Blog Archive

1 January 2020

Happy New Year!

And welcome to the last year of the decade!

Yes, I’m one of those people who recognise the closing of decades, centuries and millennia correctly, because there was no year 0. No amount of shouting on social media changes the fact.

For this last year of the decade I couldn’t resist changing our site logo, at least for the next twelve months. I had an eye check last month and for the first time ever I was told my long sight had slipped below 20/20 vision. That and the ticking of the calendar to 2020 inspired me to make this logo for our site:

Since Christmas, none of us have done much reading. Apart from the usual things happening during the holiday period, we’ve had bushfires in the mountains. So far, we are personally unaffected except for a lot of smoke and heat, but there is a large fire to the south and a huge one to the north which threaten to join up somewhere near us. The heat and smoke have made it difficult to concentrate on books at all.

Now that the new year is here, I’m hoping we will get some reprieve from the weather and conditions to make reading more enjoyable again. I hate putting sweat all over my books!

- bikerbuddy

3 January 2020

January in the Blue Mountains, Australia, and that means a month of Sport for Jove’s outdoor productions of Shakespeare at Everglades Gardens. This year they are doing Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. We go most years, but with all the bushfires in NSW this year, we don’t get too many smoke-free days where it’s possible to breathe outside. Sitting outside in the smoke, above a valley where a fire still burns, isn’t an appealing prospect, no matter how good the production will probably be (and it will be good, this company always has brilliant productions). However, this year for the first time, they’re putting on some additional shows in February. Hopefully conditions will be better by then.

Back in 2018, bikerbuddy included an appraisal of the company's production of Measure for Measure at the end of his review for that play. His appraisal of the production can be found here.

- Toriaz

19 January 2020

We’ve been out of action for a few days. While we were lucky not to have the recent bushfires close to us, the rains that have helped to quell the fires over the last few days began with a violent electrical storm that shot a bolt of lightning just outside our house. It was like a bomb going off. As a result, we were down one modem and I’ve lost 50 percent of the memory on my computer. It’s still limping along. Enough to do this web page. And we now have a new modem.

-bikerbuddy

27 January 2020

We started this year's blog posts with bikerbuddy talking about getting new reading glasses. I’ve never needed reading glasses myself - I’ve always been short-sighted – but in the past two weeks I’ve been having difficulty reading. I decided age has probably caught up and I now need reading glasses, too, so I tried to book an eye exam. Can’t get one until the end of the week, so given that and the time it will take before my new glasses are ready, that means I probably have another fortnight before I will be doing any further reading. So, no more reviews from me until later in February at the very earliest!

-Toriaz