Ash cloud descends on the blog

Sorry to those of you who are regular blog readers - it's been pretty quiet lately. No good excuse comes to mind - just some weeks are more bloggy than others. Blame that guy Ash McLeod - he seems to be responsible for everything else going wrong in the southern hemisphere lately.

Let's just say all my interesting blog content is buried under this somewhere.

Letters

I suddenly started writing letters in December 1985. I was on holiday in Sydney with my family, and I really felt the urge to keep in touch with all my schoolmates from Grade 12 in Burnie, who were just then scattering to all points. Well, mostly Launceston and Hobart. When I got back from Sydney and moved to Hobart myself, I kept writing, even to the people who were just across town. I had discovered an outlet for feelings and ideas that, for me, speech didn't ever provide.

This was a time when most of my close mates were girls, and I was busily trying to work out how to make that a plus. I was not a wimp exactly, but pretty unthreatening I guess. I had a long term crush on one of the girls, and was massively in denial of the obvious - that we would always be just good friends. It appears, from decoding the replies, that many of my letters to girls were attempts to work out what made them tick. Must have been very wearing for the girls, some of whom are (incredibly) still friends. I was (and still am) pretty phone-phobic. One girl lived out in the country. I walked 17 kilometres to visit her one day and she wasn't there. I hadn't been prepared to phone ahead and check.

Yesterday after 25 years I finally threw out most of the big bag of the letters I got back. I skimmed the letters before chucking them out.

A few of the keepers.

I am keeping the ones from my family and from blokes. [And a few with really great handwriting, for an art thing I have in mind]. The blokes' letters have actual information about stuff going on, music, sport, things that were happening. And as a bonus, they don't make me cringe. The ones from Mum are very funny to read now. In my first few months living away from home, it seems like we wrote each other every week. I spent the year living at a residential college, and I must have reported on the fairly dissolute ways of the inmates. After the annual College Ball, Mum's next letter says "you can probably get the shirt clean if you bleach it carefully", and "how did your chair get burnt in the first place? You must have been sitting awfully close to the bonfire!"

Once I had grown up a bit and given up on ever understanding girls, I used to write letters as a sort of substitute diary. Writing stuff down gave me a chance to analyse it and think about what was happening in my life. The letters were a sort of proto blog in a way. I will feel I have got better at blogging when I can make it somehow a bit more like a letter - one with bits and pieces thrown in at the last minute before the walk down to the letterbox. Stuff that might not make sense in any way other than "this was here and now I have sent it to you there".

Blog burst

I have been blogging rarely of late, but don't worry, I have been saving up some burning issues. Should I put them all in one bumper post, or give them each their own little headline, and moment in the sun? I think the latter.

As this little post is not itself about anything, this is where I'll put these drawings I have been doing recently. One of them looks like a laughing alien that has disguised itself as a hill. One of them looks like those mega expensive Coogi jumpers that used to be for sale only in airports.

Word cloud - last three months of blogging

No surprises really. Looks like I am overusing the word "just". Make your own clouds here at Wordle.

Back-at-work January Schnippettes

1. I have got a new follower, who appears to actually be two people, and their own blog is in Spanish. This has prompted me to add a Translate button over on the right there, which will translate the whole blog into a variety of languages from Afrikaans to Yiddish. Here is a recent post in Hebrew - the words that are untranslated speak volumes don't they?



2. We all went to the beach yesterday. I went for a walk at one stage and saw what I thought was a crab heading for me, a comfortable sort of size to hold in a large hand if you were so inclined. As I got closer I realised - holy heck, its a huntsman spider! At the beach! I changed direction pretty quick. As I continued on down the beach I heard people one after the other behind me also sucked in by the crab-that-turns-out-to-be-a-house-spider. I guess if a huntsman has got all its scaring people and eating mice done for the day, there is nothing wrong with it just clocking off and heading down to catch some rays and maybe do some bodyboarding.
3. Celebrity ToolWatch! Sam Newman was seen this morning, lost in South Hobart. Work colleague explained to him how to find Cascade Brewery, missed opportunity to send him instead to Cockle Creek or Clarendon Vale. He was in a left-hand drive white stretch convertible. If you do not know of Sam, substitute your favourite love-to-hate TV waste of space.
4. Elf and I went to our first wedding in ages on Saturday. My art school pal Ado was marrying Elf's former work colleague Lou, so we knew quite a few of the guests. Ado and I met when were both 17 and are now both 41, so there were years and years of mutual friends there to catch up with. It was a stand-up reception which was a bit challenging, with small amounts of deep-fried food circulating on platters. Wore my throat out yelling conversation over the loud music. Ado's mum is terrific, we had not seen each other in nearly 20 years but she was great to talk to and remembered a lot that I had forgotten.
   

Snib and Palp

I just need to blow my own trumpet here and say I have been knocking myself out over at my other, other blog, Snib and Palp. In honour of S&N's 2nd birthday I have added 17 new words to my compendium of four letter words you should know and use frequently.

Attention blog visitors - triangulating you now.

I have started using Google Analytics to try to work out why the hell people from umpteen countries keep on blundering in here. Apparently a lot of them are looking for names for netball teams.

Anyway - I have banged on about the glorious variety of countries from which I have attracted (mostly once-off) visitors. Now I have a finer grain of data - I know which city they are from! And this takes it to a more interesting yet spooky level of intimacy.

Among others I have had one visit each from;

Whippany, New Jersey
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
Bismarck, North Dakota
Nelson, New Zealand
Nei-Hu, China
Uddingston, Scotland
Katowice, Poland
Ikoma, Japan
Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei
Alcala de Henares, Spain
and also Don Mills (a suburb, not a person), in Toronto, Canada.

And I say to all of you: I hope I was some help in naming your netball team.

A thing a lot of people put on their blog is "funny things people have googled to get here". I am above such puerile filler and plus I have never known how to find that out. But now I do, so:

"whatever happened to hovercraft"
"netball team name suggestions"
"margaret pomeranz hair"
"ideas for netball team names"
"gravelly beach tasmania greek restaurant"
"fun netball team names"
"betty boop shop wynyard tasmania"
"cool netball team names"

Blog flags - semifinal results

France has edged out Thailand in a thrilling (note: I've redefined "thrilling") finish. New Zealand maintained their early dominance to run out easy victors over plucky trilingual* Switzerland.

France 8 d Thailand 7
New Zealand 23 d Switzerland 9

So. Hmm. Its been pretty dull really hasn't it. And with very little chance of a sudden spike in French interest in the next month, things are looking good for the Kiwis.

But... wait! What is this note I've just been passed? "Photographes de Carla Bruni Sans Couture"? Why, that might just do the trick. We'll see.

*Actually quad-lingual including Romansch, with only 35,000 speakers

Blog Visitor Semis

At the end of March we are down to 4.

France 7 d South Africa 6
Thailand 7 d Romania 2
Switzerland 6 d Turkey 5
New Zealand 18 d Phillipines 3

In the semis France meet Thailand and Switzerland are up against the mighty silver fern of New Zealand. My mate Ben in Bangkok (who has been responsible for most of their numbers) starts work back here on Monday - so it looks good for France to progress to the Grand Final. NZ are unbackable favourites against the disciplined Swiss, but blog readership is a funny game. Anything could happen in the next 30 days.

Results on 30 April.

Blog visitor quarter finals

For my own super-slow-mo amusement, I am going to set up a kind of world-cup of blog visitors. On 31 March I will award victories in the quarter finals to the countries with the most visitors on the flag counter thingy. This is feeble and pathetic but there you go.

South Africa v France
Thailand v Romania
Turkey v Switzerland
Phillipines v New Zealand

After that we will have the semis. Obviously Thailand and New Zealand are top seeds and look likely to meet in the grand final, but you never know. The dark horse is Romania, who have lately come from nowhere to, er, somewhere.

Comments stuck in the series of tubes

Sorry to Wendy, Elf and Sally. I have been tweaking the blog settings, and set Comments to "always approve before publishing". Then I never actually checked if there was something I needed to approve. Your lively and thought provoking comments are now up. I have set it back to allow unmediated, public access, open slather, open-mike night, poetry slam style commenting. Continue to "throw down", "peeps"!

1000 posts

That last bit of business about the advent calendar was my 1000th Diary of Dadness blog entry! That makes me a lance-corporal in the massive army of blogging. Until I got the flag thingy I had no idea that my blog was at least viewed (if not actually read) in places so widely distributed. My latest arrival logged on in Turkey - hello sir or madam! Thanks for reading, everyone.

Little flags piling up

OK, I am blogging about the blog now, which is sad. But - I am fascinated to watch the flags accumulating in the visitor records panel there. There's been a burst of activity in the Baltic on Wednesday when I suddenly saw Poland, Latvia and Lithuania clock on. Is it one person driving around with a laptop? And where is Estonia?

I know that's Ben in Thailand and Charles in Germany. Wendy is contributing a lot of the US figures from Arkansas. But who is dropping in from Mexico? Canada? Romania and Slovakia for goodness sake?

If you are somewhere interesting reading this, pop in a comment, I'd love to know.