WARM LAPTOP AND A COLD BODY

I haven't been in the mood for doing much this Saturday. I think
I've got into the habit of doing nothing because I caught a bad cold
last week and it had me out of action for about five days. It's
actually been ten years since I last caught a cold or flu, thanks
mostly to my lack of human interaction in all probability. Cold and
flus, to say nothing of COVID-19, have apparantly been spreading
more fiercly than ever over this winter now passed.

Not that winter seems like its over. The sun is rising early, true
enough, but this morning the house felt as cold as any time over the
last few months. Still the frogs are liking it - singing away as they
do every evening. It seems especially wet, though a map on TV showed
the rainfal as right on average. I think I'm eternally skewed to
expect dryness because I grew up during long droughts in the 2000s.

But that makes it a great time for my dam tours. Following my visit
to the West Barwon Reservoir, I tracked down some info on other
Australian dams, compiling them into an initial list of interesting
ones to visit. Weekend before last, just before I got sick, I made
my way, by one of my very enjoyable but extremely convoluted
routes, to the Lal Lal reservoir. Annoying the road to the dam was
gated off, but the empty observation area did offer a perfect view
of the reservoir, even accented by a few eagles riding on the
updraughts and fighting with each other in the air.

I continued on to Lal Lal falls, which must have been at full flow.
In contrast to the reservoir, the falls were very popular and the
carpark was about full. Still I found some quiet spots to admire
them, in fact I got quite brave, given my fear of heights, climbing
on the the roots of a huge gumtree growing on the edge of the valley
to get a great photo of the waterfall framed by the tree's twisted
old branches.

I ran out of time to see the other waterfall though because I needed
to go and pick up a 1960s US Air Force electronics textbook that
someone was giving away in nearby Ballarat. Studying the map again
later, I see that there's another road that goes close to the dam
and stops at a camp site, so altogether it would definitely be worth
another trip some time.

I'm actually typing this on my old laptop, the 33MHz 486 that
refuses to start up cold. I'm trying it as my new 'bedroom computer'
to replace the 80s luggable which no longer boots due to a dead (and
not easily replaced) hard disk. The afternoons are a rare time when
it's nice and warm in my bedroom due to the sun shining in, and I
usually never get to take advantage of it. So I decided to type up
a phlog post from bed. Trouble is that I had to cuddle this old
lappy for almost an hour before it was warm enough to boot, while
flicking through Sun Tzu's The Art of War (translated by Samuel B.
Griffith), and now it's not really warm anymore. In fact it's cold,
and it's past time to cook dinner. So I'll bid you goodbye and
skuttle away into some part of the house that has heating.

Well I guess I'll try uploading this first - one plus of using this
as my bedroom computer is that it actually has WiFi. via an old
PCMCIA adapter, Linux 2.2, and way too much effort that I put in as
a teenager setting the drivers up.

 - The Free Thinker