How Does One Recap 13 Years?

I swear I only went to put the kettle on...

Hello again. It's me. Much older and wiser (debatable), and a little battle worn. 

I fell down a rabbit hole of reading blogs this morning, some long abandoned sadly, some still active with a thriving community, and some still active but seeming like a lone voice still telling things to the internet. In reality I'm mostly elsewhere; Facebook, Instagram and BlueSky. Instagram is generally my regular haunt.

I've missed blogging at times, missed the long form storytelling this makes possible, and missed how connected other people's stories made me feel. I'm not sure anyone will read this, but that's ok. I mean, I'd prefer it if someone did, but we all know that blogging has seen its heyday pass. Most of us have shorter attention spans now. Dopamine habits that must be obeyed.

I have an ulterior motive, and this might scare you off, but I have some conversations I need to have with the Universe about cancer. Not only, but there will be some posts about cancer. Anyone still here? Yeah I know, it's a lot. I KNOW. Anyway, it won't be doom and gloom because I'm not made that way, but I do need to wrangle my thoughts and writing them down helps. 

Having said that, here's a quick list of major things that have happened over the past 13 years, in a totally eccentric and arbitrary order:

• Travel. Starting in 2015 I visited Portugal & Spain (2015), Italy (2016), Canada (2017), Greece (2018), Spain & Portugal again, but different parts (2019). I was booked to visit Egypt in 2020 but Covid happened and everything was cancelled. Other things over the past 4 years prevented me from travelling [cancer foreshadowing!], but then I visited Japan this year in 2025. Travel is good for the mind and the soul, and I hope to do more of it still. Maybe I'll get to Egypt one day.
• For almost 6 years now I have been in a relationship with a wonderful man called Thomas. He's kind, gentle and crazy tall at 6'4", a full foot taller than me. He's also handsome as all get out, and that's not just my biased opinion. As we say in this country, I'm punching above my weight.
• I started working in a University in 2011, and in 2023 I was retrenched. Which was kind of great, actually. They were very good to me while I was unwell [more foreshadowing] and I walked away with enough to live on for about a year and a half, which helped me enormously.
• I turned 60, and as we are allowed in Australia I accessed my superannuation to pay myself a pension. It might not be forever, I might try and return to work, but being 60 and re-entering the workforce is daunting and seems like an insurmountable task. In the meantime I'm resting and looking after my health.
• Sadly my sister Fiona passed away, after a very long and very tough battle with Crohn's Disease.
• I registered a business name to make millinery items for sale, but hats... in this economy? I made a few hats and still might pursue it, but the timing is tough and everyone's wallets are tight.
• I had to move house 3 times, as places I was renting were sold by the landlords. I'm about to move again, but this time Thomas has bought an apartment so this should be my last move.
• In early 2021 I discovered I had prostate cancer, and then 2 weeks later I discovered I also had thyroid cancer. It was during a Covid lockdown here in Sydney and it was difficult, and lonely at times, but I got through it and am now minus a prostate and a thyroid. I also had radiation treatment for both.
• Earlier this year I discovered that my PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) went from undetectable post surgery, as expected, to slowly climbing again, meaning that some rogue prostate cancer cells were out and about in my system. I now know that I have a wee small babby tumour in a lymph node in my abdomen, so I recently started treatment to stop it from growing. I might also have some more radiation at some point to try and pew pew it out of existence.

I think those are the main points we need to cover, and some I might write about in more depth. 

I'm doing well, maybe a little directionless at present as I've been spending a lot of time on heath related matters and haven't started enjoying retirement fully yet. I've reacted quite well to my new treatment regime, and I've recently started losing weight, so everything feels positive. I'm looking forward to making a home with Tom, even though we currently already live together, but it feels hard to put down permanent roots in a rental. I look forward to exploring our new suburb of Hurstville, and it'll be my first time outside of Sydney's 'Inner West' in decades.

Funk & Fabulousity

I have been a lifelong fan of all things aromatic. Fabulous fragrances. Pretty perfumes. Once upon a time (in a galaxy, well, you know) I even worked in the industry, as a Fragrance and Cosmetics Buyer for a retail chain. Yes, on the short list of Gayest Jobs Ever.

The combination of a bit of extra discretionary income recently, and some exciting and challenging times in the fragrance industry (the rise of exciting indie perfumers, and the tarnishing and cheapening of many classic old fragrances, in part due to drastic allergen rules being introduced, for a start) have stoked the smouldering incense embers of my old obsession. Also with the rise of internet shopping, a medium not conducive to the smell testing of fragrances, many retailers and manufacturers have introduced affordable sampling programs. For small cost you can sample a whol range of new and interesting 

I've also bought a whole bunch of fragrance ingredients recently, with a plan to playing around and making some of my own fragrances. If that works out, I might even try and sell them through www.etsy.com, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Developing a fragrance is a long, complicated process.

So, I bow to present my new endeavour: You Smell MARVELLOUS. Come on over and let's get our stink on.

The Interim Birthday Post

I celebrated my birthday last weekend, and I had a fabulous time. Really, it was an embarrassment of riches. Amongst the gifts both physical and emotional, I also received a cracker of a head cold. Ugh. I struggled into the office on Monday, but yesterday and today I've rarely moved from the bed or the sofa. Possibly the worst cold I've had in years! And it's gorgeous and sunny outside!

I call no fair!

Anyhoo, I'm struggling to do much of anything that involves a thought process, so I'll post some pics and thoughts about the weekend sometime in the next day or so. See you then.

4 Months. REALLY?

Sorry about that. I popped out to put the kettle on and got distracted. Ooh, shiny.

Even though I haven't drawn back the grill on this little confessional for the past 4 months it's not as if I haven't had things to 'fess up about. There have been highs, there have been lows, and there have been shitty times. (Literally, along the way I either developed some sort of virulent bug or Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and although it has eased off just recently touchwood I was suffering there for about 5 weeks. All tests so far have been inconclusive.)

And bless me for I have also sinned. Yeah Gods I give thanks for the sinning, because I've met some truly gorgeous guys over the past 4 months. And not just in body, but also in spirit. There has been crushes, there has been friendly hook-ups and there has been lots of flirting. At 46, who knew? Turns out there's life in the old girl yet.

Facelift

I thought I might take advantage of Blogger's new design features, and give things a little bit of a facelift around here. A freshen up. Maybe a brow lift and some lip plumping.

It's actually winter here rather than autumn, but I'm finding it hard to let go of the golden ginkos. Anyhoo, I hope you like the new(ish) look!

Happy Birthday

...little blog of mine.



For today you are 6!

(Which means it's also time for a birthday shout out for my brother-from-another-mother Michael Guy!)

13 Inches Of Joy

I've been a bad blogger lately. Largely absent. Patchy in my performance. (Frankly, at this rate it's like I'm turning into one of any number of bad ex boyfriends.) However, recent events should change that!

Meet my precious. A new 13" MacBook Pro. So not only am I back in MacLand (after the older MacBook I was given by a friend packed it in), but most importantly when I get home from work I can pour a wine, plant my arse on the sofa, flick on the tv and surf The Interweb. This is modern living. It also means that the iPod Nano I scored as a very generous gift at Christmas time is doing what an iPod should.

Have you heard of these "iPod" things? Trust me, in my estimation they might just catch on.

I still have the desktop pc that James no longer required and very kindly gave me, but having the laptop facilitates Wine Time and Web Surfing without the need to miss my stories. It's an embarrassment of riches.

Don't Ever Say Never

So. I'm back!

When I said that I might return I wasn't expecting to come back so quickly, if ever, truly. I suspected I would miss blogging though, but I underestimated just how much I would miss it over these past 2 months.

Aside from missing connecting with you all, from a functional point of view it's hard to suddenly stop doing something you've done pretty much daily for around five and a half years. Cold turkey is a bitch! Almost every day I find myself stumbling on something that I think "oh, I must blog about this... crap!"

So I return, cap in hand, having cried "wolf!" only once.

The End, My Friend

Sadly, I feel the time has come to draw a close to this little old blog of mine.

My biggest problems these days are time and energy. Gone are the heady days of being able to web surf and blog at work, when what my employers lost in productivity my blog gained in amusing or interesting links found, or thoughts and experiences recorded. Now when I get home of an evening I'm tired, especially since I started working 2 part-time jobs, 6 days a week.

The death, or at least (I'm praying) long-term coma, of the lovely laptop I was using and switching back to a desktop pc has also meant that web surfing and blogging have to be done in the cloistered confines of my bedroom. Not being able to web surf while I'm sitting in front of the tv has meant that many nights I'd really rather just watch the tv. In fact I've even been hanging out less on the sites I used to frequent, like Flickr and Ravelry. Definite signs that I'm spending less time on the computer.

What a fantastic experience these past five plus years have been! Nearly 180,000 visits! Many hundreds (thousands?) of comments! In the heyday of this blog I used to hang out in the comments all the time, so much so that at times it was almost like a chat room. Ah, good times. How lively and what energy this blog had then.

I thought about taking a break, but in truth every time I have taken little breaks in the past I have come back with only a short term burst of energy. This blog loses momentum, and readers, each time also. I'd rather not go out with a whimper and of late I've been hearing the sound of faint whimpering. Reading back what I've written just now I'm struck at how much I've used the word 'energy', and I guess that is the key.

Thank you all for the good times. In over 5 years the bad times have been amazingly few, nothing harsher than the occasional and rare rude comment. I know I will miss not having a forum to write in, because I have discovered how much I love the art of writing. Sharing my photos has been another joy, and your encouraging comments have always really touched me. Maybe these will things will draw me back to this blog sometime in the future, but I don't know if they will and so I don't think it wise to make any promises. In the meantime I'll be leaving everything here, feel free to poke around and maybe one day in the future we can meet back here.

Love,
Andrew... the other one.

Back On The Intertubes

Thanks to the kindness of James O'Brien I have kissed goodbye to the tribulations of internet cafes, with their dirty keyboards, sniffling patrons and interesting browser caches. (Seriously, next time you use an internet cafe check the browser history. Fascinating.) James had an old Linux based pc which was surplus to requirements, so while I'm waiting to get the laptop fixed I'm able to be back on the air.

Now all I have to do is regain the blog readership I had back when I was posting regularly and not whining about a) losing my job or b) having a dead computer...

Short Break

I decided to download and install the latest software updates and security patches yesterday for the Mac laptop I'm using, in part to see if it helps the problem I'm having with it crashing. It seems I've overwhelmed it. It now freezes part way through start-up and won't go any further. PC users are used to the Blue Screen Of Death, but I have to tell you the subtle grey on grey Mac screen with the Apple logo replaced by a circle with a slash through it (like a No Smoking logo) and the little endless spinning doohickey is just as dispiriting. Technology hates me. So I'm off to the grand Apple store today to see what they can do, and more importantly if they will do it for free.

In the meantime it's back to internet cafes (you should see the keyboard I'm using... ugh), and so my recently sporadic updates are likely to be even more sporadic in the short term. Hang in there gentle reader, as soon as I bend technology to my will, instead of the other way around, I'll be back!

Absenteeism

Before I start this blog post I just have to share this, I'm watching one of the morning music video shows and they are doing 'one hit wonders'. You know what, Vanilla Ice rhymed "lyrical poet" with "and I know it", which is a) kind of ironic in its lack of lyrical poetic-ness and b) awesome!

Anyhoo, hey everybody! Sorry for the unexpected blog hiatus. Rumours of my demise are vastly overexaggerated. In truth I had a phenomenally busy start to the week (month end processing at work), which meant I staggered home brain dead and barely able to string words together on Monday and Tuesday. Then Wednesday, Thursday and last night I was out until fairly late. A latter half of the week that involved lots of work (still), but balanced with beers, all-male jelly wrestling (hello, awesome), catching up with friends and sushi. Oh, and I scored a big bag of yummy Alpaca yarn last night from my friend Frances who sees an absence of crochet in her future, and is therefore de-stashing!

Video show update, this is playing now:

One hit wonder shows are almost exclusively the domain of the white boy rapper! Oh, and aside from the word "informer" this is thoroughly impenetrable to me. I guess I'll never know if having your "boom-boom down" is a good thing, or not. Factoid: Snow's one and only album was called "12 Inches Of Snow". Ick.

But last night wasn't a late one as I seem to have scored myself a streaming head cold in the process. Ugh. There was a period of about 4 days where the last vestiges of the consumptive hacking was gone, gone!, but now it's a world of Butter Menthols, tissues with aloe vera* and a fresh round of... consumptive hacking. Yay me. Just a cold though, no swine flu, so put away your face masks scaredy cats.



So a quiet weekend is on the cards. I have a dinner invitation tonight (which I might not make at this stage), and I might go to knitting at the pub tomorrow afternoon if this cold is a bit better, but aside from copious amounts of internet porn that's about it. Now be a sweetie and fetch mummy a Butter Menthol, there's a pet.

* At first I had a bit of an Squick Factor about greasy feeling tissues, but the no nose redness results overcame my misgivings. That's a big plus for aloe vera right there.

Happy Easter!

Just popping in to wish everyone a Happy Easter.


As I mentioned yesterday I'm heading 'off the grid' until Tuesday, going bush with the botanist. Yikes, no Internets for 5 days! (Xtube's traffic stats will be down, and that's no joke.)

Have a fun Easter, see you on Tuesday!

"What I Did On My Blog Holiday" by The Other Andrew, Age 44 & 1/2

Hey ho everybody. Well that wasn't long! Is it a bit naff to dramatically announce a break (back of hand to brow) and then come back after only a week? I suspect it is a bit, but if this wasn't attention seeking then it wouldn't be blogging, right?

In reality I feel a little better, especially in the past day or so. Even as recently as Thursday I still felt congested, but yesterday and today I feel much better. Still hacking enough to get a free seat (and an exclusion zone) on the bus... but if that's what it takes to get a seat, so be it. Chalk that up to a bonus. 5 weeks in and I am ready for this to be done with, so cross everything that it's really going this time!

I got a little cabin crazy. Aside from going to work, and going to dinner a few nights ago, I've hardly left the house. My couch has a deeper ass shaped dent in it now than it ever had, and given that I'm a comfort eater (sigh) it's a marginally bigger dent too!

Anyhoo, that past week in a nutshell. A week in which I...

Survived:

• A power blackout. Thankfully it was the night after Earth Hour, so you know, thanks to lacksadaisical housekeeping the candles weren't even put away yet! Score.
  
• A burnt thumb (damn your eyes homemade pizza!).
  
• That cranky, irritable time of the month we in the accounting trade refer to as 'month end'.

Enjoyed:

• Recovery.
  
• This song full of dancing Harajuku-jin. The higher the hair, the closer to Elvis!
  
• Actually, maybe it's a hair thing, because I'm digging this song by La Roux... and one thing she has got is a fab head of hair.
  
• A foray into steampunk fiction (although I do agree with this reviewer that the characterisations are somewhat thin).
  
• A fantastic night out with James, Tom, Colin and Judy at a special "Colonial Gastronomy: Spice" dinner at Elizabeth Bay House. 19th c dishes in one of Sydney's best preserved colonial homes, with a fantastic demonstration and talk about the colonial spice trade, good company and lashings of wine. Because in this life my motto* is "pics, or it didn't happen" of course there are photos (and as always, click them to enbiggen):

Did not enjoy:

• Not blogging! Oh sure it was nice to not feel the pressure to come up with blog posts, but the flip side is that I'd find myself thinking I'm SO blogging this!... oh, crap.

(* Or one of them. Along with "never eat anything bigger than your head", "it's not cruel if it's funny", etc.)

Bye Bye, For Now

Time for a little blogging break for me.

The past 4 weeks or so have been especially tough, battling undiagnosed pneumonia (which seems to be hinting at making an unwelcome return in the past few days) whilst trying to continue working through it the whole time. I can't blog, or even web surf except for a few 'safe' sites, at work and when I get home in the evening I've often found myself lacking energy, inspiration and especially the humour to put together something entertaining. Well, most of the time anyway. The past month hasn't been without its bright spots, but much of the time though I haven't felt like I had a voice with much to say, unless it was to talk about feeling run down, tired and uninspired.

One harsh reality of blogging, content providing so to speak, is that when things get tough going, when providing content that people find engaging or entertaining gets hard, is when you need the support of your audience the most. But it's the time when a few dull posts, or some dour entries about being sick, tend to drive people away. It's hard not to get disappointed when you see your stats and comments dropping.

So time for a break. Time to not spend my evenings on the computer, after having stared at one at work all day. Time to refresh, regroup and especially recover.

I will be back. I'm just a couple of months short of my 5th anniversary of being The Other Andrew. 5 years! It's been too big a chunk of my life to walk away from easily, and except for this low spot (and a few previous dips over the years) it's been 5 years of fun and friendship.

Once I'm feeling refreshed and like I have something to say I'll be back! I'm sure it won't be long.

Dinner With The Diva

After reading each other's blogs for a little while, and originally meeting online through Thom's blog Fabulon, last night I caught up with US blogger "La Diva Laura" (of La Diva Cucina) right here in Newtown. OMG, so much fun! Laura livid in Sydney for quite a few years, so this trip has been a homecoming of sorts. I knew from reading her blog that Laura would be warm and funny, as were her friends, and we clicked straight away.

Laura.


Laura & Fiona. Fiona had the best glitter eyeliner on. Covet!


Libations! A very nommy "Asian Tiger Caprioska" - lime, passionfruit, lychee, sugar syrup, vodka, heaven.


Laura & Amanda. Good times!


"Just James" starring James O'Brien.


On the way out of the hotel we passed this cute boy busking. So nice to see the young people taking care in their appearance.

Tonight's The Night

149,996 visitors... as I write this.

Are You The One?

Hey, sometime in the next day or so this little blog will have its 150,000th visitor! Who will it be? Will it be you?

I'm so stoked that anybody reads this that really it could be 150 and I'd feel like I achieved something. Thanks so much for stopping by everyone!

Buggy

I'm labouring under a tummy bug at the moment, after waking up in the early hours of this morning with sweats, stomach cramps and... well... that's enough detail. Anyhoo, posts will sparse in the short term. Be back soon!

Pretty In Pink

Time for a new header, something bright and summery. I took this pic of the Azalea 'Pink Lace' a while back, and I hope it brightens your day like it does mine!