Twenty three years...

 

Way back in 2003, when we moved to Canberra from York in England, we needed a car - so after driving a rental Pulsar for two or three weeks we bought ourselves a second hand Subaru Impreza - three years old and a hundred thousand kilometres on the clock.

Arguably the number of kilometres it had done were a bit high for its age but it drove well and had a full service history.

For a time it was our only car, and I caught the bus or rode my bike to work most days.

When we moved further out in Canberra, we ended up with a car each and the old Impreza became my daily commute.

It lasted well without major problems, and by the time we moved to Victoria ten years ago, it had done 275,000 kilometres and still drove well. 

We did talk about selling it then, but decided to keep it as a backup, and I used to use it to transport all my cataloguing equipment between Chiltern and Beechworth when I was cataloguing the contents of Dow's pharmacy and Lakeview.

By the time I'd finished with the National Trust it had done over 300,000km and was beginning to show its age, even though it still rattled along at a decent speed.

Latterly, we found it was basically just sitting there, so today we sold it to a recycler.

We'd had hopes of selling it to someone who wanted to buy it to restore, but the fuel crisis and cost of living squeeze put paid to that, so the recycler it was.

Kind of sad to see it go, it's probably been one of our better buys car wise, but life moves on.

We're going to try having just one car for the time being despite living in a rural community with distinctly sketchy public transport, we don't drive the distances we used to, and should be able to manage our calendars to share our car effectively ...

Weird weather we're having...

 A couple of weeks ago I blogged about what a mild winter we've been having.

Since then we've had a week of cold freezing sleety rain followed by a week of even colder overnight temperatures and cold clear blue skies during the day - but cold though it is overnight, it climbs to the low to mid teens during the afternoon, warm enough to work outside in the garden for an hour or two.

The jonquils and daffodils are blooming, and the snowdrops are out, and the grass is beginning to look like its needs cutting again.

On the other hand our bower bird has abandoned his bower and gone wherever bower birds go to escape the cold. Despite the cold overnight temperatures it actually feels like early, very early, spring. with trees starting to bud and the broad beans poke their heads up.

I guess we can only wait and see...

A chilly day's cataloguing

 Up at the Athenaeum this morning for another cataloguing session.

Absolutely freezing with sleety rain making me wish I'd had the sense to wear a pair of my Swedish army surplus wool socks - light enough to wear with ordinary shoes yet infinitely warmer than regular socks.

First task of the day wasn't really cataloguing related, but I went round and removed all the old moth traps, and disposed of them. I'd planned to replace them with new ones - we are supposed to have them in stock, but they seem to have been hidden somewhere.

Given how cold it is at the moment I don't see any self respecting moth or other insect pest doing any damage just now but they obviously need to be replaced before spring.

Other than that it was simply more of the same cataloguing the collection.

No real finds this week, other than what would have been a nice example of early Australian book publishing from 1888 - a copy of This Wicked World by Caroline Emily Cameron (who usually published as either Mrs H Lovett Cameron, or simply Mrs Lovett Cameron).

Unfortunately it has been professionally rebound, meaning that the original cover and binding is missing, which is a pity, as intact it would have been an almost unique example of early Australian publishing.

Other early books catalogued today were an 1867 copy of A Lady's Confession by Pamela, Lady Campbell, and an 1888 reprint of Wilkie Collins' After Dark, otherwise it was a fairly predictable mixture of post world war two and early 1900's fiction ...

Is this climate change?

 Well, I don't know if it's climate change. El Nino, or just some random event, but we seem to have had a relatively warm winter so far.

Not only have I just cut my grass (bear in mind that this is in Beechworth in the foothills of the Victorian Alps) but our resident bower bird has rebuilt his bower and had been busy collecting bottle tops, clothes pegs and anything else blue he can lay his beak on in preparation for the mating season...

Phillip Island

 It was J's birthday this week, so we decided on a few days away on Phillip Island to celebrate.

This of course meant no cataloguing at the Athenaeum this week, but, as they say, all work and no play makes Doug a dull boy.

We drove down on the Monday. The weather over the weekend had not been the best and Monday wasn't much better, meaning it took most of the day to get there.

We avoided the city by driving down the back way via Yarra Glen and Cockatoo to Pakenham where we picked up the main road to the south and south east of Gippsland. 

We'd taken a chicken stew a bottle of wine with us, which was a good thing as we arrived in the dark at our AirBnB and it was pouring with rain, but our host had left the heating on, so we hunkered down with a bowl of stew and a glass of wine or two.

The next day the cloud and rain cleared to a windy, sunny, day. 

We'd planned to do a coastal walk, but actually didn't, driving round the island, and then picking up fish and chips from the San Remo Fish Co-op, beautiful fresh fish , and a glass of wine for dinner.

We'll go for our planned coastal walk tomorrow we told ourselves.

We didn't. The local Nordic myth re-enactment society had decided to stage Ragnorok.

We drove over to Wonthaggi to look at the new art space, all the while hoping for the weather to clear.

It didn't.

We drove on to the dinosaur beach at Inverloch in the hope of the weather clearing. The weather got worse and was now doing a decent imitation of the west coast of Scotland with incessant grey cold smirr.

We decided games were off.

However that night we treated ourselves dinner at Anerie in Cowes, and damned good it was too. 

(For some reason a lot of places on Phillip Island are named after places on the Isle of Wight in England, 

there's Cowes, Ventnor and Newhaven, and while there's no Ryde, there's a Rhyl - I've often wondered if someone got mixed up and meant to name what is now Rhyl, Ryde).

On our last day the weather again cleared and we had a bracing walk at the Nobbies, where there were hordes of Cape Barren geese, nesting, sitting on eggs, escorting gaggles of goslings, and occasionally walking out in front of cars with an arrogance that suggested a direct line to God

That, and a second windy beach walk, and we were done.

We ate at the Phillip Island brewery that evening, and the next day we were up early to drive home, almost retracing our route, save that after Cockatoo and Woori Yallock, we headed north through Healesville and up the Black Spur through the fern forests to Alexandra.

We'd bought some sandwiches and a bag of designer chips, somewhat bizarrely illustrated with a photoshopped picture of Nicholas II and George V clutching potatoes and a vinegar bottle,  from a 7-eleven we'd stopped at for petrol outside of Pakenham and had planned to sit in the park and share our picnic with Princess Alexandra, but it was foggy, chilly, and barely 7 degrees, so we ended up huddling in car,

By the time we reached the freeway at Benalla the sun was out and it was a balmy fifteen degrees, giving us a straight run home in time to pick up our mail from the post office and some things for dinner from the local supermarket.

While the weather was against us, we had fun. We might not have done everything we planned to do, but as always with winter trips it's a matter of taking pleasure in small things...

Wet, wet , wet

 

Let's just say it's been wet, very wet. 

We've had mizzle, we've had drizzle, we've had great pounding belts of rain, stuff that might have been hail, and just plain ordinary rain.

And to add to the fun, the leak in the roof we had a few years ago, came back. Not dramatically but definitely a drip.

We first noticed it a couple of days before we were due to go back to Melbourne for phase ii of Judi's medical procedure. (basically in phase i they implanted the stimulator but left it outside her body taping it in place with what looked like medical grade gaffer tape. In phase ii they confirmed it was working as it should, slipped it inside her body and sewed up the insertion site.)

As there was no way we could postpone phase ii, all I could do was file a claim with our house insurance people and leave a bucket in place to catch the drips.

Fortunately it didn't rain while we were away, and the insurers organised to get a roof repairer to come and make some temporary repairs, which so far, cross fingers, seem to be holding.

Well Judi's phase ii went well, and she only needed a night in hospital.

The only real drama was that I stupidly put my car keys on the roof of the car while I put her overnight bag in the back, and then drove off out of the hospital underground car park with the keys still on the roof, only for them to slide off when I made a sharpish left turn in traffic on the way out of the city. Fortunately Judi had her keys in her bag so everything kept working, and we could start and stop the car.

Solving the problem was a case of going back to the Hyundai dealer, telling them I'd been an idiot, and them checking I was the registered owner of the vehicle, and organising to have a new key fob reprogrammed, which meant taking the car back to them on a day when they could do it.

That was earlier this week, Wednesday in fact. It had rained in the night and I set off in what was either fog or low cloud to drive back to the Hyundai workshop.

They offered me a ride into the city centre, so I got them to drop me close to Albury Library, where I spent the morning researching Agatha Christie's trip to Iraq in 1930.

It was during this quite adventurous trip that she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, who was excavating at Ur, and quite remarkably she went overland, first by train to Damascus via Istanbul, a journey which in our adventurous days I always thought would be worth making, but now, sadly, is a journey that's probably never going to happen.

From Damascus she travelled on to Baghdad via an express bus - more adventurous that it sounds as there were no roads, let alone sealed roads, across the desert, and the bus was more akin to one of these rufty tufty all wheel drive people movers you sometimes see in the outback than your ordinary intercity express bus.

Anyway, they did the reprogramming in the morning and I got the car back in time to drive home before the rain started in earnest again. 

And it rained all day yesterday, and was still raining when I went up to the Athenaeum for my usual Friday morning cataloguing session.

It had turned cold, and apparently there was snow on the mountains, but in Stanley all there was was soaking sleety rain.

Unlike last week, where I had the pleasure of handling some early editions of Wilkie Collins lesser known novels, it was a fairly standard mix of late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction - popular in its time, but now largely forgotten.

However, it did include an 1870's edition of Henry Cockton's the Adventures of Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist, which must be in the running for the 'most ludicrous novel title' award, as well as an 1870's edition of the History of Margaret Catchpole, which might suggest an early taste for Australiana among the good folk of Stanley ...

Increasing legibility

 About a month ago I blogged that I had started keeping a diary.

Now my handwriting has always been an illegible scrawl, but as things progressively moved online it became progressively worse and worse, probably simply due to lack of practice.

After all we don't write letters or postcards any more, and any dealings with officialdom require completing an online form. Even notes, which might once have been scrawled in a spiral bound notebook are usually typed on a phone using an app like Google Keep.

Now strangely, in the last month or so, since starting my diary, I've noticed my handwriting has improved. 

About a month ago it looked like this, scrawly and wavy.

But now...

Definitely neater and possibly a tad more legible. I still wouldn't win a prize for penmanship, but it's clearly better. While practice hasn't made perfect, it's clearly improved matters...