nobody home?

One day one way or another (as previously mentioned) this will end, or I will end and this will stay until it doesn't. 

I don't know if Blogger is a happy, healthy entity or whether next week it will all disappear except all us bloggers will be getting emails from companies in Romania saying 'good news! We can recover all your blog entries for only $22.87 per entry' (sorry Romania, I thought of you only because I am getting harassed by a Romanian-based English-language journal to submit a paper, as though I have papers sitting around just looking for a niche for me to poke them into). The entries will be randomly chosen and many of them will be from other blogs. 

When blogs suddenly disappear it'll make the news along the lines of, 'yes they still exist! Or rather, they did', like when someone finally pulls the pin on myspace (assuming this hasn't already happened). 

I  am flagging a potential issue because, just a moment ago, I tried to log in to this account and was then given an option by google to create a blog under rules decreed by the European Union. I had no idea what that was about but assumed I would just have to keep trying to do what I wanted to do until they stopped asking, a tactic that sometimes works and in this case did. Anyway, just mentioning it. Perhaps blogger costs nothing to run and aids the large language models of the world, so it will be enabled to continue by the bots which control us, I don't know. 

Also, I cut my thumb a few hours ago trying to cut some nectarines. I suppose this sounds a little like not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground, let me be more specific, I was cutting a nectarine and the knife slipped and I cut my thumb. One of those odd feelings. It's double bandaged and it doesn't hurt at all. But imagine the knife had slipped and gone right into my heart? Don't worry, I've already pre-loaded some new Flooks for your holiday season entertainment. 

community

I've wondered this before, and I probably won't do it because names take on a life of their own. but since my move to City Gardens there is more of a case than ever before for me changing the title of this blog. I haven't lived in Lorraine Crescent since 2013, I mean that's close to ten years. We finally did the property settlement a few months ago and the house is now Mia's. I really enjoyed my early years in that house as is probably evident from what I wrote back then (and from the fact that I named the blog after it). I still feel a considerable connection to the area, it's the first place I really felt vested in as an adult. So it's oddly still a bit of a wrench. I don't know if I can have the same kind of feeling for North Melbourne as I did for Jacana/Broadmeadows, I think NM is a bit too big and harsh and complicated. That said I was out with the grabber yesterday and a woman with a fluffy dog in a pram asked me where I got the grabber from, and for a second I felt like well this is kind of a community-styled conversation. 

oh what a year

Hasn't it just been a rollercoaster ride? In truth, as I am writing this on 3 October, I don't really know how the ride 'ended', but I just thought I'd put in a note about my significant return to the blogosphere in 2020, after, um, a major slump last year, back to the glory days (if 'glory' means 'frequently posting') of this blog.  As I think I had previously mentioned (maybe I haven't) the problem was I had to go into my-old-gmail-address-mode to get to this blog; the main reason I am back in business with Lorraine Crescent is that Blogger has somehow made it easier to click through, so there's none of the gatekeeperishness of 'god, what's that password again?' although I suppose it's been a year of much more sittin' at home not talking to people and maybe writing here fills in the time. It takes on a life of its own though of course, a blog, and once you've got the first ten years down you are probably not going to give it up fully. 

One thing I have been considering is whether to go back and clean up previous posts particular as regards to dead links, etc. It wouldn't make sense if I just clipped them out, I'd have to put something in there a la the Simpsons picture of the drunk cameraman and a 'stand by', except no point standing by, that film clip of the Bee Gees doing 'Sweet Song of Summer' is never going to be there (it probably is somewhere on youtube though, just not on that link anymore). Well, I'll think about it. I assume that just by dint of the fact that the world is six billion buzzing browsers, those posts still get hits. I just checked a random 2009 post, because for a second I thought each post had a record of how many views it got on the 'reader' side of the blog but it doesn't, I have to go back into the works to see that; but what I did note, also arguably important, is that pictures on this blog in its early years were tiny. If I went back and enlarged them they'd probably be horrendously pixilated, don't know, but maybe there's a sweet spot where at least it doesn't look like an out of focus postage stamp. 

I mean considering most of the time this is just a low-key ramble, and I have about five loyal readers (thank you) and that's it, it's probably if not a waste of time, certainly time spent that I could be doing better things with, but also it keeps the (writing) muscle active, and that's not the worst thing. 

Anyway, greetings from October! Remember us? We were naive, we had no idea what the next three months was going to hold. We were optimistic for the outcome of a US presidential election. Yes, we had something to focus on. 

i wonder when jimmy buffett will die

I'm betting on some time around September 2023. Wish me luck, I have a few hundred thousand dollars riding on this. Then it's Margaritaville here I come. 

countdown

11 days to the third anniversary of this blog and only 16 days to the 43rd anniversary of my birth. Which is more exciting I don't know, and I am also unsure how to celebrate them. I suspect actually the first of these anniversaries will not be celebrated at all. That still leaves the question of the second. It may be dinner at Anatolian. Their state-of-the-art audiovisual facilities could come in very handy for the rough cut that movie of my life Claudia and Per are making.