Obviously I'm getting older and shamefully lazier. I have been cycling less and less, I barely run anymore. Since starting nursing in 2015 I have put on 12kg. I am angry and frustrated at myself because I know better. I know muscles start to waste when we get older, we have to use them to keep them. I have let it go...

My Mum sent me this postcard after she had walked across Spain. It is an illustration from a Russian Fairy story, "Feather Of Finist Falcon" by Ivan Bilibin. Feather Of Finist Falcon by Ivan Bilibin I am reading Robert MacFarlane 's, "The Old Ways, A Journey On Foot". I love it. I have had to regularly pause so that...

By Crikey, it is a warm day here in Broken Hill today. We have the evaporative cooler ducting it's breeze through the house but it's still pretty warm. Outside the ground is too hot to walk on and the corrugated iron that encases everything in this town sizzles on contact. The heat shimmer makes you wonder if light...

Last month my laptop became unstable. I had been trying to do something which I began to regret. Losing patience I reinstalled the operating system. Unfortunately on my previous installation I had negligently chosen to set up my hard-drives as a striped array. This meant despite days of recovery attempts I lost...

In the endless cycle of tinkering with this website I have once again changed things around. I had a go at modifying a bash script ( BLASH ) to parse my markdown files into the html files you're now looking at. Very quickly the loops and structures became ungainly. No doubt my lack of finesse, skill and time was to...

Precious time off work. Ev out for a ride with me Working at SCU back in 2007-8 was a quiet gig. I had plenty of time to mull over things. I would cycle to work in the morning and have my day's work mostly done by smoko. In the beginning I would fill my time with projects to improve the efficiency of the campus. I...

In a recent conversation with a non-Australian it struck me that people don't know what a Ute is. It is a small utility truck. Basically a car with the back end replaced by a tray. They are incredibly useful and much loved in Outback Australia. There is a house down by the railway line near my house. It looks like...

This will be my last stash report for a while. I will be returning to Uni to studying postgraduate from mid July onwards so I expect to be busy. This series of posts has been useful for me to focus on our finances whilst we both made the decision to buy a house; move to the outback of Australia and start new jobs,...

It all happened didn't it? This could have been an absolute clusterfuck but luckily for us moving to a new home and job in the outback during a pandemic was okay. Thanks to the awesome team at LiteMoves the move was hassle free. Our house in Coffs is being looked after by the best tenants in the world. Our NZ trip...

Last Tuesday we emptied our little house into the back of a removal truck. After a quick tidy and a last tearful visit to family we set off on the trail to Broken Hill. Z&JB had to wait on some repairs to their car. They followed on at a more leisurely pace and were a couple of days behind us. We drove for ten or so...

The global COVID reset button has been activated to coincide with our move out west. My Mum and JB have not been able to fly back to the UK. So their holiday has turned into an extended stay with us. It has been great to have them both here. JB is a human dynamo of energy and has done an incredible amount of work...

My current favourite local bit of coast. I'm going to miss the sea. Monday morning at work I started running a slight temperature. My shoulders and neck ached. I work with immunocompromised patients so it was safest to go home. I am a nurse so in the interest of keeping me in the workforce I was tested for COVID-19....