G’day, Casual Ramblers!

I hope everyone is settling into the new year. For me, it’s not really a new year. Not yet, anyways. I have always had an issue with the idea that the new year should begin in the dead middle of winter. Which is why I am writing to you from the apex of summer in Melbourne, Australia.

Yeah, much has happened in the past month. And much as I could lament about it, I want to give just the overall details.

In no short order, this happened:

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That right there is my computer deconstructed because the liquid cooling system inside leaked all over the motherboard, the graphics card and the processor. In a vacuum, this is not a horror show; I had backed up the lionshare of my archival data prior to the leak. The only thing lost might be some DaVinci video editor project data in the solid-state drives on the motherboard.

(This does have implications for my ability to shift the Casual Camera to a film-based medium, but I will just resume photo galleries until that can be rectified.)

Afterwards, my car has been summarily deemed a trash heap. Or at least, the engine has a loose bearing deep within its guts and a rim that is constantly leaking air. When my father drove it, he felt like the rear passenger wheel was just about ready to fly off.

All of this would be enough to emotionally derail me, but I decided to bump the settings on my end of year experience to brutal by playing careless with my heart. That’s really no one’s fault but mine and I’m not really one for declaring vendettas against people. I just needed to reexamine with whom I expend my energy.

One thing that has been very clear, however, is that I want to keep pouring myself into what works for this blog and what works for me. One of those things that was really working was the weekly updates. I genuinely enjoyed doing them, I just found that the late fall/early winter make for a tough season to start new habits.

Especially when my computer goes underwater, my car is running into the ground, my heart is ablaze with fear and I am just trying to hold on to whatever I can as the tornado timetable of the holiday season runs roughshod over whatever routines I thought I had.

The only way to manage the stress of entering the year upside was to deem these issues as “post-January” problems and celebrate the New Year literally upside down in Australia.

For now, I am sitting in the guest bedroom of my best mate Zero’s home. I am Looking at a sky so blue you would think it was reflecting the ocean as all manner of trees, bulbous and verdigris, swim within its depths. It’s enough to make a person forget the news (yes, I am just as distraught).

I still have a couple things to do that were leftover from last year and will be working on those as you read this. In the meantime, enjoy some pictures from my first few days in Australia.

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