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...

First Jonquil!

 Not even midwinter's day - that's tomorrow - and our jonquils have begun to flower despite the last few days' incessant rain

They usually begin to flower around the first week in July here in Beechworth, but they are earlier this year, perhaps because of the mild wet start to winter we're having this year ...

A Regula Sprint

I've always liked playing about with photography, and during the pandemic I had a flirtation with retro photography, where you start taking pictures with film cameras for a retro experience - no instant gratification, and you have to think more about your shot, about light, exposure, and the rest.

Some people got serious about it, others mucked about and then didn't do that much. I'd put myself in the latter category.

But even though I didn't do much I kept following some retro photography sites and blogs, and then a few weeks ago I came across this little beauty on ebay

A Regula Sprint, just like my first 35mm camera.

I couldn't resist, and bought it. With shipping from the UK it came to a tad over eighty bucks, but it looks to be clean and in working order - it still has a sticker inside advertising the use of Gevapan film.

It came without a warranty, but I reckoned that if it turned out to be a dud I could put it on display with some of the other old cameras I've picked up here and there over the years

It's a bit heavier than I remembered it but its strange how the muscle memory comes back as how to open it and load film it.

All I can do is have a play. You never know, it might be the thing that turns me in to a semi serious retro photographer....

And I caught a bus !

 After my session in Albury Library this morning, I caught a bus back from MaMa to the dealership to collect my car after being serviced.

That may not seem like much, but as public transport around Beechworth is almost non-existent, this was the first time I've caught an ordinary bus, as opposed to the V/line coach service that connects with the Melbourne train, in the ten years I've lived here.

I'm not against catching the bus, it's just we don't have any with schedules that work for me.

Albury, and its twin city Wodonga, straddle the New South Wales/Victoria border.

In theory they function as one urban centre, but thats a theory, not the reality.

The AW city centre to city centre service is operated on behalf of Transport Victoria by Dyson's. The bus leaves from QE II square just outside of MaMa, in the centre of Albury, which is of course in New South Wales. QE II is where most of the buses in Albury end up, and it functions as a bus interchange for the city - and for Wodonga and surrounding parts of Victoria.

If you looked at the timetable and route information displayed you wouldn't know that there were buses to places in Victoria - it's all for Transport NSW buses to Laverton Thurgoona and other Albury suburbs - not a Victorian bus timetable or sign in sight (There's also a direct bus to Beechworth a few times a day, and you wouldn't guess that either- absolutely no information - you just need to trust the online timetables on both the Transport NSW and Transport Victoria sites).

Anyway, being a trusting soul, I stood in the freezing cold and lo and behold, an ordinary green and white Dyson's service bus arrived. 

I stuck my arm out and it stopped, and the doors opened, allowing me to get on.

How to pay for it was the next problem - there's absolutely no information online as to ticket costs, and it was only by using Google's AI search that I found you could pay with money - as in these funny bits of metal you find in the pockets of jackets and coats you havn't worn for years.

And Google was absolutely right.

No contactless, no Myki, no Opal, just cash, and what's more they gave you change.

and you even get a paper ticket!

Fortunately, I'd had a rummage the evening before and found around five bucks worth of change, so it was pretty straightforward.

There's a bus stop just outside the car service centre so the whole process was fairly painless, even if an act of blind faith was required that the bus really left from where they said ....

Back to Albury Library ...

 Over the last few years I've written about the role public libraries play in the life of an independent researcher, providing tables, desk and free wifi, as places to work, or simply as a place to read your email and upload data at the end of the day.

So, today I was having our car serviced. 

As it's a reasonably new car with all the electronic geegaws that come with that, it had to go back to the dealer to be serviced. 

The dealership's workshop is in Wodonga and they offered to drop me in Albury city centre.

Well, I'd intended to do some more work on Louisa Crow.

I could have decided to work in Wodonga Library, which is excellent as regards facilities, but doesn't open until 10.00, and it was 0845 on a cold damp morning after a night of biblical quantities of rain.

Wodonga doesn't have that much in the way of coffee shops with wifi where you can work, so I took up the dealership's offer of a ride to Albury city centre.

By the time they dropped me off, Canvas, the cafe attached to MaMa was open for coffee, so I treated myself to an early morning tea and sat at one of the tables using MaMa's free wifi doing the preliminary research on Trove.

Like Wodonga Library, Albury Library doesn't open until 10.00, but by the time I'd had a coffee and walked around checking where the bus stops were - there's a direct bus from outside of MaMa to Wodonga centre that goes past the dealership, the library was open.

The open plan work area was much as I remember it from when I last used the Library extensively in 2017 - the public access computers have changed, and are arranged differently, and there's now a couple of bookable quiet rooms, which can be used for conference calls, but there's still a number of large work tables, some of which are located conveniently close to power sockets, incluidng USB sockets if you need to charge a phone or tablet.

Wifi is provided as part of Albury Wodonga's joint free public wifi service, as at MaMa and Wodonga public library - it's not the fastest wifi service on the planet, but testing using Ookla's web client gave me something like 25Mbps for both upload and download, which is not unreasonable and more than adequate for an hour or two's web based research (and good enough to let me re-install Evernote, after I found that the version installed on my computer was hopelessly behind the current release).

Basically it provides all that you need, and on a cold wet Tuesday provided a useful haven for an hour or two while I researched Louisa Crow...