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Day 4 saw finer weather. In the morning we attended Lifesource Church and in the afternoon visited Lake Wyangan, the Hermit’s Cave site (again) and the memorial to Donald Mackay in the main street of Griffith.

Day 3 was a little wet so we kept our travels local. The primary visit was to the Hermit’s Cave just outside of Griffith. It was occupied by a man named Valerio Ricetti for over 20 years from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. The entire complex extended over a kilometre.

Day 2 saw us travel from Goulburn to Griffith via Cootamundra, Temora and Barellan.

Cootamundra is famous as the birthplace of Don Bradman; Temora for Paleface Adios; and Barellan (though born in Griffith) as the childhood home of Evonne Goolagong Cawley.

Cootamundra and Temora were quite attractive places. We didn’t stop in Barellan. Lunch was in Ardlethan.

So begins our photoblog¹ of our recent holiday to the Riverina and Central West region of NSW.

Day 1 was a stopover in Goulburn on the way to Riverina. My only photos were from my phone and are of the Victoria Park Rose Garden:

In my most recent pages read post (February) I mentioned that I had completed reading Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. I also mentioned that I had attempted to read one of Russell’s books around 40 years ago but had given up part way through the Introduction. I now suspect¹ that that book obtained in the the 1980s was An Outline of Philosophy which was published in the USA simply as Philosophy.

Introductory books

Having now successfully completed reading one of Bertrand Russell’s books (!) I thought it time to consider some other philosophy works. I came across a gentleman on YouTube by the name of Jared Henderson who has a video called 7 Philosophy Books for Beginners. His seven recommendations are:

My total pages read for February was 834.

I finished Daryl Thompson’s Break Through and David Saxton’s God’s Battle Plan for the Mind. I re-read The Kremlin Conspiracy which I first read around six or seven years ago. I resumed reading Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories.

I also read Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. I had attempted to read one of Russell’s books around 40 years ago. I can recall having almost no idea what he was talking about in the introduction so I gave up. This time around was a little different. I could see what Russell was saying, but whilst I only understood perhaps half of it, I persevered. I have now been exposed to some of the terminology and thrust of philosophy and have a much better idea of what I don’t know (which is more than plenty).

Last week I made the decision to switch Linux distributions for my primary and secondary notebooks.

My primary notebook had been running Devuan since October 2023, and my secondary notebook had been running Debian stable since July 2024.

What prompted my decision was something I’d read the week before that Debian had decided to cease posting on X because X doesn’t reflect Debian’s ‘shared values’.

Pardon me, but I would think that a community or project (as they describe themselves) responsible for developing, maintaining and promoting an operating system would want to promulgate their ideas and communiqués on as broad a range of platforms as possible and to garner input from an equally broad base of developers and users.

As we came into the new year I gave some thought to changing the CMS behind this site from Hugo (its current static website generator) to something else. I’ve been on Hugo continuously now for 4 1/2 years. The alternatives I considered were WordPress, Joomla and Grav.

I migrated the site (sans photos) to each of those three platforms and tried my hand at changing themes and managing general site behaviour.

My total pages read for January was 299. It included continuing my Christmas presents: The World of Croquet by John McCullogh and Stephen Mulliner; and David Saxton’s God’s Battle Plan for the Mind.

I also started another book in early January, Break Through which led me to pause my reading of the first two mentioned above. Once I finish reading Break Through (probably in early Feb), I’ll resume the others.

My total for December was pretty low, but better than November! December was 320 pages.

Firstly, I finished volume 1 of Iain Murray’s biography of Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, 1899-1939.

I started a couple of other books but have put them aside for an undetermined period of time. The first is Sophie Hannah’s Closed Casket and the second is Tim Muldoon’s Ignatian Workout that I mentioned here.

I also started reading two books that were Christmas presents: The World of Croquet by John McCullogh and Stephen Mulliner; and David Saxton’s God’s Battle Plan for the Mind.