Not even midwinter's day - that's tomorrow - and our jonquils have begun to flower despite the last few days' incessant rain
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
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 ....
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...
I've started keeping a diary, an almost daily record of what I've done and when, bike rides, interesting things I saw online that I might follow up on, that sort of thing.
I've never really kept a personal diary before. Travel journals, yes, and work and project diaries, yes, but personal day to day diaries, no.
Which in retrospect is a pity, there's been a lot of interesting little snippets along the way that I should have noted down.
I'm structuring the diary like one of my work or project diaries - essentially a journal rather than a diary.
I've always found work and project diaries useful to keep a record of what was done when and indeed where we are up to, as well as in the days when I had to do such things, compile the dread annual activity statement.
Strangely I didn't keep a work diary for either of my projects with the National Trust, instead just relying on my utterly illegible work books, and the spreadsheets I created along the way.
My reasoning for not keeping a work diary were that they were both 'start at the beginning and keep on going until you reach the end' type projects.
In retrospect that was a mistake, especially in the case of Dow's, where there was a hiatus of nearly fifteen months due to the various Covid lockdowns and closures. While I did document my decisions along the way in various blog posts, they don't give the level of detail a proper project diary gives.
In the absence of any real project plan or an external project manager, I found I had to make decisions along the way about how to do things, which I documented in various blog posts.
However, keeping a project diary would have been useful to record the various useful out of scope things that happened along the way and supplementary information and documentation that I generated.
At Lake View, that was less of an issue, as the project was more tightly defined, but again a project diary might have been worth keeping.
I did start keeping one towards the end of the project, simply because I was also spending time up at the Athenaeum, and I needed to keep a record of what I did for which project.
I've carried on keeping a project diary for my work at the Athenaeum, into which I add other bits and pieces, like blogs posted and odd little ad hoc bits of research, like my work on the Friends of Russian Freedom.
Likewise I've been keeping a travel diary for years, at first just for our longer trips, but now for most trips, I find it useful to be able to put us in a place at a particular time.
So, now a personal diary. Today's the first day of it, so it's pretty boring so far but I'm hoping a written record of things, books I mean to buy, and other useful snippets might prove useful.
The other thing about the diary is that I'm keeping it in a hardback notebook - a cheap Amazon basics notebook and writing it with my trusty Lamy nib pen.
The paper quality of the cheap Amazon notebook is not too bad - not quite as nice as ClaireFontaine or Moleskine, but smooth enough to write on with a nib pen without any blotches.
I do find writing in a notebook with a nib pen helps fix things in my memory more that simply just using Evernote or OneDrive to manage documents, or indeed to use jrnl on one of my computers to make a day by day record.
We'll see how this goes...
A few days ago, we took the last few of last year's big old lemons off the tree in the yard to make way for this year's crop.
Some were still good enough to juice, or slice up to garnish chicken roasted in the oven or indeed a pre-dinner tipple.
We sliced into one of them
After the disruption caused by Lucy's passing, after which neither of us was good for much while we grieved, not to mention helping our remaining cat adapt to being the only cat in the house - he has been calling for Lucy, and sometimes, when he goes out on the deck still looks behind him to see if she's following him.
Still, cuddles, love and attention seems to be soothing him and I'm sure he'll come to terms with her not being around.
We have soothed ourselves by putting a little cat sculpture in the garden to remind us of her and I must admit I caught myself talking to it while working in the garden in the same way I would chat to our cats
