Travellin' Penguin

I’ve had a good week overall. I think I left off at Tuesday. Today is the King’s Birthday holiday. Can’t get used to the “king”. I forget at times the Queen is gone.

I was ready to go to my training session Wednesday but she had to cancel.So I stayed in and caught up on my reading of The Sea,The Sea. i was going to mention Charles again but found this lovely quote online under People also ask on google. Another Charles

“Charles is the central character in the book, its narrator and the definer of its perspective. He is selfish, arrogant, manipulative, prone to self-delusion, simultaneously intelligent and unwise, a glutton and a self-indulgent sensualist.”

He has discovered his young love from his youth lives nearby and he tries everything to get her back. Her husband presents as a bully and Hartley as he knows her is terrified of the whole situation. I listen to it for 30 to 60 minutes daily while doing puzzles on my iPad. So relaxing. This book really has characters you love to despise but can’t stop listening as I want to know how it all ends.

I was going to go to the gym Thursday but had to take our cat Grizzy to the vet first thing so he could get a dental done. Turns out two of his molars are side by side instead of one in front of the other. Weird but not doing any harm so didn’t need an extraction. However he has been put on a diet. He is 8 yrs old and weighs almost 10 kgs. (22 pounds).

But he does have shiny clean teeth.

Got busy with one thing and another and didn’t get there. I decided to have a long weekend of catching up on things.

I moved my desktop into the spare room that has a long desk that is part of a wall bed when the bed is in the wall. Fold the bed down and the desk disappears under it. My photography gear and books are now in there. There is pretty good light. Meanwhile the little desk it was on in the bedroom is my diary/journal writing table with a few art supplies on it. It is a nice change and quite motivating.

Yesterday was spent at Mt Field national park with three friends. We enjoyed the walk and took more fungi photos but not as many there as in previous spots. However I saw a pink robin. I have wanted to see one of those ever since I heard of them and never have. However the woman I was with was so excited she screeched and scared it off. I told my sister today if she had been with me and did that I would have popped her on the head but guess you can’t do that to friends.

We had a good time, the weather people were wrong and the predicted showers did not arise. Just so beautiful.

Well another week has disappeared and onto a new one. Back to the gym soon.

Hope all of you have a good one!

 We are having a beautiful winter here so far this year and there seems to be quite a bit of activity around.

 New Books-  Amor Towles new book has arrived and I’m looking forward to reading Table For Two. It is a series of six short stories which is a different format to his previous books I read; The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow. I have Rules of Civility but not read it yet. He is such a good writer.

 I just finished Flann O’Brien’s book At-Swim-Two-Birds. You must put the hyphens in the title but no idea why.

This book is very comical and I really enjoyed reading it but I have no idea what it is about and will have to read some reviews now from Good Reads readers to see what they got out of it. We’ll be discussing it in book group next week. 

 The new book group read is The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. I have only recently begun it. The blurb states:

 Winner of the Man Booker Prize 1978

Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of his days in hermit-like contemplation. He buys a mysteriously damp house on the coast, far from the heady world of the theatre where he made his name, and there he swims in the sea, eats revolting meals and writes his memoirs. But then he meets his childhood sweetheart Hartley, and memories of her lovely, younger self crowd in – along with more recent lovers and friends – to disrupt his self-imposed exile. So instead of ‘learning to be good’, Charles proceeds to demonstrate how very bad he can be.

 I’m listening to an audible copy of it and it is narrated by Swazi-English actor Richard E. Grant. The narration is pretty good but he does seem to act it more in parts than just read it. I understand a few actors tend to do this with audible books from what I have heard from others. The character of Charles begins quite mildly as he wants to remove himself from the world and has bought a house in a remote seaside home in the UK. As I read along his true colours are beginning to merge and he is quite a misogynistic pompous ass.  His character is hard to like but others may disagree. I’m not that far into it yet so we’ll see how I go with him.

 On the weekend I went with a friend down to the Franklin Forest which is older growth forest and very beautiful. We were on a fungi hunt. As the group weren’t photographers but more of a land care group not much time was given to setting up tripods and getting good crisp photos of fungi.  I have now spent four days shooting fungi this winter and I am all fungi-ed out. 

 On the home front of paying more attention to some cooking (as Mr. P does most of the cooking and I want to get back into it more again) I made a very simple comfort meal of a Shepherds Pie. However it does not have a pastry bottom.

 I used one of those packets of seasonings you get in the supermarket. Like Maggi or something like that.

You have 500 grams of mince that you cook up on the stove with one chopped onion and one chopped carrot and the seasoning packet plus a bit of water. Directions are on the packet. While that is cooking you boil up four potatoes and then mash them with butter and salt/pepper if you like. Though the seasoning probably has a lot of salt in it.

 Put the mince mixture into an oven proof dish, spread the potato onto the top of it and cook at 180C for 20 minutes or so. Top it with shredded cheese if you like for another three or four minutes until the cheese melts and it is all done.

 Very easy and very good. We had enough for two evening meals with salad. 

 Those packets now come in so many flavours and if you don’t have all the seasonings on hand they are useful but we can’t use them all the time as I imagine they are higher in sodium and that isn’t good for heart health. But once  a week or so should not be a problem, if that.

 Today I went into town and after the gym did quite a bit of street photography.  I was using a wider angle lens (35mm) instead of 50 and my goal was to get more of the environment around the subject as to tell more of a story. I think I got some good ones but have not downloaded them yet.

Well that sums up the week so far. I hope all of you are well.

 By the way, I wanted to mention…as I follow several blogs and several of them are written by very prolific writers I am now only picking one post from each writer to read and comment on. I feel bad when so many people comment on my posts and I can’t get time to comment on theirs but a couple of you do quite a few posts a week and I don’t. So weekends will be the time I take to stay in touch with you and at least one, maybe two posts. I don’t get to as many books as many of you do.

 I enjoy Jinger’s format on the Intrepid Angeleno’s page ( https://intrepidangeleno.wordpress.com/).She writes about more than just books and I really enjoy that format as it is like getting a letter from a friend “back home”. Since we all have emails, text messages, etc I think I’m going to make my posts more like “old fashioned letters”. Thank you Jinger for the great idea. 

 All the best to all of you.  

If you’re looking for news on books then you might turn this off this week. I was on a three person photographic fungi exploration/instruction this week in the southwest wilderness of Tasmania.

Luke O’Brien, https://www.lukeobrien.com.au , a professional photographer, conducted this trip. One other person signed up as well as me as we were the overflow from the same trip a couple of weeks ago. We went to the Styx and Florentine valleys of Tasmania. So beautiful it takes your breath away.

A few years ago the government wanted to log it and protestors chained themselves to the trees. A very big protest with one young woman who set up in one of the tallest trees and stayed there around 300 days from memory. Thank goodness they did this as those trees of old growth forest are still there. I have attended a couple of 1000 person rallies on parliament lawns to stop the destruction of these forests.

However protests continue around the state as Tasmania’s government continues to log old growth trees of hundreds of years old for woodchips to send to China. Hopefully the protests do their job though many get arrested and spend time in jail in the name of the forests. I want to share the phone photos I took as my camera photos, though much better are not ready yet. They need editing.

Look at the base of this tree, almost my height.

This is the fungi chart we had with us of just the fungi in Tasmania.

The reverse side of the Fungi Flip chart.

Now the week begins and I need to start reading again. Books other than books about fungi though I do fine them incredibly fascinating. If we didn’t have fungi and the work they do, especially underground, our forest floors would be inpenetrable. They are truly amazing.

Until next week…enjoy going out and doing something this week.

My week list…..pilates class, trainer, barre’ class, meeting in town, vet appointment for dog’s vaccinations, a Fullers book launch, a seniors lunch in historic town of Richmond with friends in the pub, some walking and getting started in my book group’s book. Keep moving people…..