Another mine, another dirt road. An easy load, and it should have been my last for the year, but I’m squeezing in one more today, Friday.
Christmas 2023 was a biggy – a great granddaughter born early in December; my mum, a great great grandmother, over for the celebrations (and photos); Milly, my fellow great grandparent, our kids, Psyche, Lou and Gee all in town for a big dinner; not to mention my cousin, travelling with mum, Lovely, the mother of the centre of all our attentions, and lots more grandkids.
But two months off work, followed by a forced break for a gearbox rebuild, left the business bank balance looking very sorry. Still, as I said during the year, regular work for a couple of months caught the bank balance back up, and irregular work keeps me ticking along.
Christmas 2024 will be a bit less eventful, hopefully. We’ll nearly all be down at the new Dr Gee’s place outside Denmark, though not mum, nor Psyche who’ll stay in Darwin, having been here for our island birthdays in October. I picked Lou up from the airport Tues morning after a 12 hour flight from Darwin via Melbourne – and yes, that is as ridiculous as it sounds, the airlines really do have us by the balls. He’s gone on by bus, as did Milly, Lovely and now one year old great grandbaby a few days earlier. I will follow with urgent supplies of seafood, wine and beer as soon as work allows.
Now I know you’re all waiting, so here is the wadholloway prize for the Best Blog Post of 2024 (that he has read):
I have one runner up: Melanie at Grab the Lapels for all her 292 Sunday Lowdowns which took us through life on the farm, horror, and studying to be an American sign language interpreter (and big shoutouts to Biscuit, her mum, and Nick, everyone’s favourite pirate).
And the winner is Emma of Book Around the Corner for her series Literary Escapades which has taken us to theatres and bookstores around France, to London, around her favourite literary locations Montana and Wyoming, and once (I kept crissing the country as she crossed, so we never did meet up), Australia.
Literary escapade: Australia, Aug 2018
Literary escapade: Sheriff Longmire loop, Wyoming, Oct 2023
Literary escapade: My Year (2023) at the Theatre
Literary escapade: Paris, Jul 2024
Literary escapade: London, Aug 2024
Literary escapade: the Vosges Mountains, Aug 2024
Thank you Emma for all the wonderful places and events to which you have taken us.
My favourite post of my own, leaving aside the Independent Woman series on my other and now completed gig (AWWC), was – and I don’t have any orphans I have to boost, though there were quite a few that felt like they might be for a while – let’s say, Son of Sin, Omar Sakr (Journal 115) which combined a good book, my great granddaughter and some interesting (to me) off road trucking.
Last year I wrote “I read pretty well daily Crikey, the Age, Guardian, New York Times‘ [still do, and now also Al Jazeera]; follow the downfall of Trump on Palmer Report and Twitter [we know how that went]; follow the self-inflicted downfalls of Bruce Lehrmann and Ben Roberts-Smith [but have they suffered any consequences]; but the big story is Gaza.”
Gaza, we can see, is a tragedy, a slaughter, a holocaust, ongoing now for 15 months and still our spineless Prime Minister will not condemn our ‘friend’ Israel, nor restrict arm sales. Meanwhile Israel has expanded its territorial ambitions from an ethnically cleansed Gaza, to the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.
After the US election I was one of the many who migrated from X to BlueSky. Starting at BillTheAustralianLegend, I had to keep subtracting bits until finally arriving at billlegend.bsky.social (that’s 3 l’s) – where I’m a mellow, literary socialist. I still use X, where thankfully I see nothing of Melon, to keep me abreast of Gaza.
Guy Rundle has been banished from Crikey; Helen Razer cannot be found (you see people looking for her on BlueSky); my new regular, I hesitate to say favourite, columnist is Jamelle Bouie (NYT), but I need a revolutionary socialist Australian (and Bouie is hardly any of those).
For 2025 I am planning on less blogging and more trucking stuff – driving, refurbishing equipment – and hopefully, some home renovation. I will continue with Black Africa, without committing to regular posts; I have unfinished business in North America: particularly reading around the provinces of Canada, and becoming better informed and better read about the Harlem Renaissance; I’m sure I will continue following and promoting the Ursula K Le Guin Prize for innovative SFF.
Take a break over the holidays then gird your loins, 2025 is going to be interesting times.