New year & all that.

As usual, I’ll make another attempt.

Some say blogging is dead. On Facebook the other day, a friend said that blogs were pretty much dead to him. Everything he needed, he could get from a couple of different podcasts.

I have to say that I’ve been enjoying the podcasts a fair bit.

Digression #1
In November I turned 40 and one of my presents was a “fitbit“. I’m the kind of guy who likes to be able to count things, and while at Bible College I was the only one in the group who wanted to play basketball without keeping score, I enjoy being competitive against myself. I’ve enjoyed the fitbit, because it lets me know, right there on my wrist, exactly how many (or how few) steps I have done that day. I’ve been aiming for 10k and if I get to the end of the day and I’m only at 6, I find that a real kick in the pants… so much so that I’m likely to whack my shoes on & walk for an hour or so, so that I can have 12k (the extra two thousand steps is just to show the fitbit who’s boss)!
It does’t always work, but so far I’ve been walking a lot more on average & I enjoy the fact that my resting heart rate is going down!

back to the action….

Now that I’m walking more (see digression #1), I need something to keep my mind occupied when I do so and podcasts like “This American Life” and “Serial” have done the job admirably. I’ve got a couple of new podcasts to listen to in the New Year, but they might remain blog-fodder for the moment.

With all that said, I don’t think I have a podcast in me personally, and despite the fact that I’ve been horribly inconsistent over the last 5 or more years, I really enjoy the process of blogging and know that when I’m doing it more regularly, I certainly feel more creative. So I’ll give it another go, maybe throwing in a New Years attempt to use my diary & evernote more for keeping my ideas in the forefront of my mind.

So, we popped down to Sydney today so that Shona & Pumpkin could go to an hour-long intro to  ballett thing in Chatswood. Whilst we were down there, we dropped some meals off at a friend’s house and they had a late birthday present for me (they had an early one too, but that’s a different story).

This is the coolest book I’ve seen in ages. Basically, the author Randall Munroe explains any number of complicated things, but the book only uses 1000 most common words in the English language! I’ve read a couple so far & they’re awesome.
Here’s another.

After playing drop-off, we drove to Kirribilli to drop something off to my niece. While we were there, we finally took out another present, this time a Christmas present that was for Gumnut.

If you can’t see from the picture, it’s basically a paper aeroplane. Not too exciting.

BUT, when you get a paper aeroplane that comes with a small rechargeable motor (which can be attached to just about any plane you can make) that’s a different animal!

The Powerup 2.0 was the unexpected winner from Christmas. It was small, easy to make, you can download more templates from the internet, but best of all, it exceeded expectations! I thought it would be one of these gimmicky things that gets an extra 5 meters out of a plane, but we had it take off & stay airborne for close to a minute!

It’s always enjoyable to get a photo of one of your kids with an authentic beaming smile.

Of course, spending time with my (including siblings up from Wagga & Melbourne) was the real highlight over the Christmas period. No amount of cool presents could compete with that. That said, it’s nice when you get something that is just cool, and even better when it’s not a thousand dollar iDevice, but a book or a paper plane!