UPDATE (+ “Road Trip pt 1”)

I have not been quite so attentive of late. But I have been busy, but then again maybe not so busy. It’s christmas. I guess that distorts things. But maybe also I have also reached a point where this little digression is increasingly peripheral. It takes so much time to do this shit, and although I get the occasional compliment, it doesn’t seem like I am really making a difference. I guess to my life it was interesting for a while. To my future existence — or indeed anyone else’s that is weary of my sphere of influence — it might also be worthy. But right now I am thinking this blog’s day’s are numbered.

For the time being I am kinda soldiering on — so here are some pics and later a story.

I cooked for Dee and it was a triumph. Usually she turns her nose up at anything I cook. This time she was impressed. I have to thank my mum’s BF John for the recipe/inspiration.

I think this is the first real-life fire I have ever witnessed.

ROAD TRIP (pt 1)

I am getting increasingly rubbish at driving. I just don’t do it enough these days. And this became apparent when I sideswiped a parked car just outside our house as I tried to get out of the way of an oncoming vehicle. The other car suffered no damage, yet Dee’s car was horribly, and expesively damaged.

But aside from that utter fail, when I drive in general conditions I find myself a bit lost. For example I accidentally choose routes that are only traversable by bike and have to backtrack or just aggravate the trip with excess milage. And this malaise is overly exacerbated by our river and it’s infinite twists and turns but it’s very finite crossing points.

So it is summer holidays here. A forced period of work leave. For Dee it is closer to 17 days, but for me it is just 10.

And then Dee and I wanted to do something unusual with our summer holiday random free-day — so we went antique shopping in the country. And it seems everyone else was at the beach so going inland seemed obvious to me as a ginger and a recovering agoraphobic and perhaps to Dee too who just likes road trips and getting to be master of the tunes on the car stereo.

Secretly I wanted to also visit Kulgun, the farm my great, great grandad ran in the late 1800s.

We navigated there just by sense. I kinda knew the idea from google maps but it was kinda awesome just turning down roads we weren’t sure led anywhere and suddenly being on the right track.

So this is my great, great grandad’s farm. His name was Henry and here is his handwriting,  his ledger about the farm: how many animals he had, what crops he tried to grow, how little money he made. And the crazy thing is — he kept this ledger for decades. Perhaps that’s not so crazy seeing how poor they were. It was such a struggle to survive back then.

And the ledger also cryptically noted other amazing episodes in his life (in those days you didn’t necessarily put stuff down like we/I do these days) plus it acted as an address book. It was only rediscovered this year when I tried to find all my poppa’s research before it was lost forever. And in that process I managed to give it back to one of my relatives — Darren — who still runs the farm — all these years later.

So Kulgun is still our soil. And Thursday I got to see it for the very first time, and I wanted to see the views, the land. I wanted to see what they might have seen.