DJ Mischiff. He's where he needs to be

Yesterday I was down at the docks. Ever since I was a child I love looking at naval boats. Navy ships just do it from me and I can spend hours looking at them.

So yesterday was a fantastic day for me. It was so good because they opened up the ships to the public and we could get on and spend as much time as we wanted looking through the ship.

They showed you everything. Well not everything, they didn’t show us some of the weapons and they didn’t show us some of the crew accommodation but we got to have a look all round the boat anyway. I even got to go on the bridge and stand where the captain stands and look at what the captain sees.

We got to look at the helicopters, because one of the ships had a helicopter landing pad on the ship. It wasn’t an aircraft carrier or anything like that but even so they were able to land helicopters on the ship. I suppose a helicopter is useful for ferrying people to land and back or maybe for searching for people who are lost in the water. I don’t know, but I love seeing the helicopters.

It was a bit of a nuisance though because there were huge lines on the dock of people all wanting to get onto the ships just like me. There must have been 1000 people there all waiting patiently, and I must have spent as much time in the line as I did on the ships.

There were 3 ships open, different types of ships, and I went on all 3. But each time I went on a different ship I had to wait in line again.

But it was worth it. It was a whole day spent looking at the Navy ships but it was a day well spent. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do with a weekend.

They told me that there are some more ships coming back here in a few months and I’m prepared to stand in line for hours again just to see those ones as well. I hope they’re different to the ones I saw today. (more…)

I know I have to keep fit. I’m not as young as I used to be and so as I get older I just know I have to do something to keep fit. For me it’s riding a bike.

I love to ride, I really do, I just love it.

It wasn’t that long ago  that I found cycling and I’m glad I did. I’m not that young and I had to do something serious to keep fit, I wasn’t the fittest person in the world actually.

Swimming never did it for  me. I mean swimming is boring, really really boring. You just swim up and down, up and  down, up and down. For hours and hours and hours. Actually it only feels like hours and hours, I rarely swim for more than about 30 minutes, that’s about as long as I can stand the boredom.

Underneath you there’s this black line and you just watch that black line, there’s  nothing else to do other than swim. It’s really boring and I just couldn’t keep at it for long.

So trying swimming was a flop for me. It never worked at all. And to get fit you really need to do it at least 4 or 5 times a week if not 6 times a week and if you’re bored and every minute feels like an hour I  just can’t do it at all.

And you’ve  got to do about a half hour at least. Less than  that and its a bit of a waste of time.

So once I knew that I  hated swimming I had to find something else to do to keep fit. I also didn’t like running, so that was out. But one  day I thought about cycling.

Teh first problem. I didn’t have a bike. So I wasn’t going  to be cycling too far with no bike to do it on. Well actually I did have a bike but it’s really really very old and all rusted, so no use. So I had to get hold of a bike and and they aren’t  cheap to buy.

There’s a cycling club nearby me so I went and talked to them and found out that they  were starting a new group of riders and so I figured that the universe was telling me that it was time to buy a new bike, that it was the perfect opportunity for me.

And right  from the start once I joined the new cycling group I enjoyed riding. They varied their rides  and did longer and shorter ones as well. But I did find that the pace of riding was not  right for me, a bit too slow.

I’m not as young as I would like but even so I would have  preferred that they rode a little bit faster, it was too slow for me and so I began riding on my own to try  and get a better workout for fitness.

So after a  while riding on my own I found that it was nice to ride really hard but a little lonely. I was getting a decent workout but on my own. So I made some  enquiries and found out that there was a group that rode out of town a few days a week that used  road bikes and rode hard. It went on Sundays and I decided to go  along.

Problem was I didn’t have the right bike for it. I had a hybrid bike and these guys rode hard, on road bikes, and they told me that there was no way I could keep up on a  hybrid. So I bit the bullet and bought a good reliable road bike, and now I ride with them. Its really great. A hard ride and I have to work very hard to keep up with them. Some of those guys are pretty good  riders. Sometimes like this morning I get dropped and can’t keep up as I would like.

But unlike the recreational group the Sunday riding gives me a hard workout and that’s what  I wanted, I’m not complaining. (more…)

I love summer and I love nice days. A great day just makes you feel so good, and today is a great day/

Don’t you love days like today, I certainly do. It’s just as I like it. Warm but not really hot, (I hate heat). And there’s no wind and it’s just ideal for me. I love it like today. I’ve been out in the car today and I’ve been feeling really good. I drive along looking at the stunning views and I love it here where I live. I see cows walking around and happy people.

But whilst I’ve decided that it’s a great day you may not quite think so. Maybe in fact you’ve decided that it’s a really terrible day. Perhaps you’ve had something nasty happen to you today, maybe something that really pissed you off. Your day just isn’t working out so that’s how it’s going for you, but for me it’s great.

But of course it’s different for you than it is for me. It’s pretty subjective and that’s why it may be wonderful for me and not so good for you. My day is the best ever, yours is the worst ever.

What is it that makes it a great day for me but is really not the best day for somebody else? Why is it that I see the beautiful sunshine and the cows in the fields and the happy people? Why is it that you may not see these, or if you do they aren’t so beautiful?

Maybe you see terrible things in the day, all bad, all sad. The best day for me is maybe the worst day for you.

Isn’t it just all in our heads, yours and mine? Isn’t it our mind that tells us it’s a great day or a bad day, isn’t it irrespective of how the day really is? We look at our experience of the day through our minds and we see if from that perspective, you and I.

I even think it’s possible that if you and I have the exact same experience of the day we will see it totally differntly. You come for a drive with me and we see different things, the both of us. You see the same cows, the same sun, the same people, but maybe you don’t even see them like me.

Maybe you see something totally different. You mind registers the same things as mine,  but it filters it all through the experiences you’ve had in the past and mine does that too, and that makes our experience of the day  different. (more…)

I told one of my friends about my website and he asked me why I write this rubbish. And I call him a friend! I suppose at least he’s being honest.

I write this because I like writing. I don’t need readers.

Writing is a lot of fun. I love to write and I’ve done it for a long time before now. And I still love to write now just as much. I remember when I was young and at primary school I wrote so many short stories, I suspect my teacher got really bored reading all my stories. And she was amazed that I could write quite so much when I was so young. But I’m not sure that I’m any good at it, I just like it and so I keep at it.

I did a university degree when I got a bit older, but it didn’t include any writing, though I wish now it had. If I was young again and going to university all over again I’d think about doing some real study all about the art of writing. I studied what I needed to to get a job, I just wish I’d studied what I liked to do. That’s’ writing

I have no idea if I would ever have become good enough at writing to make a living at it, probably not, but I would have liked to have tried. You never know unless you try, and I wish I had tried more. I would have given it a really good go, and would have made a difference or maybe not.

I’m convinced writing is a real skill that can be learned. Of course not everyone can learn writing because there’s other important things as well. For example I think it’s essential that you love to write. That’s like anything. If you don’t love it you’re unlikely to keep at it long enough to learn the skill. It needs to be your life. It’s mine.

If you love it then you’ll take the time you need to take to develop it till you’re really good at it. It will take time but I’m sure it can be done. You need to work on it every day but if you love doing it then that’s no problem. That’s what I plan to do. If I get around to it.

So I have this website and this is where I’m going to practice my writing as much as I can. I have it here on the internet as it’s a convenient place to have it, but I really don’t intend for lots of people to come along and read it really, I just like to see it here. (more…)

If you live in the country then it’s essential to have your own animals and I’ve got mine, cows. And I love cows.

Cows are really great. I really like my cows, they’re so gentle. Apart from bulls you can’t really find a nasty cow. Mine are like my pets, the kids get to pat them and the kids like to take their hay out and feed them hay, and if you’re feeding them then they’re happy to be patted a bit. They don’t quite sit there are like being patted, but if you’re feeding them then they don’t mind.

The best time to pat cows is when you feed them hay. They just love their hay, and when the grass growth is getting slow because winter is coming you need to supplement their feed with hay or something else. I have hay to feed them.

Now that means of course  that youre committed to feeding your cows their hay every single day. Once there’s no feed out there then they need hay each day without fail. So you can’t just go away for a few days and leave them to starve. So youre committed to cow feeding.

I like to feed my cows, but I like holidays too so when I go away I have to make some other arrangements. These are my arrangements for feeding my cows.

I have various fields each fenced off. 3 in total. So when I have lots of grass in there I lock one up and leave it with the long grass in it. Then when I go away I open the gate to that one and the cows can discover that the gate is open and head in there for their feed.

And the cows aren’t silly at all, they know that there’s grass in there somewhere when they look through the gate so once if I’ve opened the gate they’re right in there as fast as they can.

And then I come back from the holiday and my cows are all happy. And I take them out of the grass paddock and put them back in the main paddock again.

I feed them immediately after my own breakfast. They know exactly when I am going to feed them and when I come out to feed theyre sitting right in front of the shed with the hay in it waiting for their breakfast. I usually give them a couple of bales of hay. Sometimes when I feel generous I give themmore bales.

In fact this morning I gave them 3 bales. But it’s getting warmer now and the grass is beginning to grow fastaer and that’s good because I don’t have a lot of hay left. But that’s ok because I’ve got more grass coming so I’ve got hay coming too. (more…)

I love fishing. And I have a small boat.

Just a small aluminum boat, that’s about 11 or 12 feet long. Its got its own trailer so I can tow it with the car, I don’t need to put it on the roof of the car luckily.

I took my family away with it last week. It was school holidays so everyone had the time off for a holiday. We decided that we didn’t want to stay at home for the whole holidays so we decided to get away for a few days and have a holiday. 4 days actually, which was really nice. It was great though it was raining and there was a really strong wind when we left, though that all went away after a few hours which was nice. And then the sun came out and it was really pleasant.

It was a really nice place to go too. There was so many things for the kids to do there it wasn’t funny. Kids need so much to do nowadays. So if you’ve got bored kids there’s real problems, if you’ve got bored kids then they hassle you constantly for something to do and it gets annoying.

Bored kids can be the worst thing you can do for your holidays. They get grumpy and unhappy and keep hassling you all the time to come out and play with them, when all you want to do is to sit and relax and read a book or 3. Kids hassling you doesn’t make for a great holiday.

But there were no bored kids last weekend. There was this plastic thing there that they could jump on and they spent hours jumping up and down on that and they loved that. How they can be so entertained with something so simple as that is beyond me but they loved it, so we were happy.

And there was a games room there and they played in there for hours and hours. There was this huge television and every night there was a kids movie for them to watch there.

And there was also an outdoor swimming pool so they played in that for hours too, and it wasn’t so cold. They both love swimming in the pool.

But I mentioned our boat. I took the boat along because there was a river there and I could take them out on the river. And it’s useful for taking other stuff along too. The kids bikes won’t fit in the car but no problem getting them in the boat. (more…)

I live in the country and I’m proud to tell you that. It’s great.

I just love living in the country and I’m happy to say so to anyone.

But one of the good things about the country is the birds. (I just love seeing birds).

Out here there are just so many birds, just so many. Hundreds of birds. It must be because they like the trees around here because theres always birds and they sit in the branches of the trees and eat the pods with  their beaks and hold them in their claws and eat them one by one. Birds are good to watch.

Although I do like birds they do make a mess of my trees unfortunately. When they break off a small branch to eat the pods they drop them on the ground and it looks like a battlefield under my trees, bits of my branches everywhere. Just everywhere.

Mainly theyre parrots. They very colorful that I just love to sit and watch them sit in my trees. I even get them sitting on my veranda, sometimes if Im lucky I get them sitting right on the window. And theyre so colorful that I just sit still so I dont scare them away and watch them. And they don’t mind at all.

Now of course youve got to balance the damage the birds do with the benefits of having them around the house. And as I like to have the birds here I just have to put up with the tree damage. You have no choice.

Its got to be so much better out here than in the city. I’ll bet theres no birds like that in the city, none. Too many people to scare them off and no trees for them to eat. So they’re all out here. (more…)

Well it’s all over, the weekend is finished and it was great, though I’m sad it’s done. It was just fantastic to get away, I need to get away more often, it’s good for the mind. But it was a little hard starting quite so early. Too early for me I have to say.

6 in the morning is too early for me. Way too early. At 6 am even the birds aren’t even awake. It is completely dark and feels like it’s about 2am. It’s really hard to get out of bed at that time, though when you’ve got a weekend to go to it’s still worth getting up. Something to get up for, at least it was for me.

I had to get going on time to meet the other people who were coming, so I picked up my friend. But it took quite a while to get all his gear packed into the car, we were stuffing things into every space we could find in the trunk.

And what can you do about weather? It was raining. And for the last few months it’s been so great, warm good weather, just my luck that when I go away it’s raining. Really annoying to get bad weather.

We had to drive to the place where we were camping for the night. It was raining all the way but by the time we got there and get out it had pretty much stopped raining. That was good as I don’t like putting a tent up in the rain, especially heavy rain, and everything gets wet trying to get it all into the tent. And you sleeping bag gets all wet.

And the speed limits were all down too so we had to go slower than we should have.

But it was a good weekend. I caught a couple of fish there so I had fish to eat for dinner. What a treat. I’m looking forward to the next one, and I hope it isn’t raining this time.

I think it’s time for me to go away again, and I’m really looking forward to time off work.

Yeah, I get to go away this very weekend. I’m really looking forward to it heaps.

And this time I can’t go with my family because they have some sort of concert to go to that I’m not particularly fond of so they can’t come and I get to go with a friend of mine.

We are planning to camp in a tent. I have a great tent, canvas, water proof, big enough to be really comfortable and its forecast to rain, so I may need all of that. I hope it doesn’t rain though  because rain isn’t what you need when you go camping.

We leave this Friday morning at about 6 am. We are meeting some other people at 9 and it will take about 4 hours to get where we’re meeting. I don’t really like getting up early in the morning, good thing I don’t have to too often.

But it’s not that much of a problem getting up early if you’ve got a holiday to get up for. And I’m looking forward to it so it’s not that much of a problem for me really.

But my car is quite old, very old actually, I really hope the car makes it there ok. It’s not that it’s breaking down or anything, in fact it goes pretty  well eally. But it is old and I just keep my fingers crossed that it makes it and gets back home.

Saturday is going to be a brilliant day. Nothing planned at all, just a day to do nothing if you want. I plan to take fishing gear along and do some fishing and catch a fish, in fact I bought a new fishing rod this morning. Sadly I broke my old fishing rod a while ago, which was such a shame.

I made that fishing rod myself when I was about 25. I bought the blank and I also bought the whipping and the rod varnish and all the other bits and pieces that go into making a good fishing rod. I was pretty pleased with myself that I managed to make my own fishing rod, that’s cool.

Ive used that fishing rod for a lot of years now, and it was a sad day when I broke it and I don’t even know how I broke it, I was just walking through the trees and suddenly I noticed the tip of the rod broken off hanging in its own on the line. Boy was I annoyed.

It wasn’t worth a lot of money but it was to me. I mean I made that rod all by myself. And I broke it. So today I went back to the fishing shop and bought a rod, but it’s not as good as mine. (more…)