Old Posts

Humbling

We had a family BBQ birthday party for yours truly on Saturday night and I decided to retrieve my seldom used telescope from storage and set it up for the first time in the two years since we moved away from Scotland. My 9 year old niece was keen to get a good look at the moon through a telescope for the first time and we also caught a great glimpse of Mars sitting low in the southern sky after around 9pm, check your horizon around then and you'll see a orangey-red coloured star. Mars is currently approaching its closest position to Earth for thousands of years, so there's never been a better time to get a hold of a scope and take a look.

Through the scope we were able to make out some grey-ish definition and a very defined ice-cap shown as a bright white spot around the 9 o'clock position on the disc. It's the clearest I've ever seen Mars in my short and very amatuer career as a kid-on astronomer.

Radio Silence - Oh Look, Words

I find myself in a sort of weblog limbo, having given up blogging for a week I've come to realise what it's like out there in the real world. A world that contains blogs rather than a world contained within blogs; confusing paradox, I know, but there you go. Or rather, there I went. About the middle of last week I gave very serious consideration to posting up a farewell post, so sure was I that I was 'over it'. In fact, I still feel the same way today but I declined the opportunity to check out on the basis that there's simply no point making an 'official' statement of public record in much the same way that before I had a weblog, I didn't go about telling people that I didn't have a weblog. Regardless of what happens from here on in, I will always have a weblog, unless that is, I take down the site - which I also considered since there's frankly nothing worse than a dead weblog lying there like some 4 day old road kill.

If I'm 'quitting', then the domain comes down with me. But I don't think I want to pull my domain down as that would be just too over-dramatic, and so it follows that the blog is staying and I'm typing this which, I suppose, means I'm still blogging. I must admit, though, that I was - and I still am - quite taken with the idea of being an ex-blogger with all the techno-kudos such status would guarantee.

Perspective is what it's about and I've had plenty time to consider that aspect of blogging in the context of my wider existence. Over the last couple of years this blog has remained the same but my circumstances behind the blog have changed considerably. Many of my previously spare cycles are now being soaked up by my current job - don't ask - and I also have the paternal responsibilities I didn't have when I started. Plus, I'm all idea-ed out it seems. One de facto purpose - if it has one - of this blog appears to be my propensity for stupid ideas, which in itself is quite a stupid idea but in many respects has helped me understand myself better. Perhaps this demystification (sp?) of my inner mind has taken some of the shine off things for me, perhaps in my own mind this realisation puts me more in the context of a performing chimp or a chain smoking beagle, whereas I was previously ignorant of the origins and persistent form my creative behaviour takes.

Anyway, salvation is most likely hand, literally, in the form of lunch this Saturday with AKMA and Margaret who will hopefully administer the required corrective therapy on behalf of the blogging world at large. Can't think of a better cure personally.

On a more humorous note; my Sister, Brother-in-law and three neices visited this weekend, and whilst en route to buy me a new tie as a birthday gift the following exchange took-place.
Aimee (8) : Mummy, where are we going?
Debbie : Tie-Rack, to buy Uncle Gary a new tie.
Aimee (Sounding worried & confused): Mummy, is that not near Iraq?
Beyond all that, my biggest accomplishment of the last week off-blog has been to re-discover, by virtue of listening to more radio, just how fan-bloody-tastic The Sultans Of Swing sounds when played at speaker-popping volume on my HiFi & new digital radio set-up. If you haven't listened to TSOS for a while, I insist you'll feel all the better for doing so as soon as you can. Loud.