I know, I know. Time gets away from me, no excuses. I’m just diving in with this past week. Tasmanian weather has turned quite cool. Inconsistent rain. Back and forth to doct for erratic, genetic blood pressure annoyances. Hopefully something will work soon. But exercising a lot this past week and reading again after a big slump of books in print.

Weekdays had the twice gym sessions with Daniel and the weights. I have paid for 10 sessions for a personal trainer, who has become a friend for 30 min sessions once a week. So that will get me to gym 3x a week between the two of them. Daniel does weights, Teresa who is 55 but looks 35 does PT for core strength. Then a bit on a treadmill.

I’m doing a 5 day intensive photography workshop/tour of the Flinders ranges in July . 8 people plus two very professional photographers teaching us from 5:30 am to 8pm for 5 days. I’ll either learn some wonderful techniques or lie dying in the outback somewhere. But looking forward to it. Really!

Friday I slung the camera over my shoulder and spent two hours walking around Battery Point in Hobart. It is the oldest neighbourhood here and very historic with lovely cottages, convict built walls and beautiful gardens and lovely cafes. One in particular is very good and always busy. The clouds were dark and threatening and I was sure I’d get wet. Sat outdoors, wrapped in my winter coat, enjoying the fresh air and a delicious quiche full of goat’s cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, side salad and a decaf cappuccino.

Then walked along Salamanca place, a historic area with many sandstone buildings, old trees and a large market on Saturdays. Not many people out due to the weather. There is a carriage with two wonderful horses that do rides around the area. The horses are very well cared for and beautifully groomed. Their work hours are not high. I stopped for a pat. Soxy and Rex, who is a beautiful strawberry roan. They were having lunch out of large buckets with grain. Rex got grumpy once his meal was finished. Waving his head around but soon got over it.

Saturday I went metal detecting up from our road about 4 or 5 kms near Mt Wellington (Kunanyi). It was a park with woodchips that had no lost gold rings in it. The green area next to bush and the swings had old foundations and lots of nails and junk metal. Probably destroyed in the very large 1967 bushfires that people still talk about.

That was my travel for the week. I might add, after detecting, I went to the Fern Tree tavern to sit outside in the sun and watch people walk off the hiking tails of the mountain in late afternoon. No decaf coffee (We aren’t a coffee shop! I was informed). Is there tea? Yes, English breakfast, Earl Grey, Green, Chamomile. Great I’ll have chamomile. Right, that will be $5.00. I paid and went outside, wrapped my scarf around my neck tighter, it was 5 degrees C (about 40 F) and sat at a table in the sun to wait for my pot of tea and a cup. Five minutes later out comes an old mug, filled with hot water and a teabag. I guess they are not a coffee shop, though in fairness I have had some very good meals at night time there. I enjoyed the scenery and I suppose everything balances out at the end.

Books. I have been listening to Patricia Highsmith’s diary again. It’s 986 pages! I will be listening to it for some time I’m sure. I really loved her book The Talented Mr Ripley and the play. She has quite a dark sense of quirkiness. We are only in year 1944 at the moment. No mention of the war for the past couple of years but all about her writing and love life which is quite skewed. Her love life, not her writing.

At the recommendation of a Fullers staff member I have begun the book by Lian Dolan called Lost and Found in Paris. So far I am enjoying it. The blurb states:

Joan Blakely had an unconventional childhood: the daughter of a globe-trotting supermodel and a world-famous artist. Her artist father died on 9/11, and Joan—an art historian by training—has spent more than a decade maintaining his legacy. Life in the art world is beginning to wear on her—and then one fateful afternoon her husband drops a bombshell: he’s fathered twins with another woman.

Furious but secretly pleased to have a reason to blow up her life, Joan impulsively decides to get out of town, booking a last-minute trip to Paris as an art courier: the person museums hire to fly valuable works of art to potential clients, discreetly stowed in their carry-on luggage. Sipping her champagne in business-class, she chats up her seatmate, Nate, a good-looking tech nerd who invites her to dinner in Paris. He doesn’t know she’s carrying drawings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But after a romantic dinner and an even more romantic night together, Joan wakes up next to her new lover to discover the drawings gone. Even more shocking is what’s been left in their place: a sketch from her father’s journals, which she thought had been lost when he died on 9/11, and a poem that reads like a treasure hunt.

With Nate as a sidekick, Joan will follow the clues all over Paris—from its grand cathedrals to the romantic bistros to the twisty side streets of Montmartre—hoping to recover the lost art, and her own sense of adventure. What she finds is even better than she’d expected.

It’s a bit fluffy but just what I needed to start reading real books again.

Okay, this is long. I’ll stop. Will let you know how next week goes. All the best to everyone.