Birchip and the Silo Art Trail

Once Shannon and I left Swan Hill, it was a surprisingly short drive of an hour or so until we saw our first artwork on the side of a silo. This was in Sea Lake, which is just to the south of Lake Tyrrell. If you haven't been there, it is amazingly large and terribly pink. It also had this amazing area to look at the stars, which I can only imagine is great at night.

From there we went onto our first piece of silo art, which was of a girl on swing. There is silo art in various places in Victoria and, as you'd imagine, there are all sorts of subjects and styles. But this first one was just the sort of thing that I like: literal and vivid.

After that we headed south to a little town where the silo art was of a man and his cattle dog, which was just amazing. But it was a terribly small town and I don't think we saw so much as a petrol station or a general store. But we did see bit of sculpture made out of various bit of machinery and cars. So we followed the signs and met the people who made this sculptures and sold them. They had transformed the backyard of their house into a garden of these sculptures and it was really something to see.

Then we drove down to Burchip, which was quite a busy little place. As we did a few times in this roadtrip, we stopped at a bakery for lunch. It seems that every bakery in rural Victoria lays claim to make the best vanilla slice, and I am sure that one of them must be right. And, while the food was nice, it was hard to complete with the joy of finding this mural on the side of the post office.

This dog looks like Emmy Lou, our old dog, known with much affection as the Puppy Deluxe.

After Birchip, we travelled through various backroads to Horsham. There wasn't a highway to take us from A to B, so I decided to trust the talking map. While this didn't lead to any actual disasters, we certainly drove many a mile alone some pretty narrow road, some of which we shared with surprisingly large trucks. Once in Horsham, I did what any sensible person would do and had a nap.

09:31 pm, November 25, 2024

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Coding My Blog

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

Somewhere in the last week, I had the bright idea that I would make my own software for my blog. I have been using WordPress for a long time, and Moveable Type before that, and - around the time the earth was first cooling - Blogger.

But it was getting to the point where WordPress had so many bells and whistles that I was finding it disincentive to actually writing anything.

So I have spent about 10 hours creating my own solution, and I like it so far. It's not fancy and not competition for the big offerings, but it does what I want, how I want it.

It doesn't do comments yet, and I want to have a good think about how I can make it relatively easy for people to comment, and reasonably hard for spammers and scammers to flood the site with nonsense. Greater minds than mine continue to struggle with this.

03:24 pm, November 24, 2024

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My First Blog

This is not my first blog, far from it.

But I have never built my blog's software before. I've always used a CMS made by other people. And WordPress served me well for many years, but I want something simpler, something that I actually understand.

So here I am. And there will be some more features soon.

02:25 pm, November 24, 2024

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Board Games

Mental health is a tricky thing within any family, I suspect. And we are not different. We eat dinner together almost every night of the year, and sometimes the kids join us to watch TV after that. But it is very easy to everyone to retreat to their own screen, and I am pretty sure that this doesn't produce terrific mental-health outcomes.

One thing we have done is have an internet siesta from 11 until 2 on weekdays for kids if they are at home. It's not popular, but I am certain that unbroken hours in front of YouTube cannot be good for anyone's mental health.

The other thing we have been doing is playing games after dinner. Like many people, we did this a bit during the lockdowns but didn't persist in the habit. But we've been doing it for about three weeks, and I think it is helping us be a bit more connected, and I've been enjoying the company of Nicky and the kids.

So far we have been playing:

• Scrabble (surprisingly popular, with the kids getting lots of help from Nicky, who always wins)
• Uno
• Jenga
• Yahtzee
• Cluedo
• Cards Against Humanity
• 21 (boring an unlikely to be repeated)
• Bananagrams (surprisingly fun)
• Dominos (which we don't really understand the rules of
• Connect 4

We take turns to pick. It's my turn to pick tomorrow and I'm going for Yahtzee

02:22 pm, November 24, 2024

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