story is hers but I'm just putting this much in for background.

My brother-in-law is disabled after a really serious car accident. He was put back together in pieces and his body healed so he can walk, talk, but not function fully so he can be left at home safely but doesn't have a lot of initiative to do much for himself. Unfortunately his head injury was enough to change his personality. He hasn't worked since so my SIL works, looks after the house, a small acreage etc. She thinks I have a big job but hers has been going on now for about 28 years!! She is a hero to me. Mostly other people don't see her that way. She never has a pity party that I have seen but she is pragmatic in a way only Europeans can be and her tongue gets away with her sometimes.

Last night she was telling me about a water pipe she was trying to fix. She noticed she had low pressure and went across the paddock to where the pump is in her dam and traced the waterline back. Sure enough, there was a patch of green grass, a sure sign that water was bubbling out. So she dug up the pipe and cut around the hole and put in a joiner. A few days later, same problem. This time the ground was damp a few feet further down so she repeated the process. Then just a few days later she noticed the pressure was down again. By this time she was getting frustrated. Back to the waterline, and there between the two new joiners was a damp patch. As she said:"I dug along the pipe and this time I did what I should have done in the first **** place, I cut out a section of pipe and replaced it with a new piece and joined it up properly."

I was just reading in the paper where some of the practices of doctors are being questioned by the medical boards on the same grounds, where they fix a problem by adding tablet after tablet until the patient feels worse at the end of the treatment than they did at the beginning. Maybe like my SIL they at last need to look at the problem with a view to fixing it permanently instead of just doing a quick fix.

I enjoy my talks with her, we don't solve any of the problems of the world but we both feel better when we hang up and go off to bed.