After 12 months away I couldn’t really remember how to render this blog. I wrote a post yesterday and tried for an hour unsuccessfully to get it to publish. Other changes seemed to render but the new post would not. Today it’s obvious. I had dated it for 23rd of the 11th not 10th - and as it’s not yet November Jekyll thought better of publishing. Feeling like I’ve achieved something so writing a second post now.
Painting
I’ve had a set of 48 small acrylic tubes for years bought at half price then unused. I plan to use them now. See if I can create a set of work from that one box of colour that I like. I’ve done two and half so far including this one which I’m not sure I like.
Painting this reminded me of improv just offering paint to paper to see what happens, half enjoying half hating it as it progresses, moments of magic then when time’s up analysing results and as many steps as can be remembered and hoping next time I’ll feel more in control. However with acrylic it seems possible to have another go and erase previous attempts with another layer.
NSW hit 80% double vaccinated and from Monday October 18th our new premier granted us more freedoms. If we’re double vaccinated we can have 20 people over. People were very quick to head to bars, clubs and restaurants in my area. I still feel cautious.
On this beautiful Saturday morning I saw the double decker tour busses were optimistically doing their rounds - a single tourist sitting on the top deck the whole of Sydney to herself.
A few times a year I regret not doing art everyday to build up a collection and learn through practice. So with my latest online improv class at ITS coming to an end and wanting a break I pulled out the watercolours and spent several hours painting last weekend. I had an idea for something else to paint this weekend but sadly when I looked at last week’s effort I was unimpressed and lost motivation so it’s now Sunday afternoon and I haven’t made start yet. Instead I’ve been procrastinating by learning how to add and size an image of the drawing in Markdown so I can display it below.
So long since i wrote a post that I’d forgotten how to update this site.
Since last post where i was concerned about apocalyptic bushfires caused by climate change there has been a global pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of people.
In Sydney we have been in “lock down” with most hospitality businesses closed and most office workers working from home. Governments are slowly allowing businesses to open back up now for example a cafe can have up to 10 customers provided they stay more than 1.5 meters apart. Australians are encouraged to install an app the government created on their phones that allows contact tracing by sharing data with gov about what other phones you were nearby for more than 15 minutes.
Writing above it’s hard to imagine making it up at time of my last post. Now I wonder what normal will look like if pandemic is coming to an end.
I do believe that the climate is changing. I’m convinced that it is destabilising or breaking down due to human activity.
It has grown noticeably hotter and more erratic during my lifetime and the last few years seem worse than any that I’ve known before.
The last few months we’ve been through the hottest recorded heat in many parts of Australia, the largest most widespread bushfires starting earlier than ever before. And now immediately afterwards we have many consecutive days of rain and wind bringing flooding in many places.
As I look out at the endless white veil of rain blown horizontally across the park since I woke this morning I hope that there will be stable and idilic periods again soon. That we won’t have to change our behaviour first and then wait hundreds of years for those changes to take effect before we can have pleasant days again.
Just before the new year I made commitment to myself to eat more plants and it occurred to me that I don’t have much of a salad repertoire. So I decided to make at least 52 salads I’ve not made before over 2020. I’ve made about 6 new salads so far.
My plan is to create another site likely using Jekyll to document and share them. I imagine it will be very simple site with just the recipes with one photo and no endless SEO oriented preambles.
I’m curious how much Adsense revenue such a site would make. How much green would it make.
I’ve had various variations of a personal website since the mid 1990’s at this domain.
Initially it was a static collection of html pages, then in about 2002 I built a PHP based CMS with blog, image galleries and links pulled from delicious. Around 2007 I decided to switch to Wordpress and despite grand ambitions to write never moved beyond a stream of my photos. I’m guessing after suffering a couple of hacking attacks I decided to give a static site generator a go in 2017 but never added more than the original post.
This is another attempt at personal publishing in 2020.
