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.

In fact I've caught more buses in Sydney and Perth and Canberra than I have round here.

Geography is kind of important to this story.

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

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...

I've started keeping a diary...

 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 curious lemon

 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 

and found a lemon seedling growing inside the lemon.

Havn't seen that before ...

A return to some sort of normality

 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

The weather has been quite wonderful, warm afternoons but distinctly chilly mornings and evenings. I've been able to press on with tidying the garden before winter, and have been continuing my probably vain attempt to get all the couch grass out of the garden bed.

It will probably soon be time to start planting our winter vegetables, and I've had a bit of a cock up there.

Earlier this week Ausnet turned off the power to the street to do some maintenance to the power poles and as it was going to take them several hours we went out, first to the big Bunnings hardware store in Albury, and then on to Talangatta for lunch at the bakery.

While we were in Bunnings we bought some plants in pots and trays, plus some seeds. I don't know what happened, but when I put the plants in a cardboard box to protect them I seem to have forgotten to pick up the seeds, or else I dropped them.

Whatever happened, they weren't there when we got home, obviously my bad, so I reordered them online and hopefully they'll be here next week.

For obvious reasons, I've not been for a bike ride for almost two weeks, despite it still being (just) warm enough to ride in the mornings before breakfast, and it's now getting too late in the year for riding in the mornings - the sun's not up till after seven, and even if I set off a little before sunrise I'm having to contend with the start of the morning commuter traffic, which kind of spoils the pleasure of it, so I guess the answer is some afternoon rides, like my ride to Baarmutha a few years ago, before winter proper sets in.

Up at the Athenaeum it's been cataloguing and more cataloguing. Again no real finds this week, just the usual mix of Victorian novels lightened with some 1930s crime and romance novels, the escapist literature of the time ...

Lucy, 2017 - 2026

 

Our cat Lucy died today.

She had been sick for some time, not really eating, losing weight, and generally fading away. 

A few times she seemed to rally, and we thought there might be hope of a recovery, but it was not to be.

We of course took her to the vet, where they ran the standard tests, and couldn’t find anything obviously wrong, she was simply ill.

A second trip to the vet was a little more hopeful and she seemed to be picking up, but again, it was not to be.

We had discussed treatment options with the vet, but given that she was already weak and ill, and it could well be cancer or lymphoma, there really wasn’t anything further to be done.

We decided that since she was not obviously in pain the kindest thing would be to let her enjoy her last few days at home sitting in the sun on the back deck, something she always loved to do.

After a few days when you could see glimpses of her old playful self, she started to fade away again.

Even so, as late autumn turned colder and wetter she still wanted to be outside in the sun for an hour or two in the early afternoon watching the birds rootling around in the leaf litter and thinking cat thoughts about who knows what.

And then, as she became weaker, and really couldn’t do much more than sit on her favourite cushion, we realised it was time to let her go in as dignified way as possible.

Her last day was a cold, chilly but sunny day with snow on the mountains.

As if she knew this was the end, she insisted on sitting outside for one final time, before it was time for us to take her to the vet to be put to sleep.

Utterly heartbreaking.

She had come to us a few years ago as a former breeding queen who was in need of a home and some love, which she returned ten fold, always wanting to snuggle on a cold morning, or simply sit quietly with you while you were reading or working on your laptop.

A lovely sweet cat, she will be missed.

 

 

A little more like normal

I'd expected this week to be a bit scrappy like the previous two but life at Moncur towers has settled down again, with a couple of afternoons working in the garden in the unseasonably warm weather. (Not only have I been wearing shorts, the strawberries have started fruiting for the third time this year!)

The only trouble is that while it's been warm and sunny, it's also been dry - the soil in the garden is really really dry, which is going to be a problem in a week or two when gets time to start planting our winter veg. 

Mornings are still cold and chilly though as I discovered when I went for a bike ride just after dawn earlier this week

and while it's nothing amazing, I'm quite pleased with my performance.

Up at the Athenaeum, I'm done with prayerbooks for the moment and am back working on the historic book collection. Nothing remarkable this week, mostly crime and romance novels from either the interwar period or the 1950s.

Other than a couple of bodice rippers with bookplates from the Victorian Railways Institute Library, all the books this week seem to have been purchased direct from booksellers, which perhaps reflects the declining popularity of circulating libraries.

And I've been spending my money again on old nineteenth century postcards.

This weeks purchase is an 1896 postcard from Durban, in what was then the British colony of Natal, and is now the largest city in KwaZuluNatal in South Africa

very much a standard colonial pattern postcard of the time designed for international use - hence the 'Union postale universelle' strapline above the name of the colony.

It's addressed to a Mr R Stanton, 22 Royal Arcade Sydney.

Now vanished - it was demolished in 1969 - the Royal Arcade ran between George Street and Pitt Street near the former School of Arts

I havn't transcribed the message yet, that will be a task for a wet afternoon, but I can share that the card was sent from 80 Alice Street in Durban.

Alice Street has been renamed Johannes Nkosi Street and has been through some changes over the years and is now the site of a major transport interchange. A very quick search has not revealed any photographs of what it looked like in the colonial period, but it was already the site of a major tram interchange around the postcard was mailed...