25 august 2019

Looking at my phone photos from five years ago is a bit confusing because obviously like anyone but particularly like hoarders (it's in the genes) I use my phone (as mentioned in previous post) as just a dump for every impression/ thing that happens/thing I do/ thing I see, but at the same time I can't be friggin' bothered to make a note about why this is important or what it means, I just assume that one day I will sit down and notate on it all, which to be fair.... well, what I'm doing now is the closest I will ever get to making any kind of extra commentary on this shit. 

So five years ago, I made a loaf of bread. Yes. The weird thing about this is that I had made a loaf of bread the day before, too. So I am not sure what this was about. This bread was born in the humblest of circumstances, the scungefest that was the kitchen in Albion. I mean my kitchen today is pretty awful but nowhere near as awful. 

I guess I walked Barry and Ferdie that day, although this is the only picture from that moment, so who really knows. 

It doesn't matter in the slightest but why did I go to the 12th Caulfield (St Johns) Memorial Scout Hall five years ago today? I definitely can't tell you. 

I vaguely recall seeing this book in a bookshop in Elsternwick I think. Maybe it was the first time I saw it IRL? Because I have a short chapter in it, so I would have been interested. Maybe I was just pleased to see it out in the wild. 

Fabulous op shops in Elsternwick, so that's probably where the above images are from. 

This was around the time that I was getting ready to go to Europe, and I visited my aunt Maggie a few times with my mother, apart from anything else, I was proposing that Maggie take on Chanticleer as her new cat. Not sure what this would mean for Pompey but maybe I would keep him, I don't know. Maggie was ill with cancer and as it transpired she died in September. 

Pompey (rear) and Chanticleer in the Albion hovel. If you don't know the story of have forgotten (sometime I forget) I rescued these two from the mean streets of Albion, they were street cats with no future or at least the future of being run over by cars. They were flea-bitten, wormy and undesexed. I am guessing that by this stage they were no longer the first two categories and maybe not the third either anymore. 

Nancy hated them (still does). Though fortunately for Nancy, she doesn't have to think about them too often. & vice-versa. 

Once again this is all trivia but the one thing that I am amazed by is how awful things were five years ago and how good they are now (for me, not for anyone else, just me). I put most of the credit for that with Laura, who is a daily tonic. No doubt by this stage she had already agreed to look after these three cats while I was overseas, and as it transpired - she ended up keeping the two boys, together. It's hard now to imagine ever separating them. 

gosh...

I have 45 000 photos on my phone, I am not kidding. Actually 46, 546 and 3,909 videos. I am not kidding. I reckon about half of them are of pets doing things or just sitting. 

So that many photos is just stupid, particularly when you consider I do often delete soon after, obviously nowhere near enough lol. But it does mean I can get a good fix on what I was doing on a particular day in the last... however long the photos go back, I don't know, about 2017 I think for some reason. 

So I just thought I'd take a quick look at what I was doing on 21 August 2019 and I guess I was kind of hanging out with Pompey and Chanticleer, who were just children then, at the Albion house which every time I see it in pictures now amazes me at how squalid it really was. That dump was falling apart, shittily. I guess what surprises me more than that fact is the fact that it was only five years ago and so much has changed in that time.  

My life is about 10 000 times better and everything's good. Back then I was such a maudlin cunt. Now I'm not so maudlin. Looks like these boys liked maudlin though. I guess I taught them all their maudlinness. 

better call saul penultimate episode and hot chocolate and a reastaurant

So Better Call Saul is drawing to a close and I am finding it freaky to try and watch the second last episode which was made available on Tuesday (I am looking forward to cancelling my Stan subscription though as soon as that happens - talk about a streaming service with absolutely nothing that appeals to me aside from one thing that appeals very much). I finally steeled myself to watch half the episode this morning (up to where JimmySaul breaks into the cancer man's house). At this point the show is no longer in any sense a prequel but totally a sequel. Which is understandable but does kind of fuck up the overall continuity (until a few episodes ago you could have said, you can watch this whole thing like those faked up Star Wars prequel movies that made the real first and second films the 9th and 23rd or whatever). 

Anyway I guess I will get through to the end of that episode sometime today. Then I will no doubt be on edge for a while. 

I didn't get round to showing you the rest of my Bendigo trip from the other day, you probably feel on edge yourself. Well, I didn't go to this reastaurant: 

Not did I go to this cafe which I only photographed because of the Minna Leunig:

Oh, on the way back from Bendi I went past my old Albion stomping ground where I haven't set foot since I left in 2019 but I was adequately interested to photograph it going past:

^ No change here

^ Change - the car park - big deal right

^ Change - my townhouse block there and some building shizzle in front of it (ie in the foreground), don't know what that's about but it looks residential, and there's been some grotesque new buildings put in next to it. 

^ 'My' block again. 

^ Not a Bendigo picture - it's just that handsome Chanticleer looking dreamily at me* because like many cats (and dogs) he thinks I rock. 

^ I don't know why I own this or how long I have owned it but last night I realised it was the only album I own that I had never played and I did and, like all my other records, it's really very good. It's a lot more sparse than I expected, which possibly just means that the bulk of it (aside from the hit single which in this case was 'Heaven's in the Back Seat of My Cadillac') was recorded fast 'n' cheap with no particular frills (a few disco-y violins, that's it). But it's really solid. Mind you that's only side 1,  I will turn it over sometime in the next 25 years.  

*Alright he's not looking at me but that's only because I interposed a phone between my eyes and his. He went back to looking dreamily at me right after.