Travellin' Penguin

All I wanted for Christmas was some peace and quiet at home. I’ve done the fun things with friends and wandered around town both shopping and watching people shop.

I’ve been stuck in grid lock traffic. I’ve had people bump into me. All the rushing around. It;s over!!

The weather is windy and quite chilly today (11degrees C – 51.8 degrees F) with off and on rain. I know, it’ s summer but the upcoming weekend is to be hot. So moving on.

As far as presents, etc go I wanted chocolate and I got a fair bit of that. I wanted a book. That wasn’t hard at all. One of the books I received (from myself with leftover birthday book voucher credits) is called A Year of Junk Journaling by Martina Calvi.

I love my journals. I have my small journal for just noting what happened today. Such as an animal to the vet, paid an electric bill, walked to town. It is a day to a page. I have my Commonwealth Journal to record things I enjoy reading about. Maybe a new comet in the sky. Maybe a new recipe or a book review. I read a lot of photography magazines and there are always notes to take from that. 

Then I have the day to a page that is just a brain dump. Maybe something fun happened. Maybe some idiot showed road rage. Just getting out the day so sleep comes easily.

I can add little pictures or stickers to that. Then there is the Junk Journal. Anything and everything goes into that. I can get as creative as I want using any bits of paper, buttons, feathers, menu items, receipts, you name it. This book of Junk Journaling has many ideas and illustrations of things I can do if I want to.

One page I have in one of my older journals is just a page of the wrappers from all the different teas I drink. I have a lot of T42 teas and the wrappers are different colours. You get the picture.

I’ll share a couple of more pages. It’s also fun to cut out the heads of people on magazines, then draw the clothes and bodies. I’m so hopeless at drawing it becomes very funny.

Another book of activities is Hobart’s Best Walks, published last year as part of the Woodsman Walking Guides. There are over 40 walks listed just around the Hobart area (southern Tasmania). I can include that in my days out to do photography. I’m always trying to think of places to take my camera that I’ve not been to for awhile.

I hope to post a few photos of the Penguin and I as we traverse these some familiar walks and some not so much.

On this note I will now wish my North American friends and family a lovely, peaceful Christmas for tomorrow and hope my Australian friends have had a good day. Merry Christmas to all the other countries people might drop in from no matter how you celebrate these days or ignore it altogether.

From our family below I’ll share a bit of cuteness.

Ollie.

Peanut (Peanny)

12 yr old Cousin Eddie

9 year old Grizzy (Griswald)

And for her first Christmas with us is 3 yr old Pickles who we inherited from our friend and neighbour Denny, who sadly passed away this year.

Pickles has settled in well and is almost running the household single handed.

See you next year!

And no we don’t have snow. The good things of AI. But it feels like we have snow.

Well, we have finally travelled through the year to another Christmas. Grid lock traffic, people everywhere. Rushing. Stressing. Laughing. Silly. These are the words and actions that come to mind. 

This week has been an incredibly sad week for Australia with the tragic events on Bondi Beach last weekend. I won’t add anymore comments or noise to this situation as there is more than enough. I am tired of feeling so sad about it. Must move on. I will say though I am very much thinking of the Jewish community who were so happy celebrating Hannakah.

Everyone and their dog wants to comment about it on every social media platform, news outlets and visual media. Enough said.

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I am going into a fantasy world with Stephen King this week. I don’t read much of him. For one there is too much of him. He has so many published books. Some of them are way out in the stratosphere. The one I’m reading is a bit graphic but it is fun.

11/22/63.  That is the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

I remember that event like it was yesterday. I was in the last class of the day when I heard about it. 8th grade. Math class. Mr. Nixon. Though this incident happened in the morning, students weren’t told about it until school dismissal.  I remember walking home. I went into the house and my mother was curled up in an old blue chair we had watching the black and white tv. I think she had been there all day. My dad was at work.

We lived in a small town in mid Michigan. King’s book takes place in a small town in Wisconsin. His old pal who runs a shop has discovered a way into the past through an old staircase. He shares it with our protagonist. Old pal (as I will call him) is dying of cancer. He doesn’t have long. They have conversations about all the things they can do with returning to the past. I love those conversations. They speculate on what they could do.

They settle on the killing of Kennedy. If only Oswald could be stopped there would be a lot of changes in the world. 

I would probably choose a different event but would need to think about what it would be.

But first they decide to see if their action does change anything so they pick a crime from the 1950s where a drunken father goes home one night and kills his wife and child and permanently disables his son.

Our protagonist changes his name and heads back to the past. The fun part of this book is the prices of things, the  conversations, the news of the day. 9 cents milkshakes. The car he buys which is now a classic he buys for $300.

He has to be careful not to mention events that happened beyond the 1950s and 1960s. It is just a lot of fun and the memories it evokes are so much to laugh at. The candies, the drinks, the food. The cars, the types of shops. I remember it all from the 50s in my small town in Michigan. It is all so familiar and I feel I am there with him. 

It is funny he has the horse racing results so makes some good bets and wins (of course). That is how he collects an income while there. He also works as a substitute teacher. His real job in the present is a secondary school English teacher.

I really laughed at the books and plays taught in the schools. Of course The Catcher in the Rye was not in the school library. Haha

The school play was Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I remember the books we had to read in high school. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Didn’t appreciate any of them at the time. I think now the only one I wouldn’t mind reading again is Steinbeck’s book. When I look back I remember all the religious connotations in these books that were drummed into us even though it was a public school. Very sneaky- eh?

This book is 900 + pages long. I am just at the part where our protagonist is watching Lee Harvey Oswald who has just moved to Texas after marrying his wife, Marina Oswald. 

I am listening to this book on Audible. It is narrated by Craig Wasson. He does a great job with the variety of dialects between the north- Wisconsin and the south- Texas. 

I’m finding the book suspenseful, a very pacy read and very well defined characters. Stephen King’s characters are always very well developed. He is a wonderful writer. Love him or hate him, he sure has a backlog of very different books. I love his imagination.

I’ve been trying to remember the other books I’ve read by him over the decades. The Shining, Pet Cemetery, Cujo, Carrie, Dolores Clairborne (I think that is the name) and Misery. I began the Long Walk but got stressed so put it aside. I was a lot younger and braver when the books I mention came out in the beginning of his career. I also read On Writing which is a wonderful book with no violence. 

I wouldn’t mind reading that again.

Well that wraps up this past week. I haven’t done much else except exercise at the gym, do some Christmas shopping. I checked out all the gifts and books at Fullers book store. So much fun. I had a gift certificate from my birthday so bought a 15 minute, beautiful glass hour glass for my desk. 

I haven’t wanted to be around people this week but we have a lovely lunch coming up tomorrow with some dear friends and their family we’re looking forward to. Along with their five adult children, four of whom are home from university and their youngest finishing up high school.

Christmas will be a quiet day with our dogs, Ollie, Peanut (Peannie) and indoor cats Cousin Eddie, Grizzy (Griswald) and Pickles. I’ll get the dogs to the beach when we have good weather. Shouldn’t be long now.

I hope all of you have a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s season and a very happy 2026. Looking forward to all the bookish challenges. 

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Penguin;s Question of the Week.

If you could time travel and change one thing , what would it be?

Another Sunday morning and I’m drinking a cup of Italian blend. I have a coffee advent calendar. I gave one to a friend of mine and each morning we exchange a text. . Toasted marshmallow, Hazelnut blend, Vanilla bean. Each day it is a different flavour. It has been a laugh to share these flavours with each other first thing in the morning.

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I have been reading a beautiful book. Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains. The print is tiny so I’m doing a read/listen to the book. The narrator is Tolga Safer and is very good.

Chat GPT summarises it as:

“Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2008–2022 is a reflective, hybrid book by Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk that blends short prose pieces with his own drawings, watercolours, and notebook pages.

Summary:
The book is a curated selection from Pamuk’s personal notebooks kept over more than a decade. Rather than a single narrative, it offers fragments—memories, observations, dreams, travel notes, literary ideas, and meditations on art, politics, love, and aging. The “distant mountains” of the title function as a metaphor for memory, longing, and the unreachable ideals that shape a writer’s inner life.

Pamuk reflects on:

• The act of writing: doubt, discipline, imagination, and the solitude of the novelist
• Time and memory: how personal and collective histories blur and resurface
• Places: especially Istanbul, but also cities and landscapes encountered through travel
• Art and seeing: how drawing and writing complement each other as ways of thinking
• Politics and identity: subtle, personal responses to censorship, nationalism, and freedom

The visual elements—sketches of faces, rooms, streets, and imagined scenes—are not illustrations of the text so much as parallel thoughts, reinforcing the sense that the reader is inside the author’s mind as it wanders.”

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It is such a beautiful book and I am going through it slowly. The journals are beautiful and there is so much to see and to think about.

One of my favourite passages is:

There is an illustration of his journal on every page.

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Other than immersing myself in this beautiful story I have been pleasantly busy.

Our senior’s group had our end of year Christmas dinner. There were 16 of us and it was a lovely meal with lots of laughs. Some of the older ladies were quite hilarious after a couple of glasses of bubbles. I was the driver so okay.😁🎄😁

My exercise went well this week with three trips to the gym. A pilates class, a Barre’ class and then my trainer putting me through my paces followed by our weekly coffee and conversation solving the world’s problems. We look forward to this each week. I never want to go to the exercise classes but feel so good when finished. It feels good to stay strong.

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Yesterday the South Hobart community had their big Christmas market at the church grounds. It was a lovely day so I hopped on the bus for the three km trip down the road and took my camera. I got a few snaps of some happy people I chatted to who allowed me to take their photos. I’ll share a couple of them below.

Permission was given by-

I told her I loved her look. She whispered to me behind her hand she bought the dress in an op (thrift) shop and she hoped it would be ok. It is a lovely dress.

Many things to look at.

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Tasmania had some scary fires last week and that is always the worry of summer weather that we are beginning to get off and on.

Sixteen homes were destroyed up the east coast of the state. The winds were high as well as the temperatures. Each day of high winds bring a bit of nervousness to Australians during summer weather. But the communities sure pull together and help everyone. It always seems it takes a disaster for people to be kind to each other and interact. People are funny that way.

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But enough of that. I hope everyone is staying sane during the Christmas rush. I for one am happy when it’s over. It has become such a commercial event and so many now will not enjoy all the hype we see in the shops and the media. We will have a quiet day with a good book and a bit of lovely food. But we don’t go all out. Our tree is small on the kitchen table and the ones who enjoy it most seems to be the cats. Something different in the house for them. It is also near a big window that has birds outdoors in the bushes. 

I am looking forward to a new year and I will leave it at that. New books for book group. New activities for photography. A couple are scheduled. One photographing birds in a large lagoon. A forest full of fungi. Walking on some new trails I’ve not been on before. More exercise.

❤️ Make time for calmness during the Christmas season. ❤️