Yes. That motheaten guy looking at you above is I -- photo taken this year.
Again not a lot of news to report this year. My blogging keeps me busy in front of my computer for about 12 hours a day so I am the sedentary man. I do however go out a lot to eat -- usually for both brunch and dinner. I have only those two meals per day. There is a small anecdote about my breakfast adventures here and a note about one of my dinner adventures here. [Both of those posts are now reproduced below -- dated 25 Nov and 14 Oct,]
Judith Middleton moved out a few months ago to return to Melbourne and care for her aged father -- who is now very frail. So I was left without a companion for a short while but I now have a new lady by the name of Anne. She is such a keen chorister that she is in two choirs so she and I share a lot of musical interests -- including an interest in early church music. Through her choral contacts she hears a lot of what is going on in the Brisbane music scene so if there is some good Gregorian chant or the like being performed somewhere she lets me know and we go along. That has meant rather a lot of visits to churches lately -- even though we are both unbelievers (though both of us were, coincidentally, once communicants at Ann St Presbyterian church). There is an account of our visit to "Our Lady of Victories" Polish Catholic church here and a memoir of our visit to "Our Lady of Protection" Ukrainian Byzantine Catholic Church here
Anne is a pretty individualistic lady but she is very kind to me -- perhaps because I am the individualistic type too. She has even been to Iceland -- a place I often talk about but only admire from afar. She is a nurse by trade and tells me that everything you hear about the Queensland Health bureaucracy is true. See here for an example of what I mean.
I reported as follows last year:
"I am constantly in and out of surgery for my skin cancers these days. I just had three lots done at once yesterday. Rather remarkably, all the local anaesthetic the dermo pumped into me seems to have had a lasting but beneficial side-effect: For the last 4 months or so I have had a very sore left shoulder that I could move only in certain ways without pain. I never could work out for sure where the pain came from but it seemed to be tendonitis rather than arthritis. Anyway, six hours after surgery on my OTHER arm, the pain was all gone and I could move both arms any way I liked! I only hope the effect lasts! They put a lot of adrenaline into local anaesthetic so maybe that had something to do with it. Frozen shoulders are a rather common problem among oldies so now you know how to cure it! There are not many instant cures around for anything these days so it may be worth remembering. There was a famous case in America where some sort of surgical anaesthesia cured a kid of his autism so there may be more in these anaesthetics than meets the eye.
And I am pleased to say that my shoulder problems did indeed vanish. I am now as good as gold in that department. My dermatological adventures are however unending and there is a report of the most recent one here. I am now more or less over the procedure concerned but it sometimes takes months before everything is 100% again and that seems to be the way of it on this occasion too.
It's surprising whom you sometimes meet when you frequent hospitals, however, as I noted in October.
My son Joe is now 18 and has just finished his first year at university -- majoring in Mathematics. He got marks of 7 out of 7 for all his mathematics subjects so we are all pretty pleased about that. I have arranged a celebratory dinner in honour of the achievement for this Thursday, at which a bottle of Grange will be opened. For those who do not know the wonders of Grange, it is Australia's most famous wine and costs around $500 a bottle for the current release (1999). So I hope I don't give Joe a taste for it. It will keep him poor if I do. There are some pics of Joe here
I started a new blog recently devoted entirely to Australian politics and events of interest and it seems to have taken off well. See here.
And what about a funny photo to finish up with?
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