Well hey there imaginary internet friends!
It’s been quite a while between posts and over a year since any sort of regular posting.
I’ve not only been away from blogging, there’s been an accompanying lengthy, but very necessary, time away from most things internet**
As someone much more insightful than me observed – the internet used to be a place we went to escape real life, now real life is a place we go to escape the internet. It’s a bad scene, man.
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I’ve just completed another year around the sun and it’s felt like one of those really long years where a ton of both good and bad happened, but also one of those years that’s flown by. Which to be fair is pretty much all the years.
In 2024 (so far) in absolutely no order (this was originally a semi-colon separated list, but definitely benefits from being split out into bullets):
- Joan and Ovi visited!
- I got into weaving in a moderate way
- Much wide-spread misery at SML (entirely due to awful senior leadership)
- Japan
- upped my knitting skills with a couple of bonkers and complex (to me) shawls
- battled with mediocre health and poor energy for a long while
- Thailand
- little-to-no blog reading (I hope you are all living your best lives)
- roof repairs and maintenance
- ate my feelings for a few months, now off the snacks
- a whole lot of youtube watching
- had the venous lake on my lip zapped, moles on face and long-term sun damage also zapped (I am not vain person, but this has been brilliant, my skin glows)
- Bessie became a niche sports podcast star
- no yoga (I do miss it)
- my mother died (we’d been estranged and no contact for 25+ years – there were a lot of feelings to process)
- started a daily journalling practice
- decided on a target retirement date (mid-2028, baby!)
- returned to running (very slowly and carefully, with a heavily modified couch to 5k) – screw that physio who told me I was too old to run
- no sound baths (love and miss that kooky esoteric stuff)
- started wearing a night guard for sleeping with excellent results (turns out I was tightly clenching my teeth while asleep)
- Brisbane
- close friend decided she no longer wanted to be in my life (sudden, unexpected and weird – and threw me off balance for quite a while)
- COVID
- new car
- Melbourne
- fun experiments with a new-to-me ancient point-and-shoot digital camera – sometimes I don’t vibe with the perfection the iphone brings (totally influenced by youtube)
- booked a hiking holiday in the Black Forest for 2025
- regained quite a lot of health – I suspect I was just totally burned out (in the medical sense) and CFS was one of those zebra-not-horse misdirections.
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I’m really not sure what my intention is for the future of the blog. It’s an excellent historical record which we refer to with reasonable frequency, but I’m increasingly less comfortable with the idea of my thoughts and feelings being so easily accessible.
After a solid year of dithering, I’ve just renewed hosting for another year. I had the idea of updating the broken images, pdfing or e-booking it all and taking offline before the next renewal. I’ve also ruminated over starting something entirely new and retiring the carolbaby persona, but I’m not sure if I want to continue to put myself out there at all, regardless of name. There was also the slightly mad (and admittedly unoriginal) idea of sending out a photocopied blog-post/letter to anyone who wanted it, but I quickly rejected that as massively impractical!
I’ll continue to reflect on this all – hopefully without spending another year over-analysing and ultimately doing nothing!
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And will I be back here? I’ll see where the wind takes me!
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** Though in the interests of accuracy, there’s been a whole lot of youtube consumed during this time – it definitely has become my internet destination of choice. Be assured I have no intention of becoming a youtuber, this is a completely passive activity!