Dodo Au Go-Go

I purged some 300+ titles out of my kindle recently. And I don't mean just deleting them out my kindle app library.  I mean, I actually went into my amazon account and went to the 'manage my content and devices' link and jettisoned them permanently. When you do the permanent delete, you get asked 'are you sure?' for every single title. So that's 300+ 'yes, I'm sures'. I'm not sure if this would be considered a drastic move or standard housekeeping. Regardless, it was a well overdue step for me. You see, back when I set up and downloaded my first kindle app (circa 2012-ish), I was thrilled by the number of free ebooks available. I downloaded tons of stuff with carefree abandon. All of it. Fantasy-chosen-ones, bodice-rippers, classics, thrillers, chick-lits, dystopian sci-fi, kids books, recipe books... and everything in between.  It was probably the least picky (discerning?) I've ever been with my reading choices. I mean, they were all free, I...

It seems that bird season starts around mid-winter here in Brisbane, Australia. I have a couple of 2021 posts which detailed my bird adventures, and I'm pretty sure those posts started around June/July last year too. And so begin the 2022 encounters worries stories.  I should add that I hummed and hawed about whether to record these or not here at Dodo-land. On the one hand, they're tiny moments in time and place which are usually forgotten by the following day or week. And sometimes they're worth remembering. On the other hand, it feels - I dunno - a bit... morbidly focused on nature-things I can't change? But I think I'd rather remember than not. The Plovers The first moment is about a pair of nesting plover birds (not the same as the pair I blogged about last year ; we live in a different suburb of Brisbane now). This new local pair had successfully raised 4 chicks last year. I know, because I saw them all thriving and grooving in all their mature-feathered glor...

It's June 2022. My last blogpost was at the end of March 2022. There's a reason for the gap. You see, at the start of April 2022, I fell down a rabbit hole about newsletters. I've thought about newsletters on and off before. It was one, maybe two, years ago that I plaintively tweeted a question about why writers are supposed to do newsletters. Yet, it's the recurring advice to all writers and wannabee writers and any kind of creator - build yourself a mailing list!  The logic begins: the mailing list is yours, people sign up because they want to know more about you and your work, and it's how you can share news about yourself, your writing, any new books. A newsletter lets you market yourself to a dedicated audience.  The logic continues: it's all very well building huge follower numbers on social media, but if anything happens to that social media platform or to your account on that platform, you're back to square one from a marketing perspective.  This mak...

At the end of the road, there is a creek.  A little waterway which wends narrow and sings joyous and clear around rocks, widens into calm, almost-still pools, and runs muddy and ferocious when the rains fall. This post is a list of observations of the worlds which intersect at this creek. Many of them seemingly random, or that I have no explanations for. Let's draw on my anthropological past and call it an ethnography of the creek. Or a collection of daily ethnographies of the creek. The creek has one little footbridge, coloured red-brown. At the edges of the creek are combinations of trees, stones, grasses, lots of elephants ears, weeds, thickets and bushes, and in one spot, a large clump of bamboo. After these, there are more trees. Scattered. Or in family groups of 3 and 5. Perhaps they are the original trees from when this area was originally developed in the 1970s.  After the trees, there is grassy/parkland, some boggy patches of land and several more trees spaced further...

Earlier this year, before rainbombs  and such, I said I wanted to try and push small limits of my creative comfort zones. Which basically means joining in with my LittleOne's creative activities and doing things like splotching paint on paper or doing crafty things or making play-clay models non-judgementally. Emphasis on the non-judgementally bit. I gave myself 10 rules  (scroll down in the link to find them).  A few weeks ago, LittleOne and I did a paints day, with some new paints and brushes. I was quite impressed with how I'd managed to get these ocean colours looking quite, you know, oceany. For once, I was genuinely not harsh at myself. Then LittleOne wanted to have a go on my paper and I quickly demanded a pause in sharing my paper until I got a photo of my oceany colours.  This pause aggravated LittleOne's imp of the perverse. How dare I pause the collaboration?! Humph! As soon as I got my photo, LittleOne grabbed my paper, my oceany colours, the...

This is an old, crumpled, dried out, crunchy frangipani leaf. It's currently in my kitchen and I'm not allowed to throw it out. I've tried a couple of times, but LittleOne spotted it, rescued it and chastised me. Most severely. Both times. Why can't I throw it out? Well, you see, it goes back to the rainbomb floods, which I wrote about here . Before we realised the water coming in downstairs, we were having a normal rainy Saturday. LittleOne was transfixed by this little snail who, like its friends, had ventured out to the rainy parts of the deck to eat, groove, sing and to do whatever it is that snails do in the rain. LittleOne was quite delighted by this snail. They are quite small, with shells that aren't much bigger than the nail on a forefinger. They're small, fragile and rather cute.  LittleOne has stern, standing instructions to not touch snails and most other creatures (lest we accidentally hurt them or they bite us). But LittleOn...

On the last weekend of February 2022, starting on Friday, it rained in Brisbane. Not normal rain. It was a strange rain - heavy, hard and non-stop. It fell furiously and at the same thick, relentless volume all day. Maybe it eased off once or twice, but mostly, non-stop. All day long. I've never seen rain fall like before. I'm used to rain coming in bursts, easing up as though to take a breath, then falling hard again for a bit. Not non-stop. I worked from home, periodically looking out to marvel at this incredible non-stop volume, and very grateful I didn't have to go into the office and drive in this kind of weather. That evening, we took a little walk in the rain to look at the creek at the end of the road. It fills very easily after a little bit of rain. The creek had climbed its banks and had filled the surrounding parklands into a lake. Some local kids apparently took their boogie boards down to have a play in the new lake. The creek that turned into a lak...