Category: Uncategorized

Life as She Lives It

Thank you everyone still reading despite no new posts since about February. I’ve been busy, is all I can say. Online I’ve been looking into one or two other platforms. Always coming back to WordPress as the platform I’d rather be exploring and learning to use better, than platforms I’d be learning from scratch.

There have been changes here enough to keep me interested. For example, I just noticed the vastly bigger choice of fonts. I will love exploring those. The one I’m using today is ‘Albert Sans’. Easy to read but not going back all the way to the old Times New Romans.

In my real life too I’ve been looking at a few different ‘platforms’ … make that, places where I might want to spend the rest of my life. After experiencing both my parents not preparing for their retirement, and then being forced by circumstances into situations where they did not want to be … well, I don’t want to lay that decision-making on my kids.

So. My elder years … my physical health is set to continue somewhat shaky. Although I’ve celebrated two years in remission from lymphoma … with a teaspoon of champagne! … I recently had a flare-up of me/cfs that has left me a bit ragged round the edges. I’ve even had to use my walker again and I thought I’d recovered my balance.

I narrowed my choices for somewhere better to live down to the Retirement Village option and am researching those in the South Brisbane (Australia) area. Nothing wrong with this place, mind you, it’s just not that good for a future where I’m more decrepit. And it’s coming.

Out for a walk just now, I made it to 3000 paces. Say, 4000 in total for the day. That’s only two thirds of what I was doing before I got sick with the lymphoma and that is now nearly three years ago. And time doesn’t stand still.

I’ll miss the sunsets here when I finally go. [Lol, I think the sunset above is from my previous town, I see Wollumbin in the background (also known as Mt Warning)]

About Blogging …

Canteen scene with Drew barely visible on the left, washing dishes; Tim and Trish in the right foreground, sharing their stories; and Wendy, in the right-side rear having a break from the cooking.

About Starting a Second Blog

Inevitably, when an activity starts to take more of the hours in my week, more of the effort I have available, more space on my dining table, it starts to look like an obsession. I’ve been there before. Twelve years ago I lost a beautiful tung nut tree in my backyard to an excess of rain. As the rotting trunk was chopped down, I comforted myself with the idea that I’d be able to see a parade of fungi taking hold of the wood one after another.

The rain continued. Dozens of fungi species helped rot that stump down. I learned about fungi wherever I could find the information. Over the wet months of the El Nino weather pattern, more than a hundred species helped me become obsessed. I took my camera out for walks and recorded the ‘chitinous critters’ wherever I walked.

Chitinous critters?

Fungi cell walls are made of the same stuff as insect exoskeletons. Fungi have more in common with animals than with plants, despite having been umbrella’ed by ‘Flora’ since Linnaeus. Fungi have no chlorophyll, they need plant food to survive. They don’t move around in the same way that sponges don’t. I could go on and on. Have, in fact, given talks about them; walks and talks; I’ve done guest speaking at high school science classes; written articles; IDed fungi on FB, entered fungi sightings on ALA and iNaturalist. Citizen science stuff.

But I’ve probably only seen about four fungi species in the last two years. I have much less energy. More sedentary time. I’ve become rusty on names. Chemo fog didn’t help. It was the right time for a new obsession.

So. Lego seems to be it. With so many platforms where I could post up my finds, I never hankered to set up a separate blog for my fungi finds. Although there are quite a lot of platforms for Lego too, they don’t tend to encourage what I’m interested in. Stories. I like to write about my discoveries while building, and I like to write stories from within the building process.

Though I could write on this blog about my discoveries, I haven’t found a good way to format the stories in this blog’s existing structure. Hence. Designing and planning a second blog.

But keeping this one going is a thing. Usual stuff. Life and about life. Fiction and about fiction. Earth versus World. About media and about reading. Blogging and about blogging.

‘Life Admin’

Decisions, decisions. Shall I let go my woodworking tools, or will still have use for them?

This is what my son calls it. When my well-structured time (writing and blog-posting) grinds to a halt, and I need to take care of big stuff that has somehow all conspired to happen in the same couple of weeks. That’s when I’m doing ‘life admin’.

So in the past week and the 2-3 weeks to come … I need to go for a Covid booster, and expect a couple of days of side effects. Have been for an eye examination, the optometrist said might as well wait with the cataract operations as you’re going to the cataract capital of Australia. Fine, I said, I’ll wait. And maybe go to the dentist.

Still on my health-jag, I recently began a comprehensive exercise program. This one has to stick. It means time-tabling … something I’m not good at … at least half an hour a day. Being the eternal night owl, for me that is in the late afternoon. Easy to run out of time. It’s taken me two weeks to complete the Week 3 activities. And not only because I run out of time.

Fatigue after chemo is big, and definitely a thing. So, some days I’m really better off communing with my lap-top rather than my milk-bottle weights doing a Strength Workout. Yesterday, I did the Warm-up and could not go on to do the Cardio Circuit. I’ll have to do that today and the Strength Workout tomorrow. That gives me a free day for my Covid shot.

I’m doing more down-sizing to prepare for moving to Cairns in a few weeks, some 2000 km up the coast, into the tropics. Down-sizing means getting rid of stuff. Making decisions about what to keep, what to let go. Books mainly. But also the tools …

The most stressful thing is organizing a place to live in up there, and wondering when to start with that? Do I really want to pay a bond (four weeks rent) and four weeks to hold it for me? I’ll be traveling with the family. They’re going beginning December. Three more weeks to get it all together.

And then there’s my house down south being sold. Rising interest rates and continual rain with its danger of flooding in that town has made this a nerve-racking time. Although the house itself hasn’t flooded, the yard shed and garage have all recently had a 30 centimeter inundation.

And finally, Lodestar has a chapter missing. Chapter 31, as a matter of fact. Kes doing the river miles. Getting infill on his tattoo, and discovering Show Town’s perfidy. I’m writing it from the notes that I have found amongst all the digital files and paperwork, in between all the other stuff going on.

‘Life Admin’ …

3, Half Shaman in Space

Some good scenes in this, some nasty events, and all the sometimes hard-to-understand stuff in between where I tried to explain what life was like in the alien starship, also known as the “Octahedron”. If you’ve been reading along, you’ll have met this starship in Earth Girl, a mysterious object hanging low in the sky.

In this installment of what was to have finalized the trilogy, Jeb the half shaman meets Kosi Lionhair, the once-upon-a-time Earth Girl. Jeb and her people are in survival mode. As the human ‘face’ of the starship’s bored alien AI, Kosi causes Jeb and her people plenty of grief in the name of fun. A dramatic mix.

What follows is a taster … I’m having to learn a few more moves in the Compile section of Scrivener

Chapter 1: Entry
I’m aware. I’m awake. My breathing sounds loud. The space I’m in sounds big, so I’m not in the shuttle. I fall … but only a short distance. My legs seem too long.

I feel around me. Carpet or something under me, my hands and my thighs. I don’t hear Mongoose breathing beside me. I don’t feel him.

Snap! I open my eyes. Mongoose isn’t beside me!

I’m wearing a thin white tunic. Mongoose isn’t beside me!

I kneel up. Stand. I’m in a group of animals, still-as-statues, sitting or standing or frozen in a leap. Each on its own brown carpet square on a raised area in a huge white hall. What is this place? Where’s Mongoose?

Tiled white walls. White ceiling. White floor below the … carpeted podium? Among the statues I see animals I know. There’s a meerkat. A puma. A bear. A woodchuck. An orangutan. They are all life-sized.

No. They are all the size of human beings! There’s a thylacine with a front paw that is a different brown to the other. In the square next to the place where I was, is a mongoose. Sweat springs from me, is soaked up only where the skimpy tunic touches me. Everywhere else it rolls down me. I’m clammy in seconds. My heart hammers in my chest.

To be continued

Installment 2

Dryad after the Clear-felling, mixed media by Rita de Heer

This gig … of dumping 20 years worth of my work online … is turning out to be harder than I thought it could be. I had real trouble today just going to a File, saving it as a pdf, then inserting it here. This morning I first trapped myself thinking up a good title for this project. “A Broken Universe” sums it up quite nicely, I decided, since I could never get the timeline to gel.

I spent a couple of hours chasing through my Documents File for the long version of the Half Shaman in Space for Installment 3. As if it matters whether I post long or short, or anything in the order of the events, or anything.

But it does. There seem to be a few readers out there. Installment One did quite well.

Could only find a very short version. And I edited a couple of Files. And I did Delete a few odds and ends. Not a wasted day. Finally found what I was looking for in the Trash. Did retrieve it.

But anyway … installment two of the whole story is Half Shaman. One of the two published volumes, as it happens. Go to this Page for the details. https://wordpress.com/page/ritadeheer385131918.blog/1007