© 1984 - 2025 Adrian Tritschler
birds on the commute
Damp and grey, the first rainy morning I can remember for months. Riding in the last few streets to work there were currawongs[1] calling, somewhere, evoking winter. Then a butcherbird[2] loudly telling the world it was raining [1] Pied currawong [2] Grey butcherbird
Skyrail progress
Thursday afternoon long ride home, around to Grange road to check out the full length of the Skyrail section. Caulfield end waiting for ramps, the south viaduct is one segment short of Poath road
Evening Skyrail progress
A late evening walk up to Murrumbeena on one side of the railway and back on the other. Surprised to see how close the south viaduct of Skyrail has got – it’s level with the end of Rosella street – and also at how high it is at that point
Mark E. Smith
Oh, I just discovered that Mark E. Smith died back in January, on [2018-01-24 Wed]. It must have been while we were away up at Bright
"Read Later" housekeeping
reduced my feedly “Read Later” list from 224 down to 190 items, I wish there was a way to export it and get it directly into my org-mode feeds. Unsurprisingly, many of the old links have vanished due to bitrot. #simplify
LXRA progres
Lovely and sunny, with scattered cherry pickers…lots of scattered cherry pickers. Bike path is open to Huntingdale, but if anyone in SE Melbourne is looking for a cherry picker, I know where they’ve all been stashed. At Huntingdale a bit more of the bike path is open, lovely straight path, goes between the car park and station platform all the way to the bus interchange then vanishes with a “Cyclists dismount” sign.
not quite hoarding
Almost 30 years ago, sometime in 1988 or thereabouts, I had my left ear pierced. I bought a pair of silver earings and have worn one of them in it ever since. Last weekend it started falling open, then snapped. Today I picked up the other one from where I’ve kept it, through up to 10 house moves, and put that one in.
Superb parrots[1]
Signs along Hillview drive near Murrumbatemen warning of Superb parrots feeding on the roadside, I kept my eyes peeled but didn’t see any trace of them. So far the only ones I’ve ever seen were flying over Colin’s old place on Yass river road. [1] Superb parrot
bay tree suckers are almost ankle-high in the lawn, overdue for a mow
saw a large rat running along the back fence, it may be time for some traps
I think they’re attracted by the compost, and it may be rats rather than possums that ate the peaches. Last night we watched a large one trot casually along the fence from bay tree to garage and back
released a blackbird[1] that had got in under the netting on the tomatoes
[1] Common blackbird
lorikeets[1] have found the plum tree, much shrieking and destruction of fruit
[1] Rainbow lorikeet
should have mowed the lawn last weekend
left-most snake bean is now a metre up the trellis work
dream meetings
woke up this morning convinced that one of the things I’d have to deal with is a meeting, stupidly booked for 5-6pm this Friday. Got to work and checked my calendar and there’s no trace of it… I guess I must have dreamt it.
no TV Tuesday
Many evenings recently, especially Tuesdays, have been spent watching a post-dinner documentary. Today there was nothing on free-to-air and rather than find an online one, we had a quiet evening. Just cicadas and birds roosting. I enjoyed it.
found a nest of eggs – I suspect marbled geckos – while weeding yesterday under the plum tree
the wisteria we grew from seed from mum & dad's garden by the front tap hasn't died, lots of leaves
Jo saw a gecko race out of the compost bin, and two skinks on the front deck in the sun yesterday
neighbours finally picked up the rubbish they dumped on their lawn – not quite our garden
The mindset is just foreign to me; they wash and tidy their car every week, but are perfectly happy to just dump bags of unwanted clothes, old toys and rubbish on their front lawn
cicada skin in an unusual place, on a rose bush near the front gate – spotted by Jo on [2017-12-04 Mon]
Cam and I walk around from the side of the house so we couldn’t see it, but Jo walked out the front door and had a different angle. Unlike most of the cicada skins that are on the fence or 2m or so up a tree, this one is on a rose leaf only 1m off the ground.
sandy little ant mounds appearing in lawn as the ants recover from the rain
snake beans are just tall enough to start touching the trellis
solid rain all last night, 43mm in the gauge this morning
11pm and the branches are scratching and banging on the wall and roof near our bedroom, must trim them
cleaned the gutters, snapped some brittle dead branches off silver birch on south side
TGIF… omg, not friday at all
I think I just spent two hours thinking it was Frday, looking forward to a beer after work with colleagues, even debated riding in to Mountain Goat, then when I walked into the café I realised today is Thursday.
not quite our garden, unfortunately one of the railway cypress trees is marked, probably for removal
There’s a big red cross sprayed on one of the clump of thick cypress trees that shield us from the railway – I suspect it means that this one, the end one, is marked to be removed.
Perfect timing!
Leaving the office I walked across the hall to try and fill my water bottle before riding home in 35°C heat. The light on the door card-access reader was green… until I got a metre from it when there was a loud click and it locked, requiring card access, but only to the staff who work in there. No water for me
There’s not much more I can add to who I am.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.