Hi everyone,

Here I am again, blogging from my laptop in the evening.

Sorry I've been e-communicado for a few days.  I was away for the weekend.

Saturday I woke up at 6am and went running.  It was bitterly cold - maybe about 5 degrees tops - and I really couldn't get my legs to loosen up and settle into a proper stride.  I was especially aware of this when I got back from the run with a distinctly 'pulled' feeling in the side of my left knee, which didn't want to bend very much.  Ouch!

I had breakfast and then drove down to the parents' place, as I'd promised I to come down.  Dad was still away - somewhere on the road between there and Shepparton - when I got there, and her arrived an hour or two after I did.  He's been frantically moving cattle off the home place, as it's been raining damn near continuously for the last couple of months and the cattle are churning it into a sea of mud.  Otherwise he and mum are doing well.  Oddly, because the cattle are largely gone from the place, and because the ground is really too wet to move machinery around on, there wasn't really a great deal of work actually to do.

I slept well on Saturday night, partly because of a late night on Friday and because it's just so silent down there at night.  When I'm down there at night, I kind of understand Goya's Giant in a way I don't when I'm in the city - the sense of something vast and timeless being there, but that can only be seen perhaps at night.



Melbourne?  Well, Melbourne is light and movement and ephemera - Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie -



Sunday morning Dad left for Shepparton with the last load of cows and calves - he said it's probably the first time in 70 years there hasn't been a cow or calf on the home place.  I was going to have lunch with Mum and then come back to town in the afternoon.  About 1pm, though, Dad rang to say he was on his way back - he'd made record time to the property at Shepparton and had unloaded the cattle and rather than hang about over night for no reason, he was coming back, so I stayed for dinner.  I spent a fair bit of time outside, getting fresh air into my lungs and giving the dog a run, and also tried to think of another short newspaper historical column to try and flog.  Dad got back about 5pm and I left about 9pm.

Today at work was heavily taken up with about 4 files that needed close analysis.  One of the highlights came at lunch when I was able to log on to the York Daily Record from Pennsylvania and forward on to a bundle of people a little piece that paper had been happy to publish.  I was pretty pleased!  In the evening I went and got groceries and had a chat to my sister Jennie on the phone - she and JP and flying to the US on Wednesday for a wedding in San Francisco and will duck over to La to see Joni and the girls.  That really means a lot to me, I have to say: they have the whole of North America to choose from, but they wanted more than anything else to see my little family.  I'm pretty stoked about that!

Dinner was frozen lasagna which I heated up and then served over fresh tomatoes and lettuce, which turned out pretty good despite taking all of 8 minutes to prepare.  Watched Big Bang Theory and now, blogging and bed.

Hope all your days are peaceful and happy too.

See you tomorrow.