It seems like yesterday I was playing cowboys & indians with a prince and heir to a throne, won the equivalent of $5000 from his father the King of the country on a fishing bet, and had left Vienna for the island of Bahrain that Sheikh Isa was the total king, ruler, and owner of. And today is - an anniversary.
But it's actually not of the day we arrived on Bahrain. That date is lost to me as I was four or five years old at that time and dates meant little to me. Being in Arabia and meeting kings and princes and Persian Gulf pirates on the other hand - those were memories I kept alive...
It actually IS the anniversary of the day that our family arrived in Australia, making landfall in Fremantle almost sixty years ago.
Land Ahoy!
We arrived on a liner September 5th, not saying which year. I know because I searched our family name on historical manifests and px lists. Over the next two years we progressed from a Wheatbelt pre-electric homestead to a "normal" 60s homestead (Dad as farm hand) to a real outback homestead all the way north to near Port Hedland and from there to a little just-closed mining town.
A few years after we all left, they bulldozed the town. True story.
And almost forty years after that fabled Freo landfall, I started one of the first of my blogs here on Blogger (Blogspot) and the stable's grown over the next twenty years to the present and now and numbers nine blogs on specific different topics, including this one, my memoirs. (That I'm making at the urging of my beautiful wife with whom I've just had our eleventh wedding anniversary and our twelfth Facebook "wedding" anniversary a mere week or two ago.)
So I'll keep it short for the first post. I'm Ted, I was born in Vienna and started school at a British convent-operated school on Bahrain, transferred to a string of Australian schools as we moved around, followed (mostly) my dreams as far as working life was concerned, and was pensioned off with disability at 51 years of age and have been doing more in this "retirement" than I'd ever had to do in employment - and loving it.
I've done electronics, radio and digital communications, gardening, homesteading, IT as a system and network administrator and later as a freelancer, learned welding and carpentry and sheet metal work, leathercraft, jewellery and small sculptures, plastic recycling and some experimentation into metal, textile, and foodstuff recycling, and of course my happy place, writing and communicating.
I'm currently building a workshop where I can dabble in most of those, and hoping to have a load of projects rolling along to write up by 2024. (I have a few wrapped up and written up already on my other blogs but I'll leave the listing of those for a future article here , then you can see them all for yourself and have a browse around. I know it sounds like some of it would be eye-glazing but it's not usually presented like some research paper but rather as my experiences along the way. Oh and details for those who want to repeat those experiments.)
It's not usually about "I just felt like making this so here it si" but more a process of finding things that make our lives less energy and greenhouse intensive, reduce our dependence on the corporate food and energy systems, show how recycling can be done at the cottage (or cottage industry) level or with a small community of people, and so forth. None of the projects are frivolous and in fact most are designed to reduce our impacts, make life healthier / safer / better. I'll just say that there are among my publications going to be items of interest for almost everyone, and of course they're not written by AI, and are all free, open source, and not paywalled.
I'll also tell you that I'm always looking for support, to help pay for the considerable outlays I'm making from my pension every month, and you can use that little graphic to help and support me with a small (or large! hehehe) donation or even make it monthly; you can subscribe to my once-a-week newsletter at my News Stand, chat with me on Mastodon, and you're encouraged to share my articles with your friends and social network to help grow my reach.
