August III

It is Dad’s birthday today and like everyone who has lost a parent these times make you miss them. It gets easier most of the time although not always. I can see his rugged face and baldy head. I can see him on a hike in the bush with his boys. He was being part carried after he sprained his ankle. We tormented him and laughed all the way back through the ten kilometres of Govett’s Leap trail. The camaraderie that grew out of helping him to get back made the trip into a joyful affair and even when he was fighting his way up the climbs he was smiling!
The CB radio has still not made a peep. It is possible but unlikely I bought a broken one. It is also possible that this apartment is so deep in the gully that I will never get a signal unless I put a big investment into getting an antenna up very high. With the decline in use of these frequency radios I cannot see that as an option. Spending more before I know if it will ever work is not realistic. I did get my hands on a steel whip that doesn’t require a ground plane. Last night I went out and earthed the rain gutter to a pipe so the connection will be effective. The new antenna will be added to that guttering if I can work out how to get up to. Nobody around here has a ladder nor do they have anywhere to keep a ladder. My last one was an old wood one that rotted away so I am due for a replacement. Even that is complicated. Where can a ladder go in a tiny apartment? The most useful length for me here seems to be a 1.8m which folds out to 3.6m. It looks as though I will have to build a frame along the ceiling and hang it in the bedroom. It will be a while before I can peel any the cash to think about it. The antenna on the gutter is an experiment. I have no idea if it will fix the problem. Chances are that there is a metal under tile insulation on the roof that can act as a ground plane and it will all work. It will be months before I can get up there to set it up.
A lot of time is spent on video games at the moment and I have ended up with a few. There is entire X-Com series including the open version for Win 7. Most of those games are in the old Dos box. They were from something like 1998. The Crysis series of games is considered a little long in the tooth but I have had a lot of fun with them. All apart from the one for multiplayer. I tend to avoid that. There is Skyrim which was voted Game of all time by the Good Game program. To be honest I have enough of all the time being wasted on games. I try very hard to get set up to make drawings and paintings but am still being overwhelmed by the difficulty in creating a practical workspace in here.
Mostly my sleeping is in the first half of the day. That is usually a sign of some anxiety or something. You would think I would be able to just tell if I have strong emotions controlling my days but there is so much emotion and depression that I have had to learn to look for signals to decipher which is affecting behaviour.
There is a building over towards Berkeley Vale that has me fascinated. I can see that it is begging to be represented in a drawing of some kind. The work needs to be on paper I think with pencil, ink and acrylic paint. I cannot get a firm image of what to attempt but the place requires some photographic studies made of it in different light so I will try and get over there and get that far into the work.