How's the blog going, now that you've deferred from uni?
It's going ok, I think.
It's changed a little though, hasn't it?.
What do you mean?
It seems to have lost its focus a little. It's become quite... diaristic. More personal.
Yes, that's probably true. I think it's because I've become a little sidetracked by other interests at the moment and haven't had much time to work on considered blog entries.
What other interests?
Like non-blog writing. I've been enjoying working on things that aren't instantly in the public sphere the moment I write them. It's kind of a relief to do private writing for a while.
You were always hoping that keeping a blog would lead you to doing more writing in general, weren't you?
Yes, I guess so.
Well, it sounds like it's worked.
But now the blog feels like a bit of an imposition on my time.
Why don't you play around with the format a little, then? Make it more interesting to do? How about you do diaristic comic everyday instead of a written entry?
A comic every day? That'd be a lot of work.
Well one every second day then. Or once a week. Can't hurt to try. Do some investigations into Character or Voice or something.
Well, I suppose I could give it a go. But I can't promise I'll do a comic everyday.
I went on a bike ride around Tassie some years ago with my friend R. and didn't enjoy it all that much. There are too many hills in Tassie, and I hadn't done any preparation. And it rained a lot. I blamed my bike and didn't ride again until over a year later.
However, having receieved a bike for my Birthday last year I have found a renewed enthusiasm for this activity and have been riding to work a couple of times a week.
This long weekend R, Thieu and I headed up to Wangaratta to ride the Murray to the Mountains rail trail. It was actually pretty good. I enjoyed it. I hardly complained at all, in fact. Rail trails are good because they are largely flat (although on one section Thieu revealed that this was the steepest section of railway line in Australia and they used to have to divide the train into two parts to get it up the incline).
We rode from Wangaratta to Beechworth (43kms) on the first day, then Beechworth to Bright on Sunday (56), then finished it off with an epic 85 kms from Bright back to Wangaratta yesterday.
The only low point, really was when we rode into our motel in Bright and saw that the entire carpark was filled with Harley Davidson motorbikes. I had a sinking feeling; suspecting that these were not going to be the type of people to meekly toddle off to bed at 10:30 like we intended to do. And sure enough, once the pub closed at 2ish, they came back and sat outside drinking and revving their bikes and yelling at each other until 4:30. Meanwhile the three of us fumed and cursed them, too chicken to actually go out and say anything to them. As Thieu said, invidually they looked quite tame, but in a large, drunken posse, surrounded by motorbikes, they were reasonably intimidating.
In the morning we had fantasies of tyre slashing or pushing one bike over to create a domino effect of Harleys crashing into each other. But we didn't.
