then i realised...

...that in fact my blog is actually pretty dull. It's mainly just about episodes of Homicide! Which is... I mean... which is just an old tv show, about as old as me, and actually about as dull! So it's either that, or Pintandwefall records! Why didn't anyone tell me?!

But then, I'd tell you other things from my life but they're either about meetings with students - which are interesting, at least to me and I hope also to them, but naturally confidential. Things like that. Trying to negotiate university online systems. Which is not necessarily confidential but you want to hear about it just as much as I want to try to do it. 

Anyway I shouldn't even be writing this now. I have a ton of things I need to get done in the next few days, inc. a conference presentation for next Monday. 

Here are four pictures from my bus ride to work this morning (yes, I take the bus sometimes. I know it's ridiculous but I get-so-bored-by-walking-the-same-route). 

I love this building, it's 80s Housing Commission. 

I love this one too, for different reasons. It's on the opposite side of the road. 

This is inside the bus. There were few people on it. 

Close to where the rail station will be eventually I gather. 

wash, rinse, delete

...or perhaps wince, delete I don't know. 

I have just gone back in time ten years deleting 5000+ emails most of them junk from my first, largely now ignored, gmail account. As I have explained here before, I set up this blog using that email account and as far as I understand it that is not transferable - i.e. I will have to keep that email account forever, if I want to keep this blog going. But that doesn't explain the current weird problem which is that after an update a month or so ago my computer has decided that that old email address is what I want when I select gmail. It isn't. But it always comes up as the default, until I log out and select the tab that takes you to other possible gmail addresses - including the newer one, incidentally labelled 'default'. 

So I keep landing on my old address and seeing thousands of random junk emails so this evening, as a palate cleanser between marking first year students' work, I decided I'd delete some. This turned into a bit of a campaign and I got rid of many. There were quite a lot of emails from old friends in there who hadn't realised they were writing to an old address, and possibly wondered why I had ignored them, but they are all people I still know/consider friends, so it can't have been that much of a disaster. Although that said I didn't read them all, just skimmed. There were messages and/or relics from people who have since died (by 'relics' I mean there was a time, seemingly now passed, when every time a fb friend launched a campaign or petition or something, you'd get a gmail notification of it; so one person in particular whose funeral I was remembering only last week, was heavy on the campaigns in or around 2014 or so. That's just one example there were a few. And a lot of people as well who I don't talk to anymore and am pleased that's the case... 

Apropos of nothing except it's Sunday night, I'm kind of mentally bereft after marking student work, it feels like voices in my head, here are a few more old drawing bits and bobs from various times:

walking tour

I took students (and anyone they wished to invite along - even a couple of former students showed up!) to a walking tour of Coburg this afternoon. It was informal. I had worked out the route in advance the week before but I was still doing research up to an hour before it started. I stopped them every 10 mins or so at key spots and gave them a spiel - combination of site-specifics and general tie-ins to the planning scene. I thought it went pretty well, the only real bummer was I had planned for us to all have coffee at the Victoria St Mall in Coburg at the end and when we got there it was not the thriving place it had been the previous week - it was mainly closed and empty. But the students didn't mind much, I gather they all went off to the pub en masse. I think on the whole it went well.

Another good thing was my right foot, which has been giving me gyp for the last couple of weeks seems finally on the mend. It got a bit tetchy late in the walk but it feels fine now.