Thursday Feb. 1st 2024

I have my computer on the table on the balcony of our Sydney 'digs.'

We are five floors up, and the view is stunning. Directly below is a huge circular expanse of grass--the cricket pitch: or, as it is called, 'The Reg Bartley Oval.' About half of the Oval is in my view. On the right it is bordered by trees, some of which are the huge (yes, huge) Moreton Bay Fig trees. 

Straight ahead is a slice of the harbor, with boat traffic to and fro: ferries, white sails, motor boats leaving wakes of white. Across the water is the North Shore, covered with trees, and I can see the naval  memorial at Bradley Point--yesterday we walked on a long, long trail above the water that took us around that point. Far in the distance is a tall tower of apartments in Manly, where there is a huge beach on the Pacific side--on sunny weekends a writhing mass of naked human flesh, cooking on the beach, or crowding in the breaking waves...and, of course, the surfers.

Sometimes this stretch of water is completely blocked off by a huge cruise ship making its way in to Circular Quay--in the very centre of Sydney, with the towering bridge on one side and the famous Opera House on the other.

Over to my right, hidden by a grove of trees is Rushcutters Park, a broad expanse of grass where dog owners by the dozen exercise their animals. Down below our apartment a path comes in from the Park and meets the circular path that goes round The Oval. Straight in front of me, I see the water about fifty yards beyond the perimeter of The Oval.

These paths provide a constant stream of humanity--cyclists, runners, dog-walkers, food delivery scooters, the old and the young--now a woman with four dogs--professional dog-walker, perhaps.

Over the trees, a bit to the right are the masts of the dozens of huge yachts moored in the Marina, and further away, towering on the skyline, are six tall apartment buildings--each of them about sixteen stories tall. And the panorama of trees, apartment buildings, and elegant houses continues around to my right until it is cut off by the other wing of our apartment building. 

The balcony is in broad sunlight during the morning, but is in welcome shade from early in the afternoon.

It is 4.00pm now, and the paths below are not busy--one dog-walker, one electric bike rider, and one runner. But as we move into the evening the traffic will become much more intense.

And in the evening we will get the birds--flocks of screeching cockatoos in the nearby trees, dozens of flying foxes (not birds, I know) wending their way to the west, colorful rainbow lorikeets that flit from balcony to balcony. Swallows and martins sweeping at speed through the air.

Sunday January 28

     Just for the record, and to pass half an hour while Joan goes to sleep, I will record this day as one in which I walked eight and a half miles, with a great deal of uphill and steps. 

    We took buses to Bondi Beach, which was a seething mass of semi-naked humanity, and set off northwards by roads and trails, often in parks with big fences along the top of the very high cliffs. Unfortunately the trail was under reconstruction in various places, which pushed us inland onto suburban streets--though the architecture of so many houses was stunning, and these diversions were often quite interesting. And there were often terrific views over Sydney--a huge panorama with the Opera House and the Sydney Bridge in the centre. The walk ended at Watson's Bay, and the last mile was downhill with magnificent views of the cliffs towering over the Pacific.

There was a big downer on the bus back to Kings Cross. At an early stop after we left Watson's Bay, a huge crowd of Chinese men and women poured onto the bus, taking every seat and filling the aisle with people standing---and the decibel level of their talk was unbelievable. Am I prejudiced: I don't think so, but the noise of their talking was very disturbing. Do they understand how loud they are?

That's enough. Joan's asleep. It's 23:04. I'll clean my teeth and go to bed.

Saturday Jan. 27 2024

     In the background, the Women's Final of the Australian Open tennis tournament. Sabalenka easily beating the Chinese girl Zheng. TV on mute.

    Opposite me at the table is Joan, tapping away at her computer on one of her many work projects.

    An uneventful day--a walk over to Double Bay and further on to a swimming area (Murray Rose Pool), beautiful gardens, and an interesting art gallery. Bus back to Kings Cross, and a final wander back to the apartment via Macleay Street, the steps down to the tennis courts from the wine store, around by the cricket pavillion, and home. Altogether about three and a half miles.

So really a day with nothing to report, and I wonder why I even bothered. Maybe the only significant 'happening' of the day was that for an hour or two after getting up this morning, I seemed to be somehow psychically not myself. I couldn't say exactly what it was. There was nothing specifically painful--but there it was...something was wrong.

Nevertheless--it passed, and for the rest of the day I have felt fine.

Birthday

 January 25, 2024---my 89th birthday. 

A day, and a number of years, greeted with very mixed feelings. Happy to get the birthday wishes from the three boys--Daniel, John, and Julian--from Karen, and from Clare--on behalf of all the British relatives

Of course, I am happy to be alive: I am very, very, happy and grateful for the 26 years I have had with Joan: and I guess I am fairly lucky with my health. The pacemaker keeps ticking way: at the last overall check-up I was fine: no recurrence of sciatica (I do the prescribed exercises every day): no recurrence of the blocked small bowel, which took me into hospital for four days: and I am able to walk a fair distance each day--my aim is four miles, but often I exceed that by a couple of miles or more.

On my mental health, perhaps I am more than a little worried. The degree of my forgetfulness is a bit disturbing--the long pauses as I struggle to find a name or a word, or what day it is, do get me down. Lying in bed the other night I tried to think of the California town where we got together with John, Dan, Karen, Julian, and Sharon a couple of years ago. I could not bring it to mind. And here I am again, not being able to remember it.

So--stock-taking over, Cutler--GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE !

I forget how many birthdays I have had here in Sydney. But on each occasion Joan has taken me to dinner in the revolving restaurant at the top of Sydney Tower. And we did it again yesterday. The complete revolution of the restaurant takes about an hour, and we were there for about two hours, seeing all the lights come on all over Sydney. Staggering views...out to the sea to the east, out to Botany Bay and the airport in the south, and to the far entrance to the Pacific in the north at Watson's Bay.

Manly Beach.

Manly Beach ranks almost alongside Bondi Beach as one of the most popular Sydney beaches. It is a very long beach, but the surfing area is quite concentrated, and it is adjacent to the main swimming area, though the water is so crowded with people splashing in the waves that I doubt anybody does much actual swimming. The water is just alive with people. And the beach is covered with bodies--acres of exposed flesh. Female bums are very much in evidence as the 'thong' seems to be universal among younger women.

And extensive tattoos are everywhere.

We got there on the ferry from Circular Quay, which is the inner harbor of Sydney, where the huge cruise ships dock overnight, and there are a number of wharves for the various ferries that serve the greater harbor. The ferry took 28 minutes to get to Manly, and then we had quite a long walk to get to Shelley Beach, which is tucked away behind a small headland, which means that the sea is quite calm. No surfers, but dozens of swimmers and sunbathers--difficult to find a place to settle down, and you need to be in the shade. But we found somewhere under the trees at the back of the beach--a bit too close to other people, but it couldn't be helped. Joan swam first, then I swam, and then Joan swam again. Problems getting a shower and changing as they were constructing new changing rooms and they had substituted some small 'sheds' to change in.

We took the long walk back to the main beach. Smoothies and something to eat. Walk to the Manly Art Gallery--which we have found in earlier years is worth a visit. Then a rush to get the next ferry, light rail to the Town Hall railway station, train to Kings Cross Station, grocery shopping at Coles, and walk home. And a beer on arrival.

Bedtime--Sydney--Steps--Exercise

     Joan has fallen asleep, but I am still wide awake--which is normal for us at bedtime--and I have come into the living room, needing to kill about an hour before going to bed and--keeping my fingers crossed--trying to go to sleep.

    I have my problems with sleep, and sometimes, after a long struggle with insomnia, I end up taking half an Ambien pill, which seems to work without any sort of hangover effect.

    My pedometer shows I have walked 7.7 miles today, but distance is only one factor in walks in Sydney--a major factor in all the walks we do around the harbour and above the sea are STEPS---20 here, 30 there: then, say, 75--then a long steep upward path with sets of 5 steps every 20 yards. Sometimes the "Track Notes" in a guidebook we often use actually warns us about upcoming steps..."get your muscles ready for the ten flights up beside the sandstone cliff." This was a warning we had on today's walk.

    But the views are amazing--the harbour, the Bridge, the Opera House, the sailboats, the skyscrapers of the Central Business District, the ferries, and the occasional huge cruise ship, slowly heading out to the harbour entrance and the Pacific Ocean beyond.

    "Getting your exercise" is clearly one of the most important bits of fitness advice for eighty-year-olds like me. But when I struggle up some of these flights of stairs on our Sydney walks, I sometimes wonder if I do too much, and that maybe 'too much' may be detrimental to my health. Sometimes, for example, on these damned steps, I have a few pains in my left knee. So am I doing too much? 

Maybe, I should sometimes spend a mainly exercise-free day. Not sitting all day, of course--getting up and moving around from time to time, perhaps an hour or so dozing, or at least meditating...watching tennis on the TV---the Australian Open is in its second week, and the games are getting very interesting.

Well now--if I go and do my teeth in my usual ritual of proxa brushes, electric toothbrush, pointy toothbrush, flossing, and mouthwash--it will be time for bed.

Print Sizes

 I normally use the 'large' size print, and this is how it comes out. But often when I have posted a blog entry, I find the final published version that appears has bits in the largest type. It suddenly shifts from this to this for no apparent reason.

this is the smallest print....why anyone would want to use it is beyond my understanding.

This is small, and again who would want to use it.

This is 'normal'    still too small, I think.

This is 'medium.'   This is 'large.'

But still I am puzzled by the print shifts in the published version.

I will now publish this and see if any part changes in size

 As I approach my 89th birthday, my greatest concern is not my physical health (fingers crossed!) but whether or not I am slowly sinking into Alzheimers. Often I cannot remember a name or a word. Often I go from the kitchen to the living room and forget why I was making the trip. And now I cannot remember the word for general old age memory problems...geriatric something? Or is it senile something? Senility?

There is occasionally something you read that suggests that, to avoid Alzheimers, you should keep your brain active with crosswords and other puzzles. I am not sure that this does ward off Alzheimers. The fact that you can do puzzles may just indicate a certain level of intelligence--after all you are solving problems in which memory plays only a small role. (Sorry--I am not sure this paragraph makes any sense.)

But anyway---time has to be killed each day, and I do do a series of puzzles on a daily basis. First, the Spelling Bee from the NY Times. Then the two available Waffle puzzles. Then Wordle. Then KenKen, with a square of 6 by 6 and at the 'hard' or 'medium' level. My KenKen record time is 11 minutes. But occasionally it has taken me over 25 minutes.

And sometimes during the day, I access the Guardian Crosswords online, or work on a crossword from my book of 200 Crosswords from The Daily Telegraph: I am up to puzzle 107, having started last July.

Well--although I am sceptical of puzzling warding off the brain changes that lead to Alzheimers, if it is true, then I am doing my puzzling best.

Charles Darwin/Zoom

 Well, it was all a bit confusing with the Zoom. I accessed the meeting on my Mac, and I could see and hear Marsha Rehms, but she got no sound from me. Why not, we do not know, and we searched for some reason this afternoon after we got back from a long walk, and we could see no solution: in fact we got a couple of messages that suggested that my Mac did not have the capability to transmit sound.

But Joan accessed the Zoom meeting on her phone and I used it to read several passages. I was the only participant in the audition; Marsha e-mailed a couple of other men who were expected to participate, but seemed unable to raise them. I have little doubt that I will be involved in the reading. They seem to have decided that the parts will be, as it were, spread around to even up the contributions that each reader will make: in other words, sometimes I would be Darwin and at other times the Narrator, or one of the few other male voices. 

Rehearsals do not begin until we are back in Washington.

Charles Darwin Audition/Intro

 Today, here in Sydney, I am going to Zoom to an audition in Washington for a Cosmos play-reading. I think the only two characters I might get would be Charles himself or the Narrator. We have not been able to print the text, having no printer here, but Joan will bring it up on her computer, while I do the Zoom on my Mac. I will have to be at a bit of an angle to the Zoom screen in order to read the text. We will see how it goes.

It is a bit nerve-wracking, hoping the technology all works out. Joan is out shopping at the moment, and when she comes back we will rearrange the computers.

Sydney 2024--Early Days

 We arrived in Sydney on Saturday morning, January 13, after a long-drawn-out journey--5 hours from DC to LA, and then 14 hours from LA to Sydney. In addition, starting in Washington Dulles, we spent quite a lot of additional time in airport lounges.

The apartment, which we have rented twice before, has a wonderful view out over a cricket field, a marina with dozens of sail-boats, and on to the open water of Sydney harbor, which is usually busy with power boats and the white sails of yachts of various sizes, and where we often see huge cruise ships moving to and from the inner harbour.

Altogether, a very attractive place to be, even though the walk to the nearest grocery shops is farther than we would like. But then, it's all exercise, and we both have our pedometers and check our daily mileage. I try to get in a minimum of 4 miles a day--and I usually meet, and often exceed that target.

The balcony of the apartment is spacious, and below is the cricket field, where there is often a game in progress. A really pleasant place to sit and just contemplate the foot and bicycle traffic below, which includes--especially in the evenings--a parade of dogs of all sorts of breeds, colours, and excitability. Lots of runners--many of whom like to circle the cricket ground, the circumference of which must be about 800 yards. 

This morning--Monday January 15th--the rain came down in torrents. The small pipe that drains the balcony was blocked and a puddle accumulated. Later in the day, I cleared the blockage and the puddle disappeared as the water drained away.

On Sunday we made one of our traditional walks. Took the bus halfway to Watsons Bay, walked the rest of the way through streets of wonderful houses, across the suspension bridge over Parsley Bay, and along by the water into the area around where the ferry docks, and then out along the coast to the lighthouse that stands at the entrance to Sydney Harbor from the Pacific Ocean. 

And back to tradition--lunch at Doyles, where we had seafood chowder and a couple of beers, followed by the bus back home.