Downtime

Picnic

Posted on 5 April 2010. Filed under: Downtime | Tags: Books, Lake Wendouree, Tintin |

We always do a picnic at this time of year, the kids didn’t want to come with us and we wanted to go a little further away than normal so we had a lovely drive out to Ballarat by ourselves. I have a friend out there who had ordered some books so we packed them away in the car and left them at his house (you knew there had to be a reference to books somewhere in this post). We then drove off to Lake Wendouree, had our picnic and then walked around the Lake.

Lake Wendouree No Swimming

Yes, I still call it a lake despite the lack of water. It has a great history and this is shown at the part of the lake where the 1956 Olympics Rowing finished. We didn’t take any photos of the installations at this part of the lake but they are very nice.

We walked around the Steve Moneghetti Track and had a great time reading all the information about him and the track, this was posted every 500m. I was in uniform and people took a great deal of interest in my tshirt; it’s a Tintin tshirt with Tintin and Snowy on the front with the words “The Adventures of Tintin” and a reproduction of the Tintin book “The Land of the Black Gold”. Yes, I said uniform. Seeing as I sell books I consider any clothing a uniform if it mentions books. Today’s was Tintin, other days I’ll wear my Disorganising Committee tshirt from the First Australian Discworld Convention.

Lake Wendouree Boat House

I’ve ended up with sore feet and a disorganised brain that can’t recall all I was going to write about today’s walk but it did include a sad note and a photo of a boat house on Lake Wendouree. When we were first there some years ago there was lots of water and I’m sure the boat houses didn’t look so strange, but now they look like fish out of water. As you can see they sit way up above the bottom of the lake, carefully avoiding the water that isn’t there. This is just sad and illustrates the drought as little else can.

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When a holiday is not a holiday…

Posted on 3 February 2010. Filed under: Downtime | Tags: holidays, reading, writing |

I’d taken some holidays, much needed as I have to break the addiction to books and the internet. It was very hard to leave the computer at home and while packing I left it to the last moment to pack my laptop as I was still undecided whether I’d be able to break the emotional ties and leave it behind. On the one hand it was meant to be a holiday but on the other I had lots of blogs to write and I can write much faster on the computer than I can by hand. In the end I managed to leave it behind and I’m not quite certain if I made the right decision. I did take plenty of paper and a pen so I could write by hand and that’s exactly what I did, I wrote five blogs in total and made numerous notes for a series of blogs I’m planning on Pulp Fiction Magazines. I didn’t manage to leave the books behind and actually packed a box of them, a very small box, though. I’d forgotten to put a note on my home page and was constantly worried about the business, I spent some time looking for internet connection and when I finally found it I couldn’t actually get into the back end of the website to add a note about me being away. I also had no mobile phone connection, we’re reliant on the mobile phone towers and there wasn’t one for my network in the neighbourhood so if potential buyers wanted to ring me they wouldn’t have been able to.

So, the theme of this blog is holidays as it’s the Christmas/New Year break and so many businesses in Australia close down for this time as it’s summer, so the holiday destinations get a real workout. We booked a week in Halls Gap, a beautiful area of The Grampians in Victoria, Australia and three days in Daylesford, home of the mineral springs. We don’t celebrate Christmas so we travelled on that day and when we got there the place was deserted, it was lovely, two days later it was absolutely packed. We booked in for seven nights and our neighbours changed every couple of days. It’s a seriously lovely place and I couldn’t help looking around at the shops to find the pre-loved books for sale. There were several shops with books, two of them were pre-loved: the supermarket and a gift shop. Neither of them had a lot of books but I carefully checked them all out and while the gift shop had some lovely books none of them were of interest to me. There was an empty shop and a couple of other shops up for sale and this got me thinking. A tourist destination would be a good place for a secondhand book shop. You’d have to multitask and have a section for new books as well as selling online as a lot of the time you’d be sitting there with nothing to do but it would make a great place. The scenery is just delightful and the people really friendly. The empty shop was quite big and all it needs is someone with business accumen and a bit of money. I know people who sell pre-loved books in bulk so would be able to help someone make the contacts in order to buy several thousand books at once, transport from Shepparton would be the challenge.

So, other things that came up when we were away are op shops we visited. We’d left Halls Gap and were travelling to Daylesford on New Years Day when I noticed an Op Shop open in Beaufort. It’s a tiny little town and I was so totally blown away by the idea of any shop being open on New Years Day that I had to stop and go in. Previous holidays when we’ve been looking for an icecream on New Years Day we’ve had great trouble finding anything open and have had to travel long distances only to find a place just about to close up at midday so to find an Op Shop open on this particular day was really amazing. The kids came in with me and between us we bought three books. A very nice shop, just strange to find it open on that day. Daylesford was much more as expected, it’s a real tourist town and so almost everything is open. A fabulous pre-loved bookshop, it’s only got 14 rooms of books on two storeys there’s also a number of antique and collectable shops all having a number of pre-loved books, I didn’t get to all of them as I had to spend some time with the family and also do some washing, but I did see most of them. One of the shops looks and feel like an op shop, but is actually a collectables shop and it took forever to get through as it was rather small and very crowded. They had a nice collection of Agatha Christie books but none of the ones I’m missing. We also visited the Daylesford Sunday Market, I think it’s on once a month and there were so many stalls I didn’t get through them all.