Tomorrow Anna and I are spending the morning ballooning, followed by a trip to Fitzroy Island. An account of the day will no doubt be much more entertaining and accurate if it a composed after the event, so you will just have to wait.
Anyhoo, glad to have this opportunity to let you know what's going on.
Stay safe.
Tom. ¶ 2:57 pm 0 comments
So here's what I'd look like if I had a big curly mostache...and you could only see in sepia...and had retinopathy.
I haven't written in a while. (A standard epilogue for blog entries.) Truth be told, not that much has happened that was interesting. I got a new bicycle and I plan to tell you all about that, but I haven't actually ridden it yet, so I didn't want to come at you only half the picture. My birthday passed. That was good and all, but nothing 'blogworthy". Just the bike. Oh, and I grew a big black curly mostache. Plus, I'm thinking of holding the mayor's daughter captive in the ol' gold mine. That's if I can't get my bicycle working.
So apparently even iPods like to sleep in.
After a few days off it was back to work with me. Because I'm the kind of feller who, when on holidays, likes to pretend work doesn't even exist, I was required to call in to the office before heading out to my final destination. That makes for a lot of driving - all up, roughly three hours in the car today. It also makes for a very early morning. Nevertheless, when "Uptown Girl" issued forth from my timepiece, I lept to action and was dressed and ready to go before you could say the entire New Testament in Klingon. I crept into the study and removed my iPod from my computer in the usual fashion. The computer disconnected itself from the iPod, but evidently, the iPod just wasn't ready to go. It still had "Do Not Disconnect" firmly displayed on its screen. Eventually I shut the computer down and unplugged the iPod, but this did not do the trick. It wasn't ready to get up. "Do Not Disconnect," it repeated, bolder than ever. I tried holding down buttons - nothing. Finally I just had to take it with me in the hope that it would come to its senses on the road. But it never did. Almost two hours later, it was still of the firm belief that it was connected to my computer. "Do Not Disconnect," it said - great, I have an MP3 player with separation anxiety. Four hours later we had made some progress. My iPod had forgiven me for getting it up at such an unholy hour and given up the charade of still being attached to something. My jubilations were short-lived. All that excitment had worn the little guy out and all I could summon from it was a fading grey outline of a battery icon. Grim. I had to make do with NXFM's Carly and Grover for my return trip. Well, I carried the little guy up from the car, back into the study and reunited it with its USB cable. When it was feeling a little better and some colour had returned to its battery logo, we had a little chat about what I expected out of it. Some tears were shed, but things between us are now much better. I am expecting much better behaviour out of the little tike for my second day back at work.
Please post a reply telling me, in ten million words or less, how technology has let you down. Or you could just say hi. But have a great day whatever happens, won't you?.
Tom.
¶ 10:10 pm 1 comments
Welcome! Come on in, make yourselves at home. Please take off your shoes - the carpet is new. It's so nice to see so many smiling faces. Albeit a little creepy. As I've said three times now, Welcome!
A wise man once said, "Those who fail in History are doomed to repeat it." And although he and everyone else who has ever uttered that immortal sentiment was only trying to legitimise such a trivial discipline, it is as good an introduction to this entry as I could think up. Y'see, I thought before we could move on in this little venture, we need to take a look back at those memory ridden footsteps that have brought us here. Some footprints are quite clear, some a little hazy, some remind us of good times, others of the not so good times. Many of them are misspelled. Today will simply be a review for the benefit of those who may not know the history of my bloggery, and for the reminiscence of those who do.
The year was 2004. The month was June. The day was Wednesday. The hour, minute, second and so forth are irrelevant. I was a university student, sharing a house with a couple of cousins by the names of Dan and Jono (respectively). Now Dan was the shorter and older of the pair, and had, as they say, been around the block a couple of times. As well as being an avid jogger, he had a blog. For the longest time I had no idea what this was and had jumped to several incorrect and embarrassing conclusions. One evening he sat me down and explained what a blog was. He directed me to his own one, The Birm. Dan's blog was named after his former home in Birmingham Gardens. I made a mental note that Blogs may last a long time and it wouldn't be a good idea to name one after something that might not be relevant in a few years time. I must have lost that mental note because the following morning I wrote the first entry of my own new blog, Sandgate Road.
Sandgate Road (the blog) became my home on the web. Even when we moved from Sandgate Road (the road) to Andrew Close, Sandgate Road (the blog) lived on. Many a morning would see Dan and Jono lazing about the house while I was diligently writing entry after entry for my blog. It was during that time that Jono started his own blog, The Dorse. Jonathan was (and is) full of wit and cleverness, and he and Dan contributed almost as much to SGR through inspiration as I did through actually thinking it up and writing it. Times were good for SGR.
Blogs are quite like lamb roasts. They use up a lot of your thyme/time (it's a pun that sounded a lot better in my head). And so it was that when I also began the podcast, Ten with Tom, SGR began to suffer. TWT opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Through the wonderful power of Podcasting, my voice was sent out across the Earth. I gained many new friends and explored much that mere text media could not offer.
One day in late 2005, I married the most beautiful girl that God has ever created. I moved out of Andrew Close and into Wedded bliss. I'm still here today. I'm no longer a university student either. I have a real job, with real job hours. In many ways I'm not the fellow from a couple of paragraphs ago, and yet at the same time, I don't think I could tell us apart. TWT is still here (as soon as I get a new microphone). But sadly, SGR, through all the excitement has slipped into the forgotten place. I say 'sadly' quite intentionally because I miss the written media. There is certainly a lot one can do on a podcast that one cannot do in a blog, and there certainly seems to be a lot more people willing to listen to a podcast rather than read a blog. Nevertheless, the written word is a medium not without its appeal. I missed the way I could use just these 26 letters (often in the wrong order) to create whole stories. Stories that would need all manner of music, sound effects and vocal strain if they were to be transposed to a podcast. So I sat down to reopen SGR.
It was at this point that I thought of starting a new blog - actually that's not quite correct. 'Today Tom Wrote' isn't a new blog, but the same old blog under a new name. SGR hasn't died, it hasn't even been reincarnated, it has merely taken on a new name. It will be a little different to SGR, largely because I'm a little different.
Well, thanks for sticking it out and reading this far. It may have been a stretch, but worth it I'm relatively sure.
Goodnight kids
¶ 3:10 pm 1 comments
