Righty tighty

Following on from yesterday’s blog, when I mentioned that I have rhymes or particular ways to remember things, brought back another memory. It was 2006 and I had just spent the last four years working on the community newspaper and was missing the country badly. I decided to hand in my resignation and travel to Outback Australia to do some rousing. That included sweeping the wool away once the shearer had finished shearing the sheep, picking up the fleeces, throwing them on a table and sorting the wool, a job I had relished in my earlier years. It had got a bit much for me, sitting inside on a computer most of the day, and as it was now seven years since I had left my husband and the farm that I loved, I decided a return to the land would reinject my soul with the sustenance it needed.

I flew to Melbourne, then on to Mt Gambier, before picking up a vehicle and driving it to Broken Hill, a several-day journey, if I remember correctly. Said vehicle was in poor condition. In South Australia, warrant of fitnesses were not compulsory as they were in New Zealand. After my experience with this car, I do see the merits of these safety checks. I drove from shed to shed, some of which were hundreds of kilometres into the Outback. We would return to Broken Hill on weekends or between sheds. One particular weekend, I decided to visit some Aboriginal rock drawings that were only about an hour from where our gang was working. The roads were derelict and traffic almost non-existent. I found the rock-drawing tour fascinating. There were about a dozen in our group. I was one of the last to head away at the end of the visit.

I was travelling about 100kph along the gravel road when my front tyre blew out. In New Zealand, this tyre would have been replaced long ago, due to warrant of fitness standards, but over here, without the regulations, the bald tyre had remained in place. My car went into an uncontrollable spin before miraculously righting itself, allowing me to pull over to the side of the road.

Now this was where the fun started. For the life of me, I couldn’t budge the wheel nuts holding the deflated tyre in place. Fortunately, I was confident in the tyre-changing procedure, having had many flat tyres in my time. As a young nurse, my girlfriend’s father had once made us change each tyre before allowing us to take his car away for the weekend. That was a good lesson, and one that had set me in good stead for the future.

But for the life of me, as I jumped on the wheel brace, first one way, then the other, without a shred of movement, I was becoming dispirited. No cars travelled along this road and I was kilometres from anywhere. After about quarter of an hour of trying, and starting to wonder how long it would take me to walk to the nearest house, I saw dust in the distance and then a car come into view and I recognized its occupants as two of those who had been with me on our tour.

They willingly assisted. And it was here that I got my unforgettable lesson on undoing wheel nuts. Lefty loosey, righty tighty. I must say it took a bit of work, even for these men to loosen each nut, but at least now, I knew the pushing was going in the right direction.

Lefty loosey, righty tighty is something I have never forgotten and may it one day help someone reading this, though I hope no one ever has the misfortune of having nuts as seized up as those ones were.

And just for what its worth, someone did ask me. The periodic table I mentioned in the last blog goes like this: Happy Henry likes beer but cup not overflowing. Nelly naturally, megaphonic always sings part songs clearly. So that becomes hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen oxygen. Fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur, chlorine. One has to remember here that the formula for sodium is na.

And the cranial nerves rhyme goes: On old Olympic towering tops a Fin and German viewed some hops. These equate to Olfactory, Optic, Oculomotor, Trochlear, Trigeminal, Abducens, Facial, Auditory, Glossopharyngeal and Vagus nerve.

So, with these two simple rhymes, one can memorise quite complicated data but then again with Mr Google, who does that these days? And retaining this information, will it be useful to me ever again? Probably not, but the tyre one definitely will. Righty tighty, lefty loosey.