Pt 5 - WORST * CHRISTMAS * EVER

My nephew constructed a tower for his tiger to live on..

Just before he body slammed it.

The AEG

The Remington 7: It's just a little dirty, it's still good - It's still good. 

Bar-lock, baby, Yeah! 

Say hello to my little friend.... 

I've been on a little adventure. Can't wait to tell you all.

Tis the end of the year, my friends.

Greetings Typospherians, readers and lovers of the printed and/or electronic word. And I wish you the sincerest of holiday greetings, and the best for the new year.

It has been a trying year for me in Brisbane but I have always enjoyed writing this blog, and writing with my typewriter. These elegant and beautiful writing machines and what I have written with them have helped me keep my sanity over the last 12 months.

Now, we are rushing head-long into another new year. A year that already has some very big changes in the works, that I am sure are going to bring some good - and bad, surprises. So much is happening now that I almost feel lost in it all. I could fill a blog entry with just a list of what has happened in the last two or three weeks.

I'm currently sitting in a hotel, and it is 40 degrees C outside (104 on the old scale). As such I'm loathe to leave the air conditioning of the hotel room.

And thus we have the Australian Christmas.

While shops dress their stores in faux snow to represent the northern hemisphere christmas that we are bombarded with via television and film, it always is with a sense of irony that we celebrate a frosted christmas as the temperatures usually rise harshly. In reality, Australians at christmas are likely to be having a lunch at a family member's house that has a swimming pool, so that we can all have a bit of a dip after we have filled our tummies to exploding point with salad, cold meat and a fair amount of beer.

I always feel sympathy for the poor bastard that has to dress in the Santa costumes at children's parties, shopping centers and church events. That gear is made for the North Pole, not stinking hot summer days on the driest continent on earth. As I said... irony.

Santa suit? Screw that... Hot enough here as it is.

As most of the typosphere lives in the northern hemisphere I'm sure this is very much a foreign ideal.  And to be honest, Christmas time is an oddly strange period here in Australia where it largely has little religious significance, but is rather focused on family, retail and food along with some very silly behavior.

I stepped outside the front door this afternoon to go to my car, and I burned my feet on the concrete driveway that had been baking in the sun. It really is damn hot here.

I don't have a typewriter with me, but I think I will be seeing Rob Messenger sometime in the next 7 days - so I won't be going totally typewriter talk free by the end of the year! I'm looking forward to chatting to Rob again.

The past year on this blog:
Meeting with John and several other typewriter lovers in Brisbane (Steve, Rino, Kate to name a few) has been great. Also, other writers around the country (Teeritz, Rob) have been great, too.However, I feel there's a few things that remain a bit unfinished at the end of this year.

I speak of 'The apocalypse of the typosphere' - my little piece of blog fiction that seems to have gone dormant. It hasn't, and I have a handful of episodes ready to post. However I held off because I had borrowed some ideas from discussions with miss Jane, that were related to her line of work (infection control) that made up a major plot point that I was just about to explore in the story. The problem was that a real world event that was similar to the scenario that I was envisaged actually looked like it was about to happen, and was likely to be a major stress to Jane's work life. It just wasn't the time. 

So, I just put it aside to revisit later.

Meanwhile, miss Jane and a few other people have been pushing for me to re-start another piece of blog fiction that I had neglected for a few years. I don't think I will, but I think it is time to take the material in that blog, and make something of it. I'll put the link up a bit later, if anyone is interested. It was a 'blog' of an Australian that was forced to flee the country as a refugee, after witnessing the horrors of war in a land that previously had never seen such things.

The Future:
Firstly, I'm looking forward to the second Brisbane type in - which will be on March 9, at a location that has yet to be advised. So start contacting me if you are interested in coming. Especially you, my mysterious Burpengary reader, who often visits my blog. You're only a suburb away from me, so you should really message me sometime!

Meanwhile, there's still the possibility of moving overseas. I've been thinking about this, and I intend to keep up a typosphere blog. However, I think it may be a good time to start a new blog with a new title, that is hosted somewhere other than blogger.

I'm quite nervous about the future this week, and I wish I had a typewriter with me right now, so that I could do some writing. Nothing soothes the soul like a tap on the keys of a beautiful machine.

*   *   *

So that's it for the the year. I'm going to be busy with family events and other things for the next couple of weeks, and I will be too busy to keep up with events on my blog - or even the typosphere.

So, thank you all very much for reading, commenting, and writing. I have loved reading all that the other members of the typosphere have written over the past year, and I look forward to seeing what you write in the next.

Thank you all, and have a great time!

P.S. Did I really just hit 60,000 blog reads? I missed even hitting 50k. I wonder how many of those have been shonky sites.

Present-ly engaged.

Now... I'll be frank. I'm not a Christmas-y person. There's no decorated tree in my home, no tinsel to filthy the carpet, and only a handful of Christmas cards are handed out to people that I feel are important.

...... buuuuuuuut. I"m not a Scrooge either. So there's no need to send the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.

It isn't that I dislike Christmas. I just feel that the important things tend to get left behind in the flurry of decorating, carol indulgence and present collecting. For some, that importance is their religion. In the typosphere blogs that I've read of late, there's been a little discussion about what this period means to most of the religious typists amongst us.

But to me, Christmas has always been about connections with family. While friends and people around me often declare 'Jesus is the reason for the season', the nativity scenes, caroling, biblical posturing and religious paraphernalia will often feels like stapled on additions. And historically speaking, they are - even by christian standards.

Here in Australia it is the summer solstice. For pretty much the entirety of man's occupation of this continent, the solstice period had never been observed with any religious belief. Considering there's evidence that people have lived here for at least 120,000 years, the celebrations of the solstice around here over the last 200 or so -- seems to be a relatively recent fad.

I often feel a twinge of disappointment around Christmas time. My birthday is a week out from Christmas, and due to its proximity to the big event it is pretty much not celebrated. While as adults we don't exactly make a big deal about birthdays, it is unheard of, of someone surprising me with just something as simple as a handful of friends heading out to a bar, or even just to have dinner somewhere. If I want to do something for my birthday I usually have to organize it with major effort and anticipate a close to nothing turn out. I'm usually lucky if people remember my birthday at all actually... it is just too busy at this time if year.

That said, my (now ex) boss wandered by my office the other day. She had heavily loaded bags filled with Christmas presents for people around work. But she had also bought me a birthday present. A money box! And what an awesome money box it was too....

 

Next to my Apothecary Corona 3... My Corona money box!

She didn't even know I owned a Corona 3 (let alone what one of those were), and was pretty much shocked when I sent her this photo above - showing her the real thing, along side the money box that she had bought me. 

Just for reference... no, the money box doesn't fold for storage.

And can I just say... I'm quite chuffed. Sure, the real thing is cooler than the copy, but seriously... look at the detail on this freakin' money box! It is three bank, with a fig key... and also has the knobs and paper supports all in the right places. It even has the curved paper table!

I got another surprise gift last week too. This wasn't a birthday present, but a gift from Jess in Singapore. It turns out that Jess was the lovely lady who had written me that thank you note a little while back, and she had recently bought an armful of ribbons from a typewriter specialist in Singapore. 

Jess has sent me three different ribbons. A black and red cotton ribbon, a black cotton ribbon, and a black nylon ribbon.

I had just finished dunking and cleaning out machine, and as I had never used a cotton ribbon before I immediately slipped the black and red ribbon into the freshly repaired and serviced typer.  The results were interesting and varied. While the ribbon a left very bold and thick impressions - and were clearly heavily filled with ink, it was a little hard to read. I expect this to improve as the ribbon's ink stabilizes. While I had the machine out, I decided to write a bit of an Australian Christmas typecast.

So enjoy - the Filthy Platen Christmas Special!
                           Pardon some of my tragic writing mistakes. It was a rushed out draft after all.

My HG Palmer, and a pile of Christmas preparations and presents.