Playing Catch Up With Myself : June 2022

I've been gone from this blog for so long! Life has been "interesting" in the last half year or so, and it was so much easier to throw things into Facebook. Then, in September, even Facebook became too much: we all got Covid, and it was December before I was well again. So from September to the end of Novembr, including but not limited to my birthday, nothing of a journal nature was recorded at all. So --

It's time to play Catch up!

Here's my Facebook post from June 28 ... this was way before Covid came to stay...

Winter! I haven't been "on" much in the last few weeks. Have had the mid-winter blahs, plus a couple of sniffles, a period of deep introspection around the anniversary of Mom's passing, and -- I'll be the first to admit this -- I've been reading tooooo much news. It's never good, and if you look at the news before you get something nice out of the day, you usually sink into the moody blues and ...! Dumb thing to do, I know. So I think I'll just, uh, stop doing it. 

But I haven't been "idle," and I've amassed quite a number of pics worth sharing ... notwithstanding the SD card that died suddenly, and took some great shots with it! (I lost about 30 in the transfer of photos from the card to the computer, and as usual (ha!) the ones that got away were the best. They always are, right?) Anyway, I'll post a few at a time, and start with a selfie at Aldinga Scrub a few weeks ago -- grabbing a patch of sunny weather, while it lasts. The rest of the images are all over the place ... Milang, McLaren Vale, Strathalbyn, Belair, on and on...

Phone selfie, at Belair NP ... looks like Pines 1 in the background.

Galah acrobatics in a high wind, at Milang

Winter in Belair NP ... the tail up to Amphitheatre Rocks

Rocky outcrops above Strathalbyn

Sheep in the high paddocks above Strathalby

Winter vines on the walking trails behind McLaren Vale

Playford Lake, after plenty of rain in the nearby hills

Sleepy koala, somewhere at Belair NP

If I had to choose a #photooftheday it would be this one. A Currawong appeared out of nowhere and struck poses for me, on the way back from Punchbowl lookout, Onkaparinga Gorge, a couple of weeks ago. I *thought* I'd lost these shots when the SD card died, then stumbled over them when I came to go through the last thousand or so photos, on the PC. Happy, happy!

A beautiful Currawong at Onkaparinga Gorge

Welcome, Winter ... brrrrr!

Autumn has definitely become winter ... and its cold enough to be shivery in the hills even around noon. Dave was out cycling this morning and reported seeing zero temperatures in the Clarendon region. We're just a couple of weeks short of the winter solstice, and the rain is coming quite regularly, so ... happy, happy! The creeks are running --

-- and the hills are green. What a joy, and also what a jolt to realize that it's only five months since half of Australia seemed to be on fire. This can be such a harsh country; but the truth is, few places in the world are much, if any, better these days. England is having its own drought now, which seems so bizarre; I must remind myself, we left the UK almost fifty years ago, and it isn't the place we remember. So...

When we went to Belair NP yesterday, the plan was to photograph lichen, moss and fungus, and really get the hang of macro, using the new camera. The hardest thing was judging the day just right, but this time we scored! Perfect weather, patches of sun, right after a lot of rain. And after a great deal of experimentation, I think I'm about 90% through the process of getting macro worked out to the point where it's reliable, results guaranteed every time. There still some to hash out, but it's all about fine points now. Details. Am very happy with the work the camera is doing.

On the way home, we stopped several times for shots of the evening light on the paddocks around Blewitt Springs. I haven't even got to those images yet ... I took about 600 frames yesterday, so I'm still sorting! I like what I'm seeing here. Now, if I can just kick the sinus infection I came down with overnight, I can get back to the book I'm supposed to be writing. Am on the last lap now, and it seems to be taking forever....

Not that there's any rush. I have a feeling that the pandemic will hill America hard in the next week or two, and the last thing publishers will want is to deal with foreign newbies. The timing for this really stunk. Ah, well! You live and learn.

Random beauty ... to cheer myself up.

Need to cheer myself up. Have just spent an hour reading the international news, and it's enough to make you shoot yourself, if only to make it go away. In last week's Advertiser, South Australia was described as a "happy island of safety in a troubled world," and the fact is, it's easy -- far too easy -- to sit here in the Adelaide suburbs and be oblivious to what's happening in the US, UK and parts of (though not all of) Europe. Once you get your teeth into the news and start to digest what's going on elsewhere ... well, "depressing" is an understatement. So --

Random beauty, to cheer myself up before I get back to work. I've a book to write, and I can't tackle it it in this frame of mind (thank you, facebook).

There's been times in the past when South Australia has, admittedly, been a place I only wanted to leave. My personal talents lie in writing, and before the Internet, it was extremely hard to get anyone overseas (publishers, editors, agents) to even acknowledge the fact one existed, with an Australian address -- and not even a Sydney address, at that. 

For a considerable time, I'd thought the only way to get ahead was to leave; and in fact by 1995 I'd put out the feelers, made the first tentative explorations. Of course it came to nothing ... and in the fullness of time, it's probably all for the best.

If my efforts, twenty-five years ago, had borne fruit, I'd right now be living in America. Sure, married to Dave -- and the both of us at "ground zero," where people en masse don't seem to want to believe that the pandemic is real. Reading the news, as I did this morning, is a salutary experience. A wake-up of sorts. Not quite out of the blue, one comes to realize that one is, simply stated, better off right where one already is...

...and sure, of course it's still true that it would be far easier to float a career as a writer in a place where you can walk into the editor's office, "do lunch," help to launch and promote a work via book signings and so forth. But it's important to add that the chances of actually scoring that agent, a publisher, this hypothetical ad campaign, remain at about 10%, maybe 20%, if I work hard and long enough. Meanwhile the threat of this pandemic means that people sitting at ground zero in a country where almost half of the population still doesn't believe it's happening, and therefore isn't doing one skinny iota to stop it ...

Well, now.

At this time I have two books finished and a third approaching finished, two drafts for two more books to be worked up, hopefully by the end of the year; and a fantasy trilogy to finish only after I've completed a stand-alone fantasy which can be shown, and hopefully sold, before the trilogy sees light of day. You can't sell a trilogy right off the bat. That's a lot of work already done, and just as much work left to do.

Mike and I are pretty much decided, it's a waste of time trying to secure agency representation and/or sell books before the pandemic is finished and the global economy is at least showing some signs of recovery. Until major publishers know the state of their own health, they won't be ready to take risks on unknown quantities ... new writers. So --

So ... "a happy island of safety in a troubled world," is it? Those words are very true. I weigh them
against "the future that might have been," if I'd gone through with plans, pushed and insisted, stomped my food and demanded to leave SA. Hmm.

All of which brings me back to where I began. The news is appalling, surreal, depressing. I only look at it about once a week; that's all I can bear. My heart goes out to Americans, British and certain Europeans (and I include Russia there) who're living with the reality, wrestling daily with their governments and also their brainless populations, who seem bent on mass destruction. And as for myself? Well, we've been in SA almost fifty years now. We can wait till this catastrophe sorts itself out before waving our arms around, trying to attract the attention of an American or English agent ...

On the understanding that this pandemic will end, that this virus can be defeated, that the world has a "global" future rather than finding itself a patchwork of isolated Covid-free regions and red-flagged no-go zones, suffering under a shambolic economy that can't fix itself. I don't even want to think about that. No one does. But I can't help wondering how many people must die before the general public in some of the sillier parts of the world wake up to themselves.

Hence, random beauty, to cheer myself up.

The Salmon Sandwich Bandit!

To set the scene: a picnic at the Gold Escort ground, at Belair NP, on a glorious day in late autumn. Right. Now, I've had a Kookaburra take the tuna out of a roll in my hand before (in fact, over at Karka Pavilion, also at Belair), but this little bandit took the whole thing and zoomed up into the nearest tree. The rascal sat up there at his leisure to eat the salmon, then dumped the roll.

To add insult to injury, he came back ten minutes later and swooped again, trying to get my apple pie. He aborted at the last tenth of a second, realizing it was fruit! He got my finger instead. Ahem!

So here he is -- the now world famous Salmon Sandwich Bandit, as immortalized on Facebook. If you notice, you can see the remnants of my salmon on the branch where he's sitting. Well ... he did play fair, and strike handsome poses for me to get some lovely shots. The fifth is his "beauty shot," where he glided over to another tree and sat cackling, "Me so funny!" 

Along the way, it was a great opportunity to get in some practice with the Lumix TZ90, which I am learning to love. Boy, did I make the right decision, when it came down to deciding which camera to buy. Sure, I know, I've seen the commercials for the new 60MP Sony. But I don't happen to have A$8,000 lying around, and I don't think I could carry the Sony and its lens and battery pack around my neck all day; or even for an hour. The Panasonic Lumix is right for me, at this moment: it weighs about 350g, has excellent lens elements by Leica, and gives me more gadgets and options than I can actually use -- and it does it for around 5% of the price of the killer-diller Sony. If I miraculously get well and strong again, and win lotto, I might think about upgrading to a DSLR, but for now, I'll take technology and the sweet price!

Happy New Camera, 2020!

After a year or more of bemoaning the fact that my Fuju HS50 has almost completely given up the ghost, well ... it was time to get a new camera. I've been researching them, looking at reviews, trying to figure out where the "sweet spot" lay, between needing something good, not having unlimited dollars to invest, and also needing to buy something that was light to carry about. So --

All things taken into consideration, I wound up with the Lumix TZ90, from Panasonic ... at at $438, it was an absolutely amazing deal. Then, there's its Leica optics, and its bells and whistles --

Ahem! Suffice to say, I'm having a lot of fun. More fun than I've had with photography for well over a year, because I knew that most of the shots I wanted to get, the HS-50 would spoil. (Almost everything had stopped working on it: light metering was off by a mile, and I'm sure its focusing system was way off too: you'd pull focus "here," with your chosen object right in the crosshairs, and it wold focus about ten degrees of arc away. Not fun. Not fun at all.)

So, in the last year or so I haven't done very much with photography; and I've missed it. The hobby gives you a reason to get out there and hike around, go the extra "nine yards" in order to come back with superb pictures. What's the point, if the camera is only going to spoil them? So --

The biggest step was making the decision to set down a great wad of cash. With that decision out of the way, the next was to work out which camera to buy ... and you really are spoiled for choice, no matter your price bracket. I think I spent about ten hours, hunting down individual cameras, reading reviews, comparing features.

And it all came down to a choice between a Canon PowerShot, and the Lumix TZ90. They are comparable; but the Lumix does a great deal more. It has those Leica optics, and a 3" touch screen display, plus a 'finder ... which the PowerShot doesn't have. The decision turned out to be the right one for me...

...I know, I demand a lot of a camera. I've used Fuji for well over ten years now -- had four of them; but the last one was surprisingly fragile, and I was honestly shocked when it started to break down in just a few years. I think I noticed the first "hmmm" moments after the second year. This time around, I've made the promise to myself, to be ultra-careful with the new Lumix, and deliberately NOT take liberties with it. Don't knock it. Don't let it hit anything.

Sooo I've just got myself a spare battery plus charger (there's another hundred bucks!), and have also ordered a camera bag, which will fit the Lumix snugly, not let it move about, and damage itself...

With any luck the camera bag will arrive before Dave and I take off for the Limestone Coast at the end of this month. If not, I'll have to MacGyver something to protect the camera on the road. I'm looking forward enormously to the trip. We haven't been to Mount Gambier in eight years. Hoping to get good weather for this one ... the last trip (our second to the Grampians), we had rotten luck with the weather for most of the time.

My other hope is that my health picks up a bit before we leave. I'm basically going one day at a time right now, and while I know I need to see a doctor and find out what's wrong ... I also know what the tests are going to be like. I'm putting them off as long as possible, because I just don't want to go there. Not ready yet. I'll know when I am. So --

There you have it! Happy New Camera, 2020! This is going to be big fun ... in fact, the fun has already begun. Pictures here were taken at Belair NP, Punchbowl Lookout, and in the back garden right here at home. Monday, if I'm up to it, I'll see if I can get to Onkaparinga Wetlands, and if the sky is blue and the sun bright, we should get some lovely pictures!