sometimes you just gotta sniff it

 

it's good to have a blog

If I didn't have a blog, neither you nor I would ever know that I saw David Kilgour and Yo La Tengo play a show in 2007 (and I didn't enjoy it, but that doesn't really mean anything in itself). Amazing. I literally do not remember this at all, I don't know where it happened and my description of the experience is so oblique I am not sure why I had a bad time. Crazy! I suspect the bad time probably had less to do with the actual show, than I appreciated at the time. I am also surprised to read that I've seen Yo La Tengo six times. Six??? I really like them, but I can only vaguely recollect seeing them once, and it wasn't this 2007 show. Madness!!!

This is a picture of Perry and Nancy yesterday. Perry is at one of his doggy day care hangs today. I would be happy to have him stay at home all week but he really seems to need to expend the energy and he loves going to those places so much I can't deny him. But I miss him. I am fairly sure Nancy doesn't. 

Walking at the moment is not easy because while I am (I'm pretty sure) coming to the end of my four or five-month bout of plantar fasciitis I am still hobbling a bit and every time I stand up I don't know whether it's going to hurt or not. I am also often really, really tired which can't just be the fact that I am 60 now but has to be more than that. Well, I guess I'll find out over time. But it doesn't make me the ideal companion all the time for a sometimes boisterous three year old (dog). 

I got back on Netflix recently, I forget why but to watch something in particular, possibly the Sarah Silverman special which I actually didn't enjoy that much but perhaps it was too close to the bone. Anyway, what I have since discovered is that a lot of Netflix shows have a Finnish captions option, which means I can justify watching any old pap on that basis, as a way to keep treading water on my Finnish. Most recently it was a five-part British crime show called Missing You. The above reads, 'Didn't it bother you that he had a family?' (I didn't translate that all by myself, by the way, though I know some of the words). 

'Did s/he make a mistake?'

This relates to a website called, unconvincingly, 'Honest Aspect': 'I reviewed all Honest Aspect-related documents for errors'. 

I don't know how useful this all is in learning Finnish (my ten-year plan, to be fluent by 2035!) but it can't hurt - can it? 

please end summer, you suck

Not only will summer ending be a good thing in itself but it will reduce the number of summers before we see a conclusion, for there must be a conclusion, to the right-wing insanity of much of the world at the moment. IE the end of summer will be a hurdle. Indeed if we see, as we surely must, Trump's power reduced at the US midterms in um 2027, then we really only have one full summer to get through. 

I have made a decent writerly space for myself on my small balcony which actually works well although the wifi is not always brilliant (but still, it gets there more or less). It was a junk space for years and I will most definitely sometime be locked out there you bet but I also find it very good for getting stupid little things done, like today I finessed my first lecture of the year. This is the so-called view from the balcony - pretty ridiculous I suppose, though it is definitely trees (and slightly miserable pot plants which I water lovingly every day). 

Mouldy cat picture rescued from a street in Flemington, plant Laura didn't want anymore and I did. 

The loyal animals nearby: Helms

Nancy - very much in repose

Perry - he stays close

Books for me to read while I wait for someone to come and rescue me when I get locked out on the balcony, which will definitely happen one day before too long. 

25 august 2019

Looking at my phone photos from five years ago is a bit confusing because obviously like anyone but particularly like hoarders (it's in the genes) I use my phone (as mentioned in previous post) as just a dump for every impression/ thing that happens/thing I do/ thing I see, but at the same time I can't be friggin' bothered to make a note about why this is important or what it means, I just assume that one day I will sit down and notate on it all, which to be fair.... well, what I'm doing now is the closest I will ever get to making any kind of extra commentary on this shit. 

So five years ago, I made a loaf of bread. Yes. The weird thing about this is that I had made a loaf of bread the day before, too. So I am not sure what this was about. This bread was born in the humblest of circumstances, the scungefest that was the kitchen in Albion. I mean my kitchen today is pretty awful but nowhere near as awful. 

I guess I walked Barry and Ferdie that day, although this is the only picture from that moment, so who really knows. 

It doesn't matter in the slightest but why did I go to the 12th Caulfield (St Johns) Memorial Scout Hall five years ago today? I definitely can't tell you. 

I vaguely recall seeing this book in a bookshop in Elsternwick I think. Maybe it was the first time I saw it IRL? Because I have a short chapter in it, so I would have been interested. Maybe I was just pleased to see it out in the wild. 

Fabulous op shops in Elsternwick, so that's probably where the above images are from. 

This was around the time that I was getting ready to go to Europe, and I visited my aunt Maggie a few times with my mother, apart from anything else, I was proposing that Maggie take on Chanticleer as her new cat. Not sure what this would mean for Pompey but maybe I would keep him, I don't know. Maggie was ill with cancer and as it transpired she died in September. 

Pompey (rear) and Chanticleer in the Albion hovel. If you don't know the story of have forgotten (sometime I forget) I rescued these two from the mean streets of Albion, they were street cats with no future or at least the future of being run over by cars. They were flea-bitten, wormy and undesexed. I am guessing that by this stage they were no longer the first two categories and maybe not the third either anymore. 

Nancy hated them (still does). Though fortunately for Nancy, she doesn't have to think about them too often. & vice-versa. 

Once again this is all trivia but the one thing that I am amazed by is how awful things were five years ago and how good they are now (for me, not for anyone else, just me). I put most of the credit for that with Laura, who is a daily tonic. No doubt by this stage she had already agreed to look after these three cats while I was overseas, and as it transpired - she ended up keeping the two boys, together. It's hard now to imagine ever separating them. 

a week in hong kong (last week)

Here are two of my three pets pictured near my suitcase as I pack it for a HK work trip. One thing I do know is that I have thousands of readers in HK, so I imagine by the time you read this I will have seen quite a few of you and I hope we all said hi.

More soon. 

nancy again not the cat nancy but the comic strip girl

I have continued to enjoy Olivia Jaimes' Nancy strip which I have probably mentioned before. In the last few weeks Jaimes has gone on holiday and instead the strip is being drawn by Leigh Luna. It's very different but still very good. Whereas Jaimes' Nancy is the kind of jerk only an 8-year-old can legitimately be, Luna's Nancy is in a way a little older than her years, but it's a nice exploration, Peanuts-style I guess, of kids trying out adult personas. Luna's Nancy retaliates when Sluggo fixates on another girl by befriending and in a way romancing the girl. It is kind of gay, which is not something I have a problem with, but I can imagine that other longterm readers might. However, within a few strips Nancy has forgotten the girl and it's all about making Sluggo apologise for his inattentiveness. Fucked up, in a way, but then again, these are children. Anyway, I completely approve of the new Nancy directions. 

That's what I said

'well it's something in your life'

When I got married my grandmother congratulated me and I mumbled some response and she said, 'well, it's something in your life'. I am well aware that this is one of those comments that are just basically the mundane icing on a mundane cake, but it's stuck with me. 

Here are a few things in my life:

On the weekend Laura, Leonard and I went to some Open House places she chose from research. This one is a block away from us, the Ukrainian church c. 1962, and it was amazing inside, but I'll wait for Laura to blog about it, her pictures were better than mine. 

This is bullshit as all bullshit - well - I'll hold off on opinionating about the concept of building an apartment block purely for renters but the whole 'we're local' thing is just preposterous. So League of Gentleman, mainly I mean in the sense of local shop for local people rather than Pappa Lazarou but perhaps a bit that too. I note that the building site has some indigenous-styled art on it as well but I won't make any appropriation accusations in that dept either, I have no information. 

Home life 

If I may indulge in a little more duolingo paranoia I'm coming up to my one-year streak and I have a strong feeling it's making things much easier for me (I will do the above no worries) in preparation for me feeling good about renewing my superduolingo subscription. I probably will.  

clifton hole (ignore this)

Stuff from Clifton Hole. I do recall getting deeply interested in the Clifton Hill overpass (oddly enough often called a 'rail bridge' or similar at the time, but it's actually a road bridge over a railway). Also there's some bits from my brief interest in doing a murder tour of Clifton Hill. I think there is more shizzle on that somewhere in the file. Also a nice picture of Nancy...