It’s only last Thursday that I drove to Chadstone shopping centre – the biggest in the Southern hemisphere – to buy the Italian for Dummies Audio Set. It’s an audio course with 3 CDs and a small 96 page book that you can follow along with the CDs to see in print the words [...]

Once I had my iPhone dictionaries, I then began to realise that I needed a more structured approach to learning Italian, and I brought out The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian (1st Edition) which I bought from Amazon in 1998. This book almost got tossed out during my big purge and cleanup two [...]

Colin was spot on in his comment to my last post when he wrote that learning a language from a desk calendar was novel. What I didn’t mention in my post was that the desk calendar not only gives a new Italian word every day (with a guide to pronouncing it), but it then [...]

For many years, perhaps the last ten, near the end of each year I’ve bought “The Joy of Cooking” desk calendar for the following year.  A cooking or food  tip every day; and the back of the calendar pages, when torn off, were handy for shopping lists, reminders and various notes.  I’ve even used the [...]

This evening I changed the Word Press theme I’m using from a magazine style layout to a classic blog style where each blog is seen in full on the blog home page and follow one another in chronological order. As always, you can search for something in the Search feature in the navigation bar [...]

Here it is, Friday 6 November (note: Friday 13th next week), and I’ve only made once post since Wednesday last week.  The reason is that I haven’t been able to get Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 to encode my De Dietrich boiling water video.  It crashes every time I try it.  I’ve spent days on it, [...]

Spring has arrived in Melbourne.  The decidous trees are now beginning to sprout blossoms or new leaves.  We had two days of sunshine and mild temperatures, and then on the third day, Melbourne pulled it’s 4 seasons in one day trick on me.  I set out from home on a sunny day with clear blue skies, and I wondered if I needed to wear my winter jacket (but I did).

I drove to a Bunnings hardware store where I’ve never been before, and so I set my car navigation system to the address, and when it said “You are now at your destination” and told me to turn to the right into a side street, I did.

I could see no sign of the Bunnings store in the side street, but it was obviously an industrial area, so I parked my car and went for a walk along Centre Road to see if the Bunnings store was nearby.  It didn’t take long to realise that my car navigation had got confused because the street numbers on one side of the road were about 100 off the numbers on the other side of the road.  I kept on walking as I was sure I’d soon get to Bunnings.

During my long walk, I began to notice that the sunny day with clear blue skies had turned to very dark clouds with falling rain in the far west.  It was actually very impressive and exciting.  Eventually I came to the Bunnings store, with a huge carpark and masses of available spaces.  I then decided to walk back to my car, by now about a kilometre away, and drive to Bunnings.

I hadn’t got too far when the distant falling rain caught up with me, and there I was walking along Centre Road in stormy weather, with thunder and lightning and increasingly heavy rain.  The rain began to get so heavy that I headed to a nearby office complex (set well back from the road) and stood on the verandah at the entrance.  After a while a lovely young lady came out to talk to me, and I explained why I was sheltering in their entrance.  She offered twice to drive me to my car, but I assured her that the rain wouldn’t last long.  And it didn’t.

To be honest, I enjoyed the whole experience even though I got very wet, with my jacket soaked.

Spam

Today I got two spams on my website.  The first was an entry on the Contact Me page of my website.  It was from Argentina.  The second was on my blog page in a comment on my Chainsaw Man post, and it said:

You are mistaken, this is obvious.

I don’t know what that comment means or what it related to, but I suspect it’s a lure to get me to follow up on it.