Yes, I told you that the light goes up and down, don't you notice how the wheel goes 'round? (Cream)

Jan 2024 to-be-read

Wie geht's?

I'm not making much of an impression on my to-be-read pile am I?

That's because I keep buying new books that take my fancy and even reading a book a week isn't denting the book tower.

It has made me compare that pile with one I had a year ago (pictured right) and while I've read the vast majority of those, I'm ashamed to admit that there are seven books common to both piles.

You're bound to have spotted them, but for new readers, they are:

• Elton's Me and the Jaggar bio 
• Roderick Random
• Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years
• Emerson and Murakami
• Dicken's Bleak House

So, my new mission is to read those seven in the next six or seven weeks. Just need to finish my current two first - Laurence Fearnley's Room, and Billy Connolly's Rambling Man (good combo that - Room is thoughtful and sobering while the Big Yin is hilarious).

A stunning January resolution, I think you'll agree!!

Love and peace - Wozza

Ring out the old, ring in the new (George Harrison)

Wie geht's?

It's a new year! The pages in my three key daily texts have returned to page one again.

I have started every day for the last few years by reading 366 Days with Wisdom (Venerable Master Hsing Yun) and The Daily Stoic (Ryan Holliday). When I can, I also read the day's entry in 365 Days with the Saints (Carol Keely-Gangi).

Yes, I get wisdom from where I find it.

Here's what each of them has for their January 1st entry:

366 Days with Wisdom  

Each day one needs to speak kind and gentle words.

Each day one needs to do what is beneficial.

We are successful only when we begin today.

The Daily Stoic

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control (Epictetus).

365 Days with the Saints

Mary of Nazareth is today's saint.

From Mary, we learn to trust even when all hope seems gone (Pope John Paul II).

And away we go...

Love and peace - Wozza

The pause that refreshes.

Wie geht's?

Each Christmas this tree in our back yard loses all of its leaves at the same time, and grows new ones at the same time (well - roughly - over the space of about two weeks).

I like this idiosyncratic tree - it has grown up with two trunks! Gotta have respect for its sense of adventure and originality.

The leaves thing has us flummoxed because we are in the summer season and consistently experiencing warm days (mid twenties).

What it does do is give us a visible symbol of renewal leading up to the new year.

Seneca in On Tranquility of Mind says:

The mind must be given relaxation - it will rise improved and sharper after a good break.

I think that's what our tree is doing. It clearly can't handle being in full leaf for the duration of the summer so it is taking a break, relaxing, and rising up again, with new leaves - improved and sharper after a good break.

I am having a relaxing Christmas break (with painting jobs added in, as previously indicated) and hope you are too, wherever you are in the blogosphere.

Love and peace - Wozza

A beacon of light shines all through the night just for me (Susan Cowsill)

Wie geht's?

Ron Howard and his brother, Clint Howard, have been a constant in my life.

I've just finished their Hollywood and family memoir The Boys and I felt again a real kinship to Ron as I read it.

[Although I also grew up watching Clint on Gentle Ben, I can't relate to him in the same way. I have never been drawn to excess, apart from record collecting, so his story of alcohol and drugs is completely alien to me].

But Ron, he's like my older brother (he is three years older than me and Clint is like my own brother - two years younger).

Although a world away in America there are some similarities:

• Loving parents who stayed together until our mothers passed away.
• The family dynamic is similar - Ronny and I are the older brother, with no other siblings.
• Ron and I have both sustained long marriages to one person, and we both have had families of four children.
• I even feel our personalities are similar - calm and even tempered, driven to succeed. but retaining our moral compass and values.

Of course, I've grown up with him as well thanks to the medium of Television.

My early memories of the sixties include watching The Andy Griffith Show on NZBC's one channel. Ronny Howard (as he was billed then) was my buddy - Opie Taylor. Or he would have been if he was real and lived in my Royal Oak neighbourhood.

My friends at Royal Oak Primary were all like me and Opie - friendly, quiet, generous with affection, funny, caring, sporty, respectful to our parents and adults in general, and not so clever at our schoolwork.

Then came American Graffiti (1973) and Happy Days when I was a teenager. I was a regular viewer of Richie, Potsy, Ralph and The Fonz.

Richie was again like me as I related to my friendship group: not the smartest tool in the shed, a bit vague and clueless but still like Opie grown into a teenager, battling all the things teenagers always battle. 

Reading The Boys, reminded me again how I am intertwined with other guys like Nick Hornby and Ron Howard - guys who I'll never meet, yet they feel like family.

Love and peace - Wozza

Fly me out the window somewhere far away, news on the radio, happy birthday (Concrete Blonde)

Wie geht's?

Adam Lennon Purdy (in Australia) and Keegan Warren Purdy (in China) had birthdays in the last week or so - ALP on the 11th and KWP on the 19th, so this is my customary birthday post for these two mischief makers, wascally wabbits and brothers-in-arms from the mid-eighties.

Happy birthdays to our special little guy (37) and his big brother (39)!

Love and peace - dad

I'm never really lonely in my excentrifugal forz (Frank Zappa)

Not that kind of painting, silly!

Wie geht's?

Holidays are here which means a chance to catch up on those jobs that have been on our list for a few years:

Sanding and painting the outside window frames; cleaning the verandah roof; water-blasting and painting the verandah - that kind of thing.

Thanks to shifting record boxes, I have had a sore back for a large part of the year (MRI coming in January) so I am very strategic about these jobs - anything that involves bending over is a no no. No chainsawing up logs for me for a while.

Instead, because standing straight is much more preferable to sitting down or bending, the windows are at a perfect height for attacking and so is the verandah stuff.

If anything, I think the exercise is improving my back, as well as the battery of exercises from the osteo guy that I do every second day. Cautiously optimistic I am.

Anyway, must dash - the sun is shining and I'm burning daylight.

Love and peace - Woz

What a dream I had, pressed in organdy, clothed in crinoline of smoky burgundy (Simon and Garfunkel)

Photo by Marcus Bellamy on Unsplash

Wie geht's?

A vivid dream that came to me a while ago has haunted me since.

Even more so since I found that scarily accurate picture above on Unsplash to accompany this post!!

Jacky and I were in her car, driving along a deserted road; I was driving. We crested the top of a hill and gazed down on a landscape exactly like that picture - jagged bronze-coloured rock formations leading down to water in the far distance.

We rounded a corner and the road tapered away to a dead end that was in the form of a school gate and wire fence (on the other side of which was lawn).

We stopped and I went to reverse but the road had developed a crater like hole behind us, so we were stuck!

Jacky went off to search for some car-jacks because we weirdly/illogically thought we'd be able to bridge the gap that way. I waited and waited for her return. She eventually turned up and so had a crowd of spectators who watched in silence as I jacked up the car. Then I woke up.

Feel free to have a field day analysing all that!

Love and peace - Wozza