Sunday - Thursday, March 11 - 15 2012 (diary)

A monsoonal trough has been hovering in the Arafura Sea to the North of us and we have been on cyclone watch all week. Schools were closed as a precaution.
No real cyclone has developed so far but we have had lots of wind gusts and intermitted bucketing of rain throughout this week, I love this kind of weather and I believe so does everybody else here in the Northern Territory.

I picked up John le Carré's latest spy thriller from the Palmerston Library yesterday (Our kind of Traitor), his 22nd novel published last year, perhaps to celebrate his 80th birthday ?

When we get older having a purpose in life is essential to our survival, and being creative is one of the truly magical elixirs for life.
My mother was a very creative person throughout her life involved in many aspects of art : wall decorations, batiks, Hessian dolls, pottery and even painting (she initially thought she would never be good at).
So after my father died and we had sold the family business (Martinshof) we bought a house for her in the nearby village of Gorssel and converted the garage into an art studio complete with pottery kiln.

Unfortunately my mother had a mild stroke shortly after that and lost some of her speech and her ability to do complex creative things. Doggedly she started knitting long, brightly coloured woolen scarfs, dozens of them. But in the end she was too frustrated with that and I believe made her decide to leave this world. One day she was doing her daily walk with the dog, fit as a fiddle, the next day she was dead. After her funeral we gave scarfs to everyone who was there. I still got mine.

Friday - Tuesday, March 16 - 20 2012 (diary)

I have just purchased a new laptop. For over 3 years I have been very happy indeed with my Asus N20 laptop with 12 inch display. Asus makes many hardware parts for most other computers (I have been told) and consequently builds very reliable laptops themselves. I can certainly vouch for that. Not a single problem with it during the past 3 years.
So I bought the new Asus Zen Ultrabook, the ideal companion on my trip to Europe in a few months. It is beautifully sleek, weighs only 1kg, has a 10 inch size display and boots up in seconds. It also has one USB 3 port (as well as a USB 2) which transfers files lightningly fast.
The best price I could find online was $1099, so I grabbed the last one in stock by Darwin's WOW store during their present closing down sale for just $845. I love it.

While testing my new toy at the Palmerston Library, my eyes caught the adjacent detective novel on display there.
I have a great preference for detective novels by non English writers, like Georges Simenon, that Swedish couple which name I just can't recall at present (I read most of them in their German translation) because of the distinctly local and National environment and social culture they portray.

And now I have become a hot fan of Boris Akunin (with real name Gregory Chkhartishvili, if you can pronounce that).
His novel "The Winter Queen" is absolutely delightful, part of a series about the young and very naive but smart Moscow police detective Erast Fandorin. Akunin's novels are set in the late 19th century (starting 1876), well before WW1.

Like the other novelists I mentioned above, he portrays beautifully life in Russia, especially Moscow in those days. His writing has been (I believe very aptly) described as "elegant", even reminiscent of Tolstoy, and the story and plot are both unusual and delightful. I am already looking out for any of his other books.