Northern Lights
At last! A blog about everything
Saturday, July 05, 2025
noom
I have thrown away my Noom subscription again. I was grappling with it for a while but ultimately I cannot stand they way they measure things (often imperial measurement, but also, ridiculous cupfuls and half-bowls for things that don't belong in cups or bowls, and many, many perverse-sounding fast food products offered and also constant imprecations that I should eat things I would never ever eat, like chicken). Possibly I got something out of it but in the end I think it has got too much.
Also I hate that when you write down that you ate pickles Noom insists on 'dill pickles' and then wants to measure them in spears. Spears. Fuck off with your 'spears'.
Also I have had an annoying cough for two and a half weeks now, and also, my foot still hurts often. What a time to be alive.
Tuesday, July 01, 2025
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?
Saturday, June 28, 2025
blackburn
Today Perry and I walked around various parts of Blackburn/North Blackburn. A year ago I mused on Ronald and Charmain Biggs' house in Hibiscus Road,* and finally got around to actually visiting it today. It's nothing special and perhaps that was the point (I mean, not horrible looking houses, but basically an identical row of them I think, or certainly built at the same time, though there have been various remodelling treatments since). I wonder if the Biggs were the first residents in their Hibiscus Road property - the first mention of the whole street in the papers is 1966, could it really be that new?
Houses in Hibiscus Road:
We also went to Dixons' Blackburn store, to JB Hi Fi to get a small bluetooth speaker,** and to Blackburn lake. Where Dixons' was at.
The lake.
*I note in that post from last year I say 54 Hibiscus - not sure what my source was for that as it seems to have been 52.
** Weirdest part of that was going through the front doors of the shopping centre and hearing a mid-teen boy saying to his cronies 'Let's go upstairs and look at the barbecues!'
Sunday, June 22, 2025
22 glenard dve eaglemont
Friday, June 20, 2025
Monday, June 16, 2025
amc
OK, I was able to upload this by dragging it into the post rather than uploading it from file (exhausting tech talk I know).
It's a lot of fluff yeah particularly the first few paragraphs but there's some interesting detail both in direct relation to her, and also, sign of the times stuff. It's from the SMH 22 April 1974 p. 25. How cool do the Victor Borge LP Show and that ep of The Waltons sound? That's right, negative to the power of fucktillion cool.
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As a child, naturally enough, I watched a lot of television and it being the early 1970s when I was a child, I watched a lot of what is no...