Happy New Year & A Funny Little Drawing

Happy New Year, dear readers. I trust you are enjoying the break as much as I am. In lieu of the written word, I submit to you this little sketch I did today in the company of good friend, artist and art therapist Anita Bragge. I can't vouch for the quality, but I did find it therapeutic.

New kit

I am a great fan of Evernote, which is a catch-all database that syncs effortlessly across multiple platforms and allows a hoarder of random and eclectic things like myself to collect words, images, web pages, receipts - in fact anything - in one place. Evernote is a modern-day commonplacing tool,  and I use it for all of my housekeeping and administrative needs, reserving more content-based commonplacing for my DevonThink Pro database. (The two tools do pretty much the same thing, but DevonThink is more hard-core in terms of its searching algorithms.)

So Evernote has teamed up with Livescribe to make the ultimate gadget - the wireless smart pen, which allows for notes taken in Livescribe notebooks, and sound recordings made by the pen, to be digitised automatically over WiFi, straight into my Evernote database. I love these pens. I have two previous models, neither of which are WiFi enabled, and I am looking forward to receiving the new model. 

There is something about these pens that engages my creativity - perhaps it is just the gadget lover in me, but I find a tool like this indispensable once I ease it into my workflow. There are a wide range of notebooks available, and the pens are good for drawing as well as writing. The best thing is that Evernote makes the hand written notes searchable, provided - of course - that your handwriting is relatively neat. (When I have a good hand-writing day, this seems to work really well.)

You can pick up a new Sky WiFi pen at www.smartpen.com.au, they are the local distributor. Good service too. And no, this is not a paid endorsement - I just love the kit.

Thinking of you, thinking of change

Dear, gentle reader - I have been thinking of you, but not blogging, in the last several weeks. Truth be told, I have not been writing much at all, in cafés or elsewhere. The writing life continues to beckon, although some months it seems to be off in the hazy distance, and not just around the corner.

Now, as some of you may know, I am a thoroughly urban creature at this point in my life cycle. I live on LIttle Collins Street in the City of Melbourne, right downtown, in as urban a location as one can obtain in modern Australia. From this base come my many forays into the cafés and other haunts I call my own around the city. This, and a 15 minute tram commute to the studio, keeps me relatively happy in the lifestyle stakes.

However, I am contemplating the possibility of a change. Once upon a time, before I moved to the City, I lived in the town of Woodend, near the Macedon Ranges northwest of Melbourne. I had a half acre block of land, a garden I took for granted and a large steel shed. At the time I was commuting five days a week into the city, a distance of 75 kilometres one way.

As an experiment, it both failed and succeeded - I  loved being in the country on weekends, and in principle, but the commute killed me. Five days a week was just too much, and by the end of my year out there I was a wreck.

In the future - say, about a year or so from now - I may be in a position to re-stage my country experiment with a move to Castlemaine or Bendigo, with the possibility of a two-day-a-week commute to Melbourne, and the balance of time spent in our practice's Bendigo office. Of course, for this to occur, the stars will need to align, but I am cautiously optimistic. 

Real estate in Bendigo and Castlemaine is very affordable compared to Melbourne, and my dog and cat would no doubt thank me for the acquisition of a garden. I may even be able to move into a house with a studio or shed in the garden, my own writing retreat amongst the flowers and trees.  

At any rate, this is only speculation at this time, but it is nice speculation. I think my temperament is more suited to a Victorian house circa 1860 than to an apartment circa 1927 via a 1999 renovation. So at the moment, I am dreaming of an interesting future, one with a room dedicated to my library and a writing retreat at the bottom of the garden. Who knows whether it will come to pass - but at least I can dream.